by Matt Cardin
SUMMERS, MONTAGUE (1880–1948)
Augustus Montague Summers was an English author, vampirologist, demonologist, and clergyman of dubious religious orders. Enigmatic occultist and sometimes participant in the Black Mass in his earlier days, today Summers is primarily known for his scholarly works on Restoration drama and the Gothic and his occult works on vampires, witches, werewolves, and demons, figures in which he professed his firm belief. Summers was also responsible for the first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (1928), the infamous fifteenth-century witch hunter’s manual.
The youngest of seven children, Summers was raised in Clifton, Bristol, then educated at Clifton College before going to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied theology, intending to become a priest in the Church of England. After receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1905, he attended the Lichfield Theological College to further his religious studies. In 1908, Summers was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, but following accusations of sexual impropriety he converted to Catholicism in 1909, supposedly obtaining holy orders in Italy, and thereafter passed himself off as a Catholic priest, self-styled as the Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers. He wore clerical garments until the day he died in 1948.
A couple of brief excerpts from the first of Montague Summers’s two books about vampires are enough to provide a good indicator of his characteristic style, tone, and approach to writing about supernatural and occult matters. In the now famous opening lines of the introduction to The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, Summers wrote, “In all the darkest pages of the malign supernatural there is no more terrible tradition than that of the Vampire, a pariah even among demons. Foul are his ravages; gruesome and seemingly barbaric are the ancient and approved methods by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pest” (Summers 1929, ix). Then in the first sentence of the book’s first chapter, titled “The Origins of the Vampire,” he extended the theme: “Throughout the whole vast shadowy world of ghosts and demons there is no figure so terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight with such fearful fascination, as the vampire, who is himself neither ghost nor demon, but yet who partakes the dark natures and possesses the mysterious and terrible qualities of both” (1).
Matt Cardin
Source: Summers, Montague. 1929. The Vampire, His Kith and Kin. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Before turning to writing full-time, Summers worked as an English and Latin teacher at various schools in England and London for several years. Summers’s prose, according to Gerard P. O’Sullivan, “was solemn, archaic, and often impenetrable” (O’Sullivan 2011, xxix). His other important occult works include The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926), The Geography of Witchcraft (1927), The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), The Vampire in Europe (1929), The Werewolf (1933), A Popular History of Witchcraft (1937), Witchcraft and Black Magic (1946), and The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (1947).
Perusing older as well as newer texts on the topical areas Summers pursued can scarcely be done without encountering his name and mention of his works, a fact owing as much to his curious demeanor, erudition, and rather quirky, ornate writing style as it does to the breadth of research he published in his lifetime. However, these same texts also reveal the curious absence of any real depth in Summers’s work, and it is perhaps because of this that a stigma has been attached to Summers’s writings for almost as long as they have been in print. Summers’s rather orthodox belief in supernatural figures, his sometimes impenetrable writing style, and the documentation errors his works occasionally show have contributed to a partial and sometimes outright avoidance of his work by researchers.
Summers died suddenly in his home in Richmond, Surrey, on August 10, 1948, with only a handful of close friends in attendance at his simple graveside service three days later. After his death, Summers’s contribution to the critical methodologies used for studying vampires has become undeniable. Without his frequently reprinted works, the image of the vampire that is widely recognized today might have had considerably less to do with comparative cultural studies and more to do with predominantly anglicized representations in film and literature. Indeed, it is because of Summers that the modern serious study of the vampire figure exists today.
John Edgar Browning
See also: Incubi and Succubi; Vampires; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Jerome, Joseph. 1965. Montague Summers: A Memoir. London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf.
O’Sullivan, Gerard P. 2011. “Prologue: The Continuing Quest for Montague Summers.” In The Vampire, His Kith and Kin: A Critical Edition, edited by John Edgar Browning, xxviii–lxxii. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.
Sewell, Brocard. 1991. Tell Me Strange Things: A Memorial to Montague Summers. Upton: Aylesford Press.
Summers, Montague. 1980. The Galantry Show: An Autobiography. London: Cecil Woolf.
Summers, Montague. 2011. The Vampire, His Kith and Kin: A Critical Edition. Edited by John Edgar Browning. Berkeley: Apocryphile Press.
Summers, Montague. 2014. The Vampire in Europe: A Critical Edition. Edited by John Edgar Browning. Berkeley: Apocryphile Press.
SURREALISM
Surrealism is a movement in poetry, painting, fiction, and film in which the artist attempts to tap directly into the subconscious, using such means as dreams or automatic writing to fuse subconscious and conscious thought to create a new type of reality. The movement was heavily influenced by Freudian theory and by the Gothic novel, which the founder of surrealism, the French poet Andre Breton, felt was a similar reaction against the art and social mores of an earlier era. These influences perhaps account for touches of horror that may surface in surrealist works.
Founded by Breton in 1924, surrealism grew to prominence between the two World Wars. It diverged from the earlier, nihilistic, Dadaist movement, in which artists rebelled against reason and logic in a disillusioned postwar Europe. The Surrealists sought to create something new and positive, if also shocking and discordant.
Because the term “surrealism” signifies a method of creation rather than a particular style or subject matter, there is little consistency in works so classified, but they do commonly feature strange and disquieting juxtapositions of objects and concepts, as often seen in surrealist paintings. Horrific imagery is often more apparent in film, as in Andalusian Dog (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, with its shocking scenes of a woman’s eye being sliced by a razor and ants crawling out of a wound in a man’s hand. Later Surrealist-influenced films include L’Age d’Or (1930) by Buñuel, Beauty and the Beast (1946) by Jean Cocteau, Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch, and El Topo (1970) and Sante Sangre (1989) by Alejandro Jodorosky.
Surrealist fiction may also contain horrific elements. In The Fashionable Tiger (1947) by Jean Ferry, a vicious tiger is forced by hypnotism to dress and behave as a human in a circus performance. The Rabbits and The Debutante by Leonora Carrington (1939) respectively feature carnivorous rabbits and a hyena who eats a young woman and wears her torn-off face. The Lost Traveller (1943) by Ruthven Todd, based on a series of dreams, follows a man on a quest across a bizarre landscape with bleeding statues and faceless people.
Surrealism largely disappeared as an organized movement after World War II, but its effects were widespread. Some later writers, such as Rikki Ducornet, actually employed surrealist techniques, but the movement also had a more superficial influence on many writers such as William S. Burroughs, Nathanael West, William Sansom, and J. G. Ballard, who often employed the type of disconcerting imagery or disjointedness seen in surrealist works.
The movement was one of many streams of influence on the development of weird fiction and in particular on writers such as Robert Aickman and Angela Carter. More recently, the influence can be seen in the work of the New Weird movement, including China Miéville, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco, and Caitlín Kiernan.
Lee Weinstein
See also: Aickman, Robert; Ballard,
J. G.; Carter, Angela; Dreams and Nightmares; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Ligotti, Thomas; Miéville, China; New Weird.
Further Reading
Bradley, Fiona. 1997. Surrealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hopkins, David. 2004. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2011. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. New York: Tor.
T
TEM, MELANIE (1949–2015)
The American author Melanie Tem was a renowned horror and dark fantasy writer known for her humane, insightful domestic horror, which was influenced by her career in social work. She received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards for her writing, which included nearly a hundred short stories, twelve novels, and numerous plays, poems, and storytelling performances.
Tem’s novels include Prodigal (1991), Wilding (1992), Revenant (1994), The Yellow Wood (2015), Blood Moon (1992), and Black River (1997). As a social worker and administrator, she worked with the elderly, the disabled, and adoptive children and parents, which provided her with unique insights into caring for damaged families. Her novels often locate the oppressive scenarios they explore in suburban houses, and she focuses on the domestic and on family interactions. The family’s relationships are a prime location for her horror, which is an exposé of hypocrisy and repressive binary oppositions, taboos, and rituals that prioritize some behaviors while excluding, demonizing, and punishing others. In Blood Moon she explores the violent outbursts of a serially abused, neglected child, and in the short story (with writer husband Steve Rasnic Tem) “Mama” (1995), she identifies the domineering mother, every teenage girl’s guilty secret, as a returned vampire eating flies in the kitchen, gnawing on her dominated husband. The disgusted teenage daughter nevertheless soon succumbs to her own vampire nature. In the lesbian Gothic Wilding, werewolves express hidden, socially unacknowledged passions. Tem deals sensitively with matriarchal power and problems of Othering, inclusivity, and exclusivity central to queer theory. In The Yellow Wood five father-dominated siblings struggle to cope with the traumatizing talents imposed on them, which Alexandra, who leaves, then returns, suspects is more than extreme parenting.
Tem’s horror is based on her insights into families, social practices, and everyday relationships. She excavates the ways in which families and social groups Otherize those who are different, as seen in, for example, their responses of rejection, disgust, abjection, and destruction based on fears of difference, the body, the Other, the abject, the “not I.” She also refuses to end her stories and novels on the kind of horror closure that restores a former state of order that is actually deeply flawed. In all this she undercuts neat reinforcement of the status quo, which some conventional horror embraces in its closure. Tem’s work is caring, thoughtful, and concerned with human values, exposing the lack of all of these qualities in so many family and social settings. She refuses and exposes the demonizing of humanity’s animal nature, other selves, and any easy maintenance of taboos, neat sets of behaviors, and beliefs. Melanie Tem died of metastatic breast cancer on February 9, 2015.
Gina Wisker
See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Vampires; Werewolves; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Simmons, William P. 2005. “A Conversation with Melanie Tem.” Cemetery Dance 53: 70–75.
Wisker, Gina. 2009. “Devouring Desires: Lesbian Gothic Horror.” In Queering the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and A. Smith, 123–141. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
TERROR VERSUS HORROR
Both “terror” and “horror” have been used to name the affect that characterizes horror fiction. Critics trying to understand the genre better have had to reckon with the different ways in which people can be afraid.
Much of the critical discussion of horror and terror focuses on them as emotional reactions deliberately elicited by the writer. In an influential 1826 essay, Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe wrote that terror was a kind of dread with no clear cause, while horror was a paralyzing or contracting emotion with a clear cause. Terror, according to Radcliffe, was a stimulating, expansive feeling, while horror deadened the mind. Stephen King, writing in his nonfiction survey of horror, Danse Macabre, likewise sees terror as a form of excitement associated with danger, while horror is an experience of helplessness or despair. However, it is not at all unlikely that any given writer might use these terms interchangeably, or reverse their senses.
Although a great many people have weighed in with varying opinions as to what constitutes the dividing line between terror and horror—from working horror authors themselves (such as Stephen King to Dennis Wheatley) to literary scholars and critics (such as Peter Penzoldt, Philip Van Doren Stern, and Devendra P. Varma)—no opinion has been more widely known or influential than that of Ann Radcliffe, who in her classic (and posthumously published) 1826 essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” said this:
Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (Radcliffe 1826)
Matt Cardin
Source: Radcliffe, Ann. 1826. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” In The New Monthly Magazine 7, 145–152.
On the other hand, terror and horror can also be understood in terms of the structure of a story. Terror is often the emotion a reader is meant to feel gathering strength as the story unfolds, while horror is the emotion that comes over the reader when the mystery is finally solved, and/or the evil exposed. In horror fiction, the reader is given a series of signs, which may be clues in a mystery, or moments of emotional revelation, or exploration of a place or relationship, and these signs all point toward the horror without naming it or making it too clear. Terror is the name one may give to the mounting impression created by these signs as they accumulate. Many of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories have this structure, so that the final, horrifying revelation of the story comes as a surprise, but does not come out of nowhere. The astute reader, in gradually picking up the writer’s signs, will have come to a vague suspicion that the hidden truth is nightmarish, will anticipate its being revealed, and will be both curious and reluctant to learn what it is. As long as the discovery is feared and postponed, the reader is enjoying the “terrifying” aspect of the story; however, as this unfolds, the “horror” of the story also comes increasingly into view. On re-reading, then, the reader would presumably experience primarily horror, the terror having given way to dramatic irony.
In everyday language, however, the word “terror” is often used to describe intense fear of some concrete or immediate danger, while “horror” is a feeling of denial, triggered by a more general state of affairs. For example, facing imminent death in an airplane crash would be cause for terror, while horror might better describe the sort of feeling one has contemplating one’s own mortality. Seen in this way, horror is the word for a nightmarish situation or destiny that cannot be avoided, but is too painful to accept. Terror, then, would be some avoidable outcome, or a threat that can be faced and defeated. This means that certainty about outcomes is another way to tell these two emotions apart. If the outcome is certainly negative, then the feeling will be one of horror. If there is hope, then the feeling will be terror. Seen in this way, Dracula is primarily a novel of terror, because the vampire is finally defeated. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, however, is a horror story insofar as the reader identifies with the main character, because he ends up beyond help. Lovecraft cites Charles Lamb’s essay “Witche
s and Other Night-Fears” at the opening of his own classic story, “The Dunwich Horror.” In this extract, Lamb also points out that the terrors of fantasy, such as witches and demons, do not alarm us by threatening us with bodily harm, but in a more philosophical way, threatening our spirits, our sense of self.
Michael Cisco
See also: Dracula; “The Dunwich Horror”; King, Stephen; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Numinous; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The Sublime; The Uncanny.
Further Reading
King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.
Lamb, Charles. Witches and Other Night-Fears. In The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2: Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, edited by E. V. Lucas, 65–69. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lamb/charles/elia/book1.13.html.
Radcliffe, Ann. [1826] 2004. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” In Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, edited by David Sandner, 41–50. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger.
TESSIER, THOMAS (1947–)
Thomas Tessier is an American author of horror fiction in a psychological vein, as opposed to the bloody, gory type of horror produced by many of the genre’s other major figures. His books are concise and economical in their writing and plotting—he has never published a book with more than 400 pages—and his style of writing has drawn attention from critics for its lucidity and precision. He frequently leaves the reader suspended between supernatural and naturalistic understandings of the events in his novels, of which, to date, he has published ten. He has also published three volumes of poetry and numerous short stories. He is furthermore a playwright and has had several plays professionally staged, though they have never been published.
