Horror: The 100 Best Books

by Jones, Stephen

  46: [1945] CORNELL WOOLRICH - Night Has a Thousand Eyes

  Tom Shawn, a detective, saves Jean Reid from suicide, and listens to the story of the strange events that have led her into despair. Harlan Reid, Jean’s wealthy father, has been consulting Tompkins, a melancholy psychic, and is convinced that the man has genuine powers of prophecy. Tompkins has just predicted that Reid will be killed by a lion, and Reid has been reduced to a state of panic by the announcement. Shawn agrees to look into the affair, although no actual crime seems to have been committed, and sets his men on to the case from several angles, trying to find out how Tompkins has been making his predictions, whether anyone could be using the psychic as part of an extortion scheme, and if it’s possible to prevent the prophecy from coming to pass. It seems as if a rational explanation is possible, but the brilliantly sustained finale plunges back into the supernatural as Shawn tries, on the preordained night, to keep Reid away from lions and is a helpless witness to the man’s ironic fate. Many of Cornell Woolrich’s masterly romans noirs contain horrific or fatalistic elements, but only Night Has a Thousand Eyes actually involves the supernatural. John Farrow’s 1948 film, scripted by Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, is unfaithful to Woolrich’s plot, but catches his mood successfully.

  ***

  Night Has a Thousand Eyes is surely the only horror classic to have inspired not only a movie but also a hit pop single (for Bobby Vee in 1963). But then, Cornell Woolrich’s evocative, image-laden prose has inspired scores of adaptations in all media (film, TV, theatre, radio) because of the sheer power of its imagery. Isaac Asimov called him “THE Master of Suspense”; his biographer and literary executor Francis M. Nevins Jr described him as “The Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century”. Cornell Woolrich is indeed a unique writer whose approach to horror was never blatant. Not for him the hyperbolic monsters of Lovecraft or the Jungian archetypes of slime of so many other practitioners of the genre. Better known as a writer of crime stories and novels on the edge of darkness, Woolrich tackles horror through a relentless accumulation of despair, troubling coincidences and all-too-human characterization. The horror and fantasy element never becomes explicit, and gains in credible terror by confronting everyday people with whom the reader can easily identify. Indeed, what you only guess at, what you never see, is psychologically all the more frightening; a lesson that few horror film-makers since Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur have learned well. Written in 1945 under the byline George Hopley (Woolrich’s two middle names), Night Has a Thousand Eyes was based on an earlier novelette, Speak To Me of Death, published in the February 1937 Argosy. It was seen as a breakthrough novel by his publishers, hoping for a larger audience following the first five of his brilliant “Black” series (The Bride Wore Black, The Black Curtain, Black Alibi, The Black Angel, The Black Path of Fear). But, like all great writers who trawl the same wonderful obsessions from book to book, Woolrich, writing as himself, William Irish or Hopley, could only explore again in Night Has a Thousand Eyes with his customary intensity the genteel nobility of his cipher-like characters in uncommon distress. It all had a sense of existential deja vu. Set in his familiar urban landscape of an unnamed city at night-time, in bleak anonymous diners and grey apartments, Night’s slow, claustrophobic first half sets up a simple but inevitable scenario which soon metamorphoses into a relentless chase against time and irrationality, a clockwork tension that never lets up as the hour of doom approaches. And horror, Night Has a Thousand Eyes certainly reaches in its shocking conclusion. The worst has happened, despite the police’s intervention and a set of simple explanations and coincidences that cancel out (or do they?) the need for supernatural explanations. Some of the main characters are inevitably dead, but the worse horror remains for the sad survivors, for whom love will now not be enough. They have discovered the sheer horror of inevitability, the fact they have no free will or choice. The bleakness and despair of Woolrich’s “happy ends” was reflected in his own life and he mined this sad vein with consummate obstinacy in his prolific writing career. Time, or simple sentimentality, might, in some works, have taken its toll of his style, but his manipulation of suspense, the effective modern minimalism of his characters and the emotional impact of his tales remain as strong as ever. Ray Bradbury writes “Cornell Woolrich deserves to be discovered and rediscovered by each generation”. I am not ready to contradict him. — MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

  47: [1945] H. P. LOVECRAFT AND AUGUST DERLETH - The Lurker at the Threshold

  Ambrose Dewart inherits Billington House, a shunned old pile in the woods to the north of haunted Arkham, and learns of its evil history and reputation. He is cautioned by an ancient document to ensure that a river keeps flowing around an abandoned tower, and gradually realizes that the tower, the house and a strange window of coloured glass are gateways to another dimension, in which fester indescribable monstrosities who lust to emerge into our world and cause chaos. The longest of August Derleth’s posthumous “collaborations” with H. P. Lovecraft, The Lurker at the Threshold is, apart from two fragments totalling about 1200 words, wholly Derleth’s work. Aside from pastiching his mentor’s style, complete with italicized horrible bits, Derleth systematizes Lovecraft’s collection of hints and references into what has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos, thus opening the way for many subsequent tales by other hands. Derleth proceeded to expand some more Lovecraft fragments into the stories collected in The Shuttered Room (1959) and The Watchers Out of Time and Others (1974), and he made out of whole cloth the Lovecraftian horrors of The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) and The Trail of Cthulhu (1962).

  ***

  Lovecraft’s special talent was to create a world that was deeply unsettling in all its aspects. Even the trees flourished in Arkham “centuries after time should have taken its toll of them”. Yes, we have taken the wrong fork again, folks, and we are back in the Massachusetts of gambreled roofs and retarded offspring and whippoorwhills in the hills. The Lurker at the Threshold is a joy because it is so magnificently and unselfconsciously overwritten. The horror novels one reads these days are so often churned out in King-lish: which amounts to reams of unedited stream-of-word-processorese — pompous, self-regarding, and profane. Here, there is no concern for what the reader thinks of the writers: only an out-and-out devotion to being scary, expressed with a professionalism and a self-mocking elegance that today’s horror writers would do well to study. Beyond Dean’s Corners, the benighted traveller still hastens by, urged on by a curious dislike for which he has no reasonable explanation; but which we know with a wonderful shudder of anticipation will be some of our favorite Frightful Things From Outside, especially Yog-Sothoth, who still froths as primal slime somewhere beyond space and time! Apart from the hideous Great Old Ones, however, there are many other memorably disturbing devices in this book. The window of colored glass in the library at Billington’s Wood, through which the terrifying world beyond can be glimpsed; the brilliantly faked-up documents and letters and diaries, recounting the raising of Daemons in No Human Shape. The sinister tower in the wood, which is the threshold at which the lurker lurks. For personal reasons, however, my favorite creation in this novel is Misquamacus, the Indian Wonder-Worker, who became the Manitou in my very first horror novel, and whose ambiguity in his relationship with the Great Old Ones is one of the book’s most frightening delights. Long may Yog-Sothoth froth. — GRAHAM MASTERTON

  48: [1946] PAUL BAILEY - Deliver Me From Eva

  Mark Allard, a respectable lawyer, marries Eva Craner after a whirlwind courtship, and is taken to Eva’s palatial estate home, The Cradle of Light, where he is introduced to her peculiar family. Dr. Craner, Eva’s father, is an earless, legless genius who can increase intelligence through the manipulation of the plates of the skull. This treatment has turned Eva’s brother Osman into a great concert pianist, and her sister Insa into an epileptic moron. Various atrocities and deaths ensue, culminating in the destruction of The Cradle of Light. A fast-moving, blatantly silly pulp novel, with a touch of forties
’ “steamy stuff” (“I bent her savagely to me”), Deliver Me From Eva has just enough jokes — quite apart from its punning title — to suggest that the author wasn’t absolutely serious. Paul Bailey, author also of Sam Brennan and the California Mormons and The Gay Saint, presumably wrote his own jacket copy, which describes how “restlessness and rebellion possessed his soul at an early age … He has tasted the bitterness of poverty. He has known that ghastly loneliness where city crowds are thickest. With eager eye, and hungry intellect, he has pried into the leaven of life.”

  ***

  Robert Bloch more than likely would have come up with this title if Paul Bailey hadn’t thought of it first (1946). In fact, way back then he might even have written it. It had been 40 years since I first read Deliver Me From Eva, so in order to write about it intelligently for this book I thought I had better re-read it to remind myself why, beyond Dracula or Frankenstein or The Phantom of the Opera or Guy Endore’s Werewolf of Paris or Virginia Swain’s Hollow Skin, it stuck in my memory across a gulf of eight lustrums as the book which I found the most horrifying. The book’s blurb describes it as “a masterpiece of uninhibited, spine-chilling horror”, from a writer of historical novels “an event as rare and unexpected as angels in Hades”. The hype and hyperbole continues: “When the editor finished the last gripping line” — (“God be thanked I’m a lawyer” is a gripping line?) — “his blood was running as cold as a lizard’s belly, and for a week he dared not turn off his lights at night.” The Electric Co. must have loved him — and the author. Finally: “We swear it’s the most gosh-awful, horrific spine-tingler imaginable. Like the weird and imaginative flights of Poe, Stevenson and James, Deliver Me From Eva will hold you entranced and glued to the chair.” Well, now, in the sober light of day, four decades away from this horror novel, I see the comparison should not have been made with Poe et al. but Arthur J. Burks, Arthur Leo Zagat, Justin Case or one of the venerable old horror hacks who terrified legions of fans a couple of generations ago in the Pulpy pages of Terror Tales and Horror Stories and Dime Mystery. Yes, if legendary Ray Cummings, one of the maestros of the magazine macabre, had gone on from his novels The Sea Girl and The Shadow Girl and The Snow Girl and given us The Slay Girl, it would have read, I believe, very much like Deliver Me From Eva. At the time I first read this novel it impressed me as ideal B-movie material. Johnny Eck, the half-boy of Tod Browning’s Freaks, was born to portray the mad scientist half-man Dr. Craner. (Name suggestive of cranial? — an appropriate name for a brain manipulator.) And after three years of persistence I sold it to Curtis (Games/Queen of Blood/Who Slew Auntie Roo?) Harrington. It has yet to be made but it is perfect fodder for a follow-up to Re-Animator. In fact, if Deliver Me From Eva had been made first, Re-Animator would have been a natural to follow in its bizarre and bloody footsteps, even if somewhat difficult to do, considering Dr. Craner had no feet or legs. In order to sell Eva to the movies as an agent, it was some, er, feat for me to track down the author, and by a trillion to one cosmic coincidence, where was he found to be living? In Horrorwood, Karloffornia, on … Ackerman Drive! In 1988, as I approach my 72nd birthday, the old “Ackerman drive” is still at work, keeping alive the memory of Eva. I hope some antiquarian bookseller can locate a copy for you. Or perhaps it’s time for a book publisher to bring out a new edition. If you hear of it in advance, it might be profitable to buy stock in sleeping pills or electric bills. Eva — Eva — I’m coming … — FORREST J ACKERMAN

  49: [1946] BORIS KARLOFF (Editor) - And the Darkness Falls

  One of the largest, most extensive anthologies of the forties, this volume of macabre stories and (unusually) poems includes contributions by ghost and horror perennials Oliver Onions, E. F. Benson, Guy De Maupassant, Lafcadio Hearn, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, August Derleth, H. R. Wakefield, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Bowen, John Collier, ClarkAshton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, but also mainstream names like Paul Verlaine, Ivan Turgenev, Alfred Tennyson, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Algernon Swinburne, Robert Browning, W. B. Yeats, Charles Baudelaire, Stephen Crane, Jonathan Swift, Nikolai Gogol and Joseph Conrad, not to mention such then-popular figures as John Buchan, F. Tennyson Jesse, William Seabrook, L. P. Hartley, William Irish (Cornell Woolrich) and Dorothy L. Sayers. The pieces in And the Darkness Falls, subtitled Masterpieces of Horror and the Supernatural, were selected by Karloff from a list of recommendations by Edmund Speare while the actor was touring with Arsenic and Old Lace. Karloff also put his name to Tales of Terror (1943) and The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology (1965).

  ***

  Rarely, if ever, has a marketing gimmick resulted in a better book. You can just imagine the chorus of enthusiasm from the salesmen at the idea of a big fat horror collection edited by Frankenstein himself! And indeed, the taste and personality of one of the greatest actors of the century identified with horror informs this large and stimulating compendium. It was a successor to the critically acclaimed Tales of Terror (1943), which contained fewer, but longer, works. While it lacks the virtue of a long introductory essay (present in the earlier book), it more than compensates by the inclusion of informative and often quite extensive story notes by Karloff. Containing 72 stories and poems, it is one of the largest collections of horror fiction ever published. The stories are selected for the most part from the first 40 years of this century, yet the occasional inclusion of excellent work by Gogol, Swift, and others, together with selections from 19th-century poetry by Poe, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Verlaine and others bestows on it the international and literary tone that the editors desired. Karloff’s stated intention was to widen the field of consideration from the mere 14 selections of the earlier book to the rich and diverse materials herein, and thus broaden horror readers’ taste. The book succeeds admirably in this and it is the basis for its historic importance. Still, the whole does not entirely cohere, because certain selections break the tone and partially dispel the atmosphere of horror (the parodies by Swift and Onions, for instance). And while it is good to see a collection of a variety of material by unfamiliar writers, many of whom wrote little horror, the real strength of this book is in the stories by familiar names (and in the first Inclusion ever in a horror book by Gogol’s “Viy”, praised by Edmund Wilson as one of the greatest of all stories in the field). Never has “star marketing” been used more effectively in the horror field, with ingenuity and broad-ranging taste: the result is a great anthology. — DAVID G. HARTWELL