5: [1796] MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS - The Monk: A Romance
Madrid, c. 1600. Ambrosia, the impossibly saintly abbot of the Capuchin order, is visited by a demon in the form of Matilda, a young and lovely woman who enters the monastery disguised as a novice. She seduces Ambrosia, and encourages him to plumb the depths of degradation. He is led unknowingly to rape his sister and murder his mother, and a final confrontation with Lucifer himself leaves Ambrosia’s broken and bleeding corpse to the insects. Sub-plots, essential to a Gothic novel, feature the Wandering few and a sad spectre known as the Bleeding Nun. By going beyond the comparatively polite horrors of Mrs. Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, Lewis earned the admiration of such figures as Byron and de Sade, the displeasure of many “respectable” folks, and a nickname, “Monk”, that stayed with him to the grave. The Monk, his first novel, was written before Lewis’ 21st birthday; he followed it with a succession of lesser romances, tales and plays, including The Castle Spectre (1797), Tales of Terror (1799) The Bravo of Venice (1805), and One O’clock, or The Knight and Wooddemon (1811). The Monk was filmed in 1972 as La Moine, with Franco Nero in the title role.
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The Monk, although it was published almost two hundred years ago, in 1796, may legitimately claim to be the first modern horror novel in the English language. Predecessors like Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe had pioneered the Gothic tale, but the stories they told tended to be distressingly genteel and moralistic. This was not enough for Matthew Gregory Lewis, who, while little more than a boy, produced a work that was outrageous, offensive, and obnoxious, one that still demonstrates its power to dismay. A standard history of English literature claims that it exhibits “the perverted lust of a sadist”. Can there be a higher recommendation? Set in the early 17th century, The Monk was a period piece even in 1796, yet it contains enough bad attitudes to raise a few hackles even today. Attacked for obscenity and blasphemy, the book was censored in its later editions, in no small measure because it had been revealed that the writer, who penned the novel at the tender age of nineteen, had recently become a Member of Parliament. The author’s youth is ultimately more important than his government credentials, for this is a work of enthusiasm and excess, its audacity and adolescence speaking to and for the audience that has always eagerly embraced the horrific. The Monk sneers at convention: its episodes include dead babies, mangled nuns, murdered mothers, deflowered virgins, and sex-crazed clergymen. This is the sort of material that 20th-century artists have frequently flaunted to provide their own emblems of emancipation, but Lewis had staked out the territory long before the grandparents of his followers were born. Such calculated bad taste made Lewis a celebrity in his time, yet he also embodied the essential paradox of the horror writer: contemporaries from Lord Byron to Sir Walter Scott describe him as an honorable and kindly man. Literary historians have reduced him to the catalyst whose personal influence inspired Polidori’s The Vampyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but in his lifetime he was recognized for his own achievements, and rightly so. Lewis cut to the bone. In the depraved monk Ambrosio, Lewis created a character that speaks uneasily to readers centuries later. Ambrosio is Faustian, in the traditional mode, but he represents not the lust for power, or the lust for money, or even the lust for knowledge. What he displays, embarrassingly but importantly, is the lust for lust. He is the forefather of a roster of lascivious villains from Dracula through Norman Bates to Freddy Krueger. Despite its overblown language and its overstrained coincidences, The Monk is a revolutionary work. It defies polite society, and it also challenges the limits of its genre. The evil in this tale is not exterior, an outside outrage to be subdued by the representatives of civility and good taste. Rather, the evil is within its protagonist, and there is no bland embodiment of virtue to stand in his path. The evil runs its course, consuming itself rather than facing defeat from the forces of conformity. This is not melodrama, but tragedy, and as such it shames most of the popular 20th-century terror tales whose only drive is to enforce the status quo. Lewis wanted to see how far he could go, and he went there. In a time when we are confronted with a flood of reassuring horror stories, each one promising its readers that everything awful exists only in others, the courage that Lewis displayed shines like a bloody beacon. And any book with a character called The Bleeding Nun can’t be all bad. — LES DANIELS
6: [1814-16] E. T. A. HOFFMANN - The Best Tales of Hoffmann
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann never put his name to a collection under the title Tales of Hoffmann but since the success of Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881), there have been several competing volumes under variations of the name, including R. J. Hollingdale’s Tales of Hoffmann (1932), Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight’s Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1972), and Victor Lange’s Tales (1982). The volume discussed here is E. F. Bleiler’s selection, The Best Tales of Hoffmann. In Hoffmann’s lifetime (1776-1822), his short horror pieces appeared in Fantasiest��cke in Callots Manier (4 vols, 1814-15) and Nachtst(1816), although several of his best-known works — “The Golden Flowerpot”, “The Sand-Man” — were not published until after his death. Hoffmann’s major horror novels are Die Elixier des Teufels (1815-16) and Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1821-22). Offenbach’s opera was marvellously filmed in 1951 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Moira Shearer outstanding as Olimpia the Automaton.
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This collection includes “The Sand-Man”, the best-known of Hoffmann’s stories, as well as “The Golden Flowerpot”, a lavish alchemical tale whose passages of vivid fantasy brought grudging praise from Goethe. These and most of the remaining eight tales are unrolled like dreams, with all of the humour, horror, and superreality dreams require. In “Rath Krespin”, a man collects rare violins only to dismantle them. A miser meets his doppelganger (“Signer Formica”). A machine whispers prophecies (“Automata”). A divinity student falls under the spell of a blue-eyed snake (“The Golden Flowerpot”). A miner is lured to his death by the glowing face of the Metal Queen (“The Mines of Falun”). In a comic-horrific tale “The King’s Betrothed”, a woman finds herself engaged to a carrot. But the deepest nightmare here is the “The Sand-Man”. This dark tale was written in 1816, two years before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in a similar spirit of horrified fascination with science and its application to artificial life. Hoffmann is concerned with the horror of automata indistinguishable from real people. In “The Sand-Man”, the nightmare is relentless. It begins with a child’s confusion. A cruel nurse tells young Nathanael that the Sandman “comes to little children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody”. He believes the Sandman is the lawyer Coppelius, who comes to the house nightly to visit his father on some mysterious errand. Later the child realizes the Sandman is only a story, but he also senses that Coppelius has some unpleasant hold over his parents. The child hides and sees the men engaged in some secret experiment involving a forge and glowing metal. When Nathanael is discovered, Coppelius threatens to put out his eyes. In a later, “last” experiment, the secret forge explodes, killing Nathanael’s father. Coppelius disappears. Grown-up Nathanael attends a distant university. One day a peddler comes to his room, selling barometers and thermometers. The peddler looks like the sinister Coppelius and calls himself Coppola. All the old nameless fears are aroused. Nathanael quarrels with his fianceHe soon becomes intrigued by the vision of Olimpia, the rather inert, beautiful daughter of his physics professor, Spalanzani. The professor lives across the street, and Nathanael can see Olimpia through a window. The peddler returns, offering to sell him spectacles, which he calls “eyes, fine eyes”. He lays out hundreds of glittering samples — fiery glass lenses like eyes staring back at the horrified Nathanael. He buys a telescope, which he uses to spy on Olimpia. His interest deepens to obsession. Finally Nathanael meets Olimpia at a ball. She plays piano, sings, and dances well, if soullessly, but she hardly speaks. Others at
the ball decide that she is either a wooden doll or simpleminded. Nevertheless, Nathanael pursues his fatal obsession. One night as he is paying a visit to give her a ring, he overhears a quarrel between Spalanzani and Coppelius. He walks in to find them ripping Olimpia apart: Spalanzani reclaims the clockwork he constructed, while Coppelius owns her beautiful glass eyes. After a fight, Coppelius departs with the doll — leaving its glass eyes on the floor. In frustration, Spalanzani picks up the eyes and throws them at Nathanael. Nathanael goes mad, but his fiancelara nurses him back to health. Later they go up to a clock tower to look at the city. Nathanael puts the accursed telescope to his eye, and goes mad once more. He tries to kill Clara, and finally throws himself from the tower. As in a dream, it is never clear whether Coppelius and Coppola are one man or two; are they split in reality, or only in the divided mind of Nathanael? We are never sure what the mysterious alchemical experiment might be, nor what hold Coppelius had over Nathanael’s parents. Facts become lost in Nathanael’s mad dream, in which we share. And perhaps that is what is most horrifying about this tale — we dream it ourselves. Hoffmann’s mixture of magic and madness is experienced from inside. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) was the first Late Romantic writer. His tales profoundly influenced European and American literature, and that most literary of medical arts, psychoanalysis. He was also a composer and conductor, an influential music critic (the first to appreciate J. S. Bach), and a judge. Many of his tales were appropriated for operas and ballets, including Coppelia, The Nutcracker, and Tales of Hoffmann. The Sand-Man theme of heartless automata appears in the film Metropolis and in much modern science fiction. — JOHN SLADEK
7: [1817] JANE AUSTEN - Northanger Abbey
Catherine Morland, a sensitive young girl much given to devouring sentimental Gothic romances of the type popularized by Mrs. Radcliffe, comes to Bath to stay with family friends. In the whirl of society, she meets two sets of duplicitous people — the parvenu fortune-hunting Thorpes and the more mysterious, romantic Tilneys. Although she soon sees through the Thorpes, she is lured by her fanciful notions of the romantic life to spend some time at Northanger Abbey, the gloomy ancestral home of the Tilneys. Misled by the likes of Necromancer of the Black Forest (1794) and Horrid Mysteries (1796), Catherine comes to see General Tilney as a villain in the Radcliffian sense and suspect that he has murdered his wife, but eventually a more prosaic — if still ignoble — motive emerges for his attentions. However, the General’s son Henry proves a suitable romantic hero and does finally win Catherine’s hand. Written sometime in the 1790s under the title Susan and sold in 1803 (for 10) to a publisher who didn’t bother to issue it, Northanger Abbey did not appear in print until a few months after the author’s death. It has been adapted for the stage, radio and television several times, most notably as a BBC-TV film with Robert Hardy and Katherine Schlesinger in 1987.
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At the end of the 1970s, when I was struggling to write the novel that would get me into screenwriting, I scrawled in a notebook in huge capitals: NORMALITY FOR HORROR! DETAIL, RESEARCH, CHARACTER, BACKGROUND. THE ABNORMAL ONLY HAS MEANING WITHIN THE CONTEXT (DETAILED, PROLONGED) OF THE NORMAL. I still believe it. I was reading ‘Salem’s Lot at the time and it amazed me how Stephen King’s astonishing capacity for endless ordinary details enabled him to make such a huge success out of what was an almost indecently ancient vampire plot. It was obvious that when the man adapted the technique to a really good plot he would produce a classic and he did it with The Shining. Almost by definition horror needs rules, because it thrives on the breaking of rules. It needs a sharp sense of everyday reality so that when the lights go off you really take notice. This is why so many of the greatest horror writers have made a detour into the genre from other kinds of writing and perhaps the most distinguished recruit of all was Jane Austen. No writer in literary history observed the rules and regulations of polite society as acutely as Austen, so it’s not surprising that she was also the first writer to see the subversive potential in horror fiction. She deliberately plotted Northanger Abbey so that the notions of Gothic horror fiction and of civilized society come into direct collision. Her heroine Catherine Morland is a horror fan whose imagination keeps running away with her. She sees the most innocuous Sunday afternoon walk as a potential abduction, laundry lists become secret manuscripts, country houses turn into Gothic castles. Austen milks the suspense and the humour to superb effect, but then steers the book to a point where Catherine’s horrific perception is truer than anyone else’s. “In suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife”, she concludes, “Catherine had scarcely sinned against his character or magnified his cruelty.” Northanger Abbey is often portrayed wrongly as a spoof. It obviously gave Austen a lot of fun but it was nothing of the kind. Not only does the author step out of the novel to deliver a ringing endorsement of Gothic fiction, but all the book’s humour, all its thrills, all its truth comes from the Gothic world’s conquest of the everyday. Women may not regularly be abducted to ruined abbeys by villains in black cowls but Austen is intent on showing us just how well that metaphor conveys the emotional cruelty of polite society. The Gothic perception wins. — DAVID PIRIE
8: [1818] MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY - Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus
In the Arctic, Captain Walton, an English explorer, takes aboard ship a manic young man, Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the circumstances that have brought him to the ends of the earth. Frankenstein tells of his experiments with the creation of life, and his construction of a huge, manlike creature whose repulsive aspect leads his creator to reject him. The Monster later returns to Frankenstein and tells of his sufferings at the hands of humanity and begs the scientist to make him a mate to ease his loneliness. Frankenstein agrees but abandons the project in horror, and the Monster retaliates by murdering his maker’s friends and family. Frankenstein pursues the Monster north, but dies on the ship after his story is finished. The Monster pays his last respects and then vanishes into the wastes. Frankenstein is at once a Gothic horror tale and the first important science fiction novel. Its sustained popularity and place in modern myth is probably as much due to the innumerable stage, film, television, comic book and radio adaptations of it — most of which depart completely from the text — as to the strengths of the work itself.
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Subtitled The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s masterwork is a remarkable book. Blending as it does allegory with Gothic elements, storytelling with philosophy, it is all the more remarkable because Mary Shelley completed it before her 20th birthday. Stated bluntly, this “pseudoscientific novel”, as it has been called, is about a scientist usurping nature and God’s creative powers, and the terrible consequences that follow that act. Written as a gloss on or as a rejoinder to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the book is full of grotesque, dreamlike imagery, and the wild chase across the Arctic that ends the novel is a phantasmagoric journey of the lost soul. Mary Shelley, desiring to create a ghost story, wrote instead what Brian Aldiss calls “the first … science fiction”, a novel which Shelley herself wanted to “speak to the mysterious fears of our nature”. The novel was conceived in a dream in which she saw “the hideous phantasm, of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion …” That dream followed long late night conversations with her husband, the poet Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Byron’s doctor. The conversations ranged through vampires, Darwin, and the supernatural and, at Byron’s suggestion, they were to have a contest with the four of them writing ghost stories. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an epistolary novel with overtones of the Gothic and the Romantic. While the implication is that the hero of the piece (or the anti-hero) is the young doctor Frankenstein, it is to the monster the modern reader more naturally turns. He has the most compelling speeches, is the wiser of the characters, and is the most noble in his own strange way. As Joyce Carol Oates has written of him, “S
urely one of the secrets of Frankenstein, which helps account for its abiding appeal, is the demon’s patient, unquestioning, utterly faithful, and utterly human love for his irresponsible creator.” Together Frankenstein the creator and the monster, his creation, are a whole: shadow selves. One does not exist without the other. It is why neither the monster nor Frankenstein’s bride can last. The two — man and giant — need, deserve, and find one another. “I shall be with you on your wedding night,” the monster cries. It is a promise, horrendous in its outcome, but tauntingly sexual in its undertones. Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818 and republished — with some changes — under Mary Shelley’s name and with an introduction in 1831. Movies, musicals, comic book versions, bowdlerized editions, have all made their mark on the Frankenstein story. In 1984, Barry Moser, America’s premier wood engraver, created a limited illustrated version for his Pennyroyal Press based on the first edition. The book was later reprinted for the ordinary buyer by the University of California Press. The pictures provide an intelligent, handsome, and powerful gloss on the book. (There is also a fine if academic afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.) The strong black and whites of the main text are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster — who owes nothing to the overused movie image of the creature with zipper scars and an oversized blocky head but is rather the novel’s charnel-house composite — is where Moser’s illustrations show their greatest power. We see a skull with skin stretched over old bones, wisps of hair, protruding teeth. Taken together, the pictures give the impression of a monologue (which in fact is what that section of the book is). The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster’s breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world’s strongest and most remarkable books. — JANE YOLEN
Horror: The 100 Best Books Page 3