Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Brian Stableford

  See also: Devils and Demons; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Monk.

  Further Reading

  Birkhead, Edith. 1921. “The Oriental Tale of Terror: Beckford.” In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, 94–99. New York: E. P. Dutton.

  Garrett, John. 1992. “Ending in Infinity: William Beckford’s Arabian Tale.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5, no. 1 (October): 15–34.

  Herrnstadt, Carol May. 1967. The Gothic Villain in William Beckford’s Vathek. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

  Hubbard, Jennifer Lee. 2004. The Function of the Grotesque in William Beckford’s Vathek. Seattle: University of Oregon Press.

  W

  WAGNER, KARL EDWARD (1945–1994)

  Karl Edward Wagner was an American writer, editor, and publisher of fantasy and horror fiction whose career coincides with the ascent of horror and dark fantasy as popular categories in trade publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. Wagner’s earliest published work—the novels Darkness Weaves (1970), Bloodstone (1975), and Dark Crusade (1976), and the collections Death Angel’s Shadow (1973) and Night Winds (1978)—featured his immortal Byronic swordsman Kane, a character inspired partly by Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Richard Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, whose adventures straddled the boundary between sword-and-sorcery and horror fiction. Wagner’s interest in Howard would lead him to edit three collections of the restored texts of Howard’s tales of Conan, all published in 1977: The Hour of the Dragon, The People of the Black Circle, and Red Nails.

  Wagner’s complete short tales of the supernatural were collected in three volumes: In a Lonely Place (1983), Why Not You and I (1987), and Exorcisms and Ecstasies (1997). The best of these stories are informed by his familiarity with classic supernatural fiction, including “In the Pines,” a variation on the theme of Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One,” and “The River of Night’s Dreaming,” which references the work of Robert W. Chambers. His best-known story, “Sticks,” first published in 1974. was both a tribute to the work of Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye and a contribution to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Its central concept and visual image of mysterious lattice-like stick formations that are discovered in the woods, and that seemingly hold horrific supernatural or occult significance, was borrowed for the first season of HBO’s True Detective in 2014 and also, to all appearance, by the makers of The Blair Witch Project (1999). “The Fourth Seal” and “Into Whose Hands” are both macabre ruminations on the modern medical profession (for which Wagner, as a nonpracticing psychiatrist, had trained), while a number of his stories—“Neither Brute Nor Human,” “The Last Wolf,” “Silted In,” ‘‘Lost Exits,” and “The Slug,” among others—are macabre tales about artists undone by their own flaws and vulnerabilities, a recurring theme in his later work.

  With David Drake and Jim Groce, Wagner founded the publishing imprint Carcosa, which published four collections of pulp fiction by E. Hoffmann Price, Hugh B. Cave, and Manly Wade Wellman, including the World Fantasy Award–winning Worse Things Waiting (1973) and Murgrunstrumm and Others (1977). Wagner compiled three anthologies of classic sword-and-sorcery fiction in the Echoes of Valor series between 1987 and 1991, and an anthology of medical horror stories, Intensive Scare (1989). Between 1980 and his death in 1994, Wagner edited fifteen volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, an annual series that, in his hands, was instrumental for celebrating the small press’s important contribution to modern horror fiction.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Howard, Robert E.; Onions, Oliver; Wellman, Manly Wade.

  Further Reading

  Ashley, Mike. 1996. “Wagner, Karl Edward.” St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle, 583–584. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

  Drake, David. 1989. “A Brief Introduction to Karl Edward Wagner.” Weird Tales 51, no. 1 (Spring/Fall): 110–112.

  Howard, John. 2014. “In Lonely Places: The Essential Horror Fiction of Karl Edward Wagner.” In Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic, 187–202. Staffordshire, UK: Alchemy Press.

  Mayer, John. 1997. “The Dark Muse of Karl Edward Wagner.” New York Review of Science Fiction 112, no. 1 (December): 8–17.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 1985. “Karl Edward Wagner and the Haunted Hills (and Kudzu).” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, 86–91. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  WAKEFIELD, H. R. (1888–1964)

  Herbert Russell Wakefield was an English writer and editor, the best of whose work is noted for its intelligence, dark sensibilities, and clever variations on existing formulas for supernatural fiction. Wakefield matriculated at Marlborough College in Summerfield House from 1902 to 1906, then attended Oxford University, where he received a second-class degree in history, and from 1912 to 1914 he served as secretary to Lord Northcliffe. Wakefield’s father was Bishop of Birmingham, and in 1920, following Wakefield’s service in the First World War, where he achieved the rank of lieutenant, he briefly became his father’s secretary. He later joined publisher Philip Allan (some say Collins) as editor, and in 1932, with Charles Birkin, Wakefield began the editorship of the Creeps series, some fourteen titles of which were published before the series concluded with The Creeps Omnibus (1935). This latter series contained twenty-nine stories, seven of which were by Wakefield.

  Wakefield’s first collection of ghost stories, They Return at Evening (1928), was jointly published by Philip Allan and an American publisher, Appleton, Century; in “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,” M. R. James praised the volume and described the contents as “a mixed bag, from which I should remove one or two that leave a very nasty taste. Among the residue are some admirable pieces, very inventive” (James 2009, 348). This was followed by additional collections of short stories and a handful of crime novels. At the time of his death, Wakefield had published more than seventy-five short stories, many of them ultimately supernatural, though with a strong element of physical horror. His ghosts were rarely metaphysical.

  “He Cometh and He Passeth By”: Conflicting Magics and Rival Conjurors

  Wakefield’s “He Cometh and He Passeth By” was first published in 1928 in his supernatural fiction collection They Return at Evening. The story is a simple one and easily described: after his old friend Philip Franton is killed by magic sent by Oscar Clinton, successful barrister Edward Bellamy enlists the aid of rival magician Mr. Solan, studies magic himself, and ultimately causes Clinton to destroy himself via the same magic he used to destroy Franton.

  The plot is clearly inspired by M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes” (1911), in which a magical paper must be returned to its sender or the recipient will die miserably. Nevertheless, Wakefield’s is in many ways superior. First, its world is not that of academia and scholarly societies but contemporary England, solidly drawn and clearly recognizable. In addition, while James kept his sorcerous villain (Karswell) largely offstage, letting others describe his powers and imagine his malevolence, Wakefield depicts Clinton at some length: modeled on Aleister Crowley, with perhaps a dash of Harry Crosby, the man is brilliantly amoral, openly indulging in every vice, and his demonstrations of his powers are eerie and convincing. Lastly, Wakefield’s characters have backstories that add to the narrative: Bellamy and Franton have a history of friendship, as do Bellamy and Mr. Solan, and Solan and Clinton know of and respect each other; indeed, Clinton praises Solan’s magical abilities, while Solan states that Clinton may have the best brain of any living person.

  It is these touches that add depth to Wakefield’s story, for “He Cometh and He Passeth By” is not simply a story about evading a curse but, rather, a tale of conflicting and maneuvering magics wielded by rival conjurors.

  Richard Bleiler

  Largely on the strength of “He Cometh and He Passeth By” (1928), a tale of rival magicians inspired by M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes,” Wakefield is sometimes considered one of the writers ind
ebted to M. R. James and referenced somewhat dismissively as one of the “James Gang.” This classification and categorization does him no service, for although he lacked James’s enormous intelligence, he had a far greater palette than James, a far greater awareness of the world at large, and he was capable of telling more than one kind of ghost story. Wakefield recognized that hauntings did not necessarily need to involve medieval cathedrals and manuscripts or the English public schools; indeed, hauntings could occur in the twentieth century and did not need to involve the English upper classes. Wakefield thus occasionally made use of the traditional English country estate in such works as “The Red Lodge” (published in They Return at Evening), but his settings included golf courses (“The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” in They Return at Evening), and could involve even used cars and American gangsters (“Used Car,” 1932).

  Equally diverse were his characters: the misanthropic, seething, and murderous Pownall of “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” (published as “The Unseen Player” in 1928) is beautifully characterized, and his murder of the amiable, better looking, and seemingly luckier Morisson, so that he might win a chess game, is convincingly detailed, as is his fate. At a time when most popular writers were incapable of recognizing the humanity of Asians, Wakefield’s “And He Shall Sing . . .” (in They Return at Evening) matter-of-factly makes use of Japanese as characters, one of whom is a poet; and Agatha of “Damp Sheets” (1931) is not only a strong female character but one who precipitates the action. The relatively late “The Gorge of the Churels” (1951) in many ways epitomizes Wakefield’s fiction: the protagonist is Indian, and when supernaturally threatened, he turns to his ancestral faith, which is superior to Christianity at dealing with local threats.

  Wakefield could likewise see new elements in an established situation: the aforementioned “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” does not follow the traditional pattern of supernatural fiction but extends Pownall’s feud with Morisson to a new group of chess players. Finally, Wakefield had a pleasing and occasionally puckish sense of humor: those anticipating the titular story of his collection Imagine a Man in a Box (1931) to be horrific, and perhaps involving coffins and premature burials, will be pleasantly surprised.

  In a letter to August Derleth, quoted in editor Peter Ruber’s Arkham’s Masters of Horror, Wakefield boasted: “I had over a million words published before you’d even written one word. I’d had articles in most ever leading English periodical on a variety of subjects from Gold to Economics, from water sports to Shakespearean criticism, from Pan-Uranianism to Fox farms” (Ruber 2000, 134). This material, as well as a number of shorter works of fiction, remains uncollected. It should also be noted that Wakefield’s personal life and habits led to the estrangement of most of his family; in addition, he occasionally claimed the birth date of 1890, apparently fictionalized other aspects of his life, and thoroughly frustrated future researchers by destroying most of his papers and likenesses late in his life. Finally, the date of his death appears to be 1964 rather than the 1965 stated by some reference sources. His best fiction, however, remains timeless.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: “Casting the Runes”; Derleth, August; James, M. R.

  Further Reading

  Indick, Ben P. 1992. “H. Russell Wakefield: The Man Who Believed in Ghosts.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction 1, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 73–93. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 120, edited by Janet Witalec. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  James, Henry. [1904] 2009. “M. R. James on Ghost Stories.” In Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories by Henry James, edited by Michael Cox, 337–352. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

  Ruber, Peter. 2000. “H. Russell Wakefield.” In Arkham’s Masters of Horror, edited by Peter Ruber, 130–135. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

  WALPOLE, HORACE (1717–1797)

  The youngest son of Great Britain’s first prime minister, Horace Walpole lived an extravagant life of opulence and privilege typical of many eighteenth-century aristocrats. He was also a voluminous writer whose letters have provided historians with much insight into the political, cultural, and social aspects of the eighteenth century, and his role in the development of the horror genre cannot be overlooked or overstated. It was not until he was in his late forties that he published The Castle of Otranto (1764), a strange work that established the genre of Gothic fiction. As the progenitor of the Gothic, Walpole laid the foundation for what would become the most popular type of literary fiction by the end of the century, directly influencing writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Walpole’s achievements have left a lasting impact on the horror genre, with writers such as Stephen King remarking on his importance to the field.

  In the middle of the eighteenth century there was a resurgence of interest in the medieval period among historians, antiquarians, and other intellectuals. Walpole was among those who were fascinated with the Middle Ages, not seeing it as a dark period in history but rather as a more ideal era than previously believed. Using his vast wealth, Walpole constructed a Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill for his personal amusement. His castle, an artificial eighteenth-century construction designed to look ancient, not only influenced others to create similar structures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, but it also served to inspire Walpole in his later literary endeavors. Claiming it came to him in a dream one night in Strawberry Hill, Walpole conceived of the idea to write a Gothic story, called so because of the word’s association with the medieval period, which would take shape as The Castle of Otranto. Unsure of how the reading public would receive his text, Walpole published it anonymously under a fictitious identity who claimed it was a modern translation of a sixteenth-century Italian text. As his novel proved an immediate success, Walpole claimed ownership of his work and republished it in a new edition with an introduction that declared it was the first of a new genre of romance, one that blends the old and new: the Gothic. In 1766, Walpole wrote a Gothic play entitled The Mysterious Mother. However, because his play featured incest between a mother and son, he was again unsure how it would be received, and it was thus only distributed in small numbers to close friends during his lifetime.

  Inheriting his family’s earldom in 1791, Walpole died six years later in 1797 at the age of seventy-nine. He left behind a vast art collection, numerous writings, and a significant legacy in horror fiction.

  Joel T. Terranova

  See also: The Castle of Otranto; The Haunted House or Castle; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Radcliffe, Ann.

  Further Reading

  Kallich, Martin. 1971. Horace Walpole. New York: Twayne.

  Mowl, Timothy. 1998. Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider. London: Faber and Faber.

  Sabor, Peter. 2013. Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge.

  WANDREI, DONALD (1908–1987)

  To readers of horror, Donald Wandrei is first remembered as the co-founder of Arkham House publishers, and as co-editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s Selected Letters. Less known is his genre fiction, produced in the 1930s with the encouragement of his friends, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and made available in recent years in Colossus (1989), Don’t Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei (1997), and Frost (2000), which collect his science fiction, horror stories, and mysteries, respectively. While critics and readers mostly dismiss much of this work as being of poor quality, especially the bulk of the science fiction, the best of Wandrei’s fiction is distinctive and exceptional.

  Donald Albert Wandrei was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he spent most of his life living there in his parents’ house. He suffered a lifetime of vivid nightmares, which disposed him toward writing horror stories, stocked his psyche with unearthly imagery, and provided him an intuitive grasp of the Lovecraftian “stricken awe” that arises from glimpses of the nonhuman universe.
Horror and science fiction legend Fritz Leiber, who, like Wandrei, was among the writers whose talent Lovecraft nurtured, famously said he thought Wandrei seemed Lovecraft’s most obvious successor.

  Though a few brief, moody pieces transcribe Wandrei’s bizarre nightly visions—such as “The Crater” (1967), “Nightmare” (1965), and “The Lady in Gray” (1933—his best work finds Wandrei mining them for startling images, dreamlike strangeness, and incursions of the terrifying and the irrational. In “The Painted Mirror” (1937; dramatized on the horror television series Night Gallery in the 1970s), a young boy discovers such a thing in an attic, and chipping away the paint reveals a vague, terrible landscape with the figure of a girl in the distance. Each night as he scrapes, the girl draws closer; at the end of this Borgesian tale, the girl/entity switches souls with the boy and paints over the mirror. In “The Eye and the Finger” (1944), this pair of disembodied objects nightmarishly plagues the main character, hovering in his living room, staring, pointing. “Uneasy Lie the Drowned” (1937), a neglected classic of weird fiction, tells of revenge reaching out from an unlived other life.