by Matt Cardin
Benson would certainly have objected to being called misogynistic—and a perhaps unconvincing argument may be made that his tales used and misused women because he recognized that they had been neglected and underutilized as figures of power and terror—but there is no doubt that he would have been delighted that his stories disturbed. Indeed, Benson’s brief preface to The Room in the Tower and Other Stories states that the stories were written to give “some pleasant qualms to their reader” and concludes by stating that “the author therefore fervently wishes his reader a few uncomfortable moments” (Benson 1912, v). The best of E. F. Benson succeeds admirably in providing these.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; “The Great God Pan”; Possession and Exorcism.
Further Reading
Ashley, Mike. 1992. “Blood Brothers: The Supernatural Fiction of A. C., R. H., and E. F. Benson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, 100–113. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.
Benson, E. F. 1912. The Room in the Tower and Other Stories. 1912. London: Mills & Boon.
Joshi, S. T. 2004. “E. F. Benson: Spooks and More Spooks.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 59–65. New York: Hippocampus Press.
BIERCE, AMBROSE (1842–1914?)
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American journalist, satirist, and author of short fiction, including horror fiction. In some ways his life reads like one of his stories. The unresolved circumstances of his death, generally listed as having occurred in 1914 with an added question mark, eerily parallel many of his short stories of horror and suspense.
Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Meigs County, Ohio. The Bierces moved to Kosciusko County, Ohio, where the young Ambrose graduated from high school. At fifteen he embarked on his first journalistic experience as an apprentice at a small Ohio newspaper. By all accounts his family circumstances were not happy, but his parents’ interest in reading offered an advantage that his peers did not enjoy.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Bierce joined the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment in 1861. He saw action, notably at Shiloh in 1862 and the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, where he sustained a head wound. He returned to active duty later that year and was discharged in 1865. His war experiences accounted for a significant outpouring of his fiction, and some critics suggest that the grisly battle scenes he witnessed inspired many of the horrific aspects of his stories. Although he received some acclaim for his war exploits, they ultimately embittered him, paving the way for his most noted nickname, “Bitter Bierce.”
“The Damned Thing”: Hunting the Invisible Horror
“The Damned Thing” (1893) features a common theme in horror fiction: the invisible evil force that bedevils an unsuspecting soul. It opens with eight men gathered in a cabin at night for an inquest into the death of Hugh Morgan, whose mutilated corpse is in the room with them. A man named Harker, a newspaper columnist who witnessed the death, arrives and reads from some of his notes to recount what happened. He says he and Morgan went hunting and encountered a number of eerie events that Morgan attributed to “the damned thing.” Finally, Morgan fired his gun, let out blood-curdling screams, and fell to the ground in convulsive jerks. The assembled jurors claim Harker is insane, and they conclude that Morgan was killed by a mountain lion. The story then becomes a series of extracts from Morgan’s diary, revealing that Morgan had been haunted by an invisible being and was determined to hunt it.
Bierce was accused of plagiarizing the “invisible monster” idea from Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” (1859), and he mounted a vigorous defense of his story’s originality, arguing that, instead of an invisible monster, his story posited a wild animal whose color was invisible. The idea of an invisible color proved significant because of its apparent influence on H. P. Lovecraft in the conception of one of his major stories, “The Colour out of Space.” Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” probably also influenced Lovecraft in the writing of “The Dunwich Horror,” where a fusion of elements from Bierce’s story, O’Brien’s story, and de Maupassant’s “The Horla” may be discerned.
“The Damned Thing” remains a staple of horror fiction and has been anthologized many times. A few adaptations have also appeared on television, including a 2006 episode of the Masters of Horror series directed by Tobe Hooper.
E. Kate Stewart
His marriage to Mary Ellen “Mollie” Day on December 25, 1871 did not exactly bring marital bliss. Although the two apparently loved each other, they spent most of their marriage separated and subsequently divorced in 1904. The union produced three children: sons Day and Leigh and daughter Helen. Day and Leigh died in 1889 and 1901, respectively. Day committed suicide and Leigh, an alcoholic, died from pneumonia.
Before Bierce penned his most well-known stories, he enjoyed a successful journalistic career. He spent 1872 to 1875 in London, where he wrote for the magazine Fun. There he also published his first book, The Fiend’s Delight, in 1873; it bore the penname Dod Grile and contained a collection of his newspaper pieces. On his return to San Francisco, he worked for a variety of newspapers, most notably, perhaps, The Wasp, which he edited from 1881 until 1885. He also wrote frequently for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner; his association with Hearst continued until 1909.
Between 1888 and 1891, Bierce published the stories that secured his fame as a fictionist. In 1896, Hearst sent him to Washington, D.C., so that he could stop legislation that would allow the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad to be excused from repaying loans. Bierce also gained a degree of notoriety because of a poem he had published in the aftermath of the assassination of Kentucky governor William Goebel in 1900. When President William McKinley was assassinated the next year, Bierce and Hearst were accused of inciting the president’s death. In 1909, Bierce published a collected volume of his stories and The Devil’s Dictionary.
In 1913 Bierce traveled to Mexico to join Pancho Villa’s army and observe the Mexican Revolution. His last communication with a friend came by letter in December of that year. He disappeared soon after, and the actual date and circumstances of his death remain unknown. The 1985 novel Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes presents a fictionalized imagining of Bierce’s experiences in Mexico, including his death. It was adapted as a movie of the same title in 1989, with the part of Bierce being played by Gregory Peck.
Ernest Jerome Hopkins in The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce (1970) divides Bierce’s fiction into the following groups: The World of Horror, The World of War, and The World of Tall Tales. Among anthologies of American literature that include Bierce, his war stories are most commonly featured, especially “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) and “Chickamauga” (1891). On rare occasions the horror tale “The Boarded Window” (1891) will appear. Because of the notoriety of his war stories, many readers may not realize that both his horror stories and his tall tales have much to recommend them. Common threads run through each of the types of stories that Bierce produced. He was, for example, a master of visual and other sensory detail. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” for instance, he achieves a striking effect by focusing on the haunting sound of protagonist Peyton Farquhar’s pocket watch as he descends into a dream world.
Although Bierce harbored an antipathy toward literary realism, arguing instead for the value of romanticism, he distinguished himself as a skilled practitioner of realism’s most prominent outgrowth, naturalism, through his talent for creating highly effective descriptions of physical landscapes—a result, perhaps, of his work as a journalist—in which the individual is confronted by mysterious and threatening forces. He also had an interesting habit of creating fictional “authorities” of various kinds for many of his horror tales. For instance, both “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1886) and “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (1891) quote Hali, an apparently Bierce-created philosopher who stresses that “there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some others it vanisheth quite away with the spirit” (Bierce 1910, 308
). Similarly, in “A Psychological Shipwreck” (1879) Bierce presents an “extract” from the fictional “Denneker’s Meditations” containing the haunting passage: “to sundry it is given to be drawn away, and to be apart from the body for a season” (Bierce 1910, 230). It also might not be much of a stretch to view Peyton Farquhar’s experiences in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” as similarly representing an “out-of-body” episode. A common thread connects each of these musings: the idea of the disembodied soul walking the earth. This walking-dead/zombie theme went on to influence contemporary popular culture, and Bierce can validly be identified as one of the forefathers of the modern zombie fiction subgenre, especially via “The Death of Halpin Frayser.”
Bierce’s fiction has worn well with the public, and many of his “out-of-body” horror tales enjoy currency through their subtle influence on such prominent B-horror films as White Zombie (1932) and such prominent television series as The Walking Dead. His most remembered story is unquestionably “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which has been studied extensively for its narrative technique, and which has been assigned to generations of high school students. The story has been adapted several times for film and television, including a 1929 silent film and episodes of both Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1959 and The Twilight Zone in 1964.
E. Kate Stewart
See also: “The Death of Halpin Frayser”; Zombies.
Further Reading
The Ambrose Bierce Project. Accessed June 29, 2016. http://www.ambrosebierce.org/main.html.
Bierce, Ambrose. 1910. The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume III: Can Such Things Be? New York and Washington: Neale. http://www.ambrosebierce.org/cansuchthingsbe.htm#frayser.
Cornes, Judy. 2008. “The Nightmare World of Ambrose Bierce.” In Madness and the Loss of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21–54. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Davidson, Cathy, ed. 1982. Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Morris, Roy, Jr. 1995. Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company. New York: Crown.
O’Connor, Richard. 1967. Ambrose Bierce: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown.
BLACKWOOD, ALGERNON (1869–1951)
Algernon Blackwood was a British writer who first achieved popular success in the early twentieth century with his tales featuring psychic investigator John Silence. As well as producing atmospheric ghost stories, children’s fiction, plays, and novels that are usually distinguished by a heavy strain of mysticism, many of Blackwood’s stories have had an enduring influence on subsequent horror fiction. Notable examples include “The Wendigo” and, particularly, “The Willows.”
“The Wendigo”: A Frolic in the Fiery Heights
Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” (1910), whose title refers to the wendigo of Algonquin folklore, is an example of what Margaret Atwood identifies as a Canadian genre, “Death by Bushing,” in which characters are overwhelmed by isolation in the wilderness to the point of insanity.
The narrative is presented as an anecdotal account by a Scottish doctor of a terrifying incident experienced by a hunting party in the Canadian backwoods. One of the party’s guides, Défago, succumbs to a maniacal wanderlust, personified in the form of the demonic wendigo. He disappears, before returning (in body only) from what is hinted to be a grotesque frolic in the sky, at heights so vast they burn. Distilling European anxieties in the colonial frontier, the focus of the story’s horror is almost entirely on Défago’s absorption by the illimitable wilderness, embodied by the wendigo. When Défago eventually returns to camp, his personality seems to be entirely absent; and this, more than his hideously deformed, charred feet, inspires the horror of his companions.
The folkloric myth of the wendigo (or “windigo”) has been used in works as diverse as Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983). Thanks in no small part to Blackwood’s story, it is now a definite, if minor, horror trope. Two notable iterations in horror cinema are director Larry Fessenden’s The Wendigo (2001) and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999). In the latter, the notion of “wendigo psychosis” provides an ambiguously supernatural overtone to an incident of cannibalism in the old West. The 2015 survival horror computer game Until Dawn is set in “Blackwood Pines Lodge” at the base of “Blackwood Mountain” in Canada and features the wendigo as the principal antagonist.
James Machin
Born in the southeastern county of Kent, England, Blackwood experienced a childhood marked by stifling religiosity at odds with his own inclinations. He was raised in a household dominated by his father’s sternly evangelical Christianity and then educated by similarly severe schoolmasters at the Moravian School in the Black Forest, Germany. He rebelled through clandestine investigations into Buddhism and Theosophy (he would later briefly become a member of a late nineteenth-century occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) and also through his enthusiasm for the natural world. He would later fictionalize his German education in the story “Secret Worship” (1908), where the protagonist remembers of his school days that he found solace and reprieve from the grimly repressive atmosphere by gazing through “the narrow slit windows with the vistas of enticing field and forest beyond” (Blackwood 1998, 145).
Blackwood led an itinerant early life that included spells living in the United States and Canada, detailed in his lively memoir Episodes Before Thirty (1923). By the time of the publication of his first book, The Empty House, at the age of thirty-seven, Blackwood had been a farmer, gold prospector, hotel manager, artist’s model, and journalist for the New York Times. His passion for travel and, especially, for the wilderness led to adventures in the wild expanses of the American north, Egypt, and the Swiss Alps. The tensions between domesticity and the wild, humanity and nature, and between traditional Christianity and pantheism resonate throughout his work, where they are regularly amplified into overt horror.
The most celebrated example of this is “The Willows” (1907), possibly the most widely anthologized of Blackwood’s stories, and praised by H. P. Lovecraft as a text in which “art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development” (Lovecraft 2012, 88). If not representative of Blackwood’s variegated output, it is perhaps the story in which Blackwood’s powers are most expertly and powerfully deployed, particularly his consummate skill in the inexorable ramping up of weird atmosphere through incremental, barely noticeable turns of the screw. Beginning as a genteel travelogue chronicling the months-long canoe trip of two men along the Danube, Blackwood’s story subtly strips away the ordinary and commonplace from the engulfing landscape until, by its climax, the protagonists seem entirely at the mercy of ambiguous supernatural forces threatening their survival.
This ambivalence toward the natural world as a place equally immanent with beauty and dread is also connected with another anxiety regularly evident in Blackwood’s horror fiction: the loss of personality or the absorption of the individual into the illimitable wilderness. The colonial frontier was for Blackwood, as it was for the early European settlers, a threatening, predatory entity as much as a liberating, emancipating blank canvas upon which to paint a new life. In “The Wendigo” (1910), the eponymous forest spirit of Algonquian folklore is not simply a physical threat to a small hunting party in the Canadian backwoods. The French-Canadian guide, Défago, is abducted by the monstrous and nebulous entity, and when he reappears it is in body only; his personality has been expunged. Although wildly different in tone, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912) is a further iteration of this same neurosis. In it, David Bittacy is first obsessed, then ultimately absorbed by the collective consciousness of the forest encircling his home. Bittacy’s pantheism is framed in opposition to his wife’s Christianity, but, despite Blackwood’s Buddhist sympathies, the process of Bittacy’s loss of self and ego is cast as terrifying rather than liberating. Despite the gentle, almost ethereal unfolding of the tale, the denouement is shattering.
This ambivalence provides a regular balance t
o the more visionary flights of mystical yearning of the protagonist O’Malley in the novel The Centaur (1911). It is as much an exposition as a narrative, regularly quoting great swathes of Gustav Fechner and William James, and promulgating something approaching a Gaia hypothesis of sentient planethood through the experiences of O’Malley (clearly a proxy for Blackwood himself). O’Malley travels to the Caucasus in the company of an Urmensch; a “Cosmic Being,” both premodern and more highly developed than the teeming human masses. Again, the risk O’Malley exposes himself to is the loss of personality. The price of enlightenment and connection with the Earth’s superconsciousness is engulfment: “Complete surrender would involve somehow a disintegration, a dissociation of his personality that carried with it the loss of personal identity” (Blackwood 1912, 6). Throughout the novel, O’Malley oscillates between feeling an unbearable longing to achieve “genuine cosmic consciousness” and an equally acute dread of the implications of its attainment; for “this, surely, was the inner catastrophe that he dreaded, the radical internal dislocation of his personality” (Blackwood 2012, 149–150). As so often in Blackwood’s writing, the threat to O’Malley is one of absorption and amalgamation within a greater, overwhelming whole, rather than physical threat.