of horror, it is interesting to note that there has been a renewed fashion for horror in every decade since the First World War, but this is the first such “ revival” that has produced
numerous novels.
There was a general increase in horror, particularly the
ghost story, in the 1920s under the influence of M. R. James,
both a prominent writer and anthologist, and such masters as
Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, Edith Wharton and
others. At that time the great horror magazine, Weird Tales,
was founded in the U.S. In the 1930s, the dark fantasy story
or weird tale became prominent, influenced by the magazine
mentioned above, the growth of the H. P. Lovecraft circle of
writers, and a proliferation of anthologies, either in series or
as huge compendiums celebrating the first century of horror
fiction. After the films and books of the 1930s, the early
1940s produced the finest “ great works” collections, epitomized by And the Darkness Falls, edited by Boris Karloff, and Great Tales o f Terror and the Supernatural, edited by
Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser; and Arkham House, the
great specialty publisher devoted to this day to bringing into
print collections by great horror authors, was founded by
writer Donald Wandrei to print the collected works of H. P.
Lovecraft. After the war came the science fiction horrors of
the 1930s, in all those monster films and in the works of
Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray
Bradbury. In the early sixties we had the craze for “junk
food” paperback horror anthologies and collections, under
the advent of the midnight horror movie boom on TV. But
as we remarked above, short fiction always remained at the
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forefront. Even the novelists were famous for their short stories.
A lot has changed.
Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.
—H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in
Literature
Much as we ask for it, the frisson of horror, among
the many oddities of our emotional life, is one of the
oddest. For one thing, it is usually a response to something that is not there. Under normal circumstances, that is, it attends only such things as nightmares, phobias and literature. In that respect it is unlike terror, which is extreme and sudden fear in the face of a material threat. . . . The terror can be dissipated by a round of buckshot. Horror, on the other hand, is fascinated dread in the presence of an immaterial cause.
The frights of nightmares cannot be dissipated by a
round of buckshot; to flee them is to run into them at
every turn.
—Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
III What It Is
Sigmund Freud remarked that we immediately recognize
scenes that are supposed to provoke horror, “ even if they
actually provoke titters.” It seems to me, however, that horror fiction has usually been linked to or categorized by manifest signs in texts, and this has caused more than a little confusion among commentators over the years. Names such
Introduction
7
as weird tales, gothic tales, terror tales, ghost stories, supernatural tales, macabre stories—all clustered around the principle of a real or implied or fake intrusion of the supernatural into the natural world, an intrusion which arouses fear—have
been used as appellations for the whole body of literature,
sometimes interchangeably by the same writer. So often, and
in so many of the best works, has the intrusion been a ghost,
that nearly half the time you will find “ horror story” and
“ ghost story” used interchangeably. And this is so in spite
of the acknowledged fact that supernatural horror in literature
embodies many manifestations (from demons to vampires to
werewolves to pagan gods and more) and, further, that ghosts
are recognizably not supposed to horrify in a fair number of
ghost stories.
J. A. Cuddon, a thorough scholar, has traced the early
connections between ghost and horror stories from the 1820s
to the 1870s, viewing them as originally separable: “ The
growth of the ghost story and the horror story in this mid-
century period tended to coalesce; indeed, it is difficult to
establish objective criteria by which to distinguish between
the two. A taxonomical approach invariably begins to break
down at an early stage. . . . On balance, it is probable that a
ghost story will contain an element of horror. ’ ’ Jack Sullivan,
another distinguished scholar and anthologist, sums up the
problems of definition and terminology thusly: “ We find ourselves in a tangled morass of definitions and permutations that grows as relentlessly as the fungus in the House of
Usher.” Sullivan chooses “ ghost story” as generic, presumably to have one leg to stand on facing in each direction.
We choose “ horror” as our term, both in accordance with
the usage of the marketplace (Tor Books has a Tor Horror
line; horror is a label for the marketing category under which
novels and collections appear), and because it points toward
a transaction between the reader and the text that is the essence of the experience of reading horror fiction, and not any thing contained within that text (such as a ghost, literal or
implied). And moreover, H. P. Lovecraft, the theoretician
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The Dark Descent
and critic who most carefully described the literature in his
Supernatural Horror in Literature, who was certainly the
most important American writer of horror fiction in the first
half of this century, has to die best of my memory not a
single conventional ghost story in the corpus of his works.
It is Lovecraft’s essay that provides the keystone upon
which any architecture of horror must be built: atmosphere.
And it seems to me that Freud is in accord. What this means
is that you can experience true horror in, potentially, any
work of fiction, be it a western, a contemporary gothic, science fiction, mystery, whatever category of content the writer may choose. A work may be a horror story (and indeed included in this anthology) no matter what, as long as the atmosphere allows. This means that horror is set free from the supernatural, that it is unnecessary for the story to contain
any overt or implied device or manifestation whatsoever. The
emotional transaction is paramount and definitive, and we
recognize its presence even when it doesn’t work as it is
supposed to.
To them [people who don’t read horror] it is a kind of
pornography, inducing horripilation instead of erection.
And the reader who appears to relish such sensations—
why he’s an emotional masochist, the slave of an unholy drug, a decadent psychotic beast.
—David Aylward, Revenge o f the Past
First, the longing for mystic experience which seems
always to manifest itself in periods of social confusion,
when political progress is blocked: as soon as we feel
that our own world has failed us, we try to find evidence for another world; second, the instinct to inoculate ourselves against panic at the real horrors loose on the earth . . . by injections of imagery horror, which
soothe u
s with the momentary illusion that the forces
Introduction
9
of madness and murder may be tamed and compelled
to provide us with a mere dramatic entertainment.
—Edmund Wilson, A Literary Chronicle
I used to read horror when I was depressed to jump-
start my emotions—but it only gave me temporary relief.
—Kathryn Cramer (personal correspondence)
It proves that the tale of horror and/or the supernatural is serious, is important, is necessary . . . not only to those human beings who read to think, but to those
who read to feel; the volume may even go a certain
distance toward proving the idea that, as this mad century races toward its conclusion—a conclusion which seems ever more ominous and ever more absurd—it may
be the most important and useful form of fiction which
the moral writer may command.
—Stephen King , Introduction to The Arbor House
Treasury o f Horror and the Supernatural
IV The Death of Horror
The death of the novel and the death of the short story are
literary topics we joke about, so it should come as no particular surprise that a recent, and otherwise excellent, collection of essays on supernatural fiction in America from 1820-1920
states that supernatural fiction died around 1920 (“ demate-
rialized” ), to be replaced by psychoanalysis, which took over
its function. Now it seems to me surprising to maintain that
fiction that embodies psychological truth in metaphor is replaceable by science—it sounds rather too much like replacing painting with photography. Yet this is only a recent example of the obituary approach, an effective gambit when
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dealing with material you wish to exterminate, and often used
by self-appointed arbiters of taste.
Let’s resurrect the great Modernist critic, Edmund Wilson,
for a few minutes. Wilson wrote an essay on horror in the
early 1940s that challenged the whole canon of significant
works established by the anthologists of the 1930s and ’40s,
from Dorothy Sayers and M. R. James and Hugh Walpole
and Maijorie Bowen to Wise and Fraser, and Karloff. Wilson
proposed his own list of masterpieces, from Poe and Gogol
(“ the greatest master’’) and Melville and Thrgenev through
Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad’s The Heart o f Darkness
and Henry James’ The Turn o f the Screw to Walter de la Mare
and, ultimately, Kafka (“ he went straight for the morbidities
of the psyche’’). He, Wilson, seems to be reaching toward a
redefinition of horror literature, but unfortunately his essay
vibrates with the discomfort of the humanist and rationalist
confronting the supernatural. He rejects nearly every classic
story in the horror canon and every single writer principally
known for work in the field, reserving particular antipathy
for H. P. Lovecraft, the anti-Modemist (to whom he devoted
a whole separate essay of demolition).
Wilson’s comments on Kafka are instructive. Kafka’s “ visions of moral horror’’ are “ narratives that compel our attention, and fantasies that generate more shudders than the whole of Algernon Blackwood or M. R. James combined.’’ Kafka’s
characters “ have turned into the enchanted denizens of a world
in which, prosaic though it is, we can find no firm foothold in
reality and in which we can never even be certain whether souls
are being saved or damned . . . he went straight for the morbidities of the psyche with none of the puppetry of specters and devils that earlier writers still carried with them. ’ ’ Wilson’s view
of the evolution of horror is implicit in these comments. He sees
the literature as evolving in a linear fashion into fantasies of the
psyche removed entirely from supernatural trappings. Any audience interested in these trappings is regressive. He sees no value to a modem reader in obsolete fiction.
Since Wilson’s presupposition is that the evolution of hor
Introduction
11
ror ended with Kafka, his theory of honor reading among
his contemporaries—that they are indulging in a “ revived”
taste for an obsolete form—allows him to start from the premise that the ghost story is dead, that it died with the advent of the electric light, and to conclude immediately that contemporary versions are doomed attempts to revive the corpse of the form. Sound familiar? It’s the familiar “ death of literature” obituary approach. Well, back to the grave, Edmund. You’re dead, and honor literature is alive and well, happily evolving and diversifying.
But Wilson’s approach to the horror canon was and remains
generally stimulating. Fbr it appears that as horror has evolved
in this century it has grown significantly in the areas of “ the
morbidities of the psyche” and fantasies of “ a world in which,
prosaic though it is, we can find no firm foothold in reality. ”
In order to achieve the fantastic, it is neither necessary
nor sufficient to portray extraordinary things. The strangest event will enter into the order of the universe if it is alone in a world governed by laws. . . . You cannot impose limits on the fantastic; either it does not exist at all, or else it extends throughout the universe. It is an entire
world in which things manifest a captive, tormented
thought, a thought both whimsical and enchained, that
gnaws away from below at the mechanism’s links without
ever managing to express itself. In this world, matter is
never entirely matter, since it offers only a constantly frustrated attempt at determinism, and mind is never completely mind, because it has fallen into slavery and has been impregnated and dulled by matter. All is woe. Things
suffer and tend towards inertia, without ever attaining it;
the debased, enslaved mind unsuccessfully strives toward
consciousness and freedom.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, AMINADAB or The Fantastic
Considered as a Language
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The Dark Descent
V The Three Streams
We return to the life and state of horror fiction in the present. Contemporary horror fiction occurs in three streams, in three principal modes or clusters of emphasis: 1. moral allegorical 2. psychological metaphor 3. fantastic. The stories in this anthology are separated according to these categories.
These modes are not mutually exclusive, but usually a matter
of emphasis along a spectrum from the overtly moral at one
extreme to the nearly totally ambiguous at the other, with
human psychology always a significant factor but only sometimes the principal focus. Perhaps we might usefully imagine them as three currents in the same ocean.
Stories that cluster at the first pole are characteristically
supernatural fiction, most usually about the intrusion of supernatural evil into consensus reality, most often about the horrid and colorful special effects of evil. These are the stories of children possessed by demons, of hauntings by evil ghosts from the past (most ghost stories), stories of bad places
(where evil persists from past times), of witchcraft and sa-
tanism. In our day they are often written and read by lapsed
Christians, who have lost their firm belief in good but still
have a discomforting belief in evil. Stories in this stream
imply or state the Manichean universe that is so difficult to
perceive in everyday life, wherein evil is so evident, horror
so common that we are left with our sensitivities partly or
fully deadened to it in our post-Holocaust, post-Vietnam, six-
o’clock news era. A strong extra-literary appeal of such fiction, it seems to me, is to jump-start the readers’ deadened emotional sensitivities.
And the moral allegory has its significant extra-literary appeal in itself to that large audience that desires the attribution of a moral calculus (usually teleological) deriving from ultimate and metaphysical forms of good and evil behind events in an everyday reality. Ginjer Buchanan says that “ all the
best horror is written by lapsed Catholics.”
Introduction
13
In speaking of stories and novels in this first stream, we
are speaking of the most popular form of horror fiction today,
the commercial bestseller lineage of Rosemary’s Baby and
The Exorcist, and a majority of the works of Stephen King.
These stories are taken to the heart of the commercial-
category audience that is characteristically style-deaf (regardless of the excellence of some of the works), the audience that requires repeated doses of such fiction for its emotional
effect to persist. This stream is the center of category horror
publishing.
The second group of horror stories, stories of aberrant human psychology embodied metaphorically, may be either purely supernatural, such as Dracula, or purely psychological, such as Robert Bloch’s Psycho. What characterizes them as a group is the monster at the center, from the monster of
Frankenstein, to Carmilla, to the chain-saw murderer—an
overtly abnormal human or creature, from whose acts and on
account of whose being the horror arises. D. H. Lawrence’s
little boy, Faulkner’s Emily, and, more subtly, the New Yorker
of Henry James’ “ The Jolly Comer” show the extent to
which this stream interpenetrates and blends with the mainstream of psychological fiction in this century. Both Lovecraft and Edmund Wilson, from differing perspectives, see
Joseph Conrad’s The Heart o f Darkness as essentially horror
fiction. There has been strong resistance on the part of critics, from Wilson to the present, to admitting nonsupematural psychological horror into consideration of the field, allowing
many to declare the field a dead issue for contemporary literature, of antiquarian interest only since the 1930s. This trend was probably aided by the superficial examination of
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