Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Lisa Kröger

  Russell’s work earned him two Bram Stoker awards (in 1991 and 1992), as well as the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. Penguin released a new edition of The Case Against Satan in 2015.

  Lisa Kröger

  See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bradbury, Ray; Bram Stoker Award; The Exorcist; Incubi and Succubi; Matheson, Richard; “Sardonicus”; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Adrian, Jack. 1999. “Obituary: Ray Russell.” The Independent, March 26. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-ray-russell-1083246.html.

  Errickson, Will. 2014. “The Summer of Sleaze: Ray Russell’s Incubus.” Tor.com. September 19. http://www.tor.com/2014/09/19/summer-of-sleaze-ray-russell-incubus.

  Morgan, Chris. 1998. “Ray Russell.” In St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 494–496. Detroit, MI: St. James Press/Gale.

  Staggs, Matt. 2016. “Sardonicus Rising: Horror Master Ray Russsell’s Unexpected Revival.” Unbound Worlds, September 30. http://www.unboundworlds.com/2016/09/sardonicus-rising-horror-master-ray-russells-unexpected-revival.

  S

  SAKI (1870–1916)

  Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, whose macabre stories frequently appear in horror anthologies, especially “The Open Window” (1914) and “Sredni Vashtar” (1911). Celebrated for his sly and witty portrayals of the English upper middle classes, Saki’s horror stories introduce bizarre incidents to an Edwardian England full of flappers, languid aristocrats, country homes, garden parties, and cynical young dandies or “feral ephebes” (Byrne 2007, 15).

  Munro was born the youngest of three children to an imperial military family serving the British Raj in Akyab, northwest Burma (now Myanmar), on December 18, 1870. His mother died following a miscarriage, and at the tender age of two, young Hector was sent, with his siblings Charlie and Ethel, to his grandmother’s house in England, where the children were in constant fear of two strict aunts who appear as the monstrous female relatives in Saki stories such as “The Lumber-Room” (1914) or “Sredni Vashtar.”

  Munro at first chose to follow his father into the Burmese military police, but illness drove him back to England, where he worked as a journalist for various newspapers and magazines. His first short story was published in 1899 and his first book, a historical study of the Russian Empire, in 1900. From 1902 to 1908, Munro worked abroad as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post, but then returned to London, where he wrote satires on the politics of the day as well as collections of short stories revolving around his ephebe characters Bassington, Reginald, and Clovis Sangrail.

  Elements of the horrific fantastic crept into the latter fiction. Saki’s second collection of short stories, Reginald in Russia (1910), included “Gabriel-Ernest,” a chilling tale of a beautiful boyish werewolf with a taste for child-flesh. “Sredni Vashtar,” “Esmé,” “The Music on the Hill,” and “The Easter Egg” all appear in his subsequent collection, The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), and “The Open Window” in Beasts and Super-beasts (1914), while The Toys of Peace (1919) featured “The Interlopers,” “The Penance,” and “The Wolves of Cernograst.”

  Munro enlisted for World War I in 1914, when he was in his forties, refusing an officer’s commission. He was shot and killed by a German sniper on November 14, 1916 near the village of Beaumont-Hamel on the river Somme. His last words were reported to have been, “Put that bloody cigarette out!” (Byrne 2007, 3).

  Saki’s tales are extremely funny, mingling what A. A. Milne called his “careless cruelty” with graceful satires on upper-class society (Milne 2016, 6). For example, in “Louis” (1919), an irritated husband conspires with his sister to gas his wife Lena’s Pomeranian lapdog, only to discover that Lena has been cuddling a lifelike facsimile as an excuse to avoid accompanying him to social engagements. In “Esmé,” an escaped hyena devours a Roma (Gypsy) child in front of two horrified lady hunters, one of whom recounts this episode in a highly amused fashion years later, revealing that she pretended the hyena was her dog in order to obtain a valuable brooch as compensation from a gentleman who accidentally ran it over.

  “The Open Window”: Ghosts of the Imagination

  The most anthologized of all Saki’s stories is “The Open Window” (1914), with a devastating twist and charmingly cruel practical joker. Suffering from nerves, Framton Nuttel comes to the countryside for a rest but is obliged by his sister to visit her acquaintances. At the Sappleton residence, he is greeted by fifteen-year-old Vera, who weaves a tall tale for Mr. Nuttel. She tells him that their hostess, Mrs. Sappleton, constantly leaves her French window open in the hopes that her husband and two brothers, dead in a hunting tragedy, will someday return. When Mrs. Sappleton joins them, she soon cheerily points out her husband and brothers coming across the lawn with their spaniel trotting at their side, just as Vera has described them. Nuttel believes he is seeing their ghosts and hastily departs, terrified. Mrs. Sappleton’s bewilderment at Nuttel’s abrupt exit is Vera’s cue to produce another tall tale about Nuttel.

  Practical jokes are a fixture of Saki’s fiction, and this is a characteristically Saki tale, full of mischievous jabs at conventional society that by no means detract from the “chill shock of nameless fear” (Saki 1976, 261) the reader shares with Nuttel at the sight of the figures approaching the open window. His social awkwardness is contrasted with Vera’s self-possession and the authority with which she defines their moment of shared surreality.

  The conventional Nuttel is also portrayed as an unappealing bore. In contrast, the shock that Vera delights in producing, even going so far as to feign “dazed horror” upon spotting the hunters (261), is a welcome interruption to the yawns that Nuttel induces in his hostess as he drones on about his nerves. As with many other horror fictions, the dullness of everyday life is compared unfavorably to the thrill of imagination, however terrifying those thrills might be.

  Aalya Ahmad

  Saki pits the elegant, highly artificial manners of the Edwardian drawing room against the raw violence of the natural world, most often in the form of animals and children. In his homoerotic werewolf story, “Gabriel-Ernest” (1909), which combines the animal with the child, the hapless gentleman Van Cheele is powerless before both the predations of the werewolf and the overtures of another overbearing aunt, who tries to make the lycanthropic boy her protégè, allowing him to carry off one of the infants from her Sunday-school class. The alluring queerness of the feral boy, reflecting Munro’s own suppressed homosexuality, is mirrored by the god Pan, who appears as a beautiful, laughing boy in “The Music on the Hill” (1911), in which a domineering bride is gored to death by a stag as a punishment for taking an offering of grapes from his shrine.

  While many of Saki’s women are similarly punished, leaving the impression that they won’t be missed, and his social comedies abound with disparaging references to the militant suffragettes of his time, he also has a soft spot for the younger, cheekier “flappers” of the early twentieth century. Another of his recurring characters is the precocious flapper Vera, who figures as the niece in “The Open Window.”

  Saki’s adults occasionally live to regret their confrontations with the innocent ruthlessness of Nature. In “The Penance” (1919), three children (whose circumstances closely resemble those of Munro’s own childhood) remorselessly pursue their neighbor, who has killed their pet cat, mistakenly under the impression that it was raiding his chickens. Taking advantage of his efforts to placate them, they kidnap his two-year-old daughter and drop her into the muck of the pigsty, refusing to help retrieve her until the frantic father vows to do penance by standing by the cat’s grave holding a candle and declaring himself a “miserable Beast” (Saki 1976, 427). The “inexorable” cruelty of the children—“We shall be very sorry when we’ve killed Olivia,” said the girl, “but we can’t be sorry till we’ve done it” (426)—accentuates the coldness in what might otherwise be simply a cute sto
ry of childish revenge. But there is nothing cute about Saki’s youngsters; their hatred of adult injustices is seething, bitter, and heartfelt.

  Saki was clearly influenced by Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling, both of whom have contributed major works of horror to world literature. His later contemporaries P. G. Wodehouse and M. R. James can be compared to him both in point of social satire and, in the case of the latter, the ability to introduce horrifying and shocking elements into scenes of utter normalcy. He has also been compared to the American writer of twist endings, O. Henry. Apart from his best known stories, Saki’s work remains rather obscure, and scholarship on him has occurred but rarely. However, his fiction has been highly praised as inspirational by other authors, including G. K. Chesterton, A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, Christopher Morley, H. P. Lovecraft, V. S. Pritchett, and Graham Greene.

  Aalya Ahmad

  See also: James, M. R.; Lovecraft, H. P.; “Sredni Vashtar.”

  Further Reading

  Birden, Lorene. 2004. “‘People Dined against Each Other’: Social Practices in Sakian Satire.” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2.2.

  Birden, Lorene M. 2012. “Saki as Dauphin of the Wildean Witticism.” Anachronist 17: 117.

  Byrne, Sandi. 2007. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Frost, Adam. 1999. “A Hundred Years of Saki.” Contemporary Review 275, no. 1607, 302–304.

  Gibson, Brian. 2014. Reading Saki: The Fiction of H. H. Munro. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Milne, A. A. [1911] 2016. Introduction to The Chronicles of Clovis. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. 5–6.

  Saki (H. H. Munro). 1976. The Complete Works of Saki. Introduction by Noël Coward. New York: Doubleday.

  Salemi, Joseph S. 1989. “An Asp Lurking in an Apple-charlotte: Animal Violence in Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 4: 423.

  Spears, George James. 1963. The Satire of Saki: A Study of the Satiric Art of Hector Hugh Munro. New York: Exposition Press.

  SAMUELS, MARK (1967–)

  Mark Samuels is a British writer of weird horror, primarily known for his short fiction. He is also a former general secretary of the Friends of Arthur Machen, a society devoted to the works of the visionary late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writer.

  Samuels was born in Clapham, South London. He began publishing short fiction in 1988. His debut collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, was published in 2003, and both it and its title story were nominated for British Fantasy Awards in 2004. He has, as of this writing, published four subsequent collections of fiction and one novel, The Face of Twilight (2005), which was also nominated for a British Fantasy Award. In addition, he has had numerous short stories included in horror and weird fiction anthologies.

  Much of Samuels’s fiction is set in London. He is influenced in his approach to the city by that of Machen, who saw London as a place where atavistic and/or esoteric forces might at any time erupt. In Samuels’s The Face of Twilight, a recurring character of his, Alfred Muswell (whose initials are a nod to Machen), is quoted as having written, “there are London streets that lead to another world impinging on this one” (Samuels 2006, 20). In Samuels’s work there are two Londons, with a visionary city laid on top of the ordinary one.

  Also like Machen, Samuels is intensely interested in the mystical side of Christianity. This can be seen in the tendency for his protagonists’ encounters with the weird to end not in madness and death, as such encounters generally do in much weird fiction, including Lovecraftian fiction (and Lovecraft is another of Samuels’s chief influences), but in ecstasy and transmutation, with the self animated by some primal animism or blinding numinous force.

  In addition to Machen and Lovecraft, Samuels’s work also bears the particular mark of Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Ligotti, Bruno Schulz, Stefan Grabiński, and Ramsey Campbell. But his erudite and densely allusive fiction incorporates much more of the supernatural fiction tradition than just these writers. As in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, who is another key influence, evocations of weird tales; scholarly, occult, and spiritual works; and historical events, both real and fabricated, are braided together in Samuels’s stories into a bizarre yet convincing tissue of quotations.

  His story “The Man Who Collected Machen,” the eponymous entry in his 2011 collection The Man Who Collected Machen, is a representative example of Samuels’s approach. A man who refuses to give up a rare edition of a work by Machen is therefore made a member of the Lost Club (a reference to a Machen story of that name) by a jealous collector and banished to a London transmuted by Machen’s vision. But for him it is not a dreadful exile but an ecstatic one, for he sees the wonder in that awful place.

  Samuels’s writing has had an important influence on the modern weird fiction tradition. A tribute to his work, Marked to Die, featuring stories by a number of contemporary writers of weird horror, was published in June 2016.

  Timothy J. Jarvis

  See also: Borges, Jorge Luis; Campbell, Ramsey; Grabiński, Stefan; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; The Numinous; Poe, Edgar Allan; Schulz, Bruno.

  Further Reading

  Cardin, Matt. 2006. “Interview with Mark Samuels: A Sense of Charnel Glamour.” The Teeming Brain, August. http://www.teemingbrain.com/interview-with-mark-samuels.

  Samuels, Mark. 2006. The Face of Twilight. With an introduction by Mark Morris. Hornsea, England: PS Publishing.

  SANDKINGS

  Sandkings is a novella written by George R. R. Martin that was first published in the August 1979 issue of Omni magazine; it has since been reprinted numerous times in various anthologies. Sandkings was awarded the Hugo Award by the World Science Fiction Society in 1979 and the Nebula Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1980. It was adapted into a graphic novel by DC Comics in 1987 and was filmed as the first episode of the relaunched The Outer Limits television series that premiered in 1995.

  Sandkings opens with Simon Kress, a wealthy collector of exotic animals who lives on the planet Baldur, discovering a shop, Shade & Wo, he has never seen before in an otherwise familiar city. Inside he meets the shop’s proprietress, Jala Wo, who, in response to Kress’s request for an unusual animal, presents him with the insect-like Sandkings. There are four colonies of Sandkings, differentiated by their color scheme—red, orange, black, and white—that live in the four corners of a large terrarium buried in the sand; the queen, or Maw, remains unseen, buried deep below, but directs the Sandkings via telepathic signals. Wo promises Kress that so long as he keeps the Sandkings fed they will provide him countless hours of amusement with their warfare and strategic, purposeful maneuvering. She also informs him that the creatures will grow according to their environment, which heartens Kress, who had expressed reservations about their diminutive size.

  Kress purchases the Sandkings and has them delivered to his home, where he keeps them in a terrarium much larger than the one used in the shop. A showman and braggart, Kress organizes viewing parties with fellow elites, calling attention especially to the reproduction of his likeness that the Sandkings sketch on the sides of their homes. While the partygoers are generally satisfied with the warring of the Sandkings, Kress eventually grows bored and begins withholding food from them, making them increasingly vicious. Kress’s abusive treatment escalates and soon he is engaging them in fights with other exotic alien species. Wo warns him against this behavior. When Kress notices that one of his visages has taken on a twisted appearance, he lashes out at the Sandkings queen, gouging a stick deep into her lair and most likely injuring her. The next day Kress is visited by his former lover Cath, who resents his treatment of the Sandkings. She smashes their tank but is injured in the resulting tumult. Kress flees, leaving Cath behind. When he returns much later he finds that the red, black, and white factions of Sandkings have taken over the grounds and consumed Cath. Kress takes steps to exterminate them, b
ut is forced to enlist Wo’s aid. The Sandkings, she explains, have evolved to a point of sentience, but because of Kress’s mistreatment they are pathological and fixated on revenge. Wo and her partner Shade, who is revealed to be an evolved Sandking, assume responsibility for the escaped Sandkings, much to Kress’s relief. Fleeing the scene, Kress eventually stumbles upon a solitary home. Thinking he has found refuge, he discovers that the home is actually a large sandcastle built by the escaped orange Sandkings, which have adopted Kress’s size and likeness. Their captive now, Kress is dragged away screaming, presumably to be devoured by the Maw.

  While Sandkings initially reads as pure science fiction, complete with extraterrestrial creatures and an alien world that serves as the story’s backdrop, it also functions as an example of psychological horror. As the story develops Kress experiences a gradual yet ever-increasing sense of dislocation from his environment. His sense of control over the Sandkings gradually erodes, leading to a break with his circle of acquaintances (one hesitates to call them his friends), expulsion from his home, and ultimately a complete separation from his role in Baldur’s culture of wealth and leisure. The closing scene—in which Kress is mobbed by Sandkings who have adopted his visage—effectively blends existential crisis and physical violence as Kress’s identity is symbolically and literally consumed.

  Javier A. Martinez

  See also: Martin, George R. R.; Psychological Horror.

  Further Reading

  Bischoff, David. 1995. “The New Outer Limits.” Omni 17, no. 7: 34.

  Cotman, Elwin. 2013. “The Colonial Nightmares in ‘Sandkings.’” Weird Fiction Review, March 19. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/03/wfrs-101-weird-writers-22-george-r-r-martin.