Horror: The 100 Best Books

by Jones, Stephen

  42: [1939] DALTON TRUMBO - Johnny Got His Gun

  A young American soldier, hit by a shell on the last day of the First World War, lies in a hospital bed, a quadruple amputee who has lost his eyes, ears, mouth and nose. He remains conscious, and able to reason, and tries to communicate to his doctors his wish that he be put on show in a carnival as a demonstration of the horrors of war. Trumbo’s impassioned novel — written in a pacifist fervour as the world geared up for another war — was one of the main causes of his later troubles with the House of Un-American Activities Commission. In 1971, the author returned to Johnny Got His Gun and made his only film as a director, from his own screenplay. Despite Trumbo’s obvious commitment to the material, and its universal timeliness, the film — which stars Timothy Bottoms, Jason Robards, Diane Varsi and Donald Sutherland as Jesus Christ — is an awkward work that adds little to the shattering brilliance of the original.

  ***

  This is the most powerful piece of fiction I know, and the most frightening. Like Andreyev’s The Seven Who Were Hanged and Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Johnny Got His Gun is a brilliant, all but unbearable tour de force, combining a high level of artistic technique with a fearless depth of human compassion to achieve a work that is not only breathtaking in its virtuosity but potentially life-changing for those who read it. Dalton Trumbo’s novel certainly changed my life, and I suspect that it has altered irrevocably anyone daring enough to encounter it on its own fierce terms. It is surely a story about the horrors of war. But to say that Johnny Got His Gun is a horror story would be tantamount to calling Hamlet a murder mystery: true enough as far as it goes, but a trivialization. This is difficult reading in the finest sense; its unflinching courage and passion demand a braver response than the rudimentary esthetic sense and readiness to be entertained that are required by most novels. As challenging as it is, its terrifying beauty has kept it in print for 50 years, and I suspect that it will outlive us all. Since I have found it necessary to make my selection from outside the genre, I am moved to wonder why the best-known titles in dark fantasy, the very field that purports to deal most directly with matters of life and death, should compare less than favorably with a book by a man who was primarily a screenwriter (one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten) and whose magnum opus remains unexamined, if not altogether unknown, by aficionados of horror. Perhaps the problem — the reason why such a question can even be raised — is inherent in the nature of genrefication. It seems to me that to embrace the assumptions underlying such subdivision does a disservice to readers and writers alike. For favoritism, amusing and comforting though it seems to those receiving special treatment, may ultimately imply disrespect for oneself and for others, as does any indulgence. All injustices, arising as they do out of hierarchical thinking, have at their root the notion of dualism as a common factor. And just as slaves degrade their masters by co-operating with presumptions of superiority and inferiority, to accept the splitting of fiction into separate camps does violence to the medium itself as well as the individuals who comprise the body of world literature as a whole. It finally occurs to Trumbo’s Johnny that if guns are made they will be aimed, and if bullets are fired they may one day be directed at us.

  Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn’t fight … The menace to our lives does not lie on the other side of a nomansland that was set apart without our consent it lies within our own boundaries here and now …

  I for one am willing to lay down my arms and forgo the false security of relaxed standards, the protectionism that can only prolong our adolescence and our vulnerability. How about you? — DENNIS ETCHISON

  43: [1939] H. P. LOVECRAFT - The Outsider and Others

  The Outsider is one of the most important horror collections of the 20th century, in that it was both the first major book appearance by the already-dead Lovecraft and the first publication from Arkham House. The Outsider includes work from all periods of Lovecraft’s writing career: his Dunsany-influenced dream stories (“The Cats of Ulthar”, “Celephais), his extravagantly horrid horror tales (“The Rats in the Walls”, “Cool Air”, “Pickman’s Model”), the key stories in what later became the “Cthulhu Mythos” (“The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, “The Shadow Out of Time”), and his rare attempts at pared-down science fiction-horror (“The Color Out of Space”, the Poe-influenced “At the Mountains of Madness”). The book also includes the essay “Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Outsider” by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, and Lovecraft’s lengthy essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.

  ***

  I think of Howard Phillips Lovecraft as the Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century. Both writers lived and wrote their tales in the early decades of their centuries — and their tales coloured and set the patterns for the terror writers of their respective centuries. For Poe, the lingering horrors of the era before, of the beginnings of the scientific investigation of the hitherto unknown, of such things as Mesmerism and the Inquisition, of the coming into being of a new and uncertain world amid the rot and ruins of the old. For Lovecraft, the terror of the newly discovered, the apparently infinite universe, the questioning of all established beliefs, the disintegration of the social structures cherished by those who had gone before and the confused kaleidoscope of things to come. The Outsider and Others, a collection of his most memorable stories, embodies therein his scariest tales and establishes his basic fears. These fears derived not from old legendry but from a new and even more frightening legendry that to him derived from the hints of what science was bringing forth in its most daring investigations of the universe all around us. In a surprising, astute article by Paul Di Filippo in a recent fan journal (Science Fiction Guide No. 11) this author sets forth the basic paradigms by which one can identify the differences between science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature. Those for horror fit exactly the Lovecraft premises, as well as those of almost all similar horror writings. They embody three premises: 1. The physical universe is sentient and basically unknowable. 2. The physical universe is malignant. 3. Mankind is the persecuted object of the malignant universe’s attentions. Lovecraft himself claimed to be an atheist and denied that his stories were meant to be taken at their word. But taken seriously they were, for they fit the fears and suspicions of a world emerging into a universe far stranger than any envisioned in previous centuries or theologies. Basically, Lovecraft’s tales were science-fictional rather than supernatural. The horrors he conjured up were subject to unknown laws of the vast and Creatorless universe. They were beings of substance no different from the innumerable species that exist on Earth, save that they were originated elsewhere with powers derived from laws inexplicable to humanity. This is what makes Lovecraft so effective in today’s science-haunted world, for we recognize that we do not know as much as we had thought and that the “laws” of science we believed we had discovered were but fragments and shadows of the real, uncaring, and possibly antagonistic universe. His Old Ones and Elder Gods were but beings from other worlds somewhere Out There. His Cthulhu, a godlike being to us, was a hangover from an alien biology who could indeed wait and sleep for millennia to arise again some day. Beings from unsuspected worlds and cycles could and did own and dispute this Earth in which mankind was just another animal species to be treated as such and never as equals. Yuggoth was simply an outpost of these monsters, a planet undiscovered on the outskirts of our solar system … and beyond Yuggoth were worlds outside any of our limited comprehensions. He created the premise that much of these terrible truths could be detected by a few esoteric students and hinted at in secret books like the Necronomicon — a work which has been quoted and added to by many of Lovecraft’s successors. For the 20th-century mind with a knowledge of science’s many unexplored boundaries, The Outsider plants the seeds of the horror
paradigms. Indeed, it reinforces the conjectures of the outermost limits of man’s evergrowing explorations. What new “laws” are to be discovered? What new horrors shall come from laboratories controlled by investigators innocent of what may result from their pryings? We have new diseases and new disasters unparalleled, and in Lovecraft’s tales there are shadowy outlines of such “things to come”. Lovecraft is science fiction horror that reaches the disbelievers. What is the colour we cannot see? What are the natural orders of other worlds should they differ from our own? Where is the life on other planets and why should it be amicable? Are there dimensions we cannot probe or deal with? How much do we think we know that we are merely guessing at and revising steadily in those guesses? This is what makes The Outsider and its tales a seedbed of horror thoughts for the most modern of readers. Lovecraft was the Columbus of the malignant universe — Stephen King and his contemporaries are but those who follow. — DONALD A. WOLLHEIM

  44: [1942] CLARK ASHTON SMITH - Out of Space and Time

  Arkham House’s second major collection assembles the varied and imaginative work written for Weird Tales by Smith, who was a Californian poet directed towards horror and science fiction by H. P. Lovecraft. Smith’s stories take place in an assortment of bizarre, imaginary locales: Zothique, a far future continent with a vague Arabian Nights feel, very like Jack Vance’s later “Dying Earth”, Averoigne, a lamia-haunted province of mediaeval France modelled on James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme; Hyperborea, an imagined past that presumably neighbours Robert E. Howard’s Hyboria, and where worship of the toad god Tsathoggua (later appropriated by Lovecraft) is common. The Arkham edition of Out of Space and Time includes an introductory appreciation of Smith by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Later Smith collections include Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci and Other Tales (1948) and The Abominations of Yondo (1960).

  ***

  He never wrote a complete novel, though a twelve thousand word fragment of his intended full-length work, The Infernal Star — begun and abandoned in February of 1933 — lies unpublished in darkness, possibly in some dank subterranean crypt beneath stygian waters and flooded ebon caverns through which crawl thick, white worms whose semblances of countenance are the hideous, cilia-festooned simulacra of the expressions of the human corpses on which they have fed. Or maybe just in a safety deposit box in a San Francisco branch of The Bank of America. (One bite of the forbidden fruit of his lapidary prose, and I find myself overwhelmed, engulfed, supersaturated; I find myself tipsy with language, uncharacteristically emulating; indulging in an unashamedly baroque attack on the idea at hand in a syntax so rich and steaming with visual evocations that it borders on logorrhea. A style so purple it sloshes over into the ultraviolet. A writing style that would make Hemingway break out in hives.) He was a poet, a painter, a sculptor of the bizarre, and a recluse; and though he wrote in excess of a hundred stories in a canon spread across more than a dozen collections, he produced almost all of them in less than a decade of furious activity, from the beginning of the Depression in 1929 till he inexplicably deserted fiction in 1938; and though his work is solidly in the traditions of Poe, Bierce, Flaubert and Baudelaire, and though he was one of the towering triumvirate that dominated Weird Tales in its most fecund period — the other two being Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft — he is virtually unknown today beyond the rarefied venue of those who love obscure horror stories. Even his name, like those of his characters, seems to echo with intimations of Omar Khayyam and the silken opulence of ages beyond Time, of places beyond Space: Clark Ashton Smith. The magical lands he created bear in their syllables resonances with dreams of the faraway we have carried with us since the Flood: Zothique, Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Xiccarph, Averoigne, Phandiom and, of course, Atlantis. Now his stories, like silent songs in stone, are beyond the reach of modern readers condemned to the paperback illiteracies of a bumbling horde of “horror” writers who have pilfered the cache of Smith’s work, but who dash widdershins between their word-masticators and the Oxford Universal, forlornly and ineptly trying to unearth less-precise and commercially acceptable words for ossuary and innominate and bitumen-colored cerements. Purveyors of the recycled cliche and the mot injuste and language so inelegant it could stun a Visigoth. And so, even as we have had our critical abilities systematically bastardized by motion pictures cut like rock videos, so that we cannot go fifteen minutes without a car crash, thus disabling us for the paced symmetry of a Kurosawa or Resnais, we have likewise been bludgeoned by decades of commercial writing below the level of Dr. Seuss, on the theory that simple is best. (Einstein once pointed out: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”) The stunned, the bastardized, and the bludgeoned cannot enjoy Clark Ashton Smith, more’s the pity. His convolute style and sybaritic, depraved fantasies are to them as Vivaldi is to a teenager googly over Run DMC: it is merely white noise, at best impenetrable. More’s the pity, because Smith’s was a voice singular and compelling. I have written elsewhere of the epiphany of my initial encounter with his remarkable fantasy, The City of the Singing Flame, an encounter that profoundly influenced my own writing, and palpably influenced my life. It was 1950,1 was sixteen, and I found it in an August Derleth anthology in a school library in Cleveland, Ohio … and it was such a powerful icon that I stole the book, and own it to this day. As Frederic Prokosch’s Seven Who Fled and Kafka’s The Trial mercy-killed my innocence about what it took to be a writer worth reading, so Clark Ashton Smith’s stories thrashed out of me my ignorance about the limits of language. I would very likely not be writing films now, had I not learned lesson after lesson from Smith about writing visually. He has an eerie way of making mimetic in the mind even the most arcane scenes. (Oddly, however, there is very little aural and tactile freighting in his work. I can see it all, but in a disembodied, fingerless silence.) Take, for instance, this snippet from “The Last Hieroglyph”. An old, and not very talented astrologer has been commanded by the auguries to follow a terrifying guide, a mummy, through a “region of stifling vaults and foul, dismal, nitrous corridors”. Overcome with fear, the astrologer breaks away from the mummy, and tries to retrace his steps, through the catacombs:

  Presently he came to the huge, browless skull of an uncouth creature, which reposed on the ground with upward-gazing orbits, and beyond the skull was the monster’s moldy skeleton, wholly blocking the passage. Its ribs were cramped by the narrowing walls, as if it had crept there and had died in the darkness, unable to withdraw or go forward. White spiders, demon-headed and large as monkeys, had woven their webs in the hollow arches of the bones, and they swarmed out interminably as Nushain approached; and the skeleton seemed to stir and quiver as they seethed over it abhorrently and dropped to the ground before the astrologer. Behind them others poured in a countless army …

  Even those addicted to rap music and car crashes can see that horror in the dark passageway. Let Judith Krantz or Sidney Sheldon try to plow that field. The passage above is from one of the twenty stories in Out of Space and Time, Smith’s first major collection, published by the speciality house, Arkham, in 1942. Because of the rules of the game passim this book, I was allowed to pick only one title by Clark Ashton Smith. That’s tough. It’s representative, the one I selected, but by no means an adequate primer. I picked it because it contains “The City of the Singing Flame”. One of my all-time favorite stories, as I babbled earlier. But that eliminates “Genius Loci” and “Lost Worlds” and “The Abominations of Yondo” and a fistful more that delight and mystify. I go with Out of Space and Time because it remains with me, after more than thirty years since I first read it, as emblematic of what we mean when we say, “It created worlds and feelings I never knew anywhere else.” A pure wonder, especially in a time filled with white noise. — HARLAN ELLISON

  45: [1943] FRITZ LEIBER - Conjure Wife

  Academic Norman Saylor is perturbed to discover that his wife Tansy has been advancing his career through the practice of white witchcraft. However, when he
demands that she remove all her magical protections, he finds himself under attack from another faculty wife who is trying to use black magic to destroy the Saylors. Conjure Wife has been filmed several times, as an Inner Sanctum mystery, Weird Woman (1944) with Lon Chaney and Evelyn Ankers, as a 1960 segment of the Moment of Fear TV show with Larry Blyden, and (unauthorized) as a sub-Bewitched skit Witches’ Brew (1980) with Lana Turner, Richard Benjamin and Teri Garr. The classic adaptation, however, is Sidney Hayers’ Night of the Eagle (1962, a.k.a. Burn, Witch, Burn!) — written by Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont — with Peter Wyngarde and Janet Blair. Leiber, best known for his short stories and science fiction, returned to the occult horror novel in triumphant form with Our Lady of Darkness (1977).

  ***

  It is hard to decide on a single word to describe Fritz Leiber; certainly “technician” and “professional” spring to mind. But so does “versatile”. Even that seems a pallid description of what he has accomplished, writing hard science fiction, sociological SF, heroic fantasy, dark fantasy, satire, essays and criticism. Other writers have matched his range, but no other writer seems to have established himself as the best or near-best in so many areas. Consider. In the early fifties he produced a number of stories (“Coming Attractions”, “The Night He Cried”) that, in retrospect, seem to characterize the way SF changed in those volatile years. His “Fafhrd and Gray Mouser” series is certainly the most critically successful writing in the heroic fantasy field. And probably no one did more to bring the art of M. R. James and Oliver Onions into the urban sprawl of this century’s midsection than Leiber in stories such as “Smoke Ghost”, “Black Gondolier”, “Four Ghosts in Hamlet”, “The Belsen Express” and, of course, Conjure Wife. While John Campbell was changing science fiction from a principally romantic form of fiction to a principally realistic one in Astounding, he was attempting to do the same thing to fantasy in Unknown. It stressed a logical, extrapolative approach to the central themes of fantasy, which resulted in some of the strongest stories the field had yet produced. The magazine generated an excitement comparable, yet not identical, to that which Astounding was creating. It featured some of the best work by many of Campbell’s best ASF writers, as well as fantasy writers such as Frank Belknap Long and Robert Bloch, and a number who never appeared in the field otherwise, such as Raymond Chandler. The magazine’s success was based on two concepts: first, that fantasy is primarily a source of good, grown-up fun; and, second, that the premise of a fantasy needs to be extrapolated with the same rigor as the premise of a science fiction story. Conjure Wife, the first of Leiber’s novels to see print, appeared in Unknown a month before Gather Darkness!, a novel that treated the same subject in science fictional terms, was serialized in Astounding. It was printed in its current version in the Twayne collection Witches Three in 1953 but its first solo publication was a paperback edition from the small but adventurous Lion Books, the following year. Leiber’s central idea is that all women practise witchcraft and men are unaware of it. Leiber’s protagonist, Norman Saylor, innocently spies on his wife and discovers her secret, which he of course regards as superstitious and foolish. He proceeds to attack her supposed weakness until she agrees to abandon the practice and he smugly goes on with his life, or so he thinks. His life quickly begins to collapse about his ears. We are told by Leiber that Saylor is not the sort of man who ordinarily spies on his wife, but he is certainly fond of busting icons. After he has forced his wife to give up her conjuring, we are treated to a classroom lecture where he demonstrates the primitive origins of fraternity practices to his students, especially one who happens to be the president of a fraternity. But already Leiber has begun the process of smashing some of Saylor’s own icons. The way in which Saylor’s life begins to crumble around him and he slowly finds himself accepting the possibility that his wife’s beliefs may be justified is one of the main delights of the novel. Although the novel breaks structurally into two parts, it is very well unified. In the first part (three-fifths of the book’s wordage), the world Leiber postulates is depicted with the detail and love Jack Vance brings to his alien societies, and the brilliance Alfred Bester brings to his future ones. This buildup is so careful that when Leiber’s concern turns from the story’s concepts to the requirements of its plot, the reader is propelled along by the suspense in a way that is nothing but daunting to any lesser writer who’s ever tried to do the same thing. And this was, remember, Leiber’s first novel. Leiber’s main contribution as a horror novelist has been the skill and ease with which he has been able to express the traditional concerns of the classic horror writer using themes and settings contemporary to him. Conjure Wife takes place on the campus of a small, conservative university, a fairly common setting for popular novels (especially mysteries) in the early forties, possibly because the combination of small-town dynamics and urban sophistication represented the changes American society was undergoing at the time. Leiber combines the ability to find horror in commonplace things with a talent for writing intelligently and clearly, and it is this that has made him one of the best horror writers of the 20th century. If there is one unresolved question about Leiber it is whether the secret of his talent lies in his sheer ability as a writing technician, or in the intelligence of his approach to his material. Both are aptly demonstrated in his horror stories, and both serve to explain why Conjure Wife is a triumph. — GERALD W. PAGE