Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  In 1979 the BBC adapted Le Fanu’s story for television. Schalcken the Painter was written and directed by Leslie Meaghy and first aired on December 23. Though a drama, Schalcken was filmed for the arts documentary program Omnibus. It is now considered part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas series along with adaptations of M. R. James and Dickens. Meaghy’s faithful adaptation, with its slow build toward the final horrific scene, is also notable for its lush cinematography, reproducing as it does the styles, tones, and compositions of the Dutch masters.

  Brian J. Showers

  See also: Bleiler, E. F.; Carmilla; “Green Tea”; Haining, Peter; In a Glass Darkly; James, M. R.; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Summers, Montague.

  Further Reading

  Hervey, Ben. 2014. Schalcken the Painter. BFI Flipside: 1–9.

  James, M. R. 2001. Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels. In A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings by M. R. James, edited by Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden, 486–490. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press. Originally published in Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, edited by Vere H. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).

  Le Fanu, Sheridan. [1839] 2014. “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter.” In Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson, edited by Darryl Jones, 76–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Pardoe, Rosemary. 1988. “Schalken the Painting.” Ghosts and Scholars 10: 28, 34.

  Rockhill, Jim. 2002. Introduction to Schalken the Painter and Others by J. S. Le Fanu, ix–xxxiii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.

  Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

  SCHULZ, BRUNO (1892–1942)

  Bruno Schulz was a Polish author and artist of Jewish heritage, best known for his collections of fantastic short stories. He wrote atmospheric, phantasmagorical fiction that dwelt on humdrum images and scenes in a way that saturated them with a curious beauty. In some ways, Schulz’s work seems to anticipate what would later be called magical realism, in association primarily with Latin American literature. He was more interested in mystery, wonder, and the play of the grotesque and the beautiful than he was in terror, although much of his fiction does involve a kind of intense emotion of expectancy, if not dread. In modern horror fiction his presence and significance can be felt through his impact on a number of authors, including the American writer Thomas Ligotti and the British writer Mark Samuels.

  Schulz was born in Drohobycz, Poland (but now part of Ukraine), where he lived almost his entire life, and which was the backdrop and subject of his fiction. He left home to study art and architecture, then returned, and supported himself by teaching.

  Schulz had already been writing for some time, starting no later than 1925, when a friend showed some of his letters to Zofia Nalkowska, a Polish novelist and an important member of the Polish Academy of Literature. She saw Schulz’s extraordinary talent, and encouraged him to publish his work. Schulz’s first collection was published in 1934. Entitled Sklepy Cynamonowe, or Cinnamon Shops, it consisted of a series of linked, dreamlike stories drawn from Schulz’s own childhood and adolescent experiences. The collection was published in English under the title The Street of Crocodiles in 1963. A masterpiece of Polish prose, of delicate fantasy and subtle characterization, the work attracted enough praise to prompt a second book in 1937, Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra, published in English as The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1988.

  In 1938, Schulz won the Golden Laurel, a prestigious award presented by the Polish Academy of Literature, identifying him as one of the most important living Polish authors. His reputation outside Poland took longer to develop, but he is now internationally recognized as one of the greatest fantasists of all time.

  Schulz managed to avoid being forced to enter a concentration camp like many other Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation, mainly because he had the protection of Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who appreciated Schulz’s art. However, in 1942, Schulz was murdered in the streets of Drohobycz by Karl Guenter, another officer of the Gestapo.

  There are three primary recurring characters in Schulz’s stories, apart from the narrator, who is usually more or less a stand-in for Schulz himself. The first is his father, a quixotic, imaginative man who is not referred to by name; while benign, he has attributes of a sorcerer, alchemist, or mad scientist. Many of the most fantastic elements of the stories center on him. The second character is a female servant named Adela; while she works for the family, Adela is no menial, and seems to fill the void in authority, and real solidity, left behind by the remoteness of the father. The third character is Drohobycz; one dimension of Schulz’s work is the animation and expressiveness he attributes to landscape, weather, and above all the town—its buildings, streets, various objects. The moods and desires of the characters are always reflected in local variations in the spirit of the setting, which always plays a dynamic role in these stories.

  In 1973, Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy created a feature film version of The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, called “The Hourglass Sanatorium.” A story from Cinnamon Shops, entitled “The Street of Crocodiles,” was adapted into a stop-motion animated film by the Quay Brothers in 1986.

  Michael Cisco

  See also: Dreams and Nightmares; The Numinous.

  Further Reading

  Banks, Brian R. 2006. Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination, & Legacy of Bruno Schulz. Ashby-de-la-Zouch: InkerMen Press.

  Ficowksi, Jerzy. 2004. Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait. New York: W. W. Norton.

  Grossman, David. 2009. “The Age of Genius: The Legend of Bruno Schulz.” The New Yorker, June 8. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/08/the-age-of-genius.

  Nolen, Larry. 2013. “The Fragile Reality of ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.” Weird Fiction Review, June 4. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/06/101-weird-writers-25-bruno-schulz.

  SCHWEITZER, DARRELL (1952–)

  Darrell Schweitzer is known to the horror community as principal or co-editor of Weird Tales magazine from 1987 to 2007, a man behind numerous horror anthologies, a ubiquitous critic and reviewer, and the most active interviewer of authors in the horror field. Alongside these efforts, Schweitzer has generated several novels and more than 300 short stories in the horror, fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction genres.

  Schweitzer’s critical reputation is of long standing. Tackling the most famous of modern horror writers, his early The Dream Quest of H. P. Lovecraft (1978) is a standout piece of scholarship: a critique of Lovecraft’s work from a writer/editor’s perspective that yields refreshingly frank assessments. His “Readers” series of essay collections, focusing on Thomas Ligotti, Robert E. Howard, and Neil Gaiman, gathers the views of the best of today’s genre critics, and is well known to devotees of horror.

  This same community is somewhat less aware of Schweitzer’s own fiction. His outright horror stories can be found in Transients (1993), and his Cthulhu Mythos tales in Awaiting Strange Gods (2015); all hinge on intrusions of the strange and supernatural into contemporary life and are written in a disarmingly understated prose style, often in the first person. The imagery is nightmarish, and the events typically fateful. His characters—innocents, frequently children—explore Schweitzer’s themes of suffering, sacrifice, the meaning of courage, and bewilderment in the face of the unknown. The bright themes that Schweitzer links with the dark—humility, grace, transformation, holiness—share an equal place.

  Allowing for invented settings and mythic/religious overtones, Schweitzer’s fantastic fiction can easily be gathered under the horror umbrella as well. The terror of these fantasies is profound and direct: Schweitzer scorns any “Dunsanian restraint” (i.e., the practice of shying delicately away from direct depictions of horror in the manner of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany) and pres
ents chilling images of horror and scenes of bloody death that are shocking and effective. And while he keeps well to the “mythic” tradition in fantasy, the gods that weave the destinies of his characters work to a pattern that these characters will never understand.

  In his harrowing best novel, The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995), the child Sekenre, son of a sorcerer, is driven to an act of parricide, by which he himself becomes a sorcerer. This is like contracting Soul Cancer, and it fills him with the souls of all the sorcerers his father had killed. Schweitzer meets the challenge of portraying the psychology of a child whose head is stuffed with the evil, dehumanized spirits of the dead. His “Goddess” series (The Shattered Goddess [1982] and a dozen stories) explores a far-future earth reeling from the death of this titular deity, a time of random horrors and miracles. The linked stories of Living with the Dead (2008) find Schweitzer working in a new palette, spare, pale, absurdist: a town must eternally suffer the cargo-ship loads of undecaying corpses left stacked on its docks.

  Schweitzer has been awarded a World Fantasy Award for his editing of Weird Tales. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

  Steve Behrends

  See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Weird Tales; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Behrends, Steve. 1989. “Holy Fire: Darrell Schweitzer’s Imaginative Fiction.” Studies in Weird Fiction 5 (Spring): 3–11.

  Loban, Leila. 1996. “The Sorcerer behind the Mask: Darrell Schweitzer Interviewed.” Interzone 111 (September): 35–39.

  Rand, Ken. 2004. “Darrell Schweitzer” (interview). The Internet Review of Science Fiction, January. http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10014.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 1997. Windows of the Imagination: Essays on Fantasy Literature. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

  “THE SCREAMING SKULL”

  F. Marion Crawford, a popular and successful American novelist, wrote a small number of ghost stories in the course of a long career. His ghost stories were sufficiently atypical of his work—he mostly wrote mainstream novels set in Italy—that they were only collected posthumously in Wandering Ghosts (1911). Most of them have become anthology standards. And while one of these, “The Screaming Skull” (first published in 1908), is a powerful story, it is the tale’s technique that most singles it out for study.

  It was common for writers of Crawford’s era (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to frame a story by carefully describing the circumstances under which it is told. Here Crawford builds a spooky atmosphere by taking this technique to an extreme. Two retired sea captains are talking on a dark night. The story is told as a monologue, almost stream of consciousness, by one of them, who also acts out part of the continuing drama as he relates the tale—for example, by fetching the box in which the skull of the title is kept, only to discover it missing. According to the narrative, the skull, which has the disconcerting habit of screaming if moved from where it wants to be, was found in the possession of the late Dr. Pratt. The sea captain narrator has a guilty conscience because he told Pratt how a murder was committed by drugging the victim, then pouring hot lead in through an ear. The doctor’s wife, Mrs. Pratt, mysteriously died soon thereafter, and it is uncertain whether the screaming skull, which belonged to Dr. Pratt, is actually hers or just a medical specimen (although something does rattle inside it). Later, the doctor himself was found dead, as if something bit his throat and crushed his windpipe. The narrator says he has inherited the doctor’s house, skull and all. He is convinced that it hates him.

  While the reader can easily conclude that the skull is indeed screaming, as opposed to the sound merely coming from the wind, and that Pratt indeed killed his wife and that this is her skull with a lump of lead rattling inside it, the narrator uses his own diffuse narration to avoid coming to terms with these facts until it is too late, and he is likewise found dead “by the hands or teeth of some person unknown.”

  The story was adapted to film—although the screenplay’s source in Crawford’s story was unacknowledged and uncredited—in the 1950 low-grade American horror film The Screaming Skull, about a woman who thinks her new husband’s first wife is haunting her.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Crawford, F. Marion; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 2004. “F. Marion Crawford: Blood-and-Thunder Horror.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 26–38. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Moran, John C. 1981. An F. Marion Crawford Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  Morgan, Chris, 1985. “F. Marion Crawford.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 747–752. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  SHE

  She: A History of Adventure is a novel by H. Rider Haggard. It was serialized in The Graphic between October 1886 and January 1887 and then published in book form in America in 1886 and England in 1887. Haggard was an extremely popular writer, and She was his most popular book, rivaled only by his King Solomon’s Mines (1885). It remains one of the best-selling novels in publishing history, and its influence on subsequent writers of fantasy and horror has been extensive and profound, with its concepts of ancient immortals and lost civilizations influencing writers as diverse as Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

  She at first appears to be a traditional ethnographic adventure story, which is to say, an adventure story in which the narrative core depicts Anglo-European travels to another land, often for personal gain but occasionally to resolve ancestral issues, and the travelers’ interactions with the indigenous peoples. She is thus told from the viewpoint of Horace Holly, a middle-aged Cambridge professor, guardian of the young and handsome Leo Vincey. Leo’s father told Holly of his family’s heritage, left Holly with an iron box not to be opened until his son was twenty-five, and died that evening. Holly raised Leo, and on Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday, the two open the box and find in it the Sherd of Amenartas, which gives them traveling instructions.

  In East Africa they are captured by the Amahaggers, who are ruled by a mysterious white queen, “She-who-must-be-obeyed.” Leo has married Ustane, one of the Amahaggers, when there is a fight in which he is wounded. He is near death when they are taken to the lost city of Kôr, which predates the Egyptians, and meet She, also known as Ayesha, whose scientific knowledge is incredible and whose lifespan is in excess of 2,000 years. She has lived in Kôr following the death of her Greek lover Kallikrates, whom she slew in a jealous rage. She has not seen the ailing Leo, but when she does, she believes him to be the reincarnation of Kallikrates and heals him. She is jealous of Ustane and kills her, and though Holly and Leo object, She is overwhelming. She wants Leo to join her as an immortal ruler, a process that involves an immersion in the Pillar of Fire. To show Leo that it is safe, She immerses herself again, but this second time undoes the benefits and She withers away. Her last words are a promise to return.

  The character and story of She proved immensely popular with Haggard’s late Victorian readership, and the book was immediately dramatized, parodied, and pastiched. (Haggard himself assisted in some of these.) She was a strong and independent woman, something relatively rare in Victorian ethnographic adventure stories, which focus on the men; indeed, so strong was She that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung later used her as the embodiment of an archetype, the woman as sustainer and devourer. In addition, Haggard’s presentation of the “Other,” while leaving no doubt of the superiority of the English, is neither patronizing nor demeaning: his characters are sympathetic, even when their ends are, to European eyes, objectionable. She’s “scientific” knowledge and abilities are likewise intriguing, but most intriguing of all, She is riddled with erotic imagery and behavior, presented almost explicitly. These include Holly’s sexuality, Leo’s marriage with Ustane, and the character Bilali’s obsessions, but even She/Ayesha is depicted as having slept next to the c
orpse of Kallikrates for 2,000 years. Even if they could not put a word to it, Haggard’s audience undoubtedly responded to this.

  Haggard wrote continuations and sequels to She: Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1920), and Wisdom’s Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923). His attitudes toward the characters gradually shifted and evolved until, at the end, the love triangle resolved itself with She being Kallikrates/Leo Vincey’s destined bride and Amenartas/Ustane being the interloper. All of these works remain readable, and She remains consistently fascinating. Its cultural reach has been extended by multiple extraliterary adaptations. It was adapted for the stage and first filmed in 1899 by cinema pioneer Georges Méliès; there have been many additional productions for film, radio, and other media, including a rock opera.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Haggard, H. Rider; Mummies.

  Further Reading

  Brantlinger, Patrick. 2001. Introduction to She: A History of Adventure, edited by Patrick Brantlinger, vii–xxviii. London and New York: Penguin.

  Deane, Bradley. 2008. “Mummy Fiction and the Occupation of Egypt: Imperial Striptease.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 51, no. 4: 381–410.

  Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. “Rider Haggard among the Mummies.” In The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, 185–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Nelson, Dale J. 2006. “Haggard’s She: Burke’s Sublime in a Popular Romance.” Mythlore 24, nos. 3–4: 111–117.

  SHEA, MICHAEL (1946–2014)

  Michael Shea was one of the most versatile, brilliant, and sadly neglected talents in modern horror and dark fantasy literature. He began publishing short fiction in 1979 and had soon authored one of the most brilliantly horrific tales in the contemporary canon, “The Autopsy” (1980). His early tales were gathered in a 1987 Arkham House collection, Polyphemus; the eponymous novella, like “The Autopsy,” fuses science fictional and horror elements, depicting the grotesque biology of extraterrestrial beings in imagery and language straight out of H. P. Lovecraft. Shea’s debts to that author were profound, most evident in his 1984 novel The Color out of Time, a Cthulhu Mythos tale of malign alien presences infesting a secluded New England valley. Shea produced several more stories in a Lovecraftian vein, which were eventually gathered into Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (2010). Some of these stories evoke the antiquarian milieu of the originals, while others deploy more modern settings, such as his 1987 novella Fat Face, in which a prostitute down on her luck runs afoul of an eldritch monstrosity.