Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Henriette Thune. 2011. “Parallel Worlds of Possible Meetings in Let the Right One In.” Word and Image, 27, no. 1: 2–14.

  Costorphine, Kevin. 2010. “Panic on the Streets of Stockholm: Sub/urban Alienation in the Novels of John Ajvide Lindqvist.” In The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries, edited by Eoghain Hamilton, 137–144. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

  ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832–1888)

  Louisa May Alcott was the renowned writer of The Little Women Trilogy (1868–1886), and her Gothic and sensation fictions were often pseudonymous, anonymous, or lost. Her children’s fiction (Jo March’s tabloid fiction in Little Women), correspondence, journals, and scholars occasionally referenced her shadow oeuvre of thrillers before their recovery by Madeline Stern in six volumes (1975–1993). As the daughter of Bronson Alcott, she was connected to the Transcendentalist movement and progressive educational initiatives from birth, with her circle of family friends including the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

  Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy recovered Alcott’s unpublished first novel The Inheritance (1849, 1997), with Gothic landscapes and a secret family history influenced by Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Brontë. Alcott published sentimental yet sensational tales in 1850s Boston weeklies, but her 1860s thriller career involved two cheap publishing empires, Frank Leslie’s and Elliot, Thomes, & Talbot. Three different Leslie publications ran at least twenty-seven original Alcott tales (1863–1870), beginning with prizewinner “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” (1863, 1975) about a U.S. femme fatale marrying a Cuban planter to aid her revenge against her U.S. ex-fiancé. Another confidence woman tale, “V. V.” (1865, 1976), is an early detective fiction and initiated Alcott’s run with Elliott, Thomes, & Talbot (1865–1867). That firm published several poems and six novelettes (four as A. M. Barnard and two relatively upbeat Gothics with her own name), including her final two con artist narratives. These con narratives exhibit Alcott’s career-long interests in gender struggles, often defined in terms of mastery and slavery, as well as theatricality and masquerade, which threaten family structure in “Pauline’s” and “V. V.” but prove liberating for characters marginalized by gender and/or class hierarchy in “Behind a Mask” (1866, 1975) and “The Mysterious Key” (1867, 1975).

  Alcott’s thrillers invoke the supernatural, the Orientalist, and drugged states. “The Abbot’s Ghost” (1867, 1975), a late Barnard tale, is a Christmas ghost story with her usual theme of secret family history. “Lost in a Pyramid” (1869, 1998), a late Leslie work rediscovered by Dominic Montserrat, expands upon Théophile Gautier with a sorceress-mummy’s cursed flower seeds, and holds the distinction of being one of the earliest stories about defilers of an Egyptian tomb being hounded by a curse. Her anonymous novel A Modern Mephistopheles (1877) reprises Faustian bargains, foreign drugs, and moral or physical confinement from Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Alcott’s “A Whisper in the Dark” (1863, 1976) and A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866, 1995), a novel rejected by Elliott and recovered by Kent Bicknell. Before her death, Alcott agreed to reprint (1889) under her own name Mephistopheles and “Whisper.” Alcott’s parallel oeuvre illustrates supernatural and sensational themes and imagery informing nineteenth-century sentimental literature as well as dilemmas of female authorship in a patriarchal literary market.

  Alcott suffered from ill health for many years, and she died of a stroke in Boston at the age of fifty-five. She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, near Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and many other notable U.S. writers in the section of the cemetery now known as Authors’ Ridge.

  Bob Hodges

  See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Haunted House or Castle; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Mummies.

  Further Reading

  Eiselein, Gregory, and Anne Phillips, eds. 2001. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

  Porter, Nancy, and Harriet Reisen, eds. 2008–2016. Alcott Project. www.alcottfilm.com.

  Smith, Gail. 1995. “Who Was That Masked Woman? Gender and Form in Alcott’s Confidence Stories.” In American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Julie Brown, 45–59. New York: Garland.

  Stern, Madeline. 1995. Introduction to Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

  ALONE WITH THE HORRORS

  Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961–1991 was published in 1993 by Arkham House. It is a revision and expansion of Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell (1987) and was fittingly published by the firm that issued Campbell’s first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), when he was a teenager. The selection of stories is Campbell’s own, and the stories are dated by year. These dates do not indicate date of publication but date of composition. Campbell has kept a scrupulous record of the writing, publication, and translation of his work. Campbell does not include a story for every year of his literary career since 1961; both early in his career and later on, when he turned his attention to writing novels, he wrote few or no short stories; in this volume, there are no stories for the years 1962–1965, 1969–1972, 1981–1982, and 1988–1990.

  The volume is a scintillating assemblage of some of the best weird fiction written during the years it covers. “Cold Print” (1966) constitutes Campbell’s ultimate refinement of his adaptation of motifs borrowed from the work of H. P. Lovecraft, which was the focus of the juvenile pastiches of his first volume. Campbell reprints several stories from his second—and, arguably, best—story collection, Demons by Daylight (1973), which embody his distinctive melding of dream imagery, sexuality, and luminous prose.

  A full eight stories are taken from Dark Companions (1982), in which Campbell’s exposition of urban horror reaches its pinnacle. “Mackintosh Willy” (1977), for example, finds terror in a homeless person who appears to live in a bus shelter and is mercilessly tormented by two adolescent boys—but they pay for their cruelty when Mackintosh Willy revives from the dead to exact vengeance. “The Depths” (1978) features a prototypical mingling of dream and reality, where a writer discovers that if he doesn’t write down the horrible nightmares he suffers, the events they depict occur in the real world.

  Later stories feature grim and sardonic humor (“Seeing the World” [1983], in which a couple who have returned from an overseas trip are revealed to be zombies); a focus on aberrant psychological states (“Boiled Alive” [1986], where a man cannot distinguish between the real world and the pseudo-reality of film); and a clever use of modern technology to incite terror (“End of the Line” [1991], in which a telemarketer may be receiving calls from his deceased ex-wife and child).

  Overall, Alone with the Horrors includes the full range of Campbell’s short fiction and exhibits the wide-ranging imagination, the relentless focus on aberrant psychological states, and the manipulation of evocative, smooth prose that distinguish Campbell’s work in both the novel and the short story. In 1994 the book was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.

  S. T. Joshi

  See also: Campbell, Ramsey; “Mackintosh Willy”; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Campbell, Ramsey, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and S. T. Joshi. 1995. The Core of Ramsey Campbell: A Bibliography & Reader’s Guide. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.

  Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

  ALRAUNE

  Alraune is the second novel in a loose trilogy that focuses on the character of Frank Braun, a thinly veiled idealization of its author, Hanns Heinz Ewers. Alraune was originally published in Ewers’s native Germany in 1911, and it went on to become the most successful book of his career. S. Guy Endore’s original English translation first appeared in 1929, published by the John Day Company of New York in an illustrated edition with drawings by the acclaimed artist of the grotesque, Mahlo
n Blaine.

  Named after the novel’s main character, Alraune is a play on the legend of the mandrake root (Alraune is German for mandrake) that was said to grow from the spilt semen of a hanged man at the foot of the gallows tree. In the novel, Braun, buried under gambling debts, retreats to the secluded home of his uncle Ten Brinken, a wealthy biologist and collector of arcana and oddities. Among this collection is a mandragora root. Braun appeals to his uncle’s prideful and curious temperament by suggesting that he could be the first scientist in history to create a living Alraune-creature, the first to, as Braun phrases it, “make truth out of the old lie” (Ewers 1929, 58). The requirements for the task were the seed of a condemned criminal and a prostitute who would serve the Mother Earth role in the myth. Braun posits that “earth is also the eternal prostitute. Does she not give herself to all, freely?” (59).

  Thus was spawned Alraune. Her diabolical conception resulted in her body being poisonous, her soul evil. Frank Braun returns, after further travel and adventures, to find that the “project” has matured into a woman. In keeping with Ewers’s fascination with the Lilith archetype of the demonic or otherworldly female, Alraune is practically irresistible to men, whose blood is enflamed by her presence. This, naturally, is a disastrous attraction, as Alraune leaves a string of corpses in her wake before love itself leads to her ultimate destruction.

  The double current of Alraune herself, that of Eros and Thanatos, not only makes for a stimulating novel, but it also resonates with the structure of the classical mandragora myth, which was said to bring boons to one person and disaster to another. Alraune’s poisonous flesh and callous soul give the novel something of a Sadean flavor (that is, reminiscent of the notorious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writer and libertine the Marquis de Sade), while its embrace of blasphemy, individualism, and the Gothic arguably qualifies the book an example of Germany’s famous Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) literary movement from the latter half of the eighteenth century.

  While the creation of life by artificial means links Alraune directly to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it lacks some of the philosophical integrity of its predecessor. Where Victor Frankenstein strove for a Promethean leap in human abilities and comprehensions of life, Ewers’s protagonists seem to approach the endeavor with a certain mouth-watering zeal for sin for sin’s sake. The theme of parental responsibility, which served as Frankenstein’s moral anchor, tends more to float in Alraune like textual driftwood. The novel’s substance also bears the clear marks of the author’s interest in the question of genetics and environment, or alternately, blood and soil.

  Alraune was filmed no fewer than five times, beginning with three silent versions. It was also loosely adapted as a German comic book between 1998 and 2004. The novel itself was brought back into print in the twenty-first century in a new translation by Joe E. Bandel, and the original English translation by Endore was also given a new edition.

  Richard Gavin

  See also: Ewers, Hanns Heinz.

  Further Reading

  Ashkenazi, Ofer. 2012. “Assimilating the Shrew: Alraune and the Discussion of Biological Difference in Weimar Horror Film.” In Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity, 77–110. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  Ball, Jerry L. 1996. “Alraune.” Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature 1–2.

  Ewers, Hanns Heinz. [1929] 2013. Alraune. Translated by S. Guy Endore. London: Birchgrove Press.

  Koger, Grove. 2007. “Hanns Heinz Ewers.” Guide to Literary Masters and Their Works 1. Salem, MA: Salem Press.

  ANCESTRAL CURSE

  Curses are forms of magical thinking that give intercessionary power to gods and spirits. An ancestral or family curse is one that accompanies a family and causes misfortune across multiple generations.

  Many ancient cultures have ritual forms of curses on rivals and enemies, or which are used to protect family and property, or preserve memory. Assyrian memorial stones laud the powerful, but condemn those who dishonor their name. Egyptian scribes formalized “execration texts” in which the names of the enemies of the pharaoh were written on clay pots and smashed. These “threat formulas” could also be addressed to personal enemies. In the Greco-Roman tradition, defixiones, or curse tablets, appealed to the infernal gods or spirits with messages written on thin lead sheets that were then rolled and buried (sometimes in graves). In Greece, many shadowed legal disputes. Roman curses could be more personal and were composed in an obscure, occult language designed to address the gods in their own language. The Semitic god of the Old Testament issued regular curses that traveled down family lines, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5) for disobeying the jealous god. There is rich evidence of curses in northern tribes, particularly in Gaelic and Icelandic traditions.

  Highly formalized, curses promise oblivion to the enemy, usually by ending the family line. “May his name and his seed disappear in the land,” reads one Assyrian curse on a memorial stele (Holloway 2014). The content of curses has remained remarkably consistent across millennia and cultures. Curses are often paired with “lucks,” talismans that bring good fortune, countermagics that work to block the hexes of enemies. This is the purpose of the evil eye: it neutralizes the threat by cursing those who curse first. Curses are also recursive, in that it has long been feared that to come into contact with one is to become bound to its logic and suffer its consequences.

  Curses are associated with premodern thought, the kind of superstitious belief that Enlightenment thinkers believed a rational and scientific worldview would eradicate. To Victorian anthropologists, belief in curses was a sign of “primitive” thought. Yet just as Gothic literature emerged in the eighteenth century, so did a revamped idea of the family or ancestral curse. The Gothic and family curses are linked from the first avowed Gothic romance, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole’s fiction concerns the perversion of the proper patriarchal line, and the usurper Manfred meets his end in accord with an ancestral curse. This plot was repeated across many key early Gothic novels, from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

  In response to the social and economic transformations of eighteenth-century England, a new interest in genealogy was common. Families sought legitimacy and security by digging for aristocratic or even royal roots (the Walpoles being a prime example). Hence, alongside the Gothic, stories of ancestral lucks and curses became a new kind of folklore, the stories commonly told and widely known.

  Family curse stories might be typified by the Cowdray Curse, in which the nobleman Sir Anthony Browne was rewarded for his loyalty to Henry VIII by the gift of lands during the dissolution of the monasteries. Browne’s family was cursed by a monk cast out at the dissolution. Over the centuries, several disasters among the descendants culminated in the extinguishing of the line in 1793. The most notorious family curse concerned the Tichbornes. The luck of the ancient family was said to depend on the annual payment of a dole to the local poor. When the family discontinued the Tichborne Dole in 1796, the curse was activated. The heir to the baronetcy was lost at sea in 1854; ten years later a man in Australia declared himself the lost baronet. The “Tichborne Claimant” dragged the family through the courts at vast expense and much public scandal in two trials in the 1870s. The Tichbornes restored the dole, but the family was ruined.

  Many fictional family sagas followed patterns of ancestral curses. Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1818) typified the ubiquity of clan curses in the Scottish imagination and his use of these plots, tinged with the supernatural, were hugely influential. The Gothic or horror version was common to tales published by Blackwood’s Magazine. The anonymity of Blackwood stories such as “The Curse” (1832) left a shivery boundary of uncertainty as to the truth status of these narratives. Soon, family curses bled into mainstream fiction, such as the doom that haunts the Dedlock family in Charles Dickens’s Bleak Hou
se (1853). The sensation fiction boom of the 1860s was dominated by melodramas driven by family secrets and ancestral shame, a device often used by writers like Ellen Wood and Wilkie Collins. By the late nineteenth century, biological determinism colored the imagination of family inheritance. The curse in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) turns out not to be a spectral dog but the evolutionary taint of criminality in the family blood.

  Another key element of curse stories is that they are often a kind of exercise of primitive retributive justice of the weak against the strong. They are populated by monks, shepherds, the itinerant, and the dispossessed who curse feudal power, challenging its absolute rights with the promise of supernatural retribution. This class resentment figured strongly in the case of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, the wealthy aristocrat who funded years of excavation in Egypt only to die six weeks after the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1923. The recursive logic of “Tut’s Curse” allegedly killed many associated with the opening, although such a curse had no basis in ancient Egyptian belief. The story fitted into the Western tradition of ancestral curses perfectly, however. The pattern of revenge against transgression in Tut’s Curse is the model for horror films from The Mummy (1932) all the way to Drag Me to Hell (2009).

  Curses are effective in horror fiction and film because they evoke this premodern underpinning of nasty and vengeful supernatural agencies, but also because they exist in the shadowy space of rumor, hovering between fact and fiction, the perfect fodder for sensational tabloid reportage. A curse can crawl out of a museum relic, or rest with a mummy, or rise up out of the floors of a house imbued with a hidden, traumatic history. The cursed house is central to the American Gothic from Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) or Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1977). Magical thinking still assigns misfortune, poverty, illness, and death to purposive malignant forces: horror fiction simply meets us halfway to disavowed belief.