Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Further Reading

  Appleyard, J. A. 1991. Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Bettelheim, Bruno. 1976. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Thames and Hudson.

  Chilton, Martin. 2012. “Zom-B by Darren Shan, Review.” The Telegraph, September 28, 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/children_sbookreviews/9568888/Zom-B-by-Darren-Shan-review.html.

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1936. Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism. Edited by Thomas M. Raysor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

  Hunter, Nick. 2013. Popular Culture: 2000 and Beyond. London: Raintree.

  Lamb, Charles. [1823] 1835. Essays of Elia [Both Series]. Paris: Baudry’s European Library.

  McCarron, Kevin. 2001. “Point Horror and the Point of Horror.” In Frightening Fiction, edited by Kimberley Reynolds, Geraldine Brennan, and Kevin McCarron, 19–52. London and New York: Continuum.

  Pulliam, June. 2014. Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Rees, Celia. 2012. “Interview about a Vampire and Other Gothic Topics.” The History Girls Blog, October 18. http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/interview-about-vampire-and-other.html.

  Reynolds, Kimberley. 2001. “Introduction.” In Frightening Fiction, edited by Kimberley Reynolds, Geraldine Brennan, and Kevin McCarron, 1–18. London and New York: Continuum.

  Ruth, Greg. 2014. “Why Horror Is Good for You (and Even Better for Your Kids).” Tor.com, May 29. http://www.tor.com/2014/05/29/why-horror-is-good-for-you-and-even-better-for-your-kids.

  Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1990. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  Springhall, John. 1994. “‘Pernicious Reading’? ‘The Penny Dreadful’ as Scapegoat for Late-Victorian Juvenile Crime.” Victorian Periodicals Review 27, no. 4: 326–349.

  Townshend, Dale. 2008. “The Haunted Nursery: 1764–1830.” In The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, edited by Roderick McGillis, Karen Coats, and Anna Jackson, 15–38. London: Routledge.

  Part Three:

  Reference Entries

  (Authors, Works, and

  Specialized Topics)

  A

  AICKMAN, ROBERT (1914–1981)

  Robert Fordyce Aickman was a British writer of fiction and nonfiction, best known for his supernatural “strange” tales. His interests were many and various: he was a noted conservationist, a champion of the restoration of the British canal system; he loved to travel; he was a passionate patron of the arts; and he was a lifelong believer in ghosts and the paranormal, an advocate and theorist of supernatural literature, as well as a writer of it.

  “The Cicerones”: Numinous Horror

  “The Cicerones” is one of Aickman’s most memorable tales, and also one of his shortest. It was first collected in Sub Rosa. It also appeared in The Seventh Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1971), which Aickman edited, and in the posthumous compilation The Unsettled Dust. It is apparently based on something that actually happened to Aickman. The title is an old term for a city guide.

  John Trant, a bachelor approaching middle age, visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in Belgium, entering at almost exactly 11:30 a.m., anticipating the midday closure of the building. He finds the cathedral surprisingly empty. Wandering through the building, he has a series of uncanny encounters with young men and strange children, the cicerones of the title, who show him the cathedral’s morbid paintings of monsters and martyrs. At the story’s end, Trant is penned in by the cicerones, down in the cathedral’s crypt. The clock then strikes twelve, and the cicerones close in on him and begin to sing. The story derives its disconcerting power from linking the gruesome ends of the martyrs in the paintings with Trant’s own fate, though all is implicit, and the story ends in ambiguity.

  “The Cicerones” brings together a number of key Aickman themes, including travelers who, through ignorance or misfortune, stray across a boundary into some strange place, and ordinary time coming to a standstill in the face of the strange. It is also imbued with a strong sense of the numinous, that strong religious or spiritual quality that indicates or suggests the presence of a divinity. Here, though, as in other Aickman tales, this sense is turned to horror. A 2002 short film directed by Jeremy Dyson and starring Mark Gatiss was based on the story.

  Timothy J. Jarvis

  Aickman was born just before World War I (1914–1918). He would never quite feel that he “fitted in” in the modern world, feeling instead that he rightly belonged to a lost era of gentility that the war had ended forever. He had a fraught upbringing. His parents were unsuited to each other, and they fought continuously. He survived his early years by taking refuge in books, his imagination, and the supernatural, which provided him with a sense of profound communion. Aickman also had a Gothic family inheritance: Richard Marsh, a popular author who was most famous for the horror novel The Beetle, was his grandfather.

  After World War II, Aickman met the author Elizabeth Jane Howard through his conservation work, and the two had an affair. Howard encouraged Aickman to write his first ghost stories, and they published a volume together in 1951, We Are for the Dark. From that point on, Aickman concentrated more and more on his writing. In 1964, he published a novel, The Late Breakfasters, and a collection of ghost stories, Dark Entries. He also began editing the Fontana series Great Ghost Stories.

  Over the next sixteen years, Aickman published a volume of autobiography, The Attempted Rescue (1966), and six more volumes of supernatural tales. He also received recognition for his writing, winning a World Fantasy Award for the story “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” in 1975 and a British Fantasy Award for his short story “The Stains” in 1980.

  Very few of Aickman’s supernatural tales contain anything like a conventional haunting. In fact, though We Are for the Dark was subtitled “Six Ghost Stories,” he later adopted, for the subtitle of his 1968 collection Sub Rosa, “Strange Stories.” And he would use the term “strange” to describe his work throughout the remainder of his life. The term has become synonymous with the Aickmanesque story.

  In various critical writings, Aickman outlines a unique philosophy of the supernatural tale and a singular mode of composition. Aickman had a strong interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, which may well have stemmed from therapy undergone to make sense of the damage his childhood did him. He believed in Freud’s notion that only one-tenth of the mind is conscious, and that the remaining nine-tenths is unconscious. Because he felt the conscious one-tenth, the intellect, to be responsible for the ills of modernity, he thought it important to get in contact with the other nine-tenths. Of all literature, he considered the ghost story best equipped to do this. But though he believed in the supernatural, he didn’t think that the “ghost” in a ghost story had to be an actual revenant, though it did have to be, in Freudian terms, a return of the repressed, something rising up from the unconscious mind.

  Aickman had particular ideas about the compositional strategies that might be used to draw out the submerged nine-tenths of the mind. He felt that the best ghost stories are close to poetry in that they are only partly constructions of the conscious mind. He wrote that his most successful tales came to him in a half-trance. Aickman’s strange stories, then, arising from the unconscious, are akin to dreams. And they work because they are dream-like; though they have no surface logic, they hang together because they are the emanations of Aickman’s psyche and have a clear symbolic skeleton. The reader cannot shake the idea that there might be solutions to their puzzles. Of course, as is often remarked, there is nothing duller than someone relaying a dream, and sometimes Aickman’s stories miss their mark. But when they do work they are as strange and off-kilter as the oddest dreams, as chilling as the worst nightmares. And, like dreams, they are often startling in their frankness and grotesque
ry, comical in their bizarreness, melancholy in their affect, and chilling in their insinuation. Aickman’s novel The Late Breakfasters and his posthumously published novella The Model (1987) take the same themes and techniques, and develop them in different modes—satire in the case of The Late Breakfasters and magical realism in the case of The Model.

  In the autumn of 1980, Aickman became ill with cancer. He refused conventional treatment, choosing instead to consult a homeopathic physician. Following a brief illness, he died in London’s Royal Homeopathic Hospital on February 26, 1981.

  Since Aickman’s death, his reputation as one of the most significant British writers of supernatural short fiction of the late twentieth century has grown. His influence can be seen in the work of writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Joel Lane, Reggie Oliver, and M. John Harrison. His stories have been adapted for television. He has also influenced comedy: the bizarre and unsettling British troupe called the League of Gentlemen took much from Aickman’s tales. His work has been reprinted. And a new generation of writers has been influenced by him: 2015 saw the publication of an anthology, Aickman’s Heirs, edited by Simon Strantzas, which contains a number of British, U.S., and Canadian authors, including Lisa Tuttle, writing stories of Aickmanesque strangeness.

  Timothy J. Jarvis

  See also: Dreams and Nightmares; “Ringing the Changes”; Surrealism; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Crawford, Gary William. 2011. Robert Aickman: An Introduction. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash Tree Press. Kindle edition.

  Crawford, Gary William. 2012. Insufficient Answers: Essays on Robert Aickman. Baton Rouge: Gothic Press.

  Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Russell, R. B., and Rosalie Parker. 2015. Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales. Leyburn, North Yorkshire, UK: DVD. Tartarus Press.

  Strantzas, Simon, ed. 2015. Aickman’s Heirs. Pickering, ON, Canada: Undertow Publications.

  AINSWORTH, WILLIAM HARRISON (1805–1882)

  William Harrison Ainsworth was a popular English novelist who, though trained in law, chose to write creatively, specializing in historical romances. An immensely prolific writer, he published forty novels over a span of five decades, many of which contained elements of horror. In the words of H. P. Lovecraft, Ainsworth’s “romantic novels teem with the eerie and gruesome” (Lovecraft 2012, 46).

  His early stories often involved crime and criminals, and made use of such Gothic motifs as thwarted heirs, secret passages, ruined edifices, burial vaults, corpses, and ghosts, the latter genuine as well as rationalized. His first success, Rookwood (1834), is ramshackle in plotting and construction but utilizes all of these devices, as well as a legend involving the fall of a tree branch leading to a death; it describes a dispute over an inheritance and the legitimacy of an heir. (There are, additionally, false identities, gypsies, and excessive praise of highwaymen, particularly the infamous Dick Turpin, as the story gradually resolves itself in favor of the legitimate claimant.) Though not supernatural, Jack Sheppard (1839) is more genuinely horrific, describing the monstrously villainous thieftaker (someone hired to capture criminals) and thief Jonathan Wild (1682?–1725) and his role in the creation, persecution, and ultimate destruction of the titular criminal (1702–1724). Although it proved popular with readers, Jack Sheppard reveals problems that were increasingly to affect Ainsworth’s prose, specifically weak characterizations and narrative padding. Even allowing for the market, the latter is egregious.

  Ainsworth’s next significant successes were a trio of overtly historical novels—The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), and Old St. Paul’s (1841)—whose turgid plots combined with historical events proved initially popular with contemporaries. These, too, often contained horrific material, as in the latter’s depiction of the spread of the black plague and the Great Fire of 1666; their success permitted Ainsworth to establish his own magazine (Ainsworth’s Magazine, 1842–1854). He thus serialized Windsor Castle (July 1842–June 1843), a historical romance describing the events around Henry VIII’s courtship of Anne Boleyn; a strong Gothic element involves the presence of the supernatural Herne the Hunter, who haunts Windsor Forest, who leads ghostly hunts through the forest, and whose origins are variously given. Windsor Castle proved very popular, not because of the uninspired retelling of the historical narrative, but because of Herne, who is more vital and convincing than the humans surrounding him.

  Following this relatively promising beginning, Ainsworth’s fortunes began a long, slow, and sad decline. His once large readership dwindled, as did his income, and where he was once considered almost Charles Dickens’s equal, he gradually became no more than another impoverished second-rater, though it would be inaccurate and unfair to refer to him as a hack, as he undoubtedly cared about his writing. Late in his life, the City of Manchester honored him for his writings featuring the history of that city, but the accolades did not include financial security, and he died shortly thereafter. His obituaries tended to be dismissive and sometimes included erroneous material.

  Though specialists and scholars still occasionally read Ainsworth and note that his fiction often possesses narrative drive, he is unlikely to be rediscovered by later audiences. The general academic consensus is that he was neither an innovator nor particularly talented as a writer or a creator of character, and that he provided a popular readership with historical novels featuring familiar and generally uninspired horrific devices. Still, there are some who appreciate his fleeting and faded charms. Rosemary Mitchell, a British scholar of Victorian literature and history, writes that Ainsworth may well have been forgotten because his “attraction was to the gothic historical, to the black and the bloody, to haunted history,” which made his writings serve in effect as “the dark side of those progressive Victorians we all know about, with their trains and telegraphs, their technological advances and their scientific discoveries, their liberal politics and their enlightened skepticism.” She characterizes Ainsworth as a “precursor of [legendary Hollywood director and producer] Cecil B. DeMille and [best-selling author of The Da Vinci Code] Dan Brown, a master of the spectacle and the sinister, king of the colourful and the clichéd” (Mitchell 2011).

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition.

  Further Reading

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

  Mitchell, Rosemary. 2011. “‘What a Brain Must Mine Be!’: The Strange Historical Romances of William Harrison Ainsworth.” Open Letters Monthly, August 1. http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/what-a-brain-must-mine-be-the-strange-historical-romances-of-william-harrison-ainsworth.

  Schroeder, Natalie. 1985. “William Harrison Ainsworth.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 1, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler, 187–194. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  AJVIDE LINDQVIST, JOHN (1968–)

  Of Algerian descent, horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist is popularly referred to as Sweden’s answer to Stephen King, an appropriate soubriquet given the author’s interest in childhood and the decidedly supernatural bent of his fiction. Ajvide Lindqvist is notable for having produced one of the most original vampire novels of the twenty-first century, but also because he is one of a very few number of horror auteurs to have broken into the international market without writing in English. His novels are transnational enough to appeal to a wider public, yet remain decidedly Swedish in references and subject matter.

  Ajvide Lindqvist was born in Blackeberg, Sweden. He rose to fame with his first and, to date, most famous novel, Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In, published in his home country in 2004 and translated into English in 2007. The novel was made into a successful Swedish film in 2008 and was remade for the American mark
et in 2010. Thematically, his writings have thus far covered, and updated, traditional horror figures such as the vampire (lonely and sympathetic in Let the Right One In), the zombie (an empty, post-traumatic shell of her/his former self in Hanteringen av odöda / Handling the Undead [2005; 2009]), and the ghost (capable of physically possessing the living in Människohamn / Harbour [2008; 2010]). But Ajvide Lindqvist has also conjured up less familiar scenarios, such as those of Lilla stjärna / Little Star (2010; 2011), in which a psychic child is capable of sucking the life out of humans, and of the surreal mood pieces collected in Let the Old Dreams Die (2010), a translation of Pappersväggar (2006) that included the story “Låt de gamla drömmarna dö” / “Let the Old Dreams Die” (2011). In the latter, Oskar and Eli from Let the Right One In make a brief reappearance.

  One of the things that separates Ajvide Lindqvist from other contemporary authors is the allegorical quality of his writings, which work narratively as well as more metaphorically. This personal trait is particularly obvious in his last novel to be translated to English, I Am behind You (2017; published in Swedish as Himmelstrand in 2014), where an apocalyptic scenario serves as an excuse to probe the dark recesses of human despair. Similarly, in Harbour, what starts off as a fairly standard haunting turns into a reflection on Sweden’s historical connection to the sea.

  Xavier Aldana Reyes

  See also: Vampires; Zombies.

  Further Reading

  Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “Post-Millennial Horror, 2000–16.” In Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, 189–214. London: British Library Publishing.