Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Since the 1990s, writers including China Miéville (1972–), M. John Harrison (1945–), and Jeff VanderMeer (1968–) have identified with what they call the “New Weird,” in part as a way to forcefully differentiate their genre-resistant approach to weird fiction both from the horror genre and from the pulp-era roots of the Anglo-American tradition centering on Lovecraft and Weird Tales. Others, including Laird Barron (1970–), Gemma Files (1968–), and Mark Samuels (1967–), tend to work recognizably with and through both the horror genre and the Lovecraft tradition.

  Sean Moreland

  See also: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Part Three, Reference Entries: Ballard, J. G.; Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Blackwood, Algernon; Brite, Poppy Z.; Cisco, Michael; Dick, Philip K.; Dreams and Nightmares; Ellison, Harlan; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Joshi, S. T.; Kafka, Franz; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Machen, Arthur; The Numinous; Poe, Edgar Allan; Samuels, Mark; Schulz, Bruno; VanderMeer, Jeff.

  Further Reading

  Everett, J., and Jeffrey H. Shanks, eds. 2015. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Studies in Supernatural Literature. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

  Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  Joshi, S. T. 2012. “Poe, Lovecraft, and the Revolution in Weird Fiction.” Paper presented at Ninth Annual Commemoration Program of the Poe Society, October 7. https://www.eapoe.org/papers/psblctrs/pl20121.htm.

  Lovecraft, H. P. 1997. Selected Letters. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

  Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Ralickas, Vivian. 2008. “‘Cosmic Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18, no. 3: 364.

  VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2012. “The Weird: An Introduction.” In The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, xv–xx. New York: Tor.

  YOUNG ADULT HORROR FICTION

  Controversies over the consumption of horror fiction by young adults began as early as 1796 with the publication of then twenty-year-old Matthew Lewis’s shocking novel, The Monk. A story of Satanism, incest, and rape, The Monk is characterized by critics today as the product of “adolescent fantasy” and at the time of its publication was subject to venomous attacks by reviewers (Spacks 1990, 149). Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that “The Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter he might reasonably turn pale” (Coleridge 1936, 356–357). Seen as the product of a juvenile imagination and assumed to have a deleterious effect on young minds, The Monk typifies the way horror fiction written for, or read by, young adults prompts polarized responses. Though many critics of the day echoed Coleridge’s consternation, some Romantic writers vociferously argued the benefit of terrifying tales on young minds, or expressed nostalgia for their own juvenile appreciation of horror. In “Witches and Other Night Fears” Charles Lamb laments how “tame and prosaic” his adult dreams have grown in contrast to a younger self “dreadfully alive to nervous terrors” (Lamb 1835, 75). In his discussion of these Romantic responses to frightening fiction, Dale Townshend notes that William Wordsworth praised the gruesome chapbooks of his youth for giving the energy of the young imagination free rein. For Wordsworth, horror in literature (in the form of chapbook romances and gruesome fairy tales) “enabled him to withstand the potentially annihilating effects of horror” encountered in real life (Townshend 2008, 29). As a brief look at the history of the subject will show, debate about the merits (or lack thereof) of horror literature for young adult readers continues through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and well into the twenty-first.

  Since its inception in the form of the chapbooks so beloved by William Wordsworth, through the Gothic romances derided by critics in the eighteenth century, into the scandalous penny dreadfuls of the late nineteenth century, and on into the pulp horror of the twentieth century, horror literature has consistently been weighed against pedagogical criteria, with critics concerned as to how it will help (or hinder) the education and psychological development of young adults. Accordingly, critical approaches to young adult horror in the twentieth century borrow variously from developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, or some variety of ego-relational therapeutic psychology in an attempt to understand the effects horror might have on young adult readers. J. A. Appleyard argues that adolescent readers exhibit a predilection for horror and the supernatural; they “demand that stories not just embody their wishes and fantasies, but also reflect realistically the darker parts of life” (Appleyard 1991, 109). Appleyard characterizes adolescence as a psychologically “dark” period that horror stories help readers navigate. This view echoes Bruno Bettelheim’s famous thesis on fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), in which he deployed Freudian theories to argue that fairy tales help children negotiate the various phases of psychological development. In her assessment of the appeal of frightening fiction to young adult readers, Kimberley Reynolds is at first wary of such “well-rehearsed psychoanalytic arguments,” though she agrees that the monsters of horror offer the “perfect metaphor for this stage in a young person’s development . . . ‘the beast’ many teenagers suspect they harbor within themselves can be externalized, encountered and finally overcome” (Reynolds 2001, 6). Reynolds also suggests that the “abject” aspects of YA horror writing, that is, its use of disgusting imagery, helps young adult readers replay and so finally overcome the oedipal conflict of their early childhood (Reynolds 2001, 7). This narrative about the therapeutic benefits of horror for young adult readers endures today. In a an essay at the Tor.com blog titled “Why Horror Is Good for You (And Even Better for Your Kids),” writer and artist Greg Ruth states that childhood and adolescence are a “terrifying ordeal” that the horror writer can “help children survive” (Ruth 2014). The direction of commentary such as this, even though it acts in praise of horror fiction, is as paternalistic as Coleridge’s consternation over The Monk. The critics allot a therapeutic role to horror administered by adults to aid young adults on their road to developing maturity.

  Since the publication of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk in 1796, critics have argued about the suitability of horror fiction for young adult readers. From eighteenth-century Gothic romances to fin de siècle penny dreadfuls, from the furor over horror comics in the 1950s to the 1980s’ “video nasty” panic, young adult horror fiction has prompted moral panic among its detractors as well as impassioned defenses by others who see the value of frightening fiction for developing young minds. Increasingly, in the twenty-first century, horror is lauded as an important and valuable mode of writing, though many works defy accepted ideas about the ways horror fiction aids in the maturation and psychological development of young adult readers.

  This association of frightening fiction with the developing maturity of the young adult reader plays out in a continual back and forth about suitability, and the history of horror literature and young adult readers through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is also a history of moral panic. In the 1870s, cheap installment fiction aimed at a juvenile, working-class readership, known as “penny dreadfuls,” were big business for various entrepreneurial publishers. Popular titles such as The Wild Boys of London; Or, The Children of the Night (1846–1866) contained violent imagery and often “borrowed” plots (without acknowledgment) from older Gothic romances. Many contained stories about violent criminals, and John Springhall argues that they became the scapegoat for a host of social problems in the late Victorian period in Britain. In 1877, the Society for the Suppression of Vice instituted summonses against the publishers of The Wild Boys of London under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act (Springhall 1994, 326). As Springhall points out, the moral panic over penny dreadfuls was also a class
conflict. The 1852 Government Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles promoted standard middle-class morality in its attempt to suppress penny dreadfuls, part of working-class culture (Springhall 1994, 328). A similar moral panic occurred a century later in the United States when a public outcry against horror comics on the newsstands coincided with a congressional investigation on juvenile delinquency. The investigation linked delinquency to comic books thanks in part to Fredric Wertham’s indictment of the industry in Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Comic book titles such as The Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, and The Haunt of Fear by pulp comic publisher EC Comics were placed under scrutiny and, as a result, publishers agreed to self-censor to prevent further damage to reputation and sales. Among its restrictions, The Comics Code Authority forbade the depiction of excessive violence, gruesome illustrations, and vampires, werewolves, or zombies. These restrictions loosened over time, with publishers abandoning the code one after another in the late twentieth century (Marvel in 2001 and DC in 2011), rendering the code, finally, defunct.

  Penny dreadfuls and horror comics are two examples that reveal how the development of horror for young adult readers seems to follow a “masculine” direction. Typically, horror fictions are conceived of as being written for and consumed by male readers. Reynolds argues that the twentieth century saw the development of “a peculiarly male form of horror/frightening fantasy [that] has emerged in tandem with youth culture’s male rebels and the rejection of the cozy domestic world fetishized in the books, radio and television programs of the postwar period” (Reynolds 2001, 5). Despite this association of horror fiction with male youth culture, evidence abounds that female readers have also found horror fiction compelling. British writer Celia Rees counts classic “pulp” horror works of the twentieth century like The Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959–1989) and Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934) among the works that have influenced her own writing the most. As a teenager, she would “borrow” such illicit titles from under her older brother’s bed and consume them “voraciously” (Rees 2012). Rees’s juvenile appetite for horror is present in her own writing for young adults, such as the 1996 vampire novel Blood Sinister.

  In the late twentieth century, the two most popular print horror series, Point Horror and Goosebumps (category fiction imprints from Scholastic), borrowed overtly from slasher movies and B-movie horror tropes (two genres also associated with male audiences) to address female teens. Point Horror, in particular, was aimed at girls and rewrote the early twentieth century domestic genre of the “school story” as a paranoid mode in titles such as Prom Dress by A. Bates (1989) and Teacher’s Pet by Richie Tankersley Cusick (1990). Kevin McCarron notes that the Point Horror series employed distinctly masculine and feminine modes, with masculine “thrillers” that offered the appearance of realism (typified by R. L. Stine’s work) and feminine “supernatural” works that resisted such realism (typified in the vampire fictions of Caroline B. Cooney) (McCarron 2001, 42). McCarron characterizes Point Horror as conservative fiction, which tends to establish and maintain boundaries such as insider vs. outsider, often reinforces social norms (including heterosexuality and marriage), and reestablishes social cohesiveness in the resolution of its plots (Reynolds 2001, 28). Likewise, for Reynolds much of the popular fiction of the late twentieth century marketed as horror for young adults lacks the “all pervasive sense of fear and ghastly transgression which characterizes true horror” (Reynolds 2001, 3). In these evaluations of young adult horror, McCarron and Reynolds implicitly reinforce a masculine/feminine binary that runs throughout discussions of horror literature. Demanding that “true” horror be radical and subversive, they align horror with “masculine” subcultures and reject popular, or mainstream, culture, which is implicitly regarded as “feminine.”

  Radical or not, these horror fictions of the late twentieth century prompted their own moral panic among adult commentators and educationalists. Reynolds notes that British newspapers branded the Point Horror series “vile and truly pernicious,” echoing the language used about penny dreadfuls, and lists various campaigns that sought to have the books excluded from school libraries (Reynolds 2001, 2). Reynolds likens the concerns raised over the Point Horror books to the moral panic over horror comics, though they are most likely the consequence of the British “video nasty” panic of the 1980s and 1990s, which involved a media outcry about the effects of horror film violence on teenagers able to watch “adult” horror through the unregulated medium of VHS. This panic was intensified by the killing of the toddler James Bulger in 1993 by two teenagers from Merseyside who were supposedly influenced by the film Child’s Play 3. However, such damning commentary about the effects of horror abated by 2001, a shift that is in part due to the Harry Potter phenomenon. Nick Hunter notes that by the time all seven of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter titles had been published in 2008, the series had sold more than 375 million copies in 63 languages. In response, the New York Times introduced a children’s best-sellers list in 2001 after Harry Potter titles had filled the first three spots on their regular best-seller list for more than a year (Hunter 2013, 46). Though Harry Potter is not horror fiction, Rowling’s use of “dark” fantasy appealed to adult readers and critics, and its popularity with these gatekeepers led to the fantastic mode in general becoming more culturally valuable. At the same time, innovations on the small screen were also changing critical perceptions of horror for young adults. Joss Whedon’s genre-defining television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) was playful and self-aware in its use of horror tropes. The show explicitly interrogated the typical gender roles of horror narratives and played with critical assumptions about gendered responses to horror. After Harry Potter and Buffy, there occurs a distinct shift in discourse on horror fiction for young adults away from the centuries-old back and forth about its merits and pitfalls, and toward a more positive association.

  In the twenty-first century, young adult horror fiction not only proliferates in the publishing market, but it is also generally well received by critics both in the academy and in wider culture. No longer ghettoized as category fiction, as Scholastic’s Point Horror series was, young adult horror can be found across publishers and genres. Notable examples include Chris Priestley’s portmanteau horror series Tales of Terror (2007–2009) and the now canonical (and critically acclaimed) Coraline by Neil Gaiman (2002), which has since been adapted into a successful film by Henry Sellick and Laika (2009). Pulp horror also remains popular, exemplified by the gory zombie serials by Darren Shan (Zom-B, published between 2012 and 2016) and Charlie Higson (The Enemy, published between 2009 and 2015). These two series in particular attempt to exceed previous limits of acceptability in terms of gross-out aesthetics and violent content, though critics now seem more sanguine about such transgressions. The Telegraph, a British newspaper at the forefront of the condemnation of Point Horror, favorably reviewed Zom-B as “a clever mix of horror, fantasy and realism” (Chilton 2012). Finally, there is also an emergent trend for young adult weird fiction, inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. Titles include Anthony Horowitz’s Power of Five series (2005–2012) and Celia Rees’s novel The Stone Testament (2007).

  Though much commentary on this recent fiction continues to evoke long-standing ideas about horror as essentially therapeutic or helpful in developing the maturity of young adult readers, the works themselves often resist this pedagogical function. Darren Shan’s first Zom-B novel, for example, offers an unlikely hero protagonist whose moral, social, and physical maturation is cut short when she is turned into a zombie at the close of the book. In subsequent books, it proves difficult to map a developmental schema or moral lesson onto Shan’s foul-mouthed and violent zombie hero protagonist. Likewise, the nihilistic conclusion to Anthony Horowitz’s Power of Five series, Oblivion (2012) refuses the bildungsroman (i.e., coming-of-age) structure of much young adult fiction. As the title suggests, the hero protagonist of this series does not achieve maturation and
mastery in the resolution of the plot, but rather complete oblivion. Finally, young adult readers are beginning to make themselves heard in the continuing dialogue about the suitability and function of horror fiction. In 2014, pupils of the Richmond Park Academy, London, self-published an anthology titled Dare You? that challenges the assumption that adult gatekeepers might know what is best for young adult readers. The collection defies many of the accepted notions of what critics and writers think is appropriate. The stories frequently refuse resolution, and the reader is left feeling disoriented; there are no safe spaces, and barriers are frequently ruptured; shocking body horror erupts at unexpected moments. Like Shan’s Zom-B, there are thoroughly unlikeable personalities who disrupt notions of empathy and conventional morality. In many ways, Dare You? recalls the work of Matthew Lewis in 1796, who, at the age of twenty, produced a shocking, discordant, and fascinating work that proved as popular with young adult readers as it was shocking to adult critics.

  Chloé Germaine Buckley

  See also: Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror; Horror Comics; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Three, Reference Entries: Body Horror; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Cthulhu Mythos; The Monk; Penny Dreadful; Pulp Horror; Zombies.