Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  During the period of witch-hunting, numerous publications circulated that denounced and described the practices of witchcraft. In addition to religious and legal guidelines, broadsheets depicted (often in lurid detail) the various crimes of the witches. Additionally, fictional accounts of occult and demonic practice were popular in early modern Europe, and increased literacy meant that these fictions were more widely circulated. As well as behaviors, certain visual characteristics and accessories began to be associated with witches, such as the flying broomstick or distaff, black cats, and, later, the pointed hat.

  By the end of the witch trials, the figure of the witch began to appear in other forms of literature. Witches appeared in children’s chapbooks as early as 1710, foreshadowing their common role in folk and fairy tales. The Victorian era saw the beginnings of a more sympathetic understanding of the women tried during the witch-hunts; for instance, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) has a heroine who revises an earlier narrative of persecution, identifying the witch-hunters as the guilty parties and the accused witch as an innocent victim. At the same time, an increasing interest in (reconstructed) pre-Christian beliefs, including Viking, Celtic, and Germanic folk traditions, paved the way for twentieth-century witchcraft “revivals” and modern paganism, such as the development of the contemporary pagan religion of Wicca in the 1920s–1940s. Associated with Neo-Druidism, countercultural movements, New Age philosophy, and reconstructionist pagan traditions, Wicca has also been heavily influenced by the second-wave feminism of the 1970s.

  The history of European witchcraft is reflected in contemporary horror in a number of ways. Indeed, the complexity of the history allows for multiple and varied representations of witches. Arcane (often gendered) magical practices can be a source of horror, as in Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943); however, books such as Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches (2011) blur genre boundaries by combining sinister occult practices with positive protagonists and fantasy creatures like the romantic vampire. The idea of the “coven” (either a family or social group of witches) often appears in contemporary fiction; for instance, Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches series presents a matriarchal family of witches and the malevolent spirit with whom the witches are connected. Elsewhere, it is the practice of witch-hunting that is used to evoke terror and fear. Syd Moore’s Witch Hunt (2012) depicts a present haunted by the specters of women killed during witch-hunts in Essex, and, though its specter is somewhat less sympathetic, “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) by H. P. Lovecraft draws on the history of the Salem witch trials. Demonic pacts, diabolical cannibalism, and infanticide also appear frequently in modern horror. As with much of the fiction that refers to witch-hunts and trials, there is a tradition of referencing historical and pseudohistorical cases of demonic witchcraft; for instance, Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952) is based on an alleged case of demonic possession (and its brutal punishment) in seventeenth-century France. The reclamation of the witch as a positive figure has also been subverted in recent fiction, with paganism and Wicca (rather than witchcraft) being a trope of folk horror fiction, such as Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2014).

  Hannah Priest

  See also: Devils and Demons; Incubi and Succubi; Possession and Exorcism; Spiritualism.

  Further Reading

  Blumberg, Jess. 2007. “A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials.” smithsonian.com, October 23. Accessed March 26, 2016. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/?no-ist.

  Clark, Stuart. 1997. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Hutton, Ronald. 1996. “The Roots of Modern Paganism.” In Paganism Today, edited by Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, 4–15. London: Thorsons.

  Kieckhefer, Richard. 1989. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Purkiss, Diane. 1996. The Witch in History. London: Routledge.

  THE WOMAN IN BLACK

  Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) revived the British ghost story, introducing social and historical concerns particularly affecting women and families. It enacts social and family cruelties and losses, using the ghostly figure of a woman in black who wreaks deadly revenge on a society whose shortsighted, gendered bigotry separated her from her own child, who drowned tragically when the pony and trap he was traveling in was overwhelmed by sea mist and fell into the marsh sea. The lives of those unlucky enough to come into range and consciousness of the revengeful dead are both haunted and blasted as the curse of Jennet Humfrye, the woman in black, leads to the death of local children.

  The first-person narration of Arthur Kipps, solicitor, authenticates this traditional Christmas Eve ghost story (a formula reminiscent of M. R. James) as the book begins on that day with Kipps’s step-children asking him to tell them a ghost story. Being too disturbed by the story he has to tell, he instead writes it down.

  In his narrated story, Kipps is sent to the remote village of Crythin Gifford to settle the will of the reclusive, heirless Mrs. Drablow. Her home, Eel Marsh House, Lincolnshire, is isolated across a spit covered by sea at high tide. Readers are reminded of the law, inheritance, injustice, fog, and contagion in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and contradictory social values and growing up in Dickens’s Gothic Great Expectations (1861), which also deals with damaging hauntings, and in which Miss Havisham’s house resembles Mrs. Drablow’s with its paralyzing past. The Woman in Black uses familiar ghost story strategies, including spectral visits, sounds in the night, empty rooms echoing with past activities, and an overwhelming atmosphere of dread.

  Hill’s novel has a feminist message concerning “fallen women,” focusing on Jennet Humfrye, whose illegitimate son Nathaniel was adopted by her sister, Mrs. Drablow, and whose impoverishment, shame, and mental state disempowered her in life. Nathaniel was brought up at Eel Marsh House without connections to the real world or his increasingly desolate, maddened mother, product of a bigoted age that banished, silenced, and incarcerated unmarried mothers. Her fate, as well as her son’s and subsequently that of the village children, are an indictment against the age.

  Isolation is spatially represented by the landline, the narrow spit linking and dividing the house and its wealth from the village, as well as life from death. On his first visit to Eel Marsh House, isolated across the misty marshes, Kipps is traumatized by ghostly movements and sounds, particularly of pony and trap crashing, a terrified child crying, sounds of drowning, then silence. Nathaniel and his nurse Rose Judd, caught in the mist, drowned in the marshes and are condemned beyond death to repeat the fatal accident that drove Jennet to haunt graveyard, marsh, and village while the child’s ghostly crying presence remains on the spit, and at night in the nursery.

  Jennet lost everything, went mad, and died. But she returns and wanders as a ghost. Her revenge for her son’s death is wreaked on those whose normal family structures condemned her to the margins. She haunts both graveyard and village, and the children begin to die, one by one. When attending Mrs. Drablow’s funeral, Kipps hears of these losses. He also sees the woman in black.

  The ghost actually gains a voice beginning when Kipps finds Jennet’s letters begging to see her son. Finally Kipps, too, is caught up in her malevolent revenge cycle. When his wife and son visit and go for a spin in a pony trap he notices, all too late, the woman in black standing at one side. The trap crashes, killing his son and fatally wounding his wife.

  The Woman in Black was adapted for the stage in 1987 by playwright Stephen Mallatratt. A British television adaptation was released in 1989 with a script adapted from Hill’s novel by Nigel Kneale. A second film adaptation, directed by James Watkins and starring Daniel Radcliffe as Kipps, was released in 2012 and became a critical and financial success. A sequel, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, was released in 2015.

  Gina Wisker

  See also: Frame Story; The Haunted House or Cas
tle; Hill, Susan.

  Further Reading

  Cox, Donna. 2000. “‘I Have No Story to Tell!’: Maternal Rage in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.” Intertexts 4, no. 1: 74–89.

  Jones, Alan. 2003. “Who Is Haunted by What in The Woman in Black? Alan Jones Considers the Multiple Relations of Susan Hill’s Novel with Its Predecessors in the Gothic Tradition.” English Review 13, no. 3: 10–12.

  Kattelman, Beth A. 2014. “Still Scary after All These Years: Gothic Tropes and Theatricality in The Woman in Black.” In Frightful Witnessing: The Rhetoric and (Re)presentation of Fear, edited by Beth A. Kattelman and Magdalena Hodalska, 37–54. Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

  WORLD FANTASY AWARD

  The World Fantasy Awards are given annually by the World Fantasy Convention, an annual gathering of fantasy and horror professionals and enthusiasts. They are widely recognized as one of the most prestigious awards in the field of speculative fiction. Awards were given at the first convention in 1975 and at all subsequent ones (with some changes in the categories) for best novel, novella (this category was added in 1982), short story, story collection, anthology (added in 1988), artist, Special Award professional, Special Award non-professional, and Life Achievement. A Special Convention Award has sometimes been given. The award is juried by a panel of five judges (usually professional writers, editors, and critics) appointed by the Awards Administration, which is a subgroup of the World Fantasy Convention’s board of directors. Popular nominations may add two items to the final ballot beyond the judges’ choices.

  Among prominent novels to have won the World Fantasy Award are The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip (1975), Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson (1976), Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1978), The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe (1980), Little, Big by John Crowley (1982), Towing Jehovah by James Morrow (1995), Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2005), and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (2011). The Life Achievement Awards often reach beyond the usual genre suspects and have been given to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Madeleine L’Engle, and Angelica Gorodischer, in addition to such expected figures as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, and more.

  The short story category has also sometimes stretched beyond the expected. In 1989 it went to “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station,” a narrative poem by John M. Ford, and in 1991 to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a Sandman comic by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. The rumor has persisted that the rules were changed to prevent another comic book from winning. This is not true, though if a graphic novel were nominated today it would go in the Special Professional category.

  The Special Awards are often given to scholars or editors for a body of effort, not a specific work. The Non-Professional special award often goes to publishers of small-press magazines or books, not amateur material by any means, but endeavors too small for anyone to be doing it for a living.

  Given that the first World Fantasy Convention was held in Providence, Rhode Island, and its theme was H. P. Lovecraft and his Circle (with many of his old friends and protégés actually present), it was unsurprising that the award itself took the physical form of a bust of H. P. Lovecraft sculpted by Gahan Wilson. This remained the case for the next forty years, but in 2015, after some recipients expressed unease over Lovecraft’s undeniable racism, the bust was retired amid considerable controversy. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi (who has won twice) angrily returned his awards and announced a boycott of the convention. To date, no new design has been announced, but the award will continue.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Lovecraft, H. P.; Shirley Jackson Award.

  Further Reading

  Flood, Allison. 2015. “World Fantasy Award Drops HP Lovecraft as Prize Image.” The Guardian, November 9. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/09/world-fantasy-award-drops-hp-lovecraft-as-prize-image.

  Leiber, Fritz, and Stuart David Schiff. 1980. The World Fantasy Awards, Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday.

  Wilson, Gahan, ed. 1977. The World Fantasy Awards. New York: Doubleday.

  World Fantasy Convention. 2016. http://www.worldfantasy.org.

  WYNDHAM, JOHN (1903–1969)

  Written during the time of the Cold War (1947–1991) between Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the science fiction horror of British-born John Wyndham—whose full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris—reinvigorated the theme of invasion and end of days, providing a link with and mutual influence between U.S. and British science fiction and fantasy. It also established the disaster focus popular in contemporary films including Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996), 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2009), and the 1953 and 2005 adaptations of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), a major influence on Wyndham’s own writing.

  Wyndham’s work depicts strong women as well as men and reflects an island nation’s fear of the invasion of the Other, the terrors of invasion, and a sense of xenophobic powerlessness before the foreign Other with their strange ways. The invasion comes in Day of the Triffids (1951) in the shape of monstrous plants seemingly at home in people’s gardens but actually turned into man-eating, ravenous, independently mobile creatures that prey on helpless people blinded by a meteor shower. In The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), an alien invasion takes place through insemination of human women and the birth of a race of beautiful, soulless blond children (similar to Adolf Hitler’s Aryan youth) who are terrifying partly because of their extreme intelligence.

  In Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (1973), Brian Aldiss misleadingly labeled Wyndham’s work “cosy catastrophe.” The flowering of his science fiction horror (or “logical fantasy,” or “reasoned fantasy” novels—a rejection of the Jules Verne–inspired, largely American label “science fiction”) begins with Day of the Triffids and is followed by The Kraken Wakes (1953), named after Tennyson’s poem “The Kraken” (1830), and serving as a possible influence on director James Cameron’s science fiction action film The Abyss (1989). In Wyndham’s novel the invasion is in the form of alien sea creatures, gas monsters landed from another planet by a meteor shower, which lie dormant inhabiting the sea depths. Living alongside them is impossible, as they harvest humans. The Japanese develop an ultrasonic destructive device that destroys the creatures, but climate change and depopulation have devastated the world. The U.K. edition is less bleak than the U.S. version, implying that humanity is rebuilding civilization.

  Wyndham has been recognized as influencing such noted speculative fiction authors as John Christopher, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and Christopher Priest. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (filmed 1956, remade 1978 and 1993) reminds us of both The Day of the Triffids, an example of plant horror, and The Midwich Cuckoos, a changeling tale in which those like humans are in fact inhuman and could take over the world unless destroyed. Wyndham’s final novel, Web (1963), published posthumously, is about spiders on a remote Pacific island that, like Daphne du Maurier’s birds in “The Birds,” suddenly turn en masse against human beings. Wyndham’s invasion disaster horror tales continue to have a widespread influence on contemporary fiction and film.

  Gina Wisker

  See also: Wells, H. G.

  Further Reading

  Aldiss, Brian W. 1973. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City: Doubleday.

  Ketterer David. 2004. “Questions and Answers: The Life and Fiction of John Wyndham.” New York Review of Science Fiction 16 (March): 1, 6–10.

  Manlove, Colin N. 1991. “Everything Slipping Away: John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 4, no. 1: 29–53.

  Moskowitz, Sam. 1966. “John Wyndham.” In Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, 118–132. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.

  Y

  YARBRO, CHELSEA QUINN (1942–)

  Chelsea Quinn
Yarbro is a prolific American author who is probably best known for a series of historical vampire novels, although she writes in other genres as well. She has written (and published) more than sixty novels, numerous short stories, and several works of nonfiction. She was the first female president of the Horror Writers Association, and to date is one of only three female recipients of the World Horror Convention Grand Master’s Award, the others being Anne Rice and Tanith Lee.

  Yarbro’s writing career has spanned over forty years, and in that time she written under a number of pseudonyms, including Quinn Fawcett (which represents the historical mysteries she has written, including a series centered on Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft); Camille Gabor (fantasy); T. F. C. Hopkins (works of historical nonfiction); and Trystam Kith (horror). Nonetheless, she is best known as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and has published the majority of her work under that same. She has also collaborated with a number of different authors, notably Armin Shimerman (who is better known as an actor, having played Quark on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Principal Snyder on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). She also collaborated with fellow horror author Suzy McKee Charnas on the short story “Advocates,” published in 1991.

  Yarbro has contributed to many different genres of fiction, including science fiction, young adult, and Westerns, as well as a few poems. She has said she writes three to four books in a typical year, as advances for her work remain modest and she needs to earn a living. Arguably she is best known for her historical fantasy writing, and perhaps her best known creation is the aristocratic vampire the Comte de St. Germain. This character made his literary debut in 1978 in the novel Hotel Transylvania, only a few short years after Anne Rice revolutionized the literary vampire in Interview with the Vampire (1976). Although he has never quite attained the same level of fame as rock star vampire Lestat de Lioncourt from Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, St. Germain is far more thoughtful and conscience-bound than the rebellious Lestat. He is also noticeably less violent than the majority of fictional vampires, despite facing some truly diabolical nemeses. Introduced amidst the corruption of pre-Revolutionary France in Hotel Transylvania, St. Germain is the prototypical “sympathetic vampire”: he is sophisticated, philosophical, and compassionate, and spends much of his immortal life musing on the shortcomings and follies of mankind. Yarbro deliberately crafted her vampire to be at odds with traditional portrayals of the vampire such as in Stoker’s Dracula, and yet still have him be recognizable as a member of the undead. Nor did she stint on the eroticism that has come to be associated with the modern vampire (with the exception of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series). Although incapable of penetrative sexual intercourse (he has no blood flow), St. Germain finds satisfaction in pleasuring women, a bold stance to take at the time the first books in the series were written, but one that possibly demonstrates the influence of second-wave feminism and a new emphasis on female sexual pleasure.