50: [1947] AUGUST DERLETH (Editor) - The Sleeping and the Dead
Subtitled “Fifteen Uncanny Tales” The Sleeping and the Dead includes work from both classic British ghost story writers (M. R. James’ “A View From a Hill”, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Bully of Chapelizod”, Lord Dunsany’s “The Postman of Otford “, H. R. Wakefield’s “Farewell Performance”) and the then-young masters of the American Weird Tales school (Derleth’s own “Glory Hand”, Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar”, Frank Belknap Long’s “The Ocean Leech”). H. P. Lovecraft, a staple of Derleth’s career as an anthologist, is represented by “The Dreams in the Witch House” and by one of his re-write jobs, Hazel Heald’s “Out of the Eons”. Derleth’s many other anthologies include Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks? (1945), The Night Side (1946), Dark of the Moon (poetry, 1947), Night’s Yawning Peal (1952), Dark Mind, Dark Heart (1962), Travellers by Night (1967) and Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969).
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Ever since I was a child I have loved bookshops, especially those that sell secondhand volumes and look as if they might yield the odd treasure or two to the patient searcher. It was back in the early fifties, when I was a teenager, that I came across a rather battered hardcover edition of August Derleth’s anthology The Sleeping and the Dead in a shop in London’s Charing Cross Road — the name of which I’m afraid I’ve long since forgotten. I’m not sure now whether it was the title or the unusual editor’s name that caught my eye — it may even have been the rather strange publishers’ names on the spine: Pellegrini & Cudahy Inc., who turned out to be American. In any event, I leafed through to the contents page, which to someone just beginning to discover the horror genre promised a host of chilling reading. I’d actually been introduced to the world of macabre stories through — of all things — the television (then a small wooden box, with a tiny flickering, black-and-white screen that you watched in a room with the curtains drawn and the lights out). My parents, for reasons that still escape them — though their action has had a singular effect on my life — decided that the first adult programme I was going to be allowed to stay up and watch (it had been strictly Children’s Hour until then) was a dramatization of Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. To say I sat watching it absolutely terrified would be putting it mildly — but I know it excited my imagination enough to want to know if there were any more stories like that to be found. By the time I came across The Sleeping and the Dead, I had worked patiently through a good number of the classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. But it was the first anthology I had encountered (they were nowhere near as prolific then as they are today) and I ran through the names of the contributors with increasing interest: M. R. James (who I’d heard wrote ghost stories), Algernon Blackwood (wasn’t he the man who read supernatural tales on the radio?), Lord Dunsany (who a school pal said told weird little stories about ancient gods), and a couple of Americans named H. P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury. Oh, and there was also a story by the editor himself. I remember I devoured that collection in a weekend. Some of the stories, in particular M. R. James’ “A View from the Hill” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Jar” so impressed me I read them twice. I thought they were all excellent, and the book gave me for the first time an overview of the range and diversity of the short tale of horror. All the authors, I soon discovered, had produced other works, and I busied myself making a list for my next visit to the library — as well as one to keep with me for my bookshop browsing. The Sleeping and the Dead indeed became for a time the first volume in what is now a several-thousand strong library of horror and fantasy novels and collections in my Suffolk home. I was interested, too, to read the biographical details about August Derleth — like me a fan of horror since his youth (and a published author at the tender age of 13, no less!) who had written and edited dozens of books of macabre stories as well as starting his own publishing company, Arkham House, which was busy resurrecting the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and had published the first books of stories by Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch (who were also to become favourites of mine). Out of admiration for The Sleeping and the Dead, I wrote a letter of congratulations to August Derleth — and initiated what became a friendly and instructive correspondence which continued until his sad death in 1971. August was always generous with his time and advice to this young fan across the Atlantic, and even passed judgement on some of the first selections of stories I was proposing to put together for British publishers. When I found a story difficult to obtain in England, he was almost invariably able to supply a copy of it from his own huge library. August greatly encouraged me in the development of “thematic” collections, which have become my speciality, and no matter what particular theme I wanted to explore, he could always be relied upon to have a few ideas for consideration. I miss his letters and his suggestions, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to him in these pages. I’m also glad to be able to say that I showed my appreciation of his book in a more positive way while he was still alive. For when my career took me from journalism into publishing, before I finally became a full-time writer and anthologist, I had the great satisfaction of arranging the first publication in Great Britain of The Sleeping and the Dead in a paperback edition under the Four Square imprint of New English Library. My only sadness was that it cost me that original copy of the book, for it never came back from the printers. If anyone could help replace it I’d be horrifically grateful … — PETER HAINING
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51: [1949] WALTER VAN TILBURG CLARK - Track of the Cat
A strangely Gothic Western, Track of the Cat is a complex work which subliminally integrates the Death of King Arthur and a stern critique of the pioneer ethic into its snowbound family melodrama and neurotic outdoors adventuring. It was filmed by William Wellman — who had also adapted Van Tilburg Clark’s best-known book in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) — in 1954, with Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright and Tab Hunter. In an attempt to match the book’s bizarre, psychological feel, Wellman shot in CinemaScope and WarnerColor but restricted himself almost entirely to the use of blacks and whites.
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Mystic dreams. A half-mad, half-shaman Indian who carves portents of the future from bits of wood. Three brothers on a rite of passage that will see two of them dead and one the victor over an old, cunning evil. A snowstorm that tears at the soul, and a landscape of white mountains where crevasses lie hidden under smooth, deceptive powder. The land of the black painter, and blood on the snow. A Western novel. Right. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who wrote The Track of the Cat, is probably most famous for The Ox-Bow Incident, another Western-based novel that builds tautly to its conclusion in which a group of innocent men are mistakenly hanged for a murder that never happened. American high school students know The Ox-Bow Incident from Cliffs’ Notes. Very few people know about The Track of the Cat, which is a horror novel dressed up in cowboy duds and riding a horse. A panther has been attacking the livestock at an isolated ranch, and as a snowstorm gathers its fury the three Bridges brothers — the eldest Arthur, the hothead and “manly” Curt, and the naive, youngest Harold — go out into the mountains on the track of the cat. Arthur has had recurring dreams: the voice of a loved one, lost and searching in the storm. The dreams call him, and he must answer. Curt can hunt and shoot any animal; he’s not afraid of any panther, no sir! Not even the spectral “black painter” that their Indian ranch hand Joe Sam says cannot be killed. Harold, on the eve of his wedding, suffers under Curt’s bullying weight, and he walks in the shadow of his older brothers. Arthur is killed by his dreams; he is “day-dreaming”, a habit Curt warns him about, when the panther — not black after all, but an ordinary yellow cat — leaps upon him from a snowy ledge. From this portion of the novel, The Track of the Cat enters true nightmare country. Hunting the cat on his own in the mountains, Curt steadily roams farther from the ranch and familiar landmarks. He’s so intent on bringing back the cat’s hide — and impressing Harold’s bride-to-be with his killing prow
ess — that he lets the hunt seduce him. A large part of the novel focuses on Curt, as the weather closes in and the snow falls and he begins to run out of matches. This is the center of Track of the Cat: the stalking enemy, the brutal and beautiful land, both murderous and seductive. Nothing is familiar to Curt; everything is white, dreamlike, and every shadow holds a panther. The mountains slowly break Curt down into a gibbering child who fires his rifle at darting, imaginary shapes and who feels weeping swell inside him when he loses all sense of direction. The mountains are cruel, and as Curt flees from the sound of snow slithering from a tree he steps into a crevasse and falls to his death. Harold and Joe Sam find the panther and Harold shoots it, regretting that such a beautiful animal must die. He has found his harmony with the mountains, with the land that can so quickly turn monstrous. It’s not a black panther after all, Harold says, as he looks at the carcass. And Joe Sam sweeps his hands in a circle that includes the sky and mountains, and he says, “Black painter. All black painter.” The Track of the Cat is a great horror novel because it takes a huge landscape and slowly narrows it until the reader is squeezed into a cramped cave with Curt Bridges, frantically talking to one of Joe Sam’s carved cat figures as the meagre fire flickers and the storm roars outside. He is one match away from freezing to death, with the sense that the cat is now tracking him, and the hunt has turned into a struggle for survival. The Western setting gives The Track of the Cat a particularly American, folksy flavor, but underneath the cowboy’s flesh beats a heart of true horror. A great horror novel — but, first and foremost, a great novel. — ROBERT R. McCAMMON
52: [1952] SARBAN - The Sound of His Horn
In a postwar clubroom, Alan Querdilion tells a tall story about his escape from a Second World War POW camp and temporary projection one hundred years into a future where Nazi Germany won the war and has established complete domination over a neo-feudalized Europe. Eschewing the science fictional/political speculations of most “If Hitler Had Won” novels, Sarban (really John W. Wall) concentrates instead on a horrific vision of the Thousand Year Reich at play. Genetically-altered humans are hunted for sport and Querdilion finds himself the quarry of Count von Hackelnberg, a bloated cross between Guy of Gisbourne, Count Zaroff and Hermann Goering. Sarban is also the author of two volumes of weird fantasy, Ringstones and Other Stories (1951) and The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny (1953). The Sound of His Horn remains his best-known work, and has been an influence on such Nazi fantasies as Keith Roberts’ “Weihnachtsabend” and David Erin’s “Thor Meets Captain America”.
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This short novel comprises a nightmare within a vision within a dream. The dream, of peaceful country life in post-Second-World-War Britain, contains in turn the vision of an alternative future in which advanced technology supports a carefully crafted, idealized version of an imaginary Aryan past. The estate of Hackelnberg is a theme park, a “Naziland” which provides the illusion of a robust outdoor life of baronial pleasures to the fat, lazy functionaries of an urbanized modern tyranny. But at the core of this amusement park is the Count, a fabulous, superhuman figure far more ferocious and horrifying than Hitler’s heirs. The distance between this savage giant, Beowulf and Grendel rolled into one, and the Gauleiters whom he seems to serve out of whim, is one source of the resonance of the work. The thought of Nazism victorious is horrible enough. But suppose these nauseating sadists have somehow conjured, by their attempt to restore some pure, hierarchical, morally unambiguous version of the past, a dreadful primordial spirit — the Master of the Wild Hunt. The Count embodies the frightful truth behind all such reactionary longings. He treats everyone around him with the brutal contempt typical of the oldest, crudest deities, to whom human beings were merely slaves. That longed-for, perfect past is always mythical, and the world of myth reverberates with the wilful, utterly untrammeled ferocity of the early gods. Their casual habit of turning men and women into animals surfaces here as the deliberate debasement of subject peoples, through science and art, to animal levels. Sarban dramatizes the link between the Count’s archaic, macho ferocity and the modern urge to dehumanize all those perceived as weak — in the Nazi formulation, non-Aryans and, more particularly, women. The women of the Count’s domain are reduced to three basic western stereotypes: mindlessly predatory cat-women; game girls, fantastically costumed as exotic birds to become helpless prey fleeing the hunters; and gilded torch-bearers, who serve beautifully but mutely. The shock of recognizing a heightened version of current sexist attitudes contributes strongly to the reader’s unease. In fact there are hardly any characters as such in The Sound of His Horn. It is filled with emblematic figures like creatures in a dream, with a dream’s power to fascinate. But the work has more amplitude and depth than its brevity suggests. Prodigies of economy are achieved with a deceptively artless style. The gradually accelerating narrative becomes not only an observer’s tour of his own nightmare, but both a love story and a headlong adventure tale as well. The love affair is used not just as a breathing space in the form of a poignant idyll, but as an opportunity to give readers some chillingly realistic glimpses of the Nazified world beyond the estate fence. The ostensibly distancing device of having the hero tell his story to a friend who then tells it to us serves rather to draw us easily into the heart of the tale, and by contrast sharpens the focus of the terror-filled final chase; and the book becomes a grim reflection upon the atavistic and sadistic aspects of all blood sport. Above all, using a sure and delicate selection of sensory details the author evokes not only the horrors but the seductive beauties of Hackelnberg, and this ambiguity is the dark, dreamy heart of the book. The bloodthirsty, joyous call of the Count’s hunting horn, the gold and green livery of his foresters, the sunlit glades of his carefully manicured woods, the gabbling yammer of the maniacal cat-women — these flashes from a vision at once false and true, enchantingly beautiful and starkly hideous, sink indelibly into the mind. A lasting, eerie echo is the mark of Sarban’s achievement in this brief, unforgettable book. — SUZY McKEE CHARNAS
53: [1954] WILLIAM GOLDING - Lord of the Flies
A vague crisis — perhaps a worldwide nuclear war — forces an aeroplane carrying a party of English schoolboys down on an isolated tropical island. The children, members of a public school choir, try to set up some form of adult civilization, but gradually revert to savagery. A decapitated wild boar becomes a sort of god and appears to speak to the children, influencing Jack, the bully, towards tyranny and — it is suggested — cannibalism. Piggy, a fat boy, becomes the tribe’s ritual outcast and Ralph, the hero, is forced to make a stand against Jack’s growing power. Golding’s novel has survived being taught in schools, and stands as both a realist revision ofR. M. Ballantyne’s classic children’s adventure The Coral Island (1858) and an examination of the Jekyll and Hyde “beast within” horror theme. Much of Golding’s output, which includes the anthropological The Inheritors (1956) and the historical The Spire (1964), deals with fringe-horrific material. Lord of the Flies was starkly filmed in 1963 by Peter Brook and badly remade in 1989 by Harry Hook.
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When William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 there was an unsurprising amount of huffing and puffing, partly because he was considered a popular and even, horrors, accessible author (at least to those who haven’t sought access to works like Pincher Martin) —but largely because his view of the human condition seems to be so unrelentingly negative. After all, Alfred Nobel wanted the award to go to “the most distinguished literary work of an idealist tendency”. (So it’s been given to such dewy-eyed optimists as Andre Gide, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner.) And he is indeed deliciously negative, probably never more so than in the grotesque fable Lord of the Flies. In fact, the repeatedly avowed dour purpose of the book was to “attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature”, a misanthropic demonstration of our imperfectibility. Whether the book seems to succeed in this goal, or in what way it fails, m
ay be more a reflection of the reader’s attitudes than of the writer’s skill. I personally have no quarrel with the Nobel Committee’s choice; I think Golding is a writer of remarkable virtuosity and power. Nevertheless, while I enjoyed Lord of the Flies, and was properly scared by it, the overall effect doesn’t seem to argue strongly for his premise. The boys carry a great deal of obvious symbolic weight, the burden of representing archetypes, which is wonderful for the atmosphere of the story, and has everything to do with its success as a horror classic. But I think that undermines its didactic power. Acting out their simplified stereotypical roles, the boys move inevitably towards disassociation and savagery. It’s the inevitableness that gives the book its fearsome suspense, the reader worrying not “will they change their behavior and save themselves?” but rather “will an outside force save them from themselves before it’s too late?” Although in other aspects a comparison would be ludicrous, this pattern is the same plot dynamic that energizes most horror films, good or bad. A vampire or werewolf wouldn’t be scary enough if its potential victims had any chance to vanquish it by simple application of intelligence and strength. There has to be the sense that inexorable Fate is in charge; they are only human, and human is not going to do the trick. God or Science has to intervene. So we experience the delectable catharsis of being temporarily terrified, but then walk out of the theater into a real world where we know things are more complicated but at least are free of flesh-rending man-beasts or bloodsucking Eastern Europeans. I have a similar feeling of detachment after reading Lord of the Flies again. The book works beautifully on its own terms, but when I shut it, I don’t accept those terms any more. This may just go back to my initial premise, though. Golding and I are polar opposites when it comes to the central theme of the book. I believe human nature is improvable, if not perfectible; and that humans in ones and twos and even threes can be marvelously good, but in the diffusion of moral responsibility that “society” brings, we gravitate toward the evil and ugly. Of course I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from reading the book because of my quibble with its theme. It’s an evening of good solid terror, and solid food for thought besides. — JOE HALDEMAN
Horror: The 100 Best Books Page 15