Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Tessier was born in Connecticut in 1947. For college he crossed the Atlantic to attend University College Dublin. He lived for several years in Dublin, and then in London (which later became the setting for several of his novels), before returning to the United States. He currently resides in his home state of Connecticut.

  His first novel, The Fates (1978), explores the chilling impact that a strange force, possibly supernatural, has on a small town in America. It set the precedent for Tessier’s later work by offering no final explanation for its frightening events, and by refusing to offer a happy ending. His second novel, The Nightwalker, published in 1979, featured the original American werewolf in London. Its protagonist is a quiet Vietnam veteran named Bobby Ives who is the victim of strange nightmares and violent impulses. It is unclear if Bobby’s fears are due to his (probable) trauma from the war and mental illness, or if he really is turning into a werewolf.

  More dark and disturbing fiction followed. Of Tessier’s third novel, Shockwaves (1982), horror icon Ramsey Campbell called it “remarkably dark.” Perhaps for this reason, Tessier’s subsequent novel Phantom, published in the same year, features a child protagonist and actually ends on an optimistic note.

  Nevertheless, it was back to familiar territory for Tessier’s next novel, Finishing Touches (1986), which explores themes similar to The Nightwalker, focusing on a young American doctor’s descent into a murderous madness. Rapture (1987) and Secret Strangers (1990) were less supernatural and more conventional thrillers, and Tessier has been far less prolific in the years since they were published. His later novels are Fogheart (1997), Father Panic’s Opera Macabre (2001), and Wicked Things (2007), though he has continued to publish short fiction since the turn of the millennium.

  Tessier has received several award nominations and received an International Horror Guild Award for Fogheart in 1998. Though not the most prolific of horror writers, he continues to produce books, essays, and short stories, with his most recent production at the time of this writing being Remorseless (2013), a collection of his short fiction.

  Carys Crossen

  See also: Dreams and Nightmares; Psychological Horror; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  Errickson, Will. 2014. “The Erotic Horrors of Thomas Tessier.” Tor.com, June 20. http://www.tor.com/2014/06/20/summer-of-sleaze-the-erotic-horrors-of-thomas-tessier.

  “Thomas (Edward) Tessier.” 2002. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  “THERE’S A LONG, LONG TRAIL A-WINDING”

  American writer, editor, and conservative political theorist Russell Kirk (1918–1994) had already produced one collection of ghost stories, The Surly Sullen Bell (1962), the Gothic novel Old House of Fear (1961), the picaresque black comedy A Creature of the Twilight: His Memorials (1966), and several seminal publications on social, political, and religious subjects before his story “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” appeared in Kirby McCauley’s anthology Frights: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Terror (1976). The story went on to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1977.

  In the story, Frank Sarsfield is walking along a lonely stretch of highway when a blizzard forces him to seek shelter in an abandoned village beside the shell of a prison, where he finds a single dwelling unfelled by time. Sarsfield is a man of simple faith haunted by the belief that “there could be no grace for him” because of his failure to maintain contact with his parents and sister, his terms of imprisonment for raiding church poorboxes, and the degrading day-to-day existence of a vagabond. He has the stature of a Viking but shuns violence, and he loves children but mistrusts women too much to raise a family. Additionally, his untutored intelligence leans less towards making a life for himself or anyone else than toward poetry and the solipsistic daydreams in which his thoughts crowd out the outside world. Snowbound in a house where time and identity become dazzlingly fluid, he experiences an increasing sense of familiarity with his surroundings and its former denizens. He has always been prone to seeing things his fellows could not perceive, but he now notices that the odd movements seen out of the corner of his eye, certain distant sounds, and even the sense of having been touched when on the verge of a dream have taken on an added clarity before he is called upon to play a heroic role in events that coincide with the day of his birth, sixty years in the past.

  Through this “signal act of contrition” Sarsfield remits the debt implied in the age-old Christian dilemma posed in the biblical Book of James whereby humanity is saved by faith, but justified by works. Kirk’s heroes rarely play the passive role in uncovering and reacting to spectral phenomena that characterize the protagonists in most ghost stories, choosing rather to take an active, even aggressive stance toward the malignant forces arrayed against them. If Kirk’s villains sometimes seem as transparent as an allegorical character out of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), his fallible heroes are more complex. Despite bearing the marks of the venal, violent world around them, they act decisively to protect the bodies and souls of the innocent, even when their fear is most acute. As John Webster stated in the seventeenth-century tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, “Man, like to cassia [that is, cinnamon], is proved best, being bruised” (Webster 1999, 52). As powerful as this tale is in isolation, it also fits into a larger body of work dramatizing concerns Kirk had voiced in his nonfiction. Working from a central Dantesque trilogy of which this story forms the Purgatorio, “Balgrummo’s Hell” (1967) the Inferno, and “Saviourgate” (1976) the Paradiso, Kirk develops a Christian mythos drawing upon elements of medieval theology, the writings of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and others to produce a network of cross-references within his fiction, which reaches a focal and dramatic climax when Ralph Bain suddenly crashes into action in the supernatural thriller Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979) straight from his apparently fatal fall from a cliff-top at the end of 1952’s “Sorworth Place.” Frank Sarsfield’s redemption, entire unto itself, requires no such apotheosis, though he does reappear briefly in Kirk’s “Watchers at the Strait Gate” (1980).

  Jim Rockhill

  See also: Kirk, Russell.

  Further Reading

  Guroian, Vigen. 2004. “Introduction.” In Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales by Russell Kirk, vii–xvii. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

  Herron, Don. 1985. “Russell Kirk: Ghost Master of Mecosta.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 21–47. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  Kirk, Russell. 1984. “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale.” In Watchers at the Strait Gate, ix-xiv. Sauk City, WI.

  Pelan, John. 2002. “The Ghosts of Piety Hill.” In Off the Sand Road: Ghost Stories, Volume One by Russell Kirk, ix–xvii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.

  Webster, John. [1623] 1999. The Duchess of Malfi. Mineola, NY: Dover.

  “THEY”

  “They” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1904 and later collected in Traffics and Discoveries in 1904. It was influenced both by a personal bereavement of Kipling’s and by his keen awareness of the thriving world of Spiritualism—centered on the practice of spirit mediums contacting and speaking for the spirits of the dead—in turn-of-the-century England and America.

  The actual story of “They” is quite simple: the nameless narrator, driving in Sussex, makes a wrong turn, finds a beautiful old country house, and barely glimpses a number of children. The owner is a woman, Miss Florence, blind almost since birth; they speak of the children, and she reveals she loves but cannot see them. The narrator speaks of his children, one of whom (it is inferred) is dead, though he never sees faces in his dreams. Miss Florence’s butler Madden, who helps him on his way, has also lost a child to the croup and will not accept a tip. The narrator returns again some months later, becoming emotionally closer with Miss Florence; when a distraught villager appears, the narrator assists by finding and fetching a doctor, then bring
ing in a nun to assist the dying child. A third visit, in autumn, permits him to see Miss Florence deal with a dishonest tenant; he and Miss Florence take tea, the children audible but not visible, and as he watches her and the farmer, his hand is kissed in a way known only to his dead daughter. He now knows who They are: the ghosts of dead children, visible only to those who have lost children, and Miss Florence tells him that he can never return.

  Inspired by Kipling’s loss of his daughter Josephine (1892–1899) to pneumonia, “They” is an elliptical work: the word “ghosts” is never used, and it is unclear until the conclusion if the story has a point or if it is simply a series of anecdotes involving life, death, and nature. Only at the conclusion is it revealed that “They” offers a glimpse into a world in which innocent love and its memories can keep alive the dead, and that those who care the most often cannot see what they care for. It is a poignant and moving story that Somerset Maugham described as “a fine and deeply moving effort of the imagination” (Maugham 1952, xxi). Kipling scholar William B. Dillingham characterizes “They” as “perhaps the most personally revealing of [Kipling’s] stories” (Dillingham 2005, 140).

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Phantom ’Rickshaw”; “The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”; Spiritualism.

  Further Reading

  Dillingham, William B. 2002. “Kipling: Spiritualism, Bereavement, Self-Revelation, and ‘They.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 45, no. 4: 402–425.

  Dillingham, William B. 2005. “The Immortal Woe of Life: Bereavement.” In Kipling: Hell and Heroism, 101–157. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Maugham, Somerset. 1952. Introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Prose, vii–xxviii. New York: Macmillan.

  “THRAWN JANET”

  “Thrawn Janet” is a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson first published in the October 1881 issue of The Cornhill Magazine. It is narrated almost entirely in a thick Scottish dialect, which gives it the character of an old folk legend.

  The story is set in 1712 in the moorland parish of Balweary, where the Reverend Murdoch Soulis has newly arrived from college. When he hires Janet M’Clour to be his housekeeper, the locals are aghast because Janet is rumored to be “si to the de’il” (that is, a witch). Soulis saves her from being dunked in the waters of the Dule to prove that she’s a witch, and he has her swear before the townspeople that she renounces the devil. The next day, Janet appears with her head and neck twisted askew, as though she’s been hanged or “thrawn.” Soulis believes that she has suffered a palsy through the cruelty of the townspeople, but the townsfolk believe that something unholy has taken up residence in her body. One stormy evening, after Soulis has had a disturbing encounter with a strange Black Man in the churchyard, he enters Janet’s room and sees her corpse hanging from a thread on a nail in the wall. When Soulis leaves the room, the corpse pursues him, and when he invokes the power of God, the corpse dissolves into ash. The next day, when the Black Man is seen leaving town, the locals reason that it was the devil himself who had possessed Janet’s corpse the last few months. Thereafter, Soulis turns extremely dour and reclusive, and he frightens people with the intensity of his admonitions against the forces of evil.

  In his introduction to The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, Barry Menikoff praises “Thrawn Janet” as “a masterpiece of linguistic realism” and one of Stevenson’s most complex considerations of the nature of evil. As he notes, neither the villagers’ superstitiousness nor the minister’s rationalism can explain the story’s macabre events. “In effect,” Menikoff writes, “the diabolic served Stevenson as a convenient frame for focusing attention on an aspect of life that appears to resist rational explanation” (Menikoff 2002, xliii). The story was one of Stevenson’s personal favorites, and it moved him to reflect in his personal letters on whether it was wholesome for him to brood upon “the evil in the world and man.”

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Devils and Demons; Possession and Exorcism; Stevenson, Robert Louis; Witches and Witchcraft.

  Further Reading

  Arata, Stephen. 2010. “Stevenson and Fin-de-Siècle Gothic.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Penny Fielding, 53–69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  Coleman, O. Parsons. 1946. “Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in ‘Thrawn Janet.’” Studies in Philology 43, no. 3 (July): 551–571.

  Menikoff, Barry. 2002. “Introduction.” The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Barry Menikoff, xiii–liii. New York: Modern Library.

  TRANSFORMATION AND METAMORPHOSIS

  Transformation and metamorphosis are both words used to denote a change from one form or shape to another. The difference between the two terms is largely etymological: the Latin elements of “trans-” and “form” broadly correspond to the Greek elements of “meta-” and “morphosis” (meaning “between” and “form” respectively). Both words are used in English to refer to the process of change in a variety of contexts; however, in artistic works, metamorphosis generally connotes a more complete change of state or substance, often effected through supernatural or divine means. In fiction and art, the most common type of metamorphosis is the transformation of the human into another organism or inanimate object (and vice versa). Ideas of transformation have particular significance for the tradition of horror literature, as the enduring fascination with metamorphosis is reflected in numerous texts and narratives throughout the history of horror fiction.

  Transformation and metamorphosis are among the earliest concerns of human art. Sculptures and cave paintings dating back to the last Ice Age (ca. 38,000–8000 BCE) depict creatures that are part human and part animal, suggesting species fluidity (either hybridity or metamorphosis). From the earliest examples, literature also evinces this fascination. The ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE) contains, among other things, stories of scorpion-men, humans transformed into clay, and a shepherd turned into a wolf by an angry goddess. In the ancient Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers” (ca. 1200–1194 BCE), a man is transformed into a bull and then into a tree after his death. In this latter case, metamorphosis intersects with resurrection and the afterlife, which is a recurrent motif in both Western and Eastern cultures. Ideas of metamorphosis frequently appear in classical Greek and Latin writing as well, with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (ca. 760–710 BCE) containing numerous episodes of transformation. For Western fiction, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) is one of the most influential texts on transformation, with its unifying theme extending to episodes of human-animal, human-object, animal-human, and plant-human change, as well as to episodes of gender inversion and physical alteration. The mechanisms of transformation depicted in Ovid’s work are also varied, with metamorphosis being effected by human, supernatural, and divine means, but also as a result of natural change. Ovid’s work draws on earlier literature, but also on mythological and folkloric conceptions of transformation. Almost all known mythologies and folklores include some element of metamorphosis; magical practice, esotericism, and superstition also reflect a perennial concern with effecting transformation, including using rituals and spells to alter shape, status, or circumstance. Many stories are the result of an intermingling of Western and Eastern traditions. For example, One Thousand and One Nights (also known as the Arabian Nights) contains numerous stories in which voluntary and involuntary transformation is achieved through the will (or control) of a supernatural being. While some of these stories (such as “The Fisherman and the Jinni”) appear in the oldest manuscripts of the text and probably draw on Persian and Indian folklore, others (such as “Aladdin’s Lamp”) were added by the eighteenth-century French translator, Antoine Galland. Galland was friends with Charles Perrault, one of the writers responsible for the popularity of the literary fairy tale, which has its roots in European folklore and fable. Physical transformation, supernatural alteration of circumstance, and species fluidity ar
e key concerns in all these modes of storytelling.

  As well as having folkloric and mythological roots, conceptions of metamorphosis have long been inflected by developments in religious and scientific thinking. In Western traditions, the centrality of an act of transformation to Christianity is significant. The doctrine of transubstantiation, while prescribed as a unique miracle in theological texts, is reflected in European narrative fiction from the twelfth century onward. Medieval romance texts (for example, Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec and Enide) reveal a recurrent interest in the redemptive transformation of the individual (usually a man) and the potential for one substance to be translated into another through supernatural or divine will. At the same time as these developments in theology and literature, studies in biology (informed by Greek and Arabic scholarship) increased focus on natural processes of transformation such as digestion, reproduction, and growth. These intersecting influences continue to be a significant influence on fictional tales of metamorphosis.

  Horror fiction retains this fascination with transformation and metamorphosis, and the influences of older traditions are visible. In the nineteenth century, a number of Gothic texts addressed the concept of metamorphosis through engagement with both supernatural and scientific ideas. Transformative creatures such as the vampire and the werewolf, whose previous incarnations had been mainly folkloric or theological, became staple figures of horror literature, and new understandings of biology, chemistry, and physics were interpreted through the lens of fiction. One of the best-known examples of such a text is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a seemingly demonic act of horrific physical and psychological transformation is actually effected through secretive scientific experiments. Contemporary horror also often reflects current scientific concerns, incorporating new ideas of evolution, robotics, and genetic modification into older traditions of species fluidity, supernatural transformation, and ritual. For example, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” combines ideas of artificial intelligence with depictions of physical and mental transformation to depict the grotesque metamorphosis of human beings by a vengeful supercomputer. Elsewhere, arcane rites and supernatural evil are responsible for the distortion of the human form, and horrific transformation is a key theme in the works of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and Thomas Ligotti. While Ellison’s supercomputer represents the transformative potential of new technology, works such as Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin” draw on fears of ancient or repressed monstrosity and of the possibility of degeneration. Nevertheless, the basic premise of all these narratives—the possibility that a human might become something nonhuman—dates back to some of the earliest examples of artistic creation.