Last night I finished The World’s Greatest Horror Stories, published in 2004 by Magpie Books and edited by Stephen Jones and Dave Carson. This is a collection of stories mentioned in Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, which is included in the collection. Reading this book gives one a good foundation in the history of the horror genre up to Lovecraft’s time. It includes such masterworks as Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Machen’s “The Great God Pan”, M.R. James’s “Count Magnus”, Charles Dickens’s “The Signalman”, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast”, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bodysnatcher” along with many others.
Though a couple may be a little long-winded by today’s standards, overall these are wonderful stories, classic supernatural tales demonstrating what horror should be that were lauded by none other than the father of modern supernatural horror himself! I highly recommend this to anyone with an interest in literature in general though particularly of course to those with an interest in the horror genre. The beauty of these tales is their ability to keep the reader in edge-of-your-seat suspense,terrified and spellbound, without resorting to the more-often-than-not overdone and too often appalling gimmicks of gore and shock. These tales show that grisly details are not needed to enthrall an audience, but that imagination and craftsmanship are.
Title Page of Vampyre 1819 (Note handwritten attribution to Lord Byron)
On June 22, I was continuing my reading of Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” when I encountered an interesting tidbit. When Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein in the famous competition with her husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, another competitor was Dr. John William Polidori, whose story story from that competition, “The Vampyre”, went on to be the only other work of that competition that went on to achieve any sort of renown (according to Lovecraft).
Wikipedia has an interesting explanation for the title page above:
“The Vampyre” was first published on 1 April 1819 by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine with the false attribution “A Tale by Lord Byron“. The name of the work’s protagonist, “Lord Ruthven“, added to this assumption, for that name was originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb‘s novel Glenarvon (from the same publisher), in which a thinly-disguised Byron figure was also named Lord Ruthven. Despite repeated denials by Byron and Polidori, the authorship often went unclarified…Later printings removed Byron’s name and added Polidori’s name to the title page.
Go to this link for the Project Gutenberg etext of “Vampyre”. Modern printings can be found at the Open Library.
John William Polidori 1795-1821 (from Wikimedia)
Another couple of interesting notes from the Wikipedia article on The Vampyre:
“The story was an immediate popular success, partly because of the Byron attribution and partly because it exploited the gothic horror predilections of the public. Polidori transformed the vampire from a character in folklore into the form that is recognized today—an aristocratic fiend who preys among high society.[1]“
“Polidori’s work had an immense impact on contemporary sensibilities and ran through numerous editions and translations. An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard’s novel, Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires, falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who himself then wrote his own version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a “vampire craze” across Europe. This includes operatic adaptations by Heinrich Marschner (see Der Vampyr) and Peter Josef von Lindpaintner (see Der Vampyr), both published in the same year and called “The Vampire”. Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas, and Alexis Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori’s tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker‘s Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre. Dumas makes explicit reference to Lord Ruthwen in The Count of Monte Cristo, going so far as to state that his character “The Comtesse G…” had been personally acquainted with Lord Ruthwen.[10]“
I find it fascinating that possibly the two greatest motifs in the history of horror literature (Frankenstein and vampires) were started at the same friendly competition between four friends.
Unfortunately, Dr. Polidori did not live to see the success of the literary phenomenon he created. The article goes on to note:
“He [Polidori] died in London on 24 August 1821, weighed down by depression and gambling debts. Despite strong evidence that he committed suicide by means of prussic acid (cyanide), the coroner gave a verdict of death by natural causes.[3]“
On Monday, I learned of the death of Richard Matheson, one of the great horror writers of the twentieth century. As my tribute to him, here are a few quotations from and about him along with a few examples on how he generated his ideas. There were a lot, so I picked the ones that seemed most philosophical about writing and life in general in order to get a feel for the man behind the writing.
From Goodreads:
“What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one’s own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?” ― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come
“We’ve forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We’ve ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. (“The Thing”)” ― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
“If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.” ― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come
“In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.” ― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
“Now when I die, I shall only be dead.” ― Richard Matheson, I am Legend and Other Stories
From Wikiquotes:
I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I’ve written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death — the finest tribute any writer could receive. … Somewhere In Time is my favorite novel.
“Ed Gorman Calling: We Talk to Richard Matheson” (2004).
From Uphillwriting.org:
If you go too far in fantasy and break the string of logic, and become nonsensical, someone will surely remind you of your dereliction…Pound for pound, fantasy makes a tougher opponent for the creative person.
– Richard Matheson
And here are a couple of quote about Matheson–also from Wikiquotes:
Matheson gets closer to his characters than anyone else in the field of fantasy today. … You don’t read a Matheson story — you experience it.
Robert Bloch, as quoted in an address by Anthony Boucher (29 August 1958), at the “Solacon”, the 1958 Worldcon
He has many … virtues, notably an unusual agility in trick prose and trick construction and a too-little-recognized (or exercised) skill on offtrail humor; but his great strength is his power to take a reader inside a character or a situation.
Anthony Boucher in an address at the “Solacon”, the1958 Worldcon (29 August 1958)
Wikipedia offers an interesting paragraph on how Matheson came up with the ideas for some of his more famous works:
Matheson cited specific inspirations for many of his works. Duel derived from an incident in which he and a friend, Jerry Sohl, were dangerously tailgated by a large truck on the same day as the Kennedy assassination. (However, there are similarities with William M. Robson’s script of the July 15, 1962 episode of the radio drama, Suspense, “Snow on 66”.[citation needed]) A scene from the 1953 movie Let’s Do It Again in which Aldo Ray and Ray Milland put on each other’s hats, one of which is far too big for the other, sparked the thought “what if someone put on his own hat and that happened,” which became The Shrinking Man. Bid Time Return began when Matheson saw a movie poster featuring a beautiful picture of Maude Adams and wondered what would happen if someone fell in love with such an old picture. In the introduction to Noir: 3 Novels of Suspense (1997), which collects three of his early books, Matheson said that the first chapter of his suspense novel Someone is Bleeding (1953) describes exactly his meeting with his wife Ruth, and that in the case of What Dreams May Come, “the whole novel is filled with scenes from our past.”
Albert Bitzius (1797-1854) was a Swiss pastor and author, who is better known by his pen name of Jeremias Gotthelf. Gotthelf was a prolific writer whose novels and stories were based on the people of his village, Luetzelflueh, in the Bernese Emmental.
Albert Bitzius (Jeremias Gotthelf) circa 1844
Gotthelf is considered an important writer not only in Switzerland, but also as an important writer throughout the German-speaking world. Gotthelf’s works were primarily what we would today consider mainstream literature, but he did write one short novel that would be considered horror and for which he is renown: The Black Spider. Wikipedia notes:
The Black Spider is Gotthelf’s best known work. At first little noticed, the story is now considered by many critics to be among the masterworks of the German Biedermeier era and sensibility. Thomas Mann wrote of it in his The Genesis of Doctor Faustus that Gotthelf “often touched the Homeric” and that he admired The Black Spider “like no other piece of world literature.” [Thomas Mann quotation from One World Classics.]
I read The Black Spider as an undergrad around 1979. It sticks in my mind to this day. Admittedly, I had to read the Wikipedia synopsis to recall all the details, but over the decades I can still picture the hunter/the devil kissing Christine on the cheek knowing something evil would come from that simple, slightly stinging kiss and then the outpouring of thousands of murderous spiders from that spot when she breaks her oath to him. Somehow I can still recall how I felt the loathsome horror of that moment for her, not as if it were happening to me, but almost as if it were happening to someone standing next to me, as if it were happening to someone I knew. Perhaps this is because I sympathized with her goal. Christine was trying to save her village, her friends, and her family from starvation and overwork at the hands of a merciless overlord. The only way she could do it was to try to outwit the devil at the risk of horrendous consequences if she failed…and she did fail. I think it was the nobility and selflessness of Christine’s altruism that still sticks with me emotionally after thirty years. The Russian author Anton Chekhov once advised writers to write with “sympathetic characters”; this is undoubtedly a terrific example of that principle.
The Black Spider by Franz Karl Basler-Kopp (1879-1937)
One writing class I had several years ago advised to establish an “intellectual and emotional connection” between the audience and the subject. That has always proven to be excellent advice. In the case of “The Black Spider”, Gotthelf certainly established an emotional connection between Christine and myself. There have been times in my life, as in the lives of everyone else, when I have made sacrifices for the good of others (though of course not with the horrendous consequences that Christine suffers). Perhaps that is what enables us, the audience, to sympathize with Christine’s plight and to experience her torment vicariously.
Thinking back, it is with the characters with whom I have some type of shared experience, that I sympathize the most when something horrific happens to them. If we, as writers of horror, are to give our stories great emotional impact, then we have to develop characters that have their foundations in everyday experiences which our audiences can share. Lovecraft advised having average people as characters, because this made the supernatural appear truly supernatural. In “The Black Spider” all of Gotthelf’s characters are quite average, thus the supernatural events of the story strike home with great impact. Perhaps that is because we can visualize these events more clearly on some level as if we were watching them occur to our neighbors. Most of the characters in Stephen King’s writing seem to me to be quite average and we feel the same sympathy for their predicaments, because they are average..like us.
Sometimes, when I am reading an engrossing text in a quiet environment where I can fully concentrate on the text, I seem to almost slip into a nebulous world where I am experiencing the story as if I were in a lucid dream. With sympathetic characters like Christine, what little remains to separate myself from that dream world is shattered and I feel their sufferings much more acutely, as if they were happening to me, as if I were actually living the experience.
For me, being able to shatter that barrier between dream world and reality for my audience is part of the magic of writing. After all, isn’t magic the creation of illusion?
“The Pit and the Pendulum” Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1935
A day or two ago, I finished reading volume 1 of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. His style is beautiful; his choice of words is meticulous; his characters are carefully interwoven; and his imagination is mind-boggling. If you haven’t read this and you call yourself a fan of horror, you should probably be ashamed (I feel ashamed that I have not read him before now). You are missing out on some terrific stories. Now I understand why Stephen King called him “the future of horror”.
But of all his praiseworthy attributes, the one that stands out from all the others is his imagination. I cannot even imagine how he formulates his ideas. For “Midnight Meat Train”, was he just riding a subway and wonder “where does this go? What’s at the end of the line? Maybe there are cannibals at the end of the line? Where did they come from?” How did he associate cannibals with a subway? [Of course, this is all speculation I am just pulling out of the air. I have read nothing about Barker’s gifted imagination. I am using my own imagination and my experience in developing stories to speculate about his methods.]
I heard some place many years ago that genius is not seeing the similarities between apples and oranges (anyone can see the differences), but seeing the similarities between apples and tractors–or in this case, seeing the possible connections between cannibals and subways.
In “In the Hills, the Cities” How did he come up with the concept of giants made of tens of thousands of people functioning together as a single entity? Was he thinking of the original druid burning men and wonder, “what if they were bigger and could come alive?”
To come up with stories such as these, one must think completely out of the box, out of the established paradigm (per Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
The more I read of works like this, the more I take to heart the advice I see occasionally from publishers that they do not want to see more werewolf-vampire-zombie (wvz) stories or that wvz stories must be very well done to be published. I enjoy wvz stories as much as the next reader, but if I were a publisher, I do not know if I could stomach seeing hundreds come across my desk in a month for years on end.
In his work “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, Lovecraft stresses the importance of an element of the supernatural being present in what he then termed “weird fiction” because if anything is possible, then there are no longer any physical laws of reality to shield us from the horrors that may actually be in the universe. Barker does exactly that. In his writing, there are no limits to what may happen to any one at any time. We are all under the threat of horrific annihilation at any moment.
Likewise, another of Lovecraft’s bits of advice is that characters must be ordinary people so that the appearance of the supernatural will be obvious and stronger than if the characters were all super characters. This makes sense. Superman is only super when he is on earth; he would be just another overworked taxpayer on Krypton. From what I have seen so far in volume 1 of Books of Blood, all of Barker’s characters are quite ordinary people caught up in quite extraordinary and horrible circumstances. Perhaps his way of characterization is genius in itself. I think anyone can make up a fantastic character, but to make someone real, to make a genuine person and have their character show through, when it is easier to make up a shallow one or two dimensional stick figure…isn’t that a form of genius in its own right? In terms of characterization, Barker’s imagination does not tend to the supernatural, but to the perceptive and to the meticulous. [No, I haven’t read The Hellbound Heart yet but I have read “The Yattering and Jack”, and I feel confident that when I do finally encounter Pinhead (I have seen a few of the Hellraiser series), he will certainly not be two-dimensional even though he is definitely supernatural.]
But I digress.
The upshot of all this is that as writers we should push our imaginations to the limits, exploring new ways of coming up with ideas, and disdain themes and motifs that have been worked to death for decades. That is a great part of the challenge of writing. Though I love classic literature such as that by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, their works do not push the limits of the imagination as do the writers of speculative fiction such as Barker and Lovecraft or Bradbury and Asimov. Writers of speculative fiction are explorers of the imagination.
But of the subgenres of speculative fiction, where does that leave writers of horror?
It leaves us as explorers of the dark arts of the imagination. Whereas writers of science fiction and fantasy may push into better worlds like Magellan sailing around the globe, we authors of horror push into the dark, threatening, forbidding areas of the imagination, much as the conquistadors pushed into the Central American jungles or intrepid British explorers pushed along the Congo or Amazon in search of wealth or lost cities. Indeed, it could be said that we are searching for metaphorical lost cities in the recesses of the mind, seeking long-hidden worlds surrounded by mystery and horror.
If life is a journey, then we, as writers of horror are choosing the most terrifying journey through the imagination that we can, because we love the thrill of being faced with horror on every side.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1935
I was just musing that if a canon of horror literature could be developed, what should it include? This would be a collection of say ten works that define horror literature and that everyone seriously interested in horror should read if he/she they wish to learn what horror is and should be. This would not be a collection of the most popular works (whether novel, short story, essay, screenplay, theater, etc.) of horror, which would change constantly, but ten works which would define horror now and forever as the Bible does Christianity, as the Koran does Islam, and as the Analects of Confucius do Confucianism. These should be eternal works that at the end of time, after the Zombie Apocalypse when no more books are written, the few remaining survivors of humanity can review all the literary works of all time and say, “These ten defined the horror genre.” Of course, this canon will be forever debated, but lively, engaged discussion is the fun of a list like this.
To start off this conversation, here are my initial ten recommendations (subject to change as my reading progresses). I will keep this list to one work from each of ten authors so that works by one author do not overwhelm the list. This is not in any order of priority or preference–just as they pop into my mind. Although these reflect my own reading (which tends to the past more than the present), I have added one or two authors I haven’t read, but from what I understand, have made significant contributions to the horror genre.
The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article (as of April 17, 2013) gives a good, very basic introduction to Hanns Ewers:
“Hanns Heinz Ewers (3 November 1871 in Düsseldorf – 12 June 1943 in Berlin) was a Germanactor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled on himself. The best known of these is Alraune (1911).[1][2]“
The article continues on to describe some of his literary achievements:
“This was followed in 1911 by Alraune, a reworking of the Frankenstein myth, in which Braun collaborates in creating a female homunculus or android by impregnating a prostitute with the semen from an executed murderer. The result is a young woman without morals, who commits numerous monstrous acts. Alraune was influenced by the ideas of the eugenics movement, especially the book Degeneration by Max Nordau.[4]Alraune has been generally well received by historians of the horror genre; Mary Ellen Snodgrass describes Alraune as “Ewers’ decadent masterwork”,[2]Brian Stableford argues Alraune “deserves recognition as the most extreme of all “femme fatale” stories” [4] and E.F. Bleiler states the scenes in Alraune set in the Berlin underworld as among the best parts of the novel.[3] The novel was filmed several times, most recently by Erich von Stroheim in 1952.
Bleiler notes “Both Alraune and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice are remarkable for the emotion the author can arouse” and that Ewers’ writing is, at its best, “very effective”. However, Bleiler also argues Ewers’ work is marred by “annoying pretentiousness, vulgarity, and a very obtrusive and unpleasant author’s personality”.[3]“
So far I have read only two of Ewers’ short stories: “The Spider”, described as his “most anthologized work”, and “Fairyland”. I will need to read more of his works to be able to speak with some degree of confidence that I know what I am talking about, but my first impression of Ewers’ works is one of disappointment.
I read both works in English (though I speak German with moderate fluency), and his command of composition, organization, language, clarity, and suspense are competent enough, but at least the stories noted above seem to fall apart at having a comprehensible denouement, and in the area of having good taste.
“The Spider” starts off well enough with a great opening paragraph that sets the stage for suspense:
“When the student of medicine, Richard Bracquemont, decided to move
into room #7 of the small Hotel Stevens, Rue Alfred Stevens (Paris 6),
three persons had already hanged themselves from the cross-bar of the
window in that room on three successive Fridays.”
As the story develops, Bracquemont volunteers to work with the police in finding out why the three previous residents killed themselves by reporting what he sees during his stay. He records his observations in a diary. Over the next three or so weeks, Bracquemont begins observing a girl in another room across the street, who constantly spins at an old-fashioned spinning wheel. He begins to be attracted to her, he waves to her, they develop games to play over the distance (mimicking each other, etc.), he becomes infatuated with her, and obsession sets in all the while there are subtle hints of analogies between her and a female spider luring her mate to its death. I will not spoil the ending for you, if you want to read it (I read the version at Project Gutenberg Australia), but I will say that the story seemed rather drawn out and the ending was confusing with no real explanation as to why the story ends as it does. I suppose one could say it was “black magic”, as one critic noted, but there is nothing alluding to black magic anywhere previously in the story. The ending is sort of deus ex machina and very unsatisfying.
“Fairyland” is worse. It’s only virtue is that it is very short. It is the story of a cute little girl on a tramp steamer in Port-au-Prince who is the darling of the crew and who tells them of wonderful monsters she has seen ashore, monsters with enormous heads and limbs and scales. She offers to show them to the crew and the crew agrees to go along wondering what she has found. Not far from the docks, she shows them the local beggars who have enormous limbs from having contracted elephantiasis or scales from leprosy or a similar skin disease. While the crew is obviously overcome with disgust, the little girl prattles on about how cute the monsters are.
I am not one to berate anyone else over a lack of taste, but whoever published this deserved a good horsewhipping for deciding to put this atrocity in the public view. It is one of the more tasteless things I have ever seen. However, I will discourage anyone from reading it. After all, it is a matter of taste and we are dealing with matters of horror.
So far, Ewers is the one author of horror I have been most disappointed by. Still I will read at least a few more of his works before I solidify my opinion. At some point I may read Alraune only because it is his best known work, but from what I have seen of its reviews, it may be a struggle for me to wade through horrors which only the Marquis de Sade would appreciate.
Perhaps Ewers does deserve his accolades. I will only know by exploring his works further. So far though, I am not looking forward to the journey, which I make only out of intellectual curiosity.
There is one interesting sidelight about Ewers for fans of cinematic horror. One reviewer commented somewhere (I forget where) that Alraune was the original inspiration for genetically-mutated femme fatales like the alien in the Species trilogy.
I had never heard of Maurice Level (the pseudonym of Jeanne Mareteux-Level) before tonight, but after reading a couple of his short stories and a few critques of his work in general, I shall have to find more of his stories.
Level was a French writer known for his macabre stories, which were sometimes staged in the renown Theater of the Grand Guignol. Wikipedia says this about him:
“…Level’s short stories may be weak in characterization and motivation, but they are strong on obsession and violence. Their surprise endings are reminiscent of the stories of Guy de Maupassant. Many of Level’s stories were translated into English in the magazine Weird Tales. [1] As editor John Robert Colombo noted in Stories of Fear and Fascination (2007), Battered Silicon Dispatch Box French critics see Level as the heir of the Symbolist writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; British critics, as the successor of Edgar Allan Poe; American critics, as the contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft. Of this fiction, Lovecraft himself observed in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945), “This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself–the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors.” Critic Philippe Gontier wrote, “We can only admire, now almost one hundred years later, the great artistry with which Maurice Level fabricated his plots, with what care he fashioned all the details of their unfolding and how with a master’s hand he managed the building of suspense.” Level’s stories, with their gratuitous acts and mindless brutality, may be seen as precursors of “thriller” fiction and “slasher” films.”
A few of Level’s works can be found on the Internet. I read two tonight: “Under the Red Lamp” and “Last Kiss”. They are quite brief and quite terrifying. In my view, the Wikipedia article above provides a good assessment of what I have read so far. Level begins a story with a first sentence that grabs your attention, then sustains the mystery throughout the tale, until you reach a sudden, horrifying, denouement.
I highly recommend investigating his works when you have the time. He is an excellent writer that deserves more recognition than he has.
Here are a few places to start:
“The Last Kiss” at Moonlightstories.magick7.com A husband, blinded and hideously deformed when his wife threw vitriol in his face after he threatened to leave her, intervenes on her behalf when the case comes to court, preventing her from receiving a long jail sentence. At his request she pays him an emotional visit in which she begs his forgiveness and somehow even manages to kiss him, whereupon … Well, not for nothing is Level feted as a master practitioner of the conte cruel. (Synopsis from vaultofevil.proboards.com)
“In the Light of the Red Lamp” at amalgamatedspooks.com “In the first shock of grief, you sometimes have extraordinary ideas … can you believe that I photographed her lying on her deathbed? I took my camera into the white, silent room, and lit the magnesium wire. Yes, overwhelmed as I was with grief, I did with the most scrupulous precaution and care things from which I should shrink today, revolting things … yet it is a great consolation to know she is there, that I shall be able to see her again as she looked that last day.” Now, six months after his beloved’s death, accompanied by the narrator he prepares to develop the photographs of the dead woman. Slowly the images appear – and a horrible tragedy is revealed. (Synopsis from vaultofevil.proboards.com)
“The Grip of Fear” at Google Books (I haven’t read this yet, but it looks interesting.)
Apparently, many of his works are still available only in French, but some (notably those mentioned above) are available in English. His better known works are: Those who Return, Tales of Mystery and Horror, Tales of the Grand Guignol, Les Portes de L’Enfer, The Grip of Fear, and L’Epouvante.
I am a member of GoodReads.com as are several of my friends. One, a gentleman named Tim Stamps, whom I have known since my college days at Eastern Kentucky University, recently posted a review of Dracula, on which I commented. Thus began a brief conversation which I think you may find interesting for several reasons. I have quoted it below, editing out any non-relevant personal matters (after having obtained Tim’s permission to post it).
I could only read this during the Winter months, when the weather is cloudy, dark and gloomy. When I read fiction I prefer the classics, to learn how people thought in earlier times. The actual character of Dracula was the most un-interesting of the characters in the book. It turns out that Stoker only knew Vlad’s Dracula name but knew nothing of his past, and the character is actually based more on Jack the Ripper. Also it was interesting to read a book made up of supposed diary entries and newspaper articles – although most actual diaries and articles written by everyday people are nowhere near as long and detailed, especially back then when paper was scarce. I understand Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the same format, and other books of that time did the same. If you can find a copy, listen to the first half hour of this Coast to Coast show: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/20…
Tim, if you like reading classic horror tales like Dracula, then you should definitely read Frankenstein. Others you may want to check out are The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the works of Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. I have been writing horror lately and have established a blog on it that often discusses past writers of the horror genre. You may want to check it out at www.philslattery.wordpress.com. You may find some of the authors I discuss of interest. One who is known more as a writer of science fiction than of horror (though the boundary is often indistinct at best) is H.G. Wells who wrote The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and others.
True, I definitely plan to read Frankenstein. Also have been planning on getting into Wuthering Heights and the Brönte sisters books. I’ve always been a fan of H.G. Wells, also Orwell’s dystopian works – still trying to get around to reading Huxley’s Brave New World (when I find my copy) – I can also add ebooks to a kindle, but the kindle doesn’t exactly replace paper. I’ve depended on the movies too much – finding lots of extra details in the books that the films leave out. (I don’t really spend much time reading actually.) I’ll explore your site.. thanks! By the way, are there any horror films you really like? Or gothic tales. There don’t seem to be many recent ones that play into fears as well as the older ones. Some of the classics: “The Innocents” (version of Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw”), George Romero’s “Martin”, “The Exorcist”, even “The Shining” and the early “Halloween” pictures. Recent films like “The Ring” and “the Sixth Sense” have potential. I read in your blog that to be a great horror writer you need to understand the psychology and emotions of fear. Perhaps horror screenplay writers nowadays need to go back to the basics – just slashing people up and showing gruesome killings isn’t enough to heighten the sense of fear. They seem to have forgotten Hitchcock and his methods of manipulating people’s emotions, although that was a time when people actually paid attention to dialog. I don’t know what it’s going to take to make a great horror movie today. Is it even possible?
Tim wrote: “True, I definitely plan to read Frankenstein. Also have been planning on getting into Wuthering Heights and the Brönte sisters books. I’ve always been a fan of H.G. Wells, also Orwell’s dystopian w…”
Yes, you are right in all accounts, except that modern screenplay writers need to go back to the basics. They cannot go back to someplace they have never been. They need to learn the basics first. Stephen King identifies three types of horror: horror, the gross-out, and terror (the exact lengthy quote can be found on GoodReads). Modern, popular, mass-market screenplay writers use the gross-out form to excess. The great horror writers of the past (such as Lovecraft, Poe, Blackwood, etc.) never described anything gross. Yet their tales are terrifying. There is an art to horror, and Hitchcock’s concept of suspense (i.e. terror lies not in seeing something happen, but in knowing that something is about to happen) is one of the best means of achieving horror.
There are great horror movies today, but one has to veer away from the mass-market and Hollywood to find them. Independent films and small companies are your best shot: someone who cares about the art. Netflix and Hulu TV are good for finding these (and finding them cheaply at that). The series American Horror Story is quite entertaining, though it can be bloody at times. Foreign films can be an excellent source with Japan, Korea, England, Australia, and Spain coming immediately to mind. I noted that your profile says you are in the Seattle area now. Lion’s Gate Films in Vancouver, BC makes some good films (outside of the horrifyingly gross-out Saw series).
I have seen some good horror films lately, but am having a hard time recalling their names, therefore I am reviewing some lists of top horror films on line, but of course that isn’t helping much as the lists are mass-market oriented. One that pops out now is the original Swedish version of “Let the Right One In”. “Dagon”, a Spanish film based somewhat loosely on a Lovecraft story (“The Shadow over Innsmouth”) is not bad. The New Zealand film “The Devil’s Island” has some interesting ideas behind it, though it is quite bloody. That’s all I can think of on the spur of the moment.
hi Phil, Sorry about “Seattle” – don’t know how that happened (I must’ve not filled it in – the site just guessed or something.) Anyway, actually I am (still) in… I love watching foreign horror… for 70s-era foreign horror, Dario Argento comes to mind, although he leans toward the gross-out variety. Lovecraft-written films are always great. I’ll check out these you mention (and any others you run across) – if you come up with a list of interesting foreign horror for the last 3 decades or so let me know. I have one plug: watch for “Nobody in Particular”, a crime-drama I helped out on, being re-edited – should be out sometime this year.
I ran across an interesting article today at http://www.quintadimension.com/article66.html, entitled “Archetypal Horror: H.P. Lovecraft and Carl Gustav Jung”. It was written by Jorge Oscar Rossi, an Argentinian writer of science fiction (and fantastic literature in general), and published on December, 8, 2000. Please note that the article and his autobiography are in Spanish.
I am no master of Spanish, having had only two years in college and some practical, albeit frequent, experience in Texas and Mexico over the last twenty years. However, Señor Rossi’s article is well-written and relatively easy reading, so that I feel I caught the gist of it, if not all the nuances.
His main point (and anyone with a better knowledge of Spanish than I, including Señor Rossi, may correct me if I am wrong) is that Lovecraft’s ancient gods of the Cthulhu mythos represent archetypal forms of horror in the Jungian sense of “archetype”.
If you have a basic comprehension of Spanish, the article is quite intriguing and worth taking a shot at reading.
If nothing esle, the article will help you view the poster above from another perspective: what is the meaning of the poster if the creature above symbolizes archetypal fears shared by everyone?
Bram Stoker 1847-1912Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu 1814-1873
For St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I would bring up just a couple of tidbits.
First of all, the first two Irish horror authors who spring to mind are Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (born at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, according to Wikipedia) and Bram Stoker (born in Clontarf, north of Dublim (also according to Wikipedia). Follow the links to my articles on each.
Second, I did a quick search for “Irish horror humor” on Google and found reviews for Grabbers. I haven’t seen the movie yet myself, but it looks like fun. I will definitely check it out at my first opportunity and I recommend that you do too.
Third, never drink and blog. If you have ever seen the movie Sideways starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, you know the dangers of drinking and dialing. The dangers of drinking and blogging are similar, but on an international scale. 🙂
Lovecraft in the Agony of Contemplation Illustration by MirrorCradle
As I was driving about town today, I started reflecting on the difference between mainstream, so-to-speak literary fiction and speculative fiction (usually defined as consisting of the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres). I recall reading somewhere, years ago, in the submissions guidelines for a mainstream fiction magazine, that mainstream fiction consisted of whatever did not fit into a genre. Then, I considered that accurate and reasonable; now I consider it somewhat snobbish. In fact, the more I think about it, the more short-sighted and narrow-minded that statement becomes.
Speculative fiction, including the horror genre, deals with fantastic, often surreal, situations. Mainstream fiction, if you go by the definition above, deals with anything not fantastic, not surreal, i.e. the real, events that could happen in the real world. It would seem to me that the truly gifted writer would be the one with the greater imagination, the one who can conjure entire civilizations and fantastic creatures out of his mind alone. My favorite authors for many years have been, and continue to be, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, based on their styles and how their stories can touch me. However, if had to state who had the greatest imagination out of the history of writers, Tolkien would be at the top, simply because he was able to create an entire world out of his imagination (granted most of the ideas were based in Nordic mythology) and make it and his characters believeable. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos would be a close second.
Reading the guidelines of horror publications, I find that many of them do not want werewolf/vampire/zombie (w/v/z)stories. They want something different, original. That is a difficult challenge. I could dream up w/v/z stories all day long, but creating something out of thin air, like Stephen King or Clive Barker does, and to do it consistenly, is truly admirable. I have written one or two stories along the w/v/z line, but now I am taking up the challenge of writing something truly imaginative. I have no good ideas just yet, but I am examining how horror authors of the past came up with ideas and what were their inspirations.
So now here is a question of the night: if you are trying to write material outside the w/v/z tradition, how are you coming up with ideas? Have you put any new slant on horror? Do your inspirations come from dreams or from looking at real-world object and then allowing yourself to explore the possibities if something about that scene was just a little bit different?
I love maps and found an interesting one at Wikimedia tonight. The above is an illustration of “Lovecraft Country” as drawn by Miihkali (from Finland) in 2009. It is in the public domain.
The description that accompanies the map (the bottom paragraph is in Finnish) reads:
English: So called ‘Lovecraft country’ of Cthulhu Mythos, showing some of the most important cities of Massachusetts alongside with towns invented by Lovecraft. Imaginary towns are marked with square, real ones with circle.
Suomi:Cthulhu-mytologian “Lovecraft-maa”; joitain merkittäviä Massachusettsin kaupunkeja yhdessä Lovecraftin keksimien kanssa. Kuvitteelliset paikat on merkitty neliöllä, oikeat pallolla.
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:..” Ecclesiastes 3:1 (New International Version)
So when is the right time for profanity in literature? I have my beliefs, but I thought it would be interesting in finding some quotations from more respected writers (and entertainers) other than myself, so I went quote-shopping through BrainyQuotes.com and Goodreads.com.
“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.” –Mark Twain
“I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.” –Ernest Hemingway
“There was certainly less profanity in the Godfather than in the Sopranos. There was a kind of respect. It’s not that I totally agreed with it, but it was a great piece of art.” –Danny Aiello
“profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
“Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.” ― Johnny Carson
“What I’m saying might be profane, but it’s also profound.” ― Richard Pryor, Pryor Convictions: and Other Life Sentences
All make excellent points.
My personal belief is best summarized by Ecclesiastes 3:1 above, with the following addenda:
A word is either the expression of an idea or of an emotion and should be used accordingly. Profanity is therefore the expression of profane ideas or of intense emotions and should be used accordingly.
Profanity is by nature shocking to most of the general public. If used too frequently, it loses its effect and becomes tiresome. I have known people who have used profanity to excess and although they shock and offend on first meeting, they quickly become tiresome and annoying and their limited vocabulary quickly shows their narrow intellect (with few exceptions–I have heard some respected authors have had colorful vocabularies). Thus profanity is useful as a literary device only if it is used to show a person of that low character or to indicate irony. An example of the latter would be a person who is superficially of low character, but on closer examination is more profound and intelligent than expected–there are a few people like that. If profanity is to retain its shock value within a story, its use must be limited (the more limited the better), otherwise the story becomes tiresome and annoying.
Vonnegut makes an excellent point above. The more profanity one uses in a story, the less readers one will have–for whatever reason. This parallels Stephen Hawking’s experience as a writer. In the introduction of A Brief History of Time, Hawking says that someone told him that for every number used in a book, he would lose one reader. Therefore, in A Brief History of Time Hawking uses only one number in describing one of the most profound and complex scientific theories of history. An example from cinema would be the single profanity used in Gone with the Wind. That profanity was used at a critical moment and because it expressed so much at the right time, it was memorable and powerful. That moment would have lost much of its impact, if the movie had been as laced with profanity as Pulp Fiction (admittedly, I am a big fan of Pulp Fiction). For those reasons, I believe profanity in literature should be kept to an absolute minimum.
When used, profanity should have a definite purpose: to say something about a character, their emotional state, their state of mind, or their environment (e.g. in my story “A Tale of Hell”, the main character has problems with intense anger and actually ends up in hell. Profanity is part of his character on earth and part of his surroundings in hell, where, understandably, it would be constant and ubiquitous.
Profanity has only been commonly accepted in literature since the early Twentieth Century at best. Probably the foremost example of this would be Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which was first published in France in 1934, but which was banned in the U.S. Its publication by Grove Press in 1961 led to a series of obscenity trials ending in the Supreme Court finally declaring it non-obscene in 1964. Many, if not most, of the recognized masters of the horror genre wrote around or prior to 1934 and never used a single profanity, e.g. Lovecraft, Poe, Machen, Lord Dunsany, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu, Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, et cetera. Profanity is not necessary to achieve a horrifying effect. In fact, it becomes more of an artistic challenge to write something horrifying without profanity. Shock may be part of horror, but horror is much more than shock.
The upshot of all this for the contemporary writer is that, like everything else, profanity has its place, but its use must be balanced against what the author wishes to achieve while bearing in mind that its careless overuse can severely damage the reader’s experience and taint that reader’s perception of the author.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 