Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  As the global recession devastated the published industry in 2009, the small press market offered alternatives to the midlist writers who were increasingly under pressure within larger houses. New technologies such as print-on-demand continued to make publishing an attractive, if perilous, pursuit for those with an entrepreneurial spirit. A number of imprints took advantage of these circumstances, including Hippocampus Press, Grey Friar Press, Mythos Books, and Shroud Publishing. Cemetery Dance, Subterranean Press, and Tartarus Press continued to produce high-quality works of fiction, and editor Sean Wallace acquired Prime from Wildside Press, which by this point was publishing the long-running Weird Tales magazine. But the economic climate and the changes to the publishing environment caused a number of small presses to fold, including Andrew Hook’s Elastic Press and Chris Teague’s Pendragon Press.

  In 2009, online giant Amazon also released its second generation of the Kindle, a specialized e-reader. This would shape the industry for many years as publishers decided how best to integrate eBooks alongside printed books. While this technology benefited small presses to some extent, several experiments in eBook-only publishing were unsuccessful. In 2010, mass market publisher Leisure Books announced that Dan D’Auria, who had been responsible for its horror line, would be let go and that they would no longer produce print publications. In 2011, a group of writers called for the company to be boycotted for publishing eBooks for which they had not acquired digital rights.

  During this period, electronic magazines came into their own. Strange Horizons was launched in 2000 by Mary Anne Mohanraj and continues to operate today. Apex Magazine also continues to publish a range of fiction and reviews, and former editor Lynne M. Thomas recently launched Uncanny Magazine. Print-on-demand also made print anthologies more attractive than magazine publication for many editors. One of the few surviving print-only publications is Black Static, which was previously published as The Third Alternative and was acquired in 2005 by Andy Cox and TTA Press. These venues tended to divide themselves along internal genre lines, with some favoring a more literary strand while others such as Sinister Grin and Raw Dog Screaming Press have explored bizarro fiction, a visceral brand inspired by the late 1980s turn to schlock and gore. Authors who have found their foothold in the small presses of the late 1990s and early 2000s include Brian Evenson, Laird Barron, Kelly Link, and Reggie Oliver, among others.

  As the publishing industry has begun to stabilize, the last decade has seen some presses falter while others have reached maturity. In 2010 Night Shade Books, a prominent publisher, was placed on probation by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for irregularities in payment. Two years later the company, facing bankruptcy, was sold to Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing. And yet PS Publications and Tartarus Press continue to produce high-quality specialty editions in the United Kingdom, while Small Beer, Dark Regions, Hippocampus Press, Samhain Publishing, and Permuted Press publish a range of new fiction in America. Canada has distinguished itself largely through the efforts of ChiZine Publications and Undertow Press launched by Michael Kelly, while Australian publishers such as Ticonderoga, Severed Press, and Twelfth Planet Press have also taken advantage of the new paradigm of digital production. Nightmare Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, released its first issue in 2012 after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Likewise, a greater number of writers who first published with small presses have moved into mainstream success, including Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, Jeff VanderMeer, and, most recently, Michael Andrew Hurley, whose novel The Loney was first published by Tartarus Press in 2014, only to win Costa’s prestigious First Novel Award after a successful reissue by John Murray in 2015.

  Small press and specialty publishing from the beginning of the twentieth century onward has been driven in part by a desire to innovate and in part a desire to conserve the materials of the past. The small presses have traditionally been home to materials that were not expected to find a widespread audience, either because the writing was too experimental or extreme or because the traditional market for those works was declining. But as technology has made small-scale production cheaper, there has been a concomitant rise in publishing of exactly this kind. The chapbooks and hand-stapled ephemera of the past decades have largely migrated to digital formats or else been collected into cheap print-on-demand anthologies. Likewise, the specialty presses that traditionally made their money from expensive limited editions have also begun to branch out into the mass eBook and print-on-demand trade market. Whereas in the horror boom of the 1980s small press publishing was influenced by the large publishers such as Tor, in fact, the trend seems to be reversing, with independent publishing providing the impetus for innovation. The result is that readers and writers are likely to encounter more choice in the materials they read and the formats available to them in the future.

  Helen Marshall

  See also: Horror Anthologies; Horror Comics; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Aickman, Robert; Arkham House; Barron, Laird; Campbell, Ramsey; Datlow, Ellen; Derleth, August; Etchison, Dennis; King, Stephen; Lee, Tanith; Ligotti, Thomas; Link, Kelly; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Oliver, Reggie; Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  Barron, Neil. 1999. Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

  Hantke, Steffen. 2008. “The Decline of the Literary Horror Market in the 1990s and Dell’s Abyss Series.” Journal of Popular Culture 41.1: 56–70.

  Herald, Diana Tixier, and Wayne A. Wiegand, editor. 2006. Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

  Jones, Stephen. 2014. Best New Horror: # 1. Hornsea, UK: PS Publishing.

  Morrison, Michael A. 1996. “After the Danse: Horror at the End of the Century.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

  Sutton, David, and Stan Nicholls. 2000. On the Fringe for Thirty Years: A History of Horror in the British Small Press. Birmingham: Shadow Publishing.

  VAMPIRE FICTION FROM DRACULA TO LESTAT

  AND BEYOND

  Vampire fiction finds its origins in the vampire hysteria that swept across Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century, a period that saw officially sanctioned exhumations of villagers suspected of being vampires. German poets like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gottfried August Bürger, as in his ballad Lenore (1774)—which included a verse that gave rise to the line “Denn die Todten reiten schnell” (For the dead travel fast) in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)—soon began integrating into their works the figure of the vampire. But by the early part of the nineteenth century, romantics such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats began to try their own hands at vampire poetry in works such as The Giaour (1813), Christabel (1816), and Lamia (1820), respectively, which gave rise to the vampire as a distinct fictional trope.

  It was not until Dr. John William Polidori’s anonymously published “The Vampyre; A Tale” (1819) in The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register, however, that the enduring features of the vampire still seen today came into being. The first story of the undead “successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre,” according to Sir Christopher Frayling, “The Vampyre” was falsely attributed upon publication to Lord Byron, for whom Polidori had previously worked as a personal physician (Frayling 1991, 108). Polidori based his work on the fragment of a novel Byron wrote during the now celebrated ghost story competition (at which Polidori was present) between him, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley at Byron’s home, the Villa Diodati, by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, the same competition that would produce Frankenstein (1818). Polidori’s
chief vampire, Ruthven, which he stylized after Byron, is an enigmatic lord who enters London society where he encounters a young Englishman named Aubrey. They become fast friends and travel together, but various events during their adventures reveal to Aubrey that Ruthven is in fact a vampire. The novel ends with Aubrey dying insane and Ruthven marrying Aubrey’s sister, who turns up dead with her blood drained. Polidori’s story found immediate popular success, no doubt partially as a result of being initially attributed to Byron, but mainly due to its appropriation of the Gothic conventions for which the public longed. Despite its success, “The Vampyre,” and Byron’s public refutation of and disdain for the story, destroyed Polidori’s career. However, it transformed the vampire from the hideous walking corpse of folklore into the form recognized today of an aristocrat who feeds upon high society.

  Polidori’s formula surfaces again in the short story “The Mysterious Stranger,” first published in German as “Der Fremde” by Karl Adolf von Wachsmann in Erzählungen und Novellen (1844), then in installments in the popular literary magazine Würzburger Conversationsblatt (May–June 1847), and then it was translated into English and published anonymously as “The Mysterious Stranger” in Chambers’s Repository of Instructive and Amusing Tracts (October–December 1853) and later reprinted in Odds and Ends (1860). The story begins with a party of Austrian travelers led by the Knight of Fahnenberg, who has just inherited a large estate in the Carpathian Mountains. Among the party are Franziska, the knight’s daughter, her cousin and suitor, the Baron Franz von Kronstein, and Bertha, Franziska’s female companion who is admired by the courageous Knight of Woislaw, presently off in Turkey fighting in a war. Soon it becomes apparent that a torrential snowstorm is upon them, so they hasten their journey onward only to find that howling “reed-wolves” have encircled the party. The travelers soon approach the abandoned ruins of Castle Klatka, and fearing an attack, they seek refuge there. Before the travelers can reach the ruins, however, the wolves begin their assault. They fear the worst until suddenly a tall man appears out of nowhere between the wolves and the party. Knightly and old-fangled in dress, the stranger raises his hand in a waving gesture, which halts the advance of the wolves and sends them in retreat into the woods. The travelers watch as their rescuer says nothing and simply returns to the path leading up to the castle, where he seems to vanish into the ruins.

  The travelers eventually return to explore the castle, finding among its ruins the coffin of “Ezzelin de Klatka, Eques.” At sunset, appearing out of nowhere again is the tall stranger, who calls himself Azzo von Klatka. Like Dracula, he is about forty, tall, thin, and pale, with piercing grey eyes, black hair, and black beard. The thankful travelers invite their rescuer to pay them a visit at their neighboring estate, and soon the stranger makes frequent dinner visits after nightfall. In the meantime, Franziska, who has taken a fancy to the stranger, slowly becomes anemic, complains of bad dreams and nightly visitors who enter her bedroom in mist, and starts to bear a small wound on her throat. Then, arriving just in time is the Knight of Woislaw, a proto–Van Helsing character who, given his dealings abroad, suspects almost immediately that a vampire is afoot. Woislaw then takes Franziska back to Castle Klatka, where he instructs her to drive three long spikes through the coffin lid of “Ezzelin de Klatka.” Afterward, Franziska quickly recovers from her strange illness, and Azzo, the mysterious stranger, is not seen or heard from again.

  “The Mysterious Stranger,” like Polidori’s The Vampyre, obviously had a great effect on Stoker’s writing of Dracula, but it was not the last to do so. Serialized works like James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s “penny dreadful” Varney the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood (1845–1847) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla, first published in The Dark Blue (1871–1872), then reprinted in Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), did much to firmly establish the vampire in the popular imagination of the Victorian era, and, in doing so, influenced Stoker. Sir Francis Varney was the first vampire to establish, at least in English, what would become several standard tropes in vampire fiction: vampires bearing fangs and entering through windows at night to attack sleeping maidens, leaving behind two puncture wounds in the neck, and displaying hypnotic powers coupled with incredible strength and agility. Though it is not unreasonable to speculate whether Rymer or Prest had indeed read “Der Fremde” in its original German and mirrored Varney somewhat after Wachsmann’s “Azzo,” what is certainly their creation is a vampire who drinks and eats as a human, if only to disguise himself, and who acts upon his vampirism only when his energy is running low, an unfortunate condition Varney simultaneously loathes and is powerless to ignore. In this way, Varney is a prototype of the “sympathetic vampire” that would come into its own more than a hundred years later. The erotic elements seen in Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire novella Carmilla show through in Stoker’s Dracula as well, particularly in Stoker’s characterization of his vampire women. Carmilla is also set in Styria, where Stoker originally set Dracula before moving the count’s home to Transylvania.

  Stoker’s greatest achievement in Dracula, a novel he spent seven years writing (longer than any of his other novels), lies in his combining a number of tropes from previous vampire literature and displaying them to perfection in Dracula’s pages. Although Stoker did not invent many of the tropes he used, he did build upon them, and Dracula’s incredible popularity and immensely positive reception by critics only helped to fan the public’s association of these tropes with his novel. One example is Count Dracula’s transformation into a bat. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, no doubt influenced by the vampire hysteria and poetic verse of the previous century, identified and named the vampire bat (Phyllostoma rotundum) in Paraguay in 1810, and it was during the nineteenth century that the vampire bat and the supernatural vampire slowly fused together. American newspapers had appropriated the figure of the vampire as early as the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, as a pejorative to describe everything from corporations and banks to bankers and politicians. But when science invoked the vampire to name and describe certain species of bat (and later, squid), and with the publication of Polidori’s instantly popular The Vampyre in 1819, newspapers and literature worked eagerly at fusing the supernatural vampire and the vampire bat into one mythology. For a while, a new vampire hysteria spread across the globe when folks started seeing (i.e., misidentifying) vampire bats everywhere (despite their being a species native to Central and South America only). Eventually, a conflation of the supernatural vampire with the relatively harmless vampire bat occurred in the figures of the “winged vampire” or vampire “bat-winged” person, who alternately began to play a prominent role in figurative political rhetoric and even as an American literary trope. This conflation is also almost assuredly what fanned the late-Victorian image of the vampire as having fangs (a trait the European vampire of folklore lacked entirely). (Take, for example, the fanged vampire in the form of the beautiful “Vespertilia” in Anne Crawford’s “A Mystery of the Campagna” [1887], vespertilio, or “evening bat,” being a common variety of bat found the world over.) Thus, although the eighteenth-century vampire of folklore and poetic verse was responsible for the vampire bat’s subsequent nomenclature and frightening mystique, it was probably the vampire bat that, in turn, fitted the literary vampire with its iconic fangs. After Dracula, fangs, crucifixes, traveling boxes (or coffins), mirrors, and garlic were to become standard fare in vampire literature through the next century and into the twenty-first.

  Draculas the World Over in Film, Television, and

  Video Games

  1921

  Drakula halála (Hungary/Austria)

  1922

  Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Germany)

  1931

  Dracula (USA); Drácula (USA)

  1936

  Dracula’s Daughter (USA)

  1943

  Son of Dracula (USA)

  1944

  House of Frankenstein (USA)r />
  1945

  House of Dracula (USA)

  1948

  Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (USA)

  1953

  Drakula Istanbul’da (Turkey)

  1956

  Matinee Theatre, “Dracula” (USA)—Television

  1958

  Dracula (UK); The Return of Dracula (USA)

  1959

  Onna Kyuketsuki (Japan)

  1961

  El Mundo de los vampiros (Mexico)

  1963

  Mga Manugang ni Drakula (Philippines)

  1964

  Tetsuwan Atom, “Vampire Vale” (Japan)—Television, Animation; Kulay Dugo ang Gabi (Philippines/USA)

  1966

  Dracula: Prince of Darkness (UK); Emotion: densetsu no gogo=itsukamita Dracula (Japan)

  1967

  Zinda Laash (Pakistan)

  1968

  Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (UK); Kaibutsu-Kun (Japan)—Animation

  1969

  Dracula and the Boys; aka Does Dracula Really Suck? (USA)—Adult; Drakulita (Philippines); Santo en El Tesoro de Dracula (Mexico)