Horror: The 100 Best Books

by Jones, Stephen

  The Commune shot fifty-seven from the prison of La Roquette. Versailles retaliated with nineteen hundred. To that comparison add this one. The whole famous Reign of Terror in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists executed 20,000 commoners before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs? Bertrand … was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a few prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! And … future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!

  The Werewolf of Paris is also reminiscent of Theodore Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood, a short novel about a sado-masochistic romance that attempts, not altogether successfully, to make the reader sympathize with its tormented hero. But Bertrand Caillet, in spite of the crimes of passion he commits when “the change” is on him, is the novel’s ultimate victim. Even by today’s jaded standards, Bertrand’s bloody affair with the consenting, doomed Sophie de Blumenburg is deeply shocking, not because of its essential gruesomeness, but because Guy Endore treats his lovers with sensitivity and compassion, qualities too often lacking in contemporary horror literature. — MARVIN KAYE

  38: [1933] MARJORIE BOWEN - The Last Bouquet: Some Twilight Tales

  “Marjorie Bowen” was one of the many pseudonyms used by Mrs. Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long, authoress of a huge number of historical romances, biographies, history books, short stories and thrillers: most of Mrs. Long’s macabre output was published under the Bowen name (she should not be confused with her contemporary, Elizabeth Bowen). The Last Bouquet is devoted exclusively to ghost stories, typically involving either repressed but wealthy spinsters (“The Last Bouquet”, “The Crown Derby Plate”) or horrid doings in a period setting (“The Avenging of Ann Leete”, “Kecksies”). Her novels of the macabre include Black Magic (1909), The Haunted Vintage (1921) and The Shadow on the Mockways (1932), and she was also the editor of Great Tales of Horror (1933) and More Great Tales of Horror (1935).

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  Among connoisseurs it is commonly heard that Marjorie Bowen is the premiere horror writer of our century. Yet she is under-represented in anthologies. Most of her books are so rare as to be known to the connoisseur and none other. The only modern edition, Kecksies (Arkham House, 1976) captures some of her best stories, but also some workmanlike pieces, weakening the overall effect. Far more representative are The Bishop of Hell (1949) and especially The Last Bouquet. As a prose stylist she was a throwback to the 1890s. Her reader can easily imagine Beardsley her illustrator, Leonard Smithers her publisher. She improves upon the aesthetic and decadent mode in that she is never actually florid, but stylish and moody, dramatic to the highest pitch. Best known in her day as an historical novelist, she had an output so enormous that the term “hack” might appear apropos. Yet she achieved an average quality above the “best” of more lionized writers, while her own best is untouchable by her contemporaries or our modern masters. She certainly could write a trivial tale upon occasion, but none are to be found in The Last Bouquet. The low points are probably “Raw Material” and “The Prescription”, this latter a retelling of too simple a ghost story previously told by Henry van Dyke as “The Night Call”. One of her best-known stories, “The Crown Derby Plate”, has always struck me as pointless, yet this “weak” piece is an anthology favorite. Finer is “Kecksies”, an anti-heroic fantasy, while the well-known “Avenging of Ann Leete” is quintessentially Bowen in its sinister and romantic evocations; it represents the quality of the majority of these 14 stories. In Bowen’s hands, ghost stories are transformed into parables of rage and passion both human and inhuman “The Fair Hair of Ambrosine”, regarding precognition and murder, is a period tale of the grimmest sort.” Florence Flannery” also has an historical setting and offers a tragic love affair; the suffering protagonist lives through her confused centuries of torment only to find herself, at last, in the arms of a demonic, avenging love. In tales like “The Last Bouquet”, “The Lady Clodagh” and “Madame Spitfire”, we are treated to exceedingly refined portraits of passionate and insanely evil women, for whom Bowen seems to have had a niggling liking. The famous tale of “The Sign-painter and the Crystal Fishes” — one of her scant quarter-dozen tales commonly anthologized — is a break from her usual pattern in that sadness is evoked rather than anguish or hatred. It reveals Bowen’s sensitive side to be as horrific as the dark passions. Today’s authors are more than ever intrigued by sexuality and horror. None achieves Bowen’s heights of evil romance, her sensuality and horror. What in other hands is merely tacky or gross is, from Marjorie Bowen, a superior art, chilling and seductive. — JESSICA AMANDA SALMONSON

  39: [1934] ALEXANDER LAING - The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck

  Published “as by a Medical Student”, with Laing credited only as the editor, this novel purports to be an actual account of a murder case in which David Sounders, the narrator, was a suspect. Gideon Wyck, a sinister and ill-liked member of the faculty of the Maine State College of Surgery, is involved in various bizarre experiments, which focus on the demented Mike Connell, a blood donor who has fits whenever anyone who has been given his blood dies, and on a series of abnormal births. When Wyck disappears, Saunders, his telephonist girlfriend Daisy and Dr. Manfred Ailing, the deformed head of the school, investigate and discover a variety of peculiar circumstances. Later Wyck’s corpse turns up, ineptly embalmed, in the school morgue, which has been sealed during the holidays. Further complications lead to several inquests and trials, during which various misdeeds are uncovered and a murderer (or two, or three) is exposed. An early example of the type of medical thriller latterly the province of Robin Cook, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck dabbles in mad science and demonology as it builds to its detective story finale. Laing also wrote Dr. Scarlett: A Narrative of His Mysterious Behaviour in the East (1936) and its sequel, The Methods of Dr. Scarlett (1937). His The Motives of Nicholas Holtz (1936, a.k.a. The Glass Centipede) was written in collaboration with Thomas Painter. The character of Dr. Ailing would seem to have impressed Robert Bloch enough to inspire a gruesome short story, “The Mannikin”, itself an influence on the film Basket Case (1982).

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  I venture to say that few of the readers of this volume are familiar with The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck, or with its author, Alexander Laing. If this is the case, I’m not surprised, for the novel was published a half-century or more ago in a small hard cover edition, and I’ve been unable to ascertain if it was reprinted when paperbacks came into vogue. Moreover, “Alexander Laing” was the pseudonym of a writer who didn’t wish to risk his stature as a respectable author by attaching his real name to a horror story. Nonetheless, the book attained a small success in its initial publication — enough, apparently, to encourage an encore, entitled The Motives of Nicholas Holtz. The latter died a deserved death, and leads me to wonder if the “Alexander Laing” byline had been used by another. But the first book seemed to me, at the time, to be a genuine tour de force, dealing as it did with the then little-exploited phenomenon of teratology [the study of animal or vegetable monstrosities]. I base my esteem for the work on my initial encounter, and in all fairness, should probably re-read the book before giving it a place in this volume, thus ruling out such equally impressive efforts as Ramsey Campbell’s The Face That Must Die, or work by Grant, Williamson, Straub, Somtow et al. But first impressions are inclined to leave the deepest imprint, and I recall The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck as one of the most grisly and evocative readings of a misspent lifetime. I do wish I could unearth the volume and discover the real name of its author: both deserved better than this long languishment in obscurity. Strange, how so many worthwhile creations seem to be forever forgotten for lack of proper praise and attention upon first appearance. But for what it is worth, I recommend this chiller to y
our attention; if you track it down, I think you may share my opinion. — ROBERT BLOCH

  40: [1937] SIR HUGH WALPOLE (Editor) - A Second Century of Creepy Stories

  This huge collection, besides featuring short novels like J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, includes many stories that have since become anthology perennials: Wilkie Collins’ “Mad Monkton”, Ambrose Bierce’s “A Watcher By the Dead”, Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One”, Guy De Maupassant’s “The Horla” and F. Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth”. Besides these Victorian and Edwardian classics, Walpole (who is himself represented by “Tarnhelm”) selects pieces from the leading ghost story writers of the day, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood, Marjorie Bowen, Margaret Irwin, and A. M. Burrage. Arthur Machen and M. R. James are included with comparatively unfamiliar stories, “Change” and “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”.

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  Simply the best anthology ever assembled; I’ve held this view for over thirty years. Walpole edited the sequel to Hutchinson’s Century of Creepy Stories in 1937, four years after the first volume. It was a vast improvement on the first as well, that book being merely several collections edited by Cynthia Asquith rather roughly cobbled together. Despite having the appearance of a Walpole old pals’ meeting (there is no denying it contains many of his literary chums), the contents alone make it unique. Find me another book that contains “Carmilla”, “The Beckoning Fair One”, “The Horla” and The Turn of the Screw! My interest in ghost stories began with this book (and the collected M. R. James) at a very tender age. I was a precocious reader and my parents’ bookshelves contained many discoveries. These two were there, along with Eleanor Scott’s Randall’s Round and Robert W. Chambers’ Slayer of Souls. I must have read them all by the age of ten, though I can’t claim I understood much of them until later. Arthur Machen’s “Change”, for example, made no sense at all until much later in my life, when I realized he was talking about the little people swapping one of their own for a human baby. In fact, Walpole still seems to be the only editor to have used the story. The first thing about the book to give you the horrors was the spooky drawing on the spine (which you’d dare yourself to look at, then regret bitterly at bedtime that you did). But as the contents came to make more sense, the spine looked quite comforting … The rarities include the Ex-Private X story from his impossibly rare collection Someone in the Room: an embittered rustic kills his daughter and her lover as the latter is a member of a rich family occupying his old home. The murdered pair return to avenge their death. It contains a line which made me shiver then and still does: “There’s company in the copse at night as you wouldn’t like meeting. There’s them that can’t sleep because they lies hard and damp.” Other scenes firmly planted in my memory from the first readings of the book are: John Metcalfe’s phantom boat chasing the owner’s ex-wife; Le Fanu’s description of the destruction of the vampire’s body (floating in blood in its coffin!); Walpole’s Uncle Robert who could change into a dog and smelt of caraway-seed (I still don’t know what that smells like); Marjorie Bowen’s ghost who said she lived generally in the garden and smelt of earth; the little-known but absolutely creepy Ann Bridge story where two dead climbers come and get two children — in my ten-year old mind, that struck home with a vengeance; and the pure terror (I can still feel it) of “Browdean Farm”, where a broken-necked ghost comes and taps at the window, and once — horrendously — starts towards the narrator when he looks out of the front door. The sheer cost of producing books in this size has made such an anthology nigh on commercially impossible today. Even David Hartwell’s monster The Dark Descent (1987) could only get to 1011 pages compared to Walpole’s 1023. Mary Danby’s big collections for Marks and Spencer, even backed by such a large retail chain, could only go up to 700 pages. It’s a pity. No collection of ghost stories should be without Walpole’s book. By size and quality of contributors alone, it is the best anthology I have ever seen. I do not think we will see anything like it again. — HUGH LAMB

  41: [c. 1938] C. S. LEWIS - The Dark Tower

  Orfieu, a Cambridge don, reveals to a company that includes the narrator, C. S. Lewis himself, and Ransom, the hero of the author’s Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945), that he has constructed a chronoscope, a device which enables him to look into a parallel world. In this Othertime they observe a horde constructing an exact replica of the Cambridge University Library and a worker caste subjected to a race of hive-mind components who are created by an overlord known as a Unicorn, who has a sting in his forehead. Scudamore, the youngest of the party, discovers that the current Unicorn is his double and is accidentally whisked away to live in his counterpart’s body … This suggestive fragment, clearly influenced by H. G. Wells but in its parallel world theme also perhaps the dark side of Lewis’ “Narnia” books, was composed around 1938. The novel was either abandoned or has not survived complete. In this 1977 edition, with notes by Walter Hooper, it is accompanied by several uncollected science fiction stories and another fragment, After Ten Years, about the Trojan War.

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  More years ago than I care to remember — probably about 1945/50 — I was listening to an old Valentine Dyall Man in Black radio programme. It was the one about the man who was spending a jolly, mind-destroying evening observing a corpse in a glass-panelled coffin; only the corpse wasn’t dead, and, when it tapped on the glass, the guy who was keeping his morbid vigil to win a bet apparently blew a fuse. Shortly afterwards the corpse-impersonator blew a fuse as well, and the result was as predictably cheerful as the last scene of Hamlet. The point was that the hapless vigil-keeper was philosophizing about the hypothesis of fear: he said that fear consisted of the two words “what if?” and that we entered the state we call fear only because of possibilities. Thinking about it intermittently over the past four decades, I believe there’s some mileage in it. The most effective horror and the most spine-tingling fear are frequently centred on the unknown. It follows, for me at any rate, that the extra edge of unknownness adds a certain piquancy to a horror story. We are familiar with what happens to Dracula and his minions when they get their xyloid cardiac implants; werewolves respond equally satisfactorily to silver blades or silver bullets; ghouls and poltergeists avoid Holy Water; and a good .44 magnum will put paid to mere physical monstrosities. But how do we deal with unknown horror? What if the author himself left the tale tantalizingly unfinished, and the reader’s imagination has to supply the ending? My choice of C. S. Lewis’s Dark Tower depends not only upon its being a first class horror/mystery story in its own right as far as it goes (and we only have the first sixty-four pages of it) but upon this intriguing element of its missing ending. I’m also fascinated by coincidences, or what we choose to call coincidences, and the real life coincidence attached to The Dark Tower is almost a story in itself. Lewis had a gardener named Fred Paxford, who saved the unfinished manuscript of The Dark Tower from the flames after Lewis died. From all accounts, Mr. Paxford was a great gardener, but very pessimistic. Predicting all manner of crop failures throughout the year, he nevertheless produced superb results each autumn. Upon him Lewis based the character of Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in The Silver Chair, part of the immortal “Narnia” series for children. This Puddleglum was as pessimistic as the Apostle Thomas, and equally loyal and faithful when the chips were down. In the story he saves the other heroes by extinguishing the witch’s fire and destroying her evil spell. That the real Fred Paxford saved many of Lewis’s manuscripts from the bonfire after his death is an uncanny parallel with the action of his literary alter ego in The Silver Chair. What makes The Dark Tower such an outstandingly good horror/mystery story? Firstly, its intriguing, unknown ending; secondly, its very smooth transition from the ordinary to the horrific and weird: for my money, the best horror stories begin in the here and the now and almost imperceptibly remind us that the fagade of everyday life, behind which we shelter from the Great Unknown, offers as much p
rotection from the real universe as a chocolate fireguard. Thirdly, The Dark Tower incorporates one of my favourite horror story ingredients: an alternative universe. When the explorers get their chronoscope working, it dawns on them at last that they are looking neither at the past nor the future but a sinister, alternative present. Somehow that seems so much more threatening than a time that has passed or a time that is yet to be — there is always the danger of being sucked across into that horrendous other now. Then, fourthly, there is the eternal conflict element in the story. In the Dark Tower of the title a battle is raging between good and evil: the same battle that vivifies Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, or Lewis’s Ransom trilogy. Perhaps it might be truer and more accurate to talk of the battle, or the war rather than a battle. Only this one great fight between Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice, Order and Chaos, Truth and Lies — whatever names we choose to give the Contestants — is real. All other conflicts are merely symptoms and manifestations of it. This, too, is a major attraction of The Dark Tower. Lewis has no doubts about the eschatology. However hard the struggle, and however great the suffering before the final victory, Good will triumph. The Dark Tower is not only a brilliant and fascinating unfinished masterpiece of mystery and horror: it is a worthwhile philosophical statement. — LIONEL FANTHORPE