Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  “The Autopsy”: An Alien Parasite That Feeds on Terror

  Shea’s “The Autopsy” (1980) is a World Fantasy Award–nominated story about an alien parasite that invades and controls human bodies. As with much of Shea’s other work, it is atmospheric and bleak, as well as vivid and cinematic. “The Autopsy” straddles the line between classic weird fiction and contemporary horror. A continuation of Lovecraftian cosmic dread, it shows humanity coming face-to-face with a cruel and malefic universe; at the same time, it is a forerunner of splatterpunk fiction in its matter-of-fact depiction of bodily violation and bloodletting.

  The story centers on Dr. Carl Winters, a pathologist called in to perform autopsies on a number of bodies killed during a mining disaster. One of these cadavers turns out to be infested by the parasite, a highly intelligent and fiendishly manipulative entity with which Dr. Winters engages in a high-stakes battle of wits. The malign creature feeds on human terror, and the tale sustains a tone of barely suppressed hysteria as the full dimensions of the monster’s evil purpose become apparent. Dr. Winters’s ultimate gambit, a self-sacrificial act that turns the tables on the monster, is both ingenious and horrifying.

  Written in a style that moves from the grimly clinical to the visionary, “The Autopsy” is one of the most compelling examples of a horror–science fiction crossover in contemporary genre literature. The scene in which the alien reveals itself to Dr. Winters is strikingly unnerving, and the dialogue that ensues between them resonates with the finest works of “first contact” in the science fiction canon, especially stories that depict a form of extraterrestrial life whose biomorphic difference from humanity leads to a fundamental gulf of understanding.

  Rob Latham

  Shea’s uncanny ability to capture the sensibility of a major forerunner of modern dark fantasy was clear from his first publication, the 1974 novel A Quest for Symbilis, which is set in the decadent far future of Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” series. Shea crafted his own lush science-fantasy venue, reminiscent of Vance and Clark Ashton Smith, in his 1982 novel Nifft the Lean (1982), a picaresque tale with horror elements that was continued in two sequels, The Mines of Behemoth (1987) and The A’rak (2000). The series was well received by critics, with the first book winning a World Fantasy Award, though it did not connect with readers, perhaps because of its unsettled genre status—part sword-and-sorcery, part weird fiction, part quest fantasy—and its tendency to revel in scenes of baroque Gothic excess. His best work simply defies categories: the World Fantasy Award–winning story “Growlimb” (2004), for example, is science fiction in conception but horror in execution, while his 1985 novel In Yana, The Touch of Undying is sui generis (of its own unique kind): an other-world fantasy teeming with bizarre invention. By contrast, Shea’s final novel, Assault on Sunrise (2013), is a more conventional tale of dystopian apocalypse, intended as part of an unfinished trilogy.

  Shea’s sudden death in 2014 deprived the genre of one of its most unusual and compelling voices. An excellent “tribute” anthology—And Death Shall Have No Dominion, edited by S. T. Joshi—was released by Hippocampus Press in 2016 and may perhaps begin to revive Shea’s dormant reputation. It is, at present, the only book of his work in print.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Splatterpunk.

  Further Reading

  Cox, Arthur J. 1988. “The Grim Imperative of Michael Shea.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrel Schweitzer, 115–120. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  “Michael Shea.” 1996. In St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle. New York: St. James Press.

  Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Michael Shea.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 2, edited by Richard Bleiler, 839–843. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  SHELLEY, MARY (1797–1851)

  Despite her accomplished literary life, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is known for two things: writing the novel Frankenstein (1818, 1831) and keeping company with a crowd of highly significant literary figures. This included her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her), and her father, the political philosopher and novelist William Godwin, from whom she inherited a political and literary mindset. It also included her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who complicated the authorship of her work, and Lord Byron and John Polidori, with whom she participated in a famous ghost story contest while staying in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816. Her novel, Frankenstein, arose from this contest and would not only alter the course of the Gothic tradition with its relatable, tortured monster and its universal questions of life, death, and scientific pursuit, but its creation would also become a scholarly and popular obsession for the next 200 years. It has been a source of inspiration for countless works within Gothic literature, film, and visual art, and recent scholarship has increasingly considered Mary for her own genius rather than for her relationship to the writers around her.

  Part of the reason why Mary Shelley continues to fascinate is because early political and social manipulations of her biography caused its veracity to be in a constant state of fluctuation. What is certain is that Shelley’s life was fraught with traumatic births and deaths, the first of both being her entrance into the world, when Mary Wollstonecraft suffered puerperal fever following childbirth. It is rumored that young Mary made frequent visits to her mother’s grave, learning to read by tracing the name in the stone, and eventually holding a courtship with her future husband over the burial plot. Her family life was unconventional for the time, including illegitimate siblings from both her mother’s previous relationship and her father’s remarriage after Wollstonecraft’s death, establishing an early progressive view of human relationships beyond the limitations of law and social structure. She also experienced a high intellectual expectation in such a family, which received frequent visits from the great political and literary minds of the day. It was an expectation she had no difficulty meeting.

  At the age of sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, then twenty-one and already married, accompanied by her step-sister Claire Clairmont. It was a tempestuous relationship that would occasion two suicides (Mary’s half-sister Fanny and Shelley’s wife, Harriet). The group expanded to include Byron, who fathered a child with Claire and who would add to the scandal already brewing, as the group was dubbed the “league of incest.” The Shelleys married shortly after the famous summer of 1816 in an attempt to gain custody of Percy’s children via Harriet. They failed in this, with courts questioning Percy’s morality and lifestyle. He and Mary would relocate between England and the continent many times throughout their life together, creating their own circle of friends who shared their political, intellectual, and moral beliefs.

  The death of Mary’s first child soon after its birth left a lasting mark on the author, and she notes in her journal that she dreamed it had returned to life after she rubbed it by the fire to warm it. It would be the first glimmering of the central concept (of gaining the power to animate the dead) in Frankenstein, her first novel, which she would write more than a year later. The first edition was published anonymously in 1818, with a revised edition that bore Mary’s name following in 1831. The extent of Percy’s involvement in the writing of these editions and earlier drafts has been a matter of intense scholarly debate, a matter complicated by the Shelleys’ frequent literary collaboration throughout their relationship. The novel became and remained popular in England through its many dramatizations.

  Mary was a voracious reader, growing up in her father’s library, finding a haven in her husband’s library, and participating in the latest literary discussions among her intellectual circles. Surrounded by scientific and literary thinkers, she was impressively knowledgeable about the latest in scientific and medical research and political thought, a background that has kept scholars busy in their analysis of the hist
orical and medical context of Frankenstein and her other novels. In the character of Victor Frankenstein, the scientific creator, critics also read motherhood and artistic creation, following the lead of Mary’s biography in their analyses, as intensified by the recovery work of Ellen Moers and the idea of the “Female Gothic” that Moers established in the 1970s. As Frankenstein demonstrates, much of Mary’s work articulates her parents’ politics, particularly the politicization of the domestic sphere—family and education—and individual power and responsibility for egalitarian reform and positive change.

  Frankenstein was far from Shelley’s only literary progeny; she wrote six novels, many short stories, several poems, and extensive travel narratives, journals, and letters. In 1818 her one-year-old daughter, Clara, died of dysentery, and less than a year later her son, William, died of malaria at the age of three. These two deaths, in combination with tensions caused by Mary and Percy’s notoriously open relationship, devastated her, driving her into a deep depression. She channeled this grief into the writing of Matilda, originally titled The Fields of Fancy after her mother’s unfinished The Cave of Fancy. Though it was written in 1819, Matilda was not published until 1959 due to its preoccupation with incest and suicide: a father, obsessed and in love with his daughter when they are reunited after a long absence commits suicide when she fails to return this love. While the psycho-biographical approach taken by current scholars confirms the novel to be the product of a deeply depressed mind, the tendency of earlier critics to assign biographical status to much of Shelley’s work becomes problematic here. Godwin, Mary’s father, was disgusted by the text and urged her to hold its publication to prevent adding further scandal to her already unconventional domesticity, a relationship that Godwin did not support until she and Percy married, despite its similarity to his own romantic relationships. She agreed that it would not be published in her lifetime.

  In her next three novels, Mary shifted to more historical themes. Written in Italy and influenced by her time there, Valperga (1823) involved extensive research into fourteenth-century Italian politics. Mixing a fictionalized version of this history with the politics of her own day, the novel follows conflicts between two political parties, the Guelphs and the Ghibelines, and attempts by the central characters, Castruccio and Euthanasia, to create a bond between the parties with their love, one that would eventually fail with the fall of Valperga, with Euthanasia’s fictional castle representing republicanism and peace. The novel takes on themes of violence and power, with shades of Machiavellianism and Napoleon. As was the case for many of Mary’s works, however, critics would take the cue of female authorship to prioritize the love story over its political commentary and experimentation.

  In 1822, shortly before Valperga’s publication and less than a month after Shelley had suffered a miscarriage, Percy went sailing in the Bay of Spezia and drowned. When Byron died in Greece in 1824, Shelley would write in her journal of feeling like “the last man,” left behind by her children, husband, and friend (Bennett 1998, 83). In her next novel, The Last Man (1826), she embraced biographical connection to its fictional characters as a way of grieving, reserving a place for the central figures in her life within the central characters of her novel. The plot, a kind of fictionalized future history, is one part romance, one part sociopolitical intrigue, and one part Gothic apocalyptic disease narrative. It follows efforts by a first-person narrator and his circle as they successfully replace the monarchy with a republic, but even its leaders are no match for the plague, which systematically dismantles institutions and their laws, leaving men and women as equals and devoid of the restrictions imposed on them by society, before wiping out all of humanity. The narrator soon becomes the last man alive, leaving his narrative behind as a testament to the works and fate of humanity, just as Shelley would strive to memorialize and document her husband’s lifeworks.

  Percy’s father, Sir Timothy, approved of his relationship with Mary even less than Godwin did, and he made several attempts to prove that her marriage to his son was invalid and to assume custody of his remaining grandchild, Percy Florence, all of which failed. He agreed to support the dwindling family financially, but only if Shelley agreed to move back to England, which she had no choice but to do. He also forbade her from publishing his son’s biography, and, while Mary waited for the end of his life to lift that ban, she did go ahead and publish a collection of Percy’s poetry, with extensive biographical annotations and additions.

  She returned to history in her authorship of The Adventures of Perkin Warbeck (1830), a text that is rarely read and little studied today. It was largely a response to the conservative, transitional sociopolitical environment she found in England when she returned with her son. Historical and cultural research for this novel found her reaching out to friends in Ireland and Scotland, including Walter Scott, to collect folklore and regional histories. The title character Warbeck historically claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes imprisoned in the Tower of London by Richard III. He was forced to confess the falsity of this claim and was executed, but Shelley’s novel presents his case as truthful and explores questions of citizenship and national and personal identity.

  In a drastic turn from the historical novel, Shelley situated her last two novels in her own present day. Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) are often discussed together and widely believed to be the least dynamic of her novels, written to support her family. Lodore demonstrated a return to her parents’ radical views on education and gender that surfaced in Frankenstein, though the story itself is a conventional tale of a mother/daughter relationship and a father’s education of his daughter. Its inclusion of multiple forms of education amid this common plot has caused critics to disagree drastically as to its radical or conservative leanings. Falkner, written after Godwin’s death, continues the father/daughter theme and is described by some as a rewriting of Lodore. In it, the orphaned Elizabeth has been cut off from a Catholic family that disapproved of her parents’ marriage. When she interrupts Falkner’s suicide (inspired by the guilt of ruining and abandoning a woman), he takes her under his wing, involving her in his past life and its consequences, showing a repetition of some of the themes found in Matilda. Despite its lukewarm reception, Shelley claimed that it was her favorite.

  The end of Shelley’s writing career saw a turn from fiction to biographical and travel works, as well as short periodical pieces. While writing Falkner, she took on five volumes of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1835–1839), in which she chronicled the lives of great thinkers who asserted the ideals of social reform and liberty that she shared. Her last work, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, 1843 (published 1844) detailed her travels alongside her trademark political commentary. Throughout her work, she championed equal education, individual responsibility, egalitarian reform, travel and mobility, rationality, independence, imagination, and science, all sociopolitical topics glossed over by the critics of her day in favor of more “womanly” literary products. This has only recently begun to change, with scholars making concentrated efforts to recover a biography and system of thought that has been sanitized since the nineteenth century.

  In the last years of her life, Mary Shelley traveled with her son, Sir Percy Florence, and his wife, Jane, while continuing to prepare her husband’s writings and biography. In 1851, she fell into a week-long coma and died of a brain tumor that had plagued her for many years. She wished to be buried with her parents. They were disinterred from St. Pancras Churchyard, the historic site of her mother’s grave where Mary had spent so much of her youth, and moved to Bournemouth to join the daughter who inherited and built upon their sociopolitical ideologies and intellectual gifts to claim a gradually recognized position of her own within Gothic studies, women’s writing, progressive politics, and the English novel.

  Laura R. Kremmel

  See also: Byron, Lord; Frankenstein; Mad Scientist; Monster; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.

  Further
Reading

  Allen, Graham. 2008. Critical Issues: Mary Shelley. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Bennett, Betty T. 1998. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  Fisch, Audrey A., Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. 1993. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Mellor, Anne K. 1989. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge.

  Montillo, Roseanne. 2013. The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece. New York: William Morrow.

  Schor, Esther, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  SHIEL, M. P. (1865–1947)

  Matthew Phipps Shiell, who dropped the final letter of his name for all purposes after coming to England in 1885, was a British writer of supernatural horror and science fiction. He was born in Monserrat in the West Indies, the son of a lay preacher, Matthew Dowdy Shiell. Much research has been carried out into the elder Shiell’s ancestry, in association with the supposition that he was the son of a female slave, thus rendering the younger Shiel’s insistence that he had “no black blood” suspect, although the small quantity in question hardly seems relevant now.