Horror Literature through History
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The endurance and unconscious appeal of Wharton’s story may be illuminated by referring to Sigmund Freud’s theory of deferred action or afterwardness (“Nachträglichkeit” in German). This theory concerns itself with how the return to consciousness of a once forgotten act may collapse any temporality that has passed between the action and its reawakening. This is the temporal register of the ghost in “Afterward,” and it is foreshadowed in the story’s opening lines when Mary recalls the words of a friend, uttered several months before, regarding a ghostly inhabitant at Lyng. Only now, afterward, can she make some sense of what it means to be haunted, just as she realizes, once it is too late, that Elwell has taken her husband away forever.
Matt Foley
Wharton lacks many direct inheritors in horror, for during her lifetime pulps came to dominate in supernatural publishing rather than prestigious magazines. Yet her supernatural fiction’s quality, subtlety, and frisson set her as a late apogee for the Anglo-American nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ghost story tradition. She is often associated with her older friends James and W. D. Howells, for the projects of all three involve both unsentimental novels of manners and supernatural short fiction. But the preface of Ghosts reserves Wharton’s highest esteem for supernatural short stories for J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Fitz-James O’Brien, F. Marion Crawford, and the collection’s dedicatee, Walter de la Mare. In one tribute, the U.K. television anthology series Shades of Darkness (1983) adapts a de la Mare tale and three of Wharton’s (their only multiply adapted writer): “The Lady’s Maid Bell” (1902), “Afterward” (1910), and “Bewitched” (1925).
Bob Hodges
See also: Crawford, F. Marion; de la Mare, Walter; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; O’Brien, Fitz-James.
Further Reading
Jacobsen, Karen. 2008. “Economic Hauntings: Wealth & Class in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” College Literature 35.1: 100–127.
Killoran, Helen. 2001. The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.
McMullen, Bonnie. 2012. “Short Story Markets.” Edith Wharton in Context, edited by Laura Rattray, 103–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shades of Darkness. 1983. Television. Pt. Washington: Koch, 2006. DVD.
WHEATLEY, DENNIS (1897–1977)
British author Dennis Wheatley fundamentally changed horror writing when he developed a form of occult- and satanic-influenced horror that has links to the work of H. P Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Machen. In Wheatley’s work, the appearance of the Devil and his minions in the comfortable British shires and home counties (Berkshire, Essex, Surrey, and Hampshire) can be counteracted first by consulting complex reference tomes of magical lore, and then by the decisive acts of strong, chivalric, upper-middle-class men. Wheatley wrote more than 100 books and sold more than fifty million copies.
Born and raised in South London, Wheatley left his family’s Mayfair wine business after being expelled from Dulwich College, joined the Merchant Navy, and was gassed in World War I. He worked in security in London during World War II, in Churchill’s underground fortress, constructing false stories to mislead the Nazis. He wrote a mystery crime novel, adventure novels, and some science fiction, but is better known for his eight black magic novels—The Devil Rides Out (1934), Strange Conflict (1941), The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To the Devil a Daughter (1953), The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), The Satanist (1960), They Used Dark Forces (1964), Gateway to Hell (1970)—plus his short stories and edited collections of horror tales. In the 1960s and 1970s each of his black magic books averaged yearly sales of 80,000 copies.
Wheatley’s popularity waned, probably because of the values his novels promote: fear of the foreign, fear of disability (seen as degeneracy), and a patriarchal-based assertion of the need to preserve women’s morality. Each of his novels is related to threats to British respectability, and each is ultimately controlled by the actions of dashing, upper- or upper-middle-class men (such as John in To the Devil a Daughter and the Duke of Richlieu and Rex in The Devil Rides Out).There are levels of voyeurism in Wheatley’s work; for instance, in To the Devil a Daughter the morally righteous reader gains vicarious pleasure observing Christina, a semiclad young woman, rescued by a dashing young man from being sacrificed to the Devil, following a pact agreed by her father, at her birth. Speed, power, reason, and occult knowledge are used against the dark forces. David Punter notes that Wheatley can “smooth out the moments of terror and vision which comprise experience and render them into a unitary whole” (Punter 1980, 407).
While his conservatism, misogyny, and class distinction are rather controversial for today’s readers, it can be argued that the investment in homeland security and leadership by powerful men underpinning such popular entertainments as the James Bond series reflect the same values that infused Wheatley’s work. So do a host of horror and disaster movies, such as the Die Hard series, with each entry featuring Nazi-influenced fanatical villains. Wheatley’s occult horror infuses the everyday and is resolved through strong values and action. Wheatley died of liver failure in November 1977.
Gina Wisker
See also: The Devil Rides Out; Devils and Demons.
Further Reading
Baker, Phil. 2011. The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus.
Caines, Michael. 2013. “Feasting with Dennis Wheatley.” The TLS Blog at The Times Literary Supplement. December 31. http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2013/12/feasting-with-dennis-wheatley.html.
Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman.
Wisker, G. 1993. “Horrors and Menaces to Everything Decent in Life: The Horror Fiction of Dennis Wheatley.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 99–110. London: Pluto.
“THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS”
First published in 1973, Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” was inspired by the mainly inaccurate March 1964 report in the New York Times that claimed Katherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese was murdered outside of her Queens apartment in full view of thirty-seven of her neighbors, all of whom refused to render aid. Evidence since the initial publication of the story proves convincingly that no single individual witnessed the murder, which had initially been reported to the police as a domestic argument. Nevertheless, the incident became a kind of urban legend as it captured the idea of an apathetic populace made callous by the dehumanizing effects of life in the American city.
These themes of detachment and dehumanization inform “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” Beth O’Neil, recently come to New York from rural Vermont, witnesses a brutal murder in her apartment building courtyard one evening. She notices that her neighbors are also watching and that some seem to take a perverse pleasure from the spectacle. She is further shaken by a fog that suddenly rises up from the courtyard and, if only for a moment, assumes almost human features. Soon afterwards Beth becomes romantically involved with a neighbor, Ray Gleeson, but as their relationship edges toward emotional and physical violence, Beth ends things. One night Beth awakens to the sound of someone moving about in her apartment. She encounters a burglar who, upon being discovered, attacks her. Their struggle takes them to the balcony, where, on the verge of losing consciousness, Beth notices her neighbors watching. Fearful that past events will replay themselves, Beth has a sudden revelation: In order for people to survive in the city, they must give part of their humanity to it. Ray’s advances were actually an invitation to join a cult that worships the God of the City. She cries out to her neighbors that she understands and wishes to join them, and her assailant is suddenly whisked away, shredded into pieces yet somehow left alive, and dropped onto the courtyard below, which has become a type of sacrificial altar.
Ellison carefully builds toward his reveal, blending the grind of daily existence in the city with an encroaching dread. As with all of his work, the
story is saturated with his characteristic judgmental anger. In this case, that fury is built upon a false foundation, but it gives Ellison the opportunity to chastise the world. The story received the 1974 Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
Javier A. Martinez
See also: Ellison, Harlan; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”
Further Reading
Cook, Kevin. 2014. Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America. New York: Norton.
Francavilla, Joseph, ed. 2012. Critical Insights: Harlan Ellison. Pasadena: Salem Press.
Weil, Ellen R., and Gary K. Wolfe. 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
“THE WHITE HANDS”
“The White Hands” is a short story from Mark Samuels’s debut fiction collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003). It was nominated for a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 2004. It has subsequently been reprinted, notably in editor Stephen Jones’s The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 15 (2004) and editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012). Probably the best-known of Samuels’s tales, “The White Hands” is steeped in the author’s knowledge of the supernatural fiction genre.
John Harrington, the narrator of the tale, tells of his association with Alfred Muswell, a disgraced and reclusive scholar, who has an obsession with a Victorian author of ghost stories, Lilith Blake. Harrington is drawn in by Muswell’s enthusiasm, and he also develops a powerful interest in Blake, partly spurred by the delicacy and paleness of her hands in a surviving photograph. After Muswell dies, Harrington has Blake’s corpse exhumed and, when he opens her coffin, finds her still living, though she swiftly crumbles to dust. Some time later, Harrington decides to attempt to transcribe and interpret The White Hands and Other Tales, Blake’s last collection, dictated after death to Muswell. But the act drives Harrington mad.
“The White Hands” has an ambiguous ending—something common in Samuels’s work, which often explores the transformative (as opposed to the destructive) aspects of an encounter with the Weird. Though it ends with Harrington confined to a psychiatric hospital, plagued by visions of disembodied white hands, there is in his madness much more of ecstasy than despair.
It is typical of Samuels’s erudite work that his best-known tale should have a scholar of supernatural fiction at its heart. Muswell’s thesis regarding the weird tale is expounded at the opening of the story. All great literature, he claims, is concerned with “the quest for hidden mysteries,” and also “should unravel the secrets of life and death,” and therefore bring about “some actual alteration in the structure of reality itself” (Samuels 2003, 2–3). In this statement can be seen Samuels’s own authorial and philosophical approach.
Samuels has said his stories often evolve from a single image that he cannot shake off. In the case of “The White Hands,” this image was that of Blake’s disembodied hands. The image’s source was literary rather than “real world”; it was inspired by Eddy C. Bertin’s “Like Two White Spiders” (1973) and ultimately by the whole lineage of Gothic tales of preternaturally animated severed hands, including William Fryer Harvey’s “The Beast with Five Fingers” and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Hand.” In addition to its intrinsic excellence, “The White Hands” is noteworthy because it has influenced the development of new writing in the weird field that is subtle and metatextual in its approach.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: “The Beast with Five Fingers”; Maupassant, Guy de.
Further Reading
Cardin, Matt. 2006. “Interview with Mark Samuels: A Sense of Charnel Glamour.” The Teeming Brain, August. http://www.teemingbrain.com/interview-with-mark-samuels.
Samuels, Mark. 2003. The White Hands and Other Weird Tales. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press.
“THE WHITE PEOPLE”
First published in 1904, Arthur Machen’s story of a young girl’s initiation into witchcraft was actually written in 1899, the same year as the publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It is nevertheless pre-Freudian and pre-Jungian (the latter term referring to the psychological system created by Freud’s onetime colleague, Carl Jung), despite its extraordinarily suggestive imagery and barely sublimated sexuality. The author was a mystic and a Catholic whose writings show no interest in psychoanalytical theory, even if he wrote about beautiful women achieving sensuous ecstasy when covered by supernatural snakes.
As is a common technique for Machen, his characters talk out a philosophical idea, after which a narrative is presented to illustrate it. The philosophical idea under question in “The White People” is the nature of evil, which is framed in the opening debate between two characters as “the taking of heaven by storm . . . an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner” (Machen 1922, 117). Evil is a subversion of the natural order, as if roses began to sing. Sorcery and sanctity are “the only realities” (113). Great sinners are probably rarer than great saints.
In a telling passage in the prologue to “The White People”—a passage quoted eighty-five years later by T. E. D. Klein in his deeply Machen-esque horror novel The Ceremonies (1984)—a man named Ambrose explains the real nature of sin and evil to a man named Cotgrave, in words that then resonate throughout the remainder of the story’s primary narrative:
“We underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the ‘sin’ of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.”
“And what is sin?” said Cotgrave.
“I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?
“Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.” (Machen 1904, 58)
Matt Cardin
Source: Machen, Arthur. 1904. “The White People.” Horlick’s Magazine. Volume 1. London: James Elliott & Co.
To demonstrate his point, one debater hands the other the diary of a sixteen-year-old girl who was introduced to witchcraft at a young age by her nurse. Her narrative is near stream-of-consciousness and unparagraphed, which perfectly captures the naïveté of the character as she describes things she only half understands and repeats several sinister fairy tales that contain veiled warnings about her eventual plight. After visits with the sinister “white people,” several ventures into strange, unworldly landscapes, and the occurrence of as yet harmless magical pranks such as overturning tables, she is found dead before an ancient pagan statue, poisoned “in time,” as we learn in an epilogue (165).
H. P. Lovecraft, who regarded this as the second greatest weird story in English (the first being “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood), found himself explaining the ending to correspondents. It is subtle: The girl has become pregnant with a monstrous thing, but feeling a mother’s sympathy with her unborn child, she became aware of the abomination within her and so killed herself. When Lovecraft reworked this situation in “The Dunwich Horror,” he was less subtle about it. “The White People” might be imagined as “The Dunwich Horror” from the point of view of a young, innocent Lavinia Whateley (the character in Lovecraft’s tale who is impregnated by an other-dimensional entity). Here we see a major statement of Machen’s “Little People” mythos, which also influenced Lovecraft and numerous others: the idea that the “fairies” of legend are survivals of some ancient race that has gone underground and turned to evil, never having lost its links to prehuman magic.
Apparently “The White People” was intended to be a part of a larger work, a fragment, cleverly made complete by its framing device. If th
is is true, then the circumstance may be deemed fortunate or even regarded as a stroke of genius, because the story’s fascination stems precisely from Machen’s refusal to go on too long or explain too much.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: The Ceremonies; “The Dunwich Horror”; “The Great God Pan”; Machen, Arthur; “The Novel of the Black Seal”; “The Willows.”
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 1990. “Arthur Machen: The Mystery of the Universe.” In The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Machen, Arthur. 1922. “The White People.” In The House of Souls, 111–166. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
WHITEHEAD, HENRY S. (1882–1932)
Henry St. Clair Whitehead, a frequent contributor to Weird Tales magazine and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, is best known for writing weird tales set in the West Indies. Born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, Whitehead attended both Columbia College and Harvard University, but failing to earn a degree at either school, he entered Berkeley Divinity School, where he was ordained as a deacon in 1912, entering the priesthood a year later. It was Whitehead’s profession that brought him to the West Indies, where he lived in St. Croix, serving as an archdeacon. Whitehead’s tales, blurring the lines between fantasy, horror, and ethnography, focus on native magic of the West Indies.
Whitehead’s stories explore colonial and native relations in the Caribbean through their investigation of island jumbee, a term related to zombi but here connoting any island spirit or ghost. His tales often involve an academic-minded protagonist who must act as a detective when confronted with irrational forces of native magic. Gerald Canevin, a New England writer living in the West Indies and an obvious stand-in for Whitehead, frequently narrates the West Indies stories. Canevin is an expert on the supernatural and uses his knowledge of island magic to solve mysteries that often shed light on the colonial history of the islands. In “The Shadows” (1927) it is Canevin’s understanding that island magic is not mere superstition that allows him to uncover the story of Old Morris, a colonist whose attempt to harness the powers of an island fish-god for his own gain ends in his death, and in “Black Tancrède” (1929) Canevin discovers that the disturbance at a St. Thomas hotel is the work of the jumbee of a slave seeking revenge on the judge who sentenced him to death for his part in a slave revolt. While Whitehead’s depictions of West Indies natives and native culture often rely on racist stereotypes, they also reveal a more complex understanding of racial relations in the colonial West Indies. Many of his tales reveal coercive practices of colonial representatives, and island magic is often portrayed as a means of resistance for the native population. In “Hill Drums” (1931), for example, when a colonial diplomat offends the native population, they use magic to possess him and force him to leave the islands.