Horror: The 100 Best Books

by Jones, Stephen

  9: [1820] CHARLES MATURIN - Melmoth the Wanderer

  Young John Melmoth attends the deathbed of his miserly uncle and is informed that a member of the family, also called John Melmoth, has been alive since the 16th century, wandering the Earth in search of someone willing to lay down their soul for him. This Melmoth has made a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for immortality, but can get out of it if he finds someone miserable enough to sell Melmoth his/her own soul. Young John examines manuscripts and seeks out old stories, and the novel presents several episodes in which Melmoth appears to those in need of aid and is rebuffed. During his quest, Melmoth encounters a sane man imprisoned in a vile insane asylum, a Spaniard entrapped by the Inquisition, an Indian maid marooned on a desert island, a young girl forced to marry against her will, a German couple reduced to poverty and a pair of lovers dominated by a greedy mother. Finally, Melmoth returns to his estate and the Devil comes to collect his due. Maturin also wrote The Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio (1807) and Albigenses (1824).

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  I was fourteen years old when I first discovered a copy of Melmoth the Wanderer in my father’s library and tried to read it. “Tried” because I was obviously not sufficiently mature to understand the complexities of that masterpiece of Gothic horror. I merely skipped a lot of pages to get down to the “spooky bits”! However, since then I have read and re-read Melmoth many times and each time extracted nuggets of pure literary gold from what I have come to regard, with many others, as one of the great works of the horror genre of any generation. Melmoth the Wanderer was published in 1820 when its author, Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish clergyman living in Dublin, was 40 years old. Maturin, who was to die four years later, had already established his reputation with several novels and plays which had brought him praise from literary luminaries such as Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Melmoth was initially seen by its publisher Archibald Constable, as a competitor to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published two years earlier. However, the literary world soon realized that here was a work that needed no comparison with any other. Melmoth combines all the Gothic terrors. It is replete with dungeons, castles, ghosts, cannibalism, monsters (both real and imaginary) and some truly monumental instances of terror. Walter Scott, Thackeray, Baudelaire, Rossetti and Honore de Balzac were quick to hail it as a milestone of literature in any genre. Balzac, in those days before copyright, immediately wrote a sequel to the novel entitled Melmoth Reconciled, which was a little too whimsical to stand comparison with its progenitor. The book was an instant success. Numerous editions, translations and a long-running dramatization quickly followed the initial publication. H. P. Lovecraft, in acknowledging it as a masterpiece, has said that it made “the Gothic tale climb to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before”. Professor Leonard Wolf has written that it has “the most sustained and certainly the most complex vision of any Gothic fiction — not excepting Dracula.” The Irish literary critic, Aodh De Blacam, in his First Book of Irish Literature, sees Maturin as “manifestly in the tradition of Swift”, another Dubliner. He goes on to say “in works like this we see a definite vein of Irish genius, a horrific imagination which dramatizes the insane universe of the sceptic”. De Blacam went further and saw Maturin as the founder of the Irish school of horror fantasy writing in which he included later horror writers such as Fitzjames O’Brien, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and, much later, Dorothy Macardle (author of the classic The Uninvited). He argues that were it not for Maturin, then there might not have been such classics as “Carmilla”, or Dracula. To this I would argue that were it not for Melmoth the Wanderer, there might not have been the classic The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Oscar Wilde, yet another Dubliner, was a great admirer of Maturin’s work. In Melmoth there is reference to a portrait of “J. Melmoth, 1648” hanging in an obscure closet in the ancient Melmoth mansion in Co. Wicklow. The portrait is the hidden reminder that Melmoth has lived nearly two centuries. Wilde took this theme and imbued it with his own genius to write his own vivid contribution to weird literature. Indeed, Wilde paid Maturin an unusual tribute in the fact that, during his last sad days in exile in Paris, he chose the name “Sebastian Melmoth” as a pseudonym. Melmoth is only fitfully in print. Critics and literary morticians often pay tribute to it but it seems that it is hardly ever read nowadays except by ardent fans of the genre. That is exceedingly sad. Even in my rereadings of it, there are passages which never fail to make my scalp itch, make a cold tingle send shivers down my back, make me peer nervously at the rattling windows and door of my room and make me edge nearer the cold circle of light from my reading lamp. Melmoth, even with the passage of time, remains an enduring masterpiece. It is a book which ought to be read by every aspiring writer in the genre, particularly today when so many are substituting Technicolor gore for more literary qualities, such as the slow build up of tension and psychological fear, which seem so lacking in the genre today. — PETER TREMAYNE

  10: [1824] JAMES HOGG - The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner

  17th-century Scotland. George Colwan, the well-liked heir of the Laird of Dalcastle, is systematically persecuted, abused and finally murdered by his half-brother Robert Wringhim. Wringhim becomes the Laird, but later hangs himself. A hundred years later, his strangely-preserved body is found, along with a written confession. Wringhim, a fanatical Calvinist, believes in his own predestined salvation and thus in his right to commit any atrocity and go unpunished. In this belief he is encouraged by Gil-Martin, a doppelgdnger who may be the Devil. After Wringhim becomes Laird, he starts to be blamed for many crimes committed in his person by Gil-Martin and is finally driven to suicide. A powerful, ambiguous and surprisingly “modern” novel, The Private Memoirs (which has been published in abridged editions as The Suicide’s Grave or The Confessions of a Fanatic) has been highly influential upon the visions of many, including Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson. Innumerable “doppelganger” or “duality of man” stories can trace their lineage back to Hogg, including incidentally Garry Kilworth’s “Dop*elgan*er”.

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  Central to The Confessions Of A Justified Sinner is the main character’s belief in the pre-ordination of an elite group which, taken to extremes, provides him with an unassailable justification to commit murder without sinning. Since Robert Wringhim’s life follows a predestined path, laid by God, all that he does has been sanctioned in heaven and is therefore “right”. Thus, to kill one of the unchosen is merely to send a sinner to early judgement. Wringhim has a shapechanging adviser in these nefarious activities: his doppelganger, Gil-Martin, the personification of the evil side of his own nature. Fratricide, matricide and just plain, ordinary homicide are rationalized by Gil-Martin and accepted by Wringhim as necessary good works, carried out in the Lord’s name. One of the effects of horror fiction is to give the Devil a face and a name, but still retain credibility of character. This is a difficult thing to do, without creating a monster which appears ridiculous. The Devil might be absurd and grotesque, but he must not appear foolish or invite laughter. With Gil-Martin, Hogg manages to instil dread without the loss of a demonic personality. Like many Gothic horror novels with a psychological base, this one immerses the reader in a dark well of chaos, where it is difficult to separate reason from insanity, and reversals of good and evil are backed by persuasive argument. Certainly, the novel is chaotic. The narrative is erratic and, superficially at least, undisciplined, and it has more wildness and savagery than Wuthering Heights. What makes it stand out from other horror novels however, is its structure: a complicated, fractured affair, designed by Hogg to give the tale an appearance of authenticity. Hogg went to extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the contained events actually occurred. A year before publication, which was initially anonymous, he wrote a letter to Blackwood’s Magazine stating that a corpse, clutching a manuscript in its bony fingers, had been exhumed from a Scottish peat bog. An unnamed “editor” was later supposed to
have investigated this claim, relocated the grave and secured the document. Having read it, the editor questioned locals as to its authenticity. The editor even tells us he asked Hogg to lead him to the grave, but the author shut the croft door in his face. The novel then, consists of The Editor’s Narrative, covering half the book, followed by the Sinner’s Memoirs, the manuscript found with the body, and following these, Hogg’s original letter to Blackwood’s. All of these “documents” were of course written by Hogg himself. The uneven, eccentric nature of the writing, the contradictions in the text, the conflicting testimonies of “witnesses” to various murders, which appear in The Editor’s Narrative, and the strangeness of the book’s structure, all serve (whether intentionally or not) to immerse the reader in a tale of insanity, creating an atmosphere of dread and horror which gives the genre its name. It was Hogg’s best novel by far and he was even accused of being helped by another writer: a claim which his critics found difficult to prove and which has been subsequently discredited by modern-day academics. — GARRY KILWORTH

  11: [1833-47] EDGAR ALLAN POE - Tales of Mystery and Imagination

  The stories collected under the title Tales of Mystery and Imagination first appeared in a variety of periodicals between 1833 and 1847 and mainly saw their first book publication in Poe’s collections Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Tales of Edgar A. Poe (1845). Besides the three C. Auguste Dupin detective stories and such classic tales of horror as “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Black Cat”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, the book includes a series of variations on the theme of the — dead/deadly woman (“Ligeia”, “Berenice”, “Morella”), some classic adventures in the Verne mould (“The Gold Bug”, “A Descent into the Maelstrom”), a few philosophical pieces, two or three quaint but strained attempts at crackerbarrel humour and “trick” tales of the type then popular (“The Sphinx”, “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”). This diversity demonstrates that Poe was not only a major horror writer, but an important figure in American literature and a formative influence on both science fiction and the detective story.

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  The raven remains on the door. The axe will not be drawn from the brain. The beat beneath the floorboards keeps getting louder. There isn’t anywhere you can go in this overcast, weedgrown, blood-fertilized field of ours that he hasn’t been first: the chilly blue-lit corners, the arena of onstage violence, Poet’s Corner, the comedy sideshow, the Vale of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. In the perfumed, mouldy halls of horror, he is the doorkeeper, the cartographer, and the resident ghost. (Edgar, now be still: we swiped not from Walpole or Stoker with half so good a will.) There is no real fear, you see, in that which does not exist. The Elder Whats”ernames, the vampire or werewolf cinedenatured of their human origins, the retarded adolescent boogeyperson with all the world’s cutlery at his disposal — who cares? But Edgar was scared of what was there. More importantly, he was scared of what hadn’t arrived yet, but would. Jeremy Bentham and his merry pranksters said that locking bad people up made them into good people. Edgar knew better, knew that one ought to be very sure that one’s anima is dead before burying it. And now whole nations hear the scratch of bloody fingernails wanting Out, about to bring their houses down around the haunted palaces of their skulls. Violence was something that low forms did, ugly hairy monstrosities, probably foreign and of peculiar religions. Edgar gave us ordinary people, the house-owners next door doing a bit of DIY remodelling: nervous, with their little tics, but certainly not mad, or at least ethically mad. (And when he does give us the hairy thing, it is a logical hairy thing, an innocent thing with its master’s razor.) Exploration was an adventure, and if the adventurers died it was boldly and clear-eyed. Edgar descended the Maelstrom and confronted Arthur Gordon Pym with something white beyond reason. It was Edgar who exposed the elegant system of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, telling us that we would not always be able to tell the loonies from their keepers. It was Edgar who pointed out that Scheherezade was safe only as long as she spun fictions for the King. Since even Edgar’s black vision did not plumb the horrors of the bestseller system, he wrote whatever he pleased. Tales of Mystery? And Imagination? My God, Eddie, what rack of the bookstore are we gonna put that in? You’re never going anywhere unless you get out of genre … He was also, when he felt like it, funny as hell. (Something that seems generally true of fear’s fine technicians. The idiom may cut closer than it seems: if you don’t see what’s funny about hell, you’ll never make it back to type up your report). Edgar told us what horror was, and where it comes from, and in terms that will carry the message as long as horror and its source exist: which is to say, as long as we are human. Here we sit, and the Raven has told us what to expect. We walk the decks, waiting for the tarred canvas to unfurl and spell out something meaningful. On we dance, against the arrival of the guest who wears no mask. — JOHN M. FORD

  12: [1837, expanded 1842] NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE - Twice-Told Tales

  Following in the literary footsteps of Washington Irving and Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne was instrumental in establishing a distinctively American tradition of ghost, horror and supernatural fiction. Twice-Told Tales features stories of apparitions, madness, revenge, witchcraft and proto-science fiction experimentation. His later collections in a similar vein were Mosses From an Old Manse (1846) and The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1850), which contain such much-anthologized tales as “Young Goodman Brown” and “Ethan Brand”. Edgar Allan Poe praised Hawthorne’s short stories well before the author attained prominence as a novelist with The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The 1963 film Twice-Told Tales, a Vincent Price vehicle conceived as an imitation of the Poe-derived Tales of Terror (1962), features adaptations of “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”, “Rappacini’s Daughter” and the prologue to The House of the Seven Gables.

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  We have very few American tales of real merit — we may say, indeed, none, with the exception of The Tales of a Traveller of Washington Irving, and these Twice-Told Tales of Mr. Hawthorne. Of Mr. Hawthorne’s Tales we would say, emphatically, that they belong to the highest region of Art — an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order. We had supposed, with good reason for so supposing, that he had been thrust into his present position by one of those impudent cliqu which beset our literature, and whose pretensions it is our full purpose to expose at the earliest opportunity; but we have been most agreeably mistaken. We know of few compositions which the critic can more honestly commend than these Twice-Told Tales. As Americans, we feel proud of the book. Mr. Hawthorne’s distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality — a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest. But the nature of the originality, so far as regards its manifestation in letters, is but imperfectly understood. The inventive or original mind as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of matter. Mr. Hawthorne is original in all points. It would be a matter of some difficulty to designate the best of these tales; we repeat that, without exception, they are beautiful. “Wakefield” is remarkable for the skill with which an old idea — a well-known incident — is worked up or discussed. A man of whims conceives the purpose of quitting his wife and residing incognito for twenty years in her immediate neighbourhood. Something of this kind actually happened in London. The force of Mr. Hawthorne’s tale lies in the analysis of the motives which must or might have impelled the husband to such folly, in the first instance, with the possible causes of his perseverance. Upon this thesis a sketch of singular power has been constructed. “The Wedding Knell” is full of the boldest imagination — an imagination fully controlled by taste. The most captious critic could find no flaw in this production. “The Minister’s Black Veil” is a masterly composition of which the sole defect is that to the rabble its exquisite skill will be caviare. The ob
vious meaning of this article will be found to smother its insinuated one. The moral put into the mouth of the dying minister will be supposed to convey the true import of the narrative; and that a crime of dark dye (having reference to the “young lady”) has been committed, is a point which only minds congenial with that of the author will perceive. “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe” is exceedingly well imagined, and executed with surpassing ability. The artist breathes in every line of it. “The Old White Maid” is objectionable, even more than “The Minister’s Black Veil”, on the score of its mysticism. Even with the thoughtful and analytic, there will be much trouble in penetrating its entire import. “The Hollow of the Three Hills” we would quote in full, had we space; — not as evincing higher talent than any of the other pieces, but as affording an excellent example of the author’s peculiar ability. The subject is commonplace. A witch subjects the Distant and the Past to the view of a mourner. It has been the fashion to describe, in such cases, a mirror in which images of the absent appear; or a cloud of smoke is made to arise, and thence the figures are gradually unfolded. Mr. Hawthorne has wonderfully heightened his effect by making the ear, in place of the eye, the medium by which the fantasy is conveyed. The head of the mourner is enveloped in the cloak of the witch, and within its magic folds there arise sounds which have an all-sufficient intelligence. Throughout this article also, the artist is conspicuous — not more in positive than in negative merits. Not only is all done that should be done (what perhaps is an end with more difficulty attained), there is nothing done which should not be. Every word tells, and there is not a word which does not tell. — EDGAR ALLAN POE