Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Something Wicked This Way Comes crystallizes themes and approaches that had characterized Bradbury’s writing for the two decades preceding its publication. It extends the investiture of ordinary life with aspects of the Gothic and grotesque that characterizes the stories he collected in Dark Carnival (1947) and The October Country (1955). It also shows Bradbury deploying familiar tropes of weird fiction to address concerns about the everyday lives of people that transcend most genre treatments—notably, the temptation to enjoy experiences that have not been earned and regret for life’s missed opportunities. The novel marks a turning point in Bradbury’s fiction, which, at the time of its publication, was increasingly inclined toward the literary mainstream.

  Something Wicked This Way Comes exerted an enormous influence on subsequent fantasy and horror fiction, and has been adapted for radio, stage, and screen, including a 1983 movie produced by Disney and written for the screen by Bradbury himself.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Bradbury, Ray; Dark Fantasy; The Grotesque.

  Further Reading

  Bradbury, Ray. [1962] 1998. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Avon.

  Eller, Jonathan R. 2004. Ray Bradbury Unbound. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

  Eller, Jonathan R., and William F. Touponce. 2004. “Fathering the Carnival: Something Wicked This Way Comes.” In Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, 256–309. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

  King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

  Wolfe, Gary K. 1983. “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol. 4, 1769–1773. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

  SONG OF KALI

  Song of Kali is a novel by Dan Simmons, published by Tor in 1985. It was the first debut novel to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. The plot concerns a supposedly mythical cult devoted to Kali, which attempts to introduce the goddess of violence to the larger world through an epic poem.

  In the novel, a protégé of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet M. Das, has been presumed dead for eight years. Recent reports from Calcutta claim he is alive and has produced a new manuscript. Harper’s magazine sends poet Bobby Luczak on assignment to India for an interview article and to acquire Das’s poetry for publication. Luczak takes his Indian-born wife Amrita along as a translator, together with their infant daughter, Victoria.

  Das’s new poetry is a rambling tribute to the goddess Kali, Calcutta’s namesake. One man Luczak meets claims Das was reanimated during a Kapalika cult initiation. Luczak is constantly assailed by various factions with murky motives, and ultimately his daughter is kidnapped and murdered, her body used in a failed attempt to smuggle gemstones out of India. Seduced by the violent message of the Song of Kali, Luczak returns to Calcutta after burying his daughter, intending to kill everyone he blames for her death, but he overcomes the temptation.

  In 1977, Simmons spent ten weeks in India as part of a group Fulbright Fellowship of visiting educators. He came home from that trip with notebooks filled with details and sketches, planning to write an article for The Atlantic magazine. However, after receiving encouragement from author Harlan Ellison at a writing workshop, Simmons decided to use the material as the basis for his first novel, which he wrote in the summer of 1982.

  Though he spent only a couple of days in Calcutta, the city made an impression on him, and not a particularly favorable one based on the way he portrays it. The notion that a city could be “too evil to be allowed to exist” or “too wicked to be suffered” (Simmons 1985, 1) permeates the novel, as does the overcrowded city’s miasma, arising from its oppressive climate and environment.

  Simmons wrote without a specific genre in mind. The potentially supernatural elements in Song of Kali have alternate rational explanations. Many of the details he incorporated into the novel came from things he either witnessed personally or heard about second-hand. For example, a day spent attending the Calcutta Writers’ Workshop, run by famous poet P. Lal in an ancient hotel with unreliable electric power in stifling heat, inspired the character of M. Das. The novel’s success allowed Simmons to retire from teaching and become a full-time writer.

  Bev Vincent

  See also: Simmons, Dan; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Bryant, Edward. 1988. “On Song of Kali.” In Horror: The 100 Best Books, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, 277–280. New York: Carroll & Graf.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 2002. “Dan Simmons.” In Speaking of the Fantastic: Interviews with Writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 158–171. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.

  Simmons, Dan. 1985. Song of Kali. New York: Tor.

  “Song of Kali.” 1987. In Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 44, edited by Sharon K. Hall, 253–255a. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  THE SONGS OF MALDOROR (LES CHANTS DE

  MALDOROR)

  The Songs of Maldoror was first printed in its complete form in late 1869. It had been composed in the two years prior by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, a Uruguay-born Frenchman living in Paris. It is a bizarre, fragmented work of heightened prose, which tells of the cruel deeds of its eponymous antihero.

  The first Chant, or “Song,” of Maldoror was published at Ducasse’s expense in late 1868. It received a review in a literary journal, which praised the work’s originality and strange savageness, but otherwise it went unnoticed. It was published anonymously, but subsequent printings gave the author as the Comte de Lautréamont, a pseudonym Ducasse took from Latréaumont, the eponymous character of an 1838 Gothic novel by Eugène Sue.

  In writing Maldoror, Ducasse was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, whom he read and admired at a young age, and by Adam Mickiewicz, John Milton, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Charles Robert Maturin—all writers who had dealt with the theme of evil. Ducasse wished to explore evil in a new and shocking way; the name Maldoror is likely a pun on mal d’aurore or “evil dawn.”

  Ducasse’s use of the word chants in his title is interesting. Chants implies “canto,” “lay,” or “epic,” as well as “song.” This leads the reader to expect verse and musicality, but Maldoror is, in fact, a prose work, and a jarring patchwork of many different genres. There are textual appropriations from diverse literary sources: Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, Dante, Baudelaire, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. At some points, long descriptions of fauna and flora, many transcribed from textbooks, are interpolated. At others the book breaks into gothic horror, serial-novel melodrama and sentimentality, and passages of sexual transgression reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade. Maldoror is predatory in its borrowings. It divests itself of an authorial voice, as well as any claim to authority or even significance. It also has an amorphous, hybrid quality. Its metamorphoses can be seen as protean attempts to escape from morality and law.

  Ducasse died of uncertain causes on November 24, 1870, at his lodgings in a modest Parisian hotel, during the siege of the city by the Prussian army. At the time, his work was unknown. The original printer of the full texts of The Songs of Maldoror, perhaps fearing a prosecution for blasphemy, did not distribute copies to booksellers. But they were eventually circulated in small numbers, and the book slowly gained a minor following among Symbolist writers. However, it was not until 1890, when the publisher Léon Genonceaux reprinted the work in France, that the book’s reputation was sealed.

  The text subsequently has had a major impact, in particular on the Surrealists, who saw in it an almost mystical dimension. It has also had an influence on cinema; Kenneth Anger admired the book and attempted to film it, but could not get together the funds, and a film adaptation in parts by London’s Exploding Cinema Collective and Germany’s Filmgruppe Chaos was completed in 2000.

  Timothy J. Jarvis

  See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Byron, Lord; Gautier, Théophile; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Grotesque; Maturin, Charles; Melmoth the Wanderer; Sur
realism; Transformation and Metamorphosis.

  Further Reading

  Lautréamont, Comte de. 1994. Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont. Trans. and with an introduction, notes, bibliography, and afterword by Alexis Lykiard. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change.

  Thacker, Eugene. 2015. Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.

  SPIRITUALISM

  The term “Spiritualism” refers to a religion that began in the 1840s in North America and that emerged out of modest and controversial origins to make an indelible mark on the literature of horror and the supernatural. The most significant belief of Spiritualism is that it is possible for the living and the dead to communicate. In 1848, two young sisters from Hydesville, New York, reported making contact with a disembodied entity called Mr. Splitfoot. This was later revealed as a ruse by the girls, but not before their elaborate codes of communication using handclaps and reciprocal “spirit rapping” inspired a generation of mesmerists (hypnotists), psychical researchers, and Spiritualists eager to communicate with the dead. It was Spiritualism that gave rise to the famous Victorian subculture of séances led by spirit mediums who manifested supernatural marvels and conveyed messages from the spirits.

  The arcane and obscure nature of Spiritualism also saturated Victorian literary culture, which incorporated the movement’s expanding range of strategies, including “spirit raps,” clairvoyance (psychic seeing), clairaudience (psychic hearing), telekinesis (the movement of objects through sheer mental power), trance talking, and the manifestation of phantom odors, “spirit lights,” and ectoplasm, a gooey substance emitted by mediums and attributed to a spirit’s physical materialization). The influence of Spiritualism on the literature of horror and the supernatural was likewise diverse. When Spiritualism first appeared, it appealed to people who had grown frustrated with conventional religion and were turning away from mainstream belief systems to more liberal and scientific explanations of reality and human life (and death). Committed advocates of Spiritualism such as Edgar Allan Poe, Florence Maryatt, and Elizabeth Phelps included variations of Spiritualism, mesmerism, and Transcendentalism (the influential mid-nineteenth-century American philosophical and social reform movement) in stories that centered on themes of loss and contributed to a growing idealization of the dead—those same stories were often macabre in nature.

  Spiritualism was also a powerful social movement, especially in terms of women’s rights, since most mediums were women, and the movement thus enabled women to hold positions of authority. The purported female sensitivity to the spiritual world helped to establish a strong community of female writers of the transgressive supernatural tale, including Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, and Edith Wharton.

  However, by the turn of the century Spiritualism was beginning to lose its viability as a social and religious movement of reform, and its associated literature began to represent an increasing culture of ambivalence and unease surrounding both the authenticity and the nature of the movement. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), for example, represented the prevalent fear that Spiritualism was a vehicle for social and sexual violation. Arthur Machen’s stories of Spiritualist villains also echoed this concern. By the mid-twentieth century, many of the beliefs surrounding communion with the dead had dissipated altogether, but Spiritualism continued to be a vital, if distorted, underpinning of supernatural horror. In some rare cases such as Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971), psychic phenomena remained a horrifying reality. However, increasingly in twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror, Spiritualism became a source of psychological ambiguity. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), for instance, used mediums and Spiritualists to subvert reader expectations about the meaning of haunting, locating spirits and ghosts not in the beyond but within the psyche of the novel’s characters.

  Eleanor Beal

  See also: Dracula; Ewers, Hanns Heinz; The Haunting of Hill House; Hell House; Lee, Vernon; Machen, Arthur; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Turn of the Screw; Wharton, Edith.

  Further Reading

  Bloom, Clive. 2010. “Do You See It?: The Gothic and the Ghostly.” In Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present, 141–162. London and New York: Continuum.

  Braude, Ann. 1989. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  Geary, Robert F. 1992. “The Gothic Transformed: The Victorian Supernatural Tale.” In The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change, 101–120. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press.

  Grimes, Hilary. 2013. The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny and Scenes of Writing. Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate.

  Leonard, Todd Jay. 2005. Talking to the Other Side: A History of Modern Spiritualism and Mediumship. Lincoln: iUniverse.

  SPLATTERPUNK

  Splatterpunk refers to a specific subcategory of the horror genre marked by extreme violence and graphic descriptions of gore, often blended with explicit sexual content. Splatterpunk originated in the 1980s, predominantly among a small group of American horror writers, reaching its height in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

  The term was coined by writer David J. Schow in 1986 at the twelfth World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island. The term “splatterpunk” was meant as a kind of off-handed joke, a play on the term “cyberpunk” that had been recently coined to describe the movement of science fiction writers who focus on how high technology affects the lower classes in a futuristic society. The genesis of the movement is usually traced to Michael Shea’s 1980 story “The Autopsy.” Though the movement did not have any sort of true organization, several writers in the early to mid-1980s began writing similar fiction, all in reaction to what had previously been published in the horror world, specifically, the rather restrained style popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Bloch, one of the older writers whose style was being exploded by the so-called “splatterpunks,” famously criticized the subgenre, saying that “there is a distinction between that which inspires terror and that which inspires nausea” (Ross 1989, 64).

  American Psycho: Splatterpunk as Literary Fiction?

  American Psycho (1991) is a controversial novel about a serial killer written by mainstream author Bret Easton Ellis. When published, it sparked furious debates about the fictional representation of violence, with the critical treatment mirroring discussions regarding the extreme methods of splatterpunk authors.

  It is narrated by Patrick Bateman, a New York investment banker who casually and brutally rapes and murders a series of colleagues, prostitutes, and homeless persons, in sequences of unsparing brutality. Some of the more grotesque scenes of gendered violence—which include acts of cannibalism and necrophilia—sparked outrage both before and after publication: the originally planned publisher, Simon & Schuster, declined the manuscript (despite Ellis’s substantial literary reputation), and it was eventually published by Vintage Books, prompting the National Organization for Women to seek a boycott, which led to widespread debates about censorship and sexual objectification.

  This public furor obscured the fact that the novel was not celebrating Bateman’s misogyny but offering a ruthless satire of an ambitious and egotistical social climber. Indeed, it is a savage critique of the superficial materialism and amoral lifestyle of wealthy yuppies, whose contempt for their social inferiors takes, in Bateman’s case, a literally violent turn. Bateman’s narration is calm and emotionless, whether detailing his murderous rampages, describing scenes of debauched revelry, or offering his views on 1980s pop stars. There are strong suggestions that some of the events he narrates may be imaginary, as he begins to suffer hallucinations and lapses in memory. Reading the novel can be a challenge not only because of its graphic violence but also due to Bateman’s highly confusing and sometimes tedious reveries.

  The novel was memorably filmed in 2000, with C
hristian Bale capturing Bateman’s slick and sleazy persona. A musical adaptation premiered in London in 2013.

  Rob Latham

  In many ways, splatterpunk is a type of pulp fiction, especially in its big and graphic descriptions of violence used for entertainment purposes. While critics complained that the movement cheapened horror literature by simply aiming to “gross out” readers, supporters of splatterpunk praise its ability to push the boundaries and become a subversive medium, much like the role of punk music; in this way, the subgenre could be considered an amalgamation of the popular (and joyfully gory) “splatter” films and the irreverent punk rock bands of the 1980s. Taboo topics are explored widely in splatterpunk because nothing is truly off limits. This inclusivity has made many argue that splatterpunk is a progressive subgenre, and in a way, that is true. Men and women are equal victims, as are gay or transgendered characters and characters of all ethnicities. No one is exempt from the pain and suffering.

  Because of the indefinite boundaries that surround splatterpunk and its somewhat nebulous beginnings, defining splatterpunk writers is a difficult task, and one that is debated and contested. Writers who could be considered as writing in the splatterpunk tradition include David J. Schow, John Skipp, Robert McCammon, Joe R. Lansdale, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, Richard Christian Matheson (not to be confused with his father, horror writer Richard Matheson), and Edward Lee. One of the earliest examples of splatterpunk is Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (1984–1985), a collection that included such stories as “Rawhead Rex” and “The Midnight Meat Train,” which pushed the boundaries of horror with its visceral descriptions of bodily horror. Barker’s books marked a shift to the new style of horror, influencing novels such as Joe R. Lansdale’s The Nightrunners (1987), which tells the story of a young married couple trying to deal with the aftermath of the wife’s rape. Lansdale uses the brutal attack as a contrast to the supernatural God of the Razor who emerges as the novel progresses. Both the real crime and the supernatural serve to shock the readers with vivid imagery of dismemberment, skinning, and sexual violence. Another exemplary novel of the splatterpunk subgenre is The Scream (1988), written by John Skipp and Craig Spector. Skipp and Spector’s novel, about a rock-and-roll group that turns its fans into zombified maniacs, is over the top in its blood and gore, but the tale is also tongue-in-cheek, riffing off the long history of religious leaders criticizing rock music for introducing Satan to the country’s youth. More than any other writers, Skipp and Spector seem to truly embrace the title of “splatterpunk” as they relish the outlandish nature of exploding body parts and spewing bodily fluids. They continued to work together, establishing themselves as the leaders of the splatterpunk movement, writing such novels as The Cleanup and The Light at the End. Other notable texts are David J. Schow’s novel The Kill Riff (1988) and Silver Scream (1988), a splatterpunk anthology edited by Schow; Richard Christian Matheson’s short story collection Scars (1987); Joe R. Lansdale’s The Drive-In (1988); and Edward Lee’s The Bighead (1997). Though the splatterpunk movement was primarily active in the late 1980s, writers such as Edward Lee kept it alive throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.