Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Not all of Whitehead’s tales, however, are set in the West Indies. Some take place in New England or Europe and adhere more to the mode of the antiquarian ghost tale. For example, “The Shut Room” (1930) is a haunted inn story set in England, and “The Trap” (1932) is a haunted mirror story set in a boarding school in Connecticut. However, these tales often refer to Canevin’s time spent in the West Indies as the source of his understanding of supernatural events.

  Whitehead spent the last years of his life in Dunedin, Florida, where he died, likely due to a gastric illness. His tales were collected posthumously by Arkham House in Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946).

  Travis Rozier

  See also: Arkham House; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Weird Tales; Zombies.

  Further Reading

  Searles, A. Langley. 1995. “Henry S. Whitehead: A Retrospection.” Fantasy Commentator 8 (3–4): 186–200.

  Whitehead, Henry S. 2012. Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.

  “THE WILLOWS”

  First published in Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 collection The Listener and Other Stories, “The Willows” has a reputation as a seminal and definitive example of the classic weird tale. Praised by H. P. Lovecraft as a story “without a single strained passage or a single false note” (Lovecraft 2012, 88), its emphasis on carefully established mood and ambiguity contribute to a sustained atmosphere of dread. Its central mystery remains nebulous, adding to the potency of the overall effect.

  The story has its origins in a 1901 account of one of Blackwood’s expeditions written by him for Macmillan’s Magazine, “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe.” “The Willows” begins similarly as a travelogue describing the canoe journey along the Danube undertaken by the narrator and his Swedish traveling companion. They become stormbound on an island in a desolate, sparsely populated region of marshland and ever-shifting sandbanks and islets; the surrounding wilderness seems to become imbued with a hostile intelligence. Their supplies unaccountably disappear, their equipment is sabotaged, and the narrator witnesses an indistinct, semimaterial presence somehow associated with the willows. They find odd “funnels” in the sand, and the banks of willows seem to encroach ever closer upon their camp. The mysterious assault intensifies until the Swede desperately attempts to drown himself to placate their persecutors, but is rescued by the narrator. Before the Swede passes out, he claims that the immediate threat has been lifted since “they’ve found another victim” (Blackwood 1973, 50). They later discover the drowned corpse of a peasant who had earlier attempted to warn them away from the island, and are horrified when they see the funnel-shaped wounds covering his face and chest.

  At one point in “The Willows,” the narrator observes strange shapes among the titular vegetation, “immense, bronze-coloured” shapes with “limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other . . . rising up in a living column into the heavens.” His response conveys the essence of the numinous, that combined sense of fear and fascination before a preternatural reality that inspires a veritably religious sense of awe:

  Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world’s history. But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet the figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down and worship—absolutely worship. (Blackwood 1917, 153–154)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Blackwood, Algernon. 1917. “The Willows.” In The Listener and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  The story’s power is generated largely through Blackwood’s refusal to specifically delineate the exact nature of the threat facing the two protagonists. The hostile forces in “The Willows” are tenebrous and obscure, in the tradition of Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” (1859), Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887), and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” (1893). Even when the events are directly witnessed by the narrator, we are given little more information than that they are vague “shapes” or “presences.” Although he continually tries to rationalize their experiences, he is ultimately unable to successfully do so. In contrast, the Swede, through his less hesitant recourse to supernatural or metaphysical speculation, is more immediately able to parse the nature of the encounter. At various points in the narrative, the Swede discusses hostile pagan forces suggestive of a malevolent genius loci, the numinous spirit of a particular place in ancient Roman religion, and themselves as interlopers within a sacred grove. Although Blackwood strongly hints at a supernatural explanation, the two opposing viewpoints create a sustained mood of queasy uncertainty. Blackwood’s particular skill lies in his ability to sustain ambiguity without detriment to the narrative force of the tale. Its cumulative power is enhanced by the increasingly desperate speculation of the protagonists as they struggle to understand their experience.

  Included by Dorothy Scarborough in her influential 1921 collection Famous Modern Ghost Stories, “The Willows” has been a staple of horror anthologies ever since. In the Weird Tales golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, the novella was repeatedly singled out for praise by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, who both identified it as among the best supernatural horror stories ever written. It retains its reputation to this day and is the third item in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s seminal attempt at creating a canon of weird fiction, The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories (2012).

  James Machin

  See also: Blackwood, Algernon; “The Horla”; The Numinous.

  Further Reading

  Blackwood, Algernon. 1973. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover.

  Camara, Anthony. 2013. “Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows.’” Horror Studies 4, no. 1 (April): 43–62.

  Joshi, S. T 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

  Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. 2012. The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories. London: Tor.

  WILSON, F. PAUL (1946–)

  F. Paul Wilson is an American horror and science fiction novelist who has also worked in a few other genres, including historical fiction and medical thrillers. Wilson was born in New Jersey in 1946 and has remained a lifelong resident. In his formative years, he sampled, among other eclectic works of art, the classic horror comic books from EC Comics in the 1950s, the stop-motion special effects extravaganza movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the stories and novels of H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1968.

  Wilson began selling short fiction as a first-year medical student. He sold a number of comic scripts to Creepy and Eerie during the 1970s, but generally concentrated on prose fiction. His short stories and novelettes have appeared in all the major markets and numerous best-of-the-year collections; his novels have made various national best-seller lists. His novels The Keep (1981) and The Tomb (1984) both were New York Times best-sellers. His novels and short fiction have appeared on the final ballots for the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula
Award, and the Bram Stoker Award.

  Wilson’s first three novels, all science fiction, form what later came to be referred to as the LaNague Chronicles. Each reflects the author’s libertarian leanings. They were followed by further forays into science fiction later in Wilson’s career.

  In 1981 Wilson published his first horror novel, The Keep, about Nazis accidentally awakening a supernatural evil in a remote castle in the Transylvanian Alps during World War II. After this novel, which was included as one of the one hundred best horror novels in the Stephen Jones–edited Horror: 100 Best Books, Wilson published five more books in what he called his “Adversary Cycle”: The Tomb (1984), The Touch (1986), Reborn (NEL, 1990), Reprisal (1991), and Nightworld (1992). The Adversary Cycle introduced several concepts that came to form the core of much of Wilson’s fictional universe: the ancient, evil entity called Rasalom, his eternal opponent Glaeken, the town of Monroe, Long Island, the wandering healing spirit known as the Dat-tay-vao (first seen in The Touch), and the modern pulp hero known as Repairman Jack.

  The secretive Jack, who conceals his very existence from the world, made his first appearance in The Tomb. Not intending to establish a series character, Wilson left him near death at the end of that novel, only to have him reappear in Nightworld, playing a key role in frustrating Rasalom’s bid to enslave humanity. Jack’s fans proving persistent, Wilson responded with a new Repairman Jack novel titled Legacies in 1998. That book was followed by thirteen additional Repairman Jack novels, published from 1999 through 2011. Wilson also added six prequels to The Tomb, three set during Jack’s formative years, and another three set during his first months in New York City. Set between the events in The Tomb and Nightworld, the books chronicle Jack’s growing awareness of the battle between Rasalom and the entity he refers to as “the Otherness” or “the Ally,” forming the core of what Wilson has come to call “The Secret History of the World.”

  The Keep was adapted as a horror movie by director Michael Mann in 1983. The movie version has attained something of a storied status due to its much-discussed history as a prototypical “troubled production,” and the final result is mostly an incomprehensible mess, but aspects of its lush visual design, courtesy of director Mann and cinematographer Alex Thomson, as well as the hypnotic musical score by Tangerine Dream, have rendered it somewhat memorable.

  James Machin

  See also: Bradbury, Ray; Lovecraft, H. P.; Matheson, Richard.

  Further Reading

  Coker, Jennifer R. 2007. “F. Paul Wilson.” Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works 1. Literary Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed August 6, 2016).

  “F. Paul Wilson.” 2015. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  Grossberg, Michael. 2011. “The Untrod Path: Interview with F. Paul Wilson.” Prometheus: Newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society 29, no. 3 (Spring). http://lfs.org/newsletter/029/03/FPWilson.shtml.

  WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT

  The word “witch” derives from the Old English verb “wiccian,” meaning to use sorcery or enchantment. “Witch” is often used as an umbrella term for all practitioners of magic, though this obscures historical and regional differences. Historically, the English terms “witch” and “witchcraft” have specifically referred to European traditions. Contemporary horror fictions that employ the words undeniably evoke the tradition of European witchcraft, though there is often some intermingling with other traditions (e.g., Louisiana Voodoo, Haitian Vodou). Additionally, as European witchcraft has a long and complex history, contemporary horror may approach the idea of the “witch” from varying perspectives.

  The Hammer of the Witches

  In 1487, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger published a treatise on witchcraft entitled Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches). The book would come to be one of the most infamous texts of the European witch-hunting period. Kramer was a German Catholic clergyman who was expelled from Innsbruck after trying to conduct witchcraft trials without authority. Sprenger was a Dominican Inquisitor who lectured at the University of Cologne.

  The Malleus is notorious for its detailed descriptions of witchcraft and for the fervor with which it advocates the eradication of witches. The book describes the infernal pact made by witches, making a direct connection between witches and Satan. It also describes (in graphic detail) the practices of witches, including the way in which witches recruit one another through sexual temptation. The book accuses witches of cannibalism, infanticide, and castration, offering “real-life” examples of such cases. The book’s final section is a step-by-step guide to conducting a witch trial, including examples of torture and execution techniques.

  In 1490, the Catholic Church denounced the book. In 1538, the Spanish Inquisition disowned its teachings as false. While the book claimed an endorsement from the Faculty of Cologne, it seems many of the faculty condemned it for contradicting Catholic theology and promoting unethical and illegal procedures. Some historians claim that Sprenger himself denounced the book and used his power and influence to make life difficult for Kramer after its publication.

  The book is now commonly cited as a key example of early modern beliefs about women, witchcraft, and diabolical magic. However, the extent to which the book actually had any influence on historical trials is debatable.

  Hannah Priest

  European traditions of practicing and condemning witchcraft have their antecedents in antiquity. There is evidence that some practitioners of magic faced harsh punishments in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Babylonia. There are also prohibitions against some forms of sorcery in the Old Testament. In these ancient texts, there is a recurrent concern about malicious harm to men, livestock, and crops caused by sorcery. The Christian tradition of condemning witchcraft began to be codified with the Council of Elvira (ca. 305 CE), which decreed that the act of causing death through malicious intent could not be effected without “idolatry.” This decree associated witchcraft with devil or demon worship, and this association continues throughout the European tradition.

  Although most early legal prohibitions do not specifically gender witchcraft, there is some evidence of a growing association of malicious sorcery with women throughout the early Middle Ages. This may be a reflection of classical distinctions between types of magic and their respective practitioners, but it may also draw on classical mythology and literature, in which there are a number of malicious female sorcerers (for instance, Circe, a character in Homer’s Odyssey, and Hecate, a Greek goddess). Many texts made the distinction between “necromancy” (learned or ceremonial magic) and “witchcraft” (possession by the devil). The former was the province of clerical and educated men, and the latter of uneducated peasants and women. This distinction was not a rigid one, but it had far-reaching consequences.

  In order to draw a clear distinction between necromancy and witchcraft, clerical writers elaborated on the idea of diabolical witchcraft. Drawing on earlier legal codes, medieval writers increasingly began to associate witchcraft with a satanic pact to explain how “common” people might enact feats of magic to rival those of learned magicians. By the thirteenth century, this pact with the devil was imagined as a formal initiation rite or ceremony known as the Sabbat or “witches’ sabbath,” and clerics decried the rite in sermons. At the same time, the repertoire of crimes associated with witchcraft also expanded, incorporating transgressions previously included in accusations of heresy. As well as traditional complaints of malicious harm to livestock and crops, accusations of witchcraft now included references to sexual deviancy, cannibalism, and infanticide. The medieval connection of witchcraft to both idolatry and satanic pact also led to the idea that witches worshipped “familiars,” or demonic spirits concealed in animal form.

  In the fifteenth century, accusations of diabolical witchcraft began to become more systematic, and Europe entered a period of organized witch-hunting. Both Protestants and Catholics formed “Inquisitions,” under which thousands of trials were conducted. In some regi
ons, “werewolves” were tried alongside witches, as some Inquisitors (such as Henri Boguet) argued that witchcraft could include demonic shape-shifting—or at least the appearance of shape-shifting. Confessions were sometimes extracted under torture, though this varied dramatically by region, and death by burning, decapitation, or hanging was often the outcome. Corporal punishment, exile, and monetary fines were also passed as punishments. In most areas of Europe, the majority of the accused were women, though Iceland, Estonia, and Russia prosecuted more male than female witches. Throughout Europe, the majority of the accused belonged to lower socioeconomic classes. A number of witch trials were also conducted in European colonies, most famously in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692–1693. However, the fervor for witch trials abated toward the end of the seventeenth century, with a number of legal and religious edicts passed to curtail it. In England, for example, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 dismissed witchcraft as an impossibility and decreed that individuals purporting to practice the craft should be tried as confidence tricksters.