Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal. (Stoker 1897, 18)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Stoker, Bram. 1897. Dracula: A Mystery Story. New York: W. R. Caldwell & Co.

  Even before graduating in 1870, Stoker had already started following in his father’s footsteps in the Irish civil service in Dublin, accepting a position there in 1866. In 1875, he was still working for the civil service when he purchased his master’s degree (a common practice at the time that continues to this day), but in the meantime he indulged his creative passions by writing theater reviews and short fiction. Indeed, it was his review of Hamlet that led to a face-to-face meeting with actor Henry Irving. The encounter changed the course of Stoker’s life, so that in 1878, two years after his father’s death, Stoker accepted Irving’s offer to become the manager of the new Lyceum Theatre, and then immediately moved to London with his new bride (and former Oscar Wilde sweetheart), Florence Balcombe.

  Stoker’s demanding responsibilities at the Lyceum and the lengths he went to organize Irving’s English provincial and American tours, including several trips to America by himself, provided experiences that greatly informed his writing of Dracula, which he started in 1890 and continued intermittently until the novel’s publication in 1897. Dracula was immediately popular throughout the English-speaking world, and literary critics showered it with praise through at least the 1910s. However, although Dracula serves suitably well as an autobiographical lens into Stoker’s life, perhaps its greatest value is in laying bare the many tensions of fin de siècle (i.e., late nineteenth-century) England, including the evolving role of women, advancements in science and technology, criminality, and religion.

  Stoker suffered two strokes and his health gradually declined after the death of his longtime friend and employer, Irving, in 1905. Still, Stoker wrote several works, including two more Gothic novels, The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), before dying at home on April 20, 1912. His body was cremated and his remains were interred at Golders Green in London. Stoker’s title character Count Dracula remains one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world, and his novel Dracula remains one of the most reprinted works in history.

  John Edgar Browning

  See also: Dracula; The Jewel of Seven Stars; Mummies; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Belford, Barbara. 1996. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  Browning, John Edgar, ed. 2012. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Critical Feast, An Annotated Reference of Early Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1913. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.

  Farson, Daniel. 1975. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. London: Michael Joseph.

  Hopkins, Lisa. 2007. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Hughes, William. 2000. Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Murray, Paul. 2004. From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker. London: Jonathan Cape.

  Murray, Paul. 2014. “Bram Stoker: The Facts and the Fictions.” In Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays, edited by Jarlath Killeen, 56–72. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

  THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was first published in 1886. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the inspiration for the story came, at least partly, from a dream the author had. In October 1885, Stevenson’s wife Fanny was awakened one night because Stevenson was crying out in his sleep. Thinking he was suffering from a nightmare, Fanny woke him, only to find Stevenson was quite angry at being disturbed in the midst of his nocturnal imaginings, with the author exclaiming that he had been dreaming a wonderful frightening tale. Stevenson often found inspiration from his dreams: his short story “Olalla,” published in 1885, was also prompted by his nighttime visions. Stevenson referred to these dreams as “brownies,” benign spirits that would take his unconscious imaginings and shape them into material for his stories as he slept.

  In film and stage treatments of Stevenson’s famous story, the scene of transformation from Jekyll to Hyde or vice versa is always a spectacular centerpiece. In this analogous scene from the original text, in which Hyde transforms back into Jekyll, Stevenson’s sure hand as an author leavens the event’s spectacular quality with an authentic sense of grim gravitas.

  He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

  “O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half-fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there stood Henry Jekyll!

  What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. (Stevenson 1886, 101)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1886. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Despite the interruption, Stevenson worked on his story feverishly. His stepson Lloyd Osbourne later recalled that writing the first draft took Stevenson no more than three days, and the processes of writing and editing were completed in six weeks.

  The story opens not with Dr. Jekyll, nor even with Mr. Hyde, but with the respectable lawyer Mr. Gabriel Utterson. The entire story is told from his perspective, despite the fact that he is eliminated from nearly all film and television adaptations of the work. Utterson is out for a weekly walk around London with his cousin Mr. Enfield when the conversation turns to a repulsive, violent man named Edward Hyde whom Enfield has encountered. Mr. Hyde is somehow connected to a mutual acquaintance, the upstanding and respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, who pays for the damage Hyde causes. Jekyll refuses to answer questions about Hyde, but as time passes he becomes withdrawn and reclusive. Eventually, Hyde commits murder and Jekyll vanishes from society. His friends break down his door and find Hyde dead from suicide, dressed in Jekyll’s clothes. The solution is found in a letter left by Jekyll: he discovered a “draught” to turn himself into Mr. Hyde and enact his repressed, socially unacceptable desires while maintaining his respectable reputation as Dr. Jekyll. He lost control of his alter ego and Hyde took over. Wanted for murder, Hyde killed himself, and so the sorry tale of the doctor’s split personality ends.

  The hastily written novella was an immediate success, which is ironic, given that Stevenson had previously labored for eight years on a novel called Prince Otto (1885) that has languished in obscurity ever since it was published. The novella has been interpreted as a detective story, a Gothic tale, and a sensation novel (akin to the Victorian penny dreadful) by literary critics. Like many Gothic and horror tales, Jekyll and Hyde expresses fears and uncertainties prevalent at the time of its writing. Unlike many Gothic tales, however, these fea
rs are not supernatural, but are rooted in apprehensions about science and progress. It expresses these anxieties through tropes and ideas common to both Victorian and Gothic fiction, notably the concept of the double.

  The double appears in other late Victorian and early Edwardian fictions such as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910). It also appeared in the scientific theory of the era through Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious versus the conscious mind, which raised the frightening prospect of the repressed, unconscious self taking control of the conscious personality. The double, or the doppelgänger, appears in numerous Gothic texts ranging from Jane Eyre (1847) to episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Jekyll and Hyde remains the most famous example of the double in literature.

  Furthermore, the fear of degeneration permeates the story. Degeneration was a notion that developed after Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, detailing his theory of biological evolution. Degeneration was the fear that Darwin’s theory could be inverted, and that humanity could regress into a beastlier, more vicious version of itself, like the repulsive Hyde. Degeneration was a widespread concern in Victorian society and found expression in other literary works such as H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), various stories by H. P. Lovecraft, and Stevenson’s own short story “Olalla.” It was not confined to literature: several major scientific works were written about the theory, notably Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892).

  Jekyll and Hyde also expresses fears about the city and the rise of urban living. Not for nothing is London chosen for its setting; the city in Stevenson’s novel is represented as a dark, threatening space where crime can flourish. Only a few years later, in 1888, Jack the Ripper would bring terror to the streets of Whitechapel. Although the nature of Jekyll’s nastier, unrestrained self is never explained, all sorts of criminality (particularly sexual deviance) is implied. Literary critic Elaine Showalter even suggests that Hyde is an outlet for Jekyll’s repressed (illegal) homosexuality.

  The story about the doctor’s ill-fated experiments concerning his split personality is so well known that it is strange to remember that the story was originally written as a mystery. It has been adapted on numerous occasions for stage and screen, with the earliest stage versions appearing only a year after the book’s first American publication in Boston. There are also plenty of works “inspired” by the tale that depict Jekyll’s unfortunate descendants or else put a new twist on the transformation, such as the film Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), in which Jekyll turns himself into a wicked woman. Perhaps the most impressive indicator of the book’s profound and pervasive cultural impact is that the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” has passed into the English language as a figure of speech to describe someone with a split personality or severe mood swings.

  Carys Crossen

  See also: Body Snatching Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Stevenson, Robert Louis.

  Further Reading

  Dryden, Linda. 2003. The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Frayling, Christopher. 1996. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, 114–161. London: BBC Books.

  Harman, Claire. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: Harper Perennial.

  Luckhurst, Roger. 2006. “Introduction.” In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales, edited by Roger Luckhurst, vii–xxxii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Maixner, Paul. 1995. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge.

  Showalter, Elaine. 1992. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Virago.

  Stepan, Nancy. 1985. “Biology: Races and Proper Places.” In Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, edited by J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman, 97–120. New York: Columbia University Press.

  STRAUB, PETER (1943–)

  Peter Straub is a best-selling American novelist, poet, and editor who is most famous for his horror novels, some of which were among the central texts that drove the horror publishing boom of the late twentieth century. He is a two-time recipient of the World Fantasy Award, ten-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, two-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award, Grandmaster of the World Horror Convention, and recipient of the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. His work has helped to shape the face of American popular literary culture, especially, but not solely, in the field of horror publishing, where his status is iconic.

  Peter Francis Straub was born in 1943 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1965, he received a BA from the University of Wisconsin; a year later, he earned a master’s degree in Contemporary Literature from Columbia. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Susan. He is father to a son, Ben, and a daughter, Emma. Emma has also pursued a writing career, to date having published three well-received novels and a short story collection.

  Straub began his writing life as a poet; among his first published works were a series of six pamphlets that he and longtime friend, horror writer Thomas Tessier (The Nightwalker), put out under the name Seafront Press. Other volumes include My Life in Pictures (1971), Ishmael (1972), and Open Air (1972). Probably the most readily available volume of his poetry is Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970–1975, published in 1983 by Underwood Miller, the closest thing the author has to a “collected works” volume of his poetry.

  Straub soon gravitated to writing novels, publishing the mainstream works Marriages in 1973 and Under Venus in 1974. He followed these two efforts with his first forays into the macabre, publishing Julia in 1975 and If You Could See Me Now in 1977.

  In 1979, he became something of a brand-name horror author with the publication of his breakout novel Ghost Story. His friend (and later collaborator) Stephen King lauded its virtues in a lengthy chapter in Danse Macabre, his nonfiction survey of horror fiction, where he described it as “the best of the supernatural novels to be published in the wake of the three books that kicked off a new horror ‘wave’ in the seventies—those three, of course, being Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other” (King 2010, 266). It also was included as a title in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s Horror: 100 Best Books, where it was deftly analyzed by speculative fiction scholar Peter Nicholls.

  Interestingly, the only books in Straub’s canon to be adapted to film were two of the early works noted above. Julia appeared in 1976 as Full Circle and was later re-released as The Haunting of Julia. In Straub’s mind, much of the casting was suspect, and the film’s script did not hold up very well. Ghost Story appeared in movie theaters in 1981. Although the film received praise for its effective casting of John Houseman and Fred Astaire as the central characters of Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, and for the debut of Alice Krige as the preternaturally threatening Alma Mobley, it was not a critical success, as Straub’s plot was severely downsized. It did do respectable business at the box office, though.

  Shadowland was published in 1980, a novel heavily influenced by John Fowles’s The Magus. Straub followed that effort with Floating Dragon (1983), an expansive, bombastic story of terror set in suburban Connecticut.

  His next project was a collaboration with Stephen King titled The Talisman (1984), a fantasy that chronicled the adventures of a boy named Jack Sawyer in a parallel universe. King and Straub published a sequel, Black House, in 2001. Besides updating fans on Jack’s doings, it also established specific links to the worlds that King created as part of his epic Dark Tower saga. The two have discussed a third book in the series, but have not written it as of 2016.

  In 1988, Straub published Koko, the first book in what was to become known as his Blue Rose Trilogy. A New York Times best seller, Koko appeared on that list simultaneously with another memorable novel, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. Their appearance there signaled the beginning of a new era
in thriller fiction, that of the serial killer as enigmatic antihero.

  Like Harris, Straub had not yet finished wringing the last ounce of story value from his situations and characters; unlike Harris, Straub’s subsequent forays into this strange landscape proved just as intriguing as their predecessor, as the author found numerous and creative ways to riff on the situations he set up in Koko, penning two additional novels—Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993)—and writing several striking short stories that gave insight into the characters featured therein (including “Blue Rose,” “The Juniper Tree,” “The Ghost Village,” and “Bunny Makes Good Bread”). In 2010, Straub collaborated with actor Michael Easton to write the graphic novel The Green Woman. Illustrated by John Bolton, the book looks in on serial killer Fee Bandolier, who featured heavily in The Throat.

  The Blue Rose Trilogy introduced the character of Tim Underhill, a writer (he purportedly wrote the story “Blue Rose”) who became both Straub’s alter ego and, according to subsequent works, his collaborator. Underhill also played key roles in the novels lost boy, lost girl (2003) and In the Night Room (2004).

  Straub introduced one of his most memorable and beloved villains, the despicable Dick Dart, in 1985’s Hellfire Club. He delved into Lovecraftian themes in 1999’s Mr. X. His most recent novel, A Dark Matter, a reflection on the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, appeared in 2010. An alternate version of this story, the novel The Skylark, was published by Subterranean Press that same year.