Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Though much of his work was futuristic, he classified his stories and novels—other than Fahrenheit 451—as fantasy rather than science fiction, because they were about things that could not happen instead of things that might possibly happen. He likened science fiction to using a mirror to slay Medusa: though the stories seemed to be looking into the future, they were actually a way to explore contemporary issues. Despite his reputation as a visionary, Bradbury was a notorious technophobe, refusing to fly for most of his life and never learning to drive a car.

  Even when Bradbury worked in other genres and forms, horror and horrific images continued to play an important part in his stories and novels throughout his career. For example, in the futuristic story “The Veldt,” parents fall prey to their children’s imagination, and “The Banshee,” inspired by his difficult experiences working on Moby Dick, pits a John Huston-like character against the traditional Irish title creature. During the early 1950s, more than two dozen of his short stories were adapted for EC Comics magazines, including Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear. During the same period, his stories also became installments of radio dramas and television anthology series, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, where his story “I Sing the Body Electric” was adapted as the show’s 100th episode. Dozens of additional short films, television episodes, and movies have been adapted from his stories. In the 1980s he developed The Ray Bradbury Theater, a television series for HBO and, later, the USA Network, for which he adapted sixty-five of his stories. The series ran from 1986 until 1992.

  Recognition for his achievements came early in his career. He won the O. Henry Prize for “The Homecoming” in 1947 and was a finalist for “Powerhouse” in 1948. In 1954, on the strength of Fahrenheit 451, the National Institute of Arts and Letters honored him for “his contributions to American literature.” He received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000, was awarded a National Medal of Art by President George W. Bush in 2004, was made Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and was honored with Lifetime Achievement awards by the Horror Writers Association, the World Fantasy Convention, and the PEN Center USA West. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright and won an Emmy Award for his teleplay adaptation of his short novel The Halloween Tree, about the death-like Mr. Moundshroud leading a group of American Midwestern children on a journey through history to discover the meaning of Halloween. In 2007 Bradbury received a special citation by the Pulitzer Prize jury for his “distinguished, prolific, and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” The same year, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies was established in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis.

  After a stroke in 1999 left him unable to type, Bradbury continued to write by dictating his work over the phone to his daughter in Arizona, who recorded and transcribed it before faxing edits back to him. Collections of his earlier works, including some that had not been previously published, continued to appear late in his life, culminating in The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, a projected eight-volume series that aims to bring together every short story he ever published in chronological order. The week before he died in June 2012, he published an autobiographical essay in The New Yorker double issue devoted to science fiction.

  Bev Vincent

  See also: Arkham House; Dark Fantasy; The October Country; Something Wicked This Way Comes; Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  Aggelis, Steven L., ed. 2004. Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

  Bloom, Harold, ed. 2010. Ray Bradbury. New Edition. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. New York: Infobase.

  Reid, Robin Anne. 2000. Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 1988. “Tales of Childhood and the Grave: Ray Bradbury’s Horror Fiction.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, 29–42. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

  Weller, Sam. 2010. “Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203.” Paris Review 192. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury.

  Weller, Sam. 2014. Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. New York: Melville House.

  BRAM STOKER AWARD

  The Bram Stoker Award came into being with the inception of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) in 1987. It has since become a major literary award for the genres of horror and dark fantasy.

  Under the leadership of Dean Koontz, the newly formed Horror Writers Association (then named the Horror Writers of America) agreed to give out an award of accomplishment for “superior achievement” in the horror field. It was decided that the award would be named after an icon of horror, and the short list of recommendations included Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Bram Stoker.

  The award process involves both recommendations from the HWA’s membership at large and a juried selection of published works from a given year, with two rounds of voting (on the preliminary ballot and then the resulting final ballot) determining the winners. At the time of this writing, the award is divided into eleven categories: novel, first novel, graphic novel, young adult novel, long fiction, short fiction, fiction collection, screenplay, poetry collection, anthology, and nonfiction. There is also a Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in the horror field. Past winners of this latter award include Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Ellen Datlow, Clive Barker, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Anne Rice.

  Notable past winners of a Bram Stoker Award have included Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Richard Matheson, and Clive Barker. The trophy itself is a whimsical eight-inch replica of a haunted house designed by Steven Kirk.

  The Stoker Awards were originally given out in small weekend gatherings, and later at the World Horror Convention. More recently, in 2016, the awards ceremony was moved to the literary horror conference StokerCon in order to accommodate a growing audience.

  Chun H. Lee

  See also: Shirley Jackson Awards; Stoker, Bram; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  “The Bram Stoker Awards.” 2009. Horror Writers Association. http://www.horror.org/awards/stokers.htm#about.

  Wiater, Stanley. 1996. “A Shockingly Brief and Informal History of the Horror Writers Association.” Horror Writers Association. http://www.horror.org/aboutus.htm.

  BRENNAN, JOSEPH PAYNE (1918–1990)

  Joseph Payne Brennan was an American writer, poet, and editor, and publisher of Macabre magazine, which appeared in twenty-three issues between 1959 and 1976. Brennan spent the majority of his life working as a librarian in Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but although his stories often made use of New England history, culture, and traditions, and a number were set in New Haven, he apparently eschewed using his place of employment as a setting.

  Brennan’s literary career began as a writer for Connecticut newspapers, but he rapidly became a contributor to pulp magazines, writing numerous crime, mystery, and Western stories in addition to the weird and horrific fiction for which he is remembered. A capable poet whose verse utilized traditional forms, Brennan’s fantastic fiction was equally traditional in its subject matter and plainly written, but traditional and plain do not mean inferior, and he was generally capable of providing the requisite thrills required by editors and readers alike. Among his better known stories are “The Calamander Chest” (1954) and “Slime” (1953), which display the range of Brennan’s talents: the former is small-scale and personal, with a haunted chest beckoning Ernest Maax, its new owner, to death, while the latter is large-scale, describing a being of slime, monstrously emergent from the ocean, which causes death and destruction until repelled. (Stephen King has praised the latter for the efficient delivery of its horrors.)

  At times Brennan’s darker fiction ha
d a moral side, too: “Levitation” (1958) depicts a carnival performer with a genuine skill, with which he briefly silences hecklers, but when the performer collapses, the levitated heckler continues to rise. New England history is repurposed in “Canavan’s Backyard”: the titular bookseller becomes fascinated by his backyard, which seems unnervingly larger when one is in it than it does from the outside. As the narrator recounts, Canavan’s researches have disclosed a disquieting historical injustice and an accompanying curse, but knowledge of these is not sufficient to save Canavan. New England itself is presented in “The House on Hazel Street” (1961) and “Episode on Cain Street” (1967): these take place in New Haven and mourn the destruction of historic New England and its accompanying traditions.

  While the above stories are thematically connected, Brennan also had a series of stories featuring a psychic investigator, Lucius Leffing, a resident of suburban Connecticut. Nevertheless, as one would anticipate from stories first published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Leffing’s investigations lead not to the supernatural but to the human beings behind the seeming manifestations.

  Brennan was a fairly consistently second-tier writer of fiction, rarely disappointing while rarely achieving greatness, and his fiction thus appeared in books published by the genre’s small and private presses, collections that remained available despite the slow sales that would have led to their pulping by more commercial publishers. He seems to have been content with this, regarding himself as a poet who wrote occasional fiction. The World Fantasy Convention honored him in 1982 by giving him its award for life achievement, but presently he is completely out of print.

  Richard Bleiler

  See also: Arkham House; Occult Detectives; Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1991. “Darkness Come to Life: The Weird Fiction of Joseph Payne Brennan.” Studies in Weird Fiction 9 (Spring): 18–26.

  Murray, Will. 2009. “Joseph Payne Brennan Interviewed.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 330–333. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press.

  Warren, Allen. 1999. “American Gothic: Joseph Payne Brennan.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 108–114. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.

  BRITE, POPPY Z. (1967–)

  Billy Martin, whose works have appeared under the name Poppy Z. Brite, is a New Orleans–born writer of horror, Southern Gothic, and dark comedy. Featuring queer characters and explicit descriptions of gay sex narrated in a lush and sensual style, Brite’s fiction is among the first American horror to place queer sexuality at its center. Brite’s frank acknowledgment of his and his characters’ non-normative genders and sexualities, in addition to his evident fondness for subculture, have made him a controversial figure in the genre. Though his earliest novels and short stories—published when Brite was in his mid-twenties—were sometimes dismissed as “naïve,” Brite quickly achieved cult status and then mainstream success, earning a devoted readership and much praise for his poetic, languorous style and unapologetic eroticism.

  Brite began his career when he was eighteen, publishing his first story, “Missing,” in The Horror Show in 1986, followed by the publication of a number of short stories that would later be gathered in the collection Swamp Foetus (1993; later renamed Wormwood, 1996). However, Brite’s real breakthrough success came with the publication of his first novel, Lost Souls (1992), which firmly established his reputation as a writer of innovative genre fiction. Featuring an imaginative recasting of the vampire as an ambiguously gendered, separate species from humans, Lost Souls introduced many elements that would become mainstays in Brite’s work: bisexual and gay characters, the alienation and sometimes nihilism of subcultural American youth, and the non-normative family and friend group—often made up of both literal and figurative orphans—as an alternative to the broken nuclear family.

  Though much of Lost Souls takes place in New Orleans, the novel also introduces readers to Brite’s fictional city of Missing Mile, North Carolina, a small, swampy Southern town that exerts a strong atmospheric presence in Brite’s second novel, Drawing Blood (1993), which doubles as a love story and haunted house tale. Exploring the complexities of love, violence, sexuality, and addiction, Drawing Blood anticipated many of the themes that would ground Brite’s third horror novel, Exquisite Corpse (1996). Though Brite’s writing in Exquisite Corpse was highly praised, its plot—a brutal romance between two serial killers, modeled after real-life murderers Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer, and set against an HIV-saturated New Orleans—proved to be too extreme for many horror readers and critics, solidifying Brite’s reputation as a controversial writer. Exquisite Corpse is Brite’s last horror novel to be set in his own fictional universe. It was followed, in 1998, by The Lazarus Heart, a dark revenge fantasy set in the fictional universe of James O’Barr’s The Crow series.

  Brite’s horror work also includes the short story collections Are You Loathsome Tonight? (1998), Wrong Things (with Caitlín R. Kiernan, 2001), The Devil You Know (2003), and Triads (with Christa Faust, 2004), as well as the edited vampiric erotica collections Love in Vein (1994) and Love in Vein II (1997). Brite moved into dark comedy in 2002 with his acclaimed Liquor series, and in 2010, announced his retirement from writing.

  Brittany Roberts

  See also: The Haunted House or Castle; Splatterpunk; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Brite, Poppy Z. 2001. Guilty but Insane. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press.

  Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Poppy Z. Brite.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 147–152. New York: Thomson/Gale.

  THE BRONTË SISTERS

  Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were English novelists and poets of the early nineteenth century. Charlotte, the eldest, was born in 1816 and outlived the rest of her siblings, dying in 1855. Emily was born in 1818 and died of tuberculosis in 1848. Anne, the youngest, was born in 1820 and died in 1849, also of tuberculosis. Although their lives were brief, each made an important difference in the development of English literature, and their novels continue to be regarded as classics today. In the history of horror literature, their novels are important for the way they combined aspects of the Gothic with the psychological and social concerns of nineteenth-century English fiction.

  Their father, Patrick Brontë, was born in Ireland and moved to England when he became an Anglican clergyman. He was assigned to the parish at Haworth, a village in West Yorkshire, where he continued to work all his life. He and his wife Maria Branwell Brontë had six children, the first two dying young. Maria herself died in 1821, and so her children had to grow up, for the most part, without her. Patrick Brontë did not remarry, but raised the children with the assistance of relatives. In addition to the three surviving daughters, who would come to be known to posterity as the Brontë sisters, he had one son, Branwell, who died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one. As children, the Brontës amused themselves by creating interlocking stories in shared imaginary worlds; Charlotte and Branwell invented a kingdom they called “Angria,” while Emily and Anne created a Pacific island domain they named “Gondal.” In a way, these juvenile first efforts anticipated the development of fantasy fiction as a genre of imaginary worlds.

  As adults, the three sisters all arranged to have their first novels published in the same year, 1847. The Brontë family was never especially affluent, and publishing fiction was one of the few available ways that women could make money in Victorian England. The Brontë sisters had not failed to try as many of these ways as they could, having worked as teachers and governesses, both in England and abroad. Charlotte Brontë, using the name “Currer Bell,” published Jane Eyre, while Emily Brontë, writing as “Ellis Bell,” published Wuthering Heights, and Anne Brontë, writing as “Acton Bell,” published Agnes Grey. They chose to present themselves to the public disguised as the “Bell Brothers” to avoid controversy, since wom
en writers were not as respected as men and were not generally free to write about darker or more intimate topics. Taking a male name was a strategy that women writers in that era often utilized in order to get their work published; novelist “George Eliot,” for example, was in reality a woman named Mary Ann Evans.

  The nexus of literary creativity and family tragedy that was the Brontës stands as one of the most striking stories in the history of literature—Gothic, horror, or otherwise.

  1812

  Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell wed.

  1814

  Maria Brontë is born.

  1815

  Elizabeth Brontë is born.

  1816

  Charlotte Brontë is born.

  1817

  Patrick Branwell Brontë is born.

  1818

  Emily Brontë is born.

  1820

  Anne Brontë is born.

  1821

  Maria Branwell Brontë dies of uterine cancer at age thirty-eight.

  1825

  Maria dies of tuberculosis at age eleven. Six weeks later, Elizabeth dies of tuberculosis at age ten.

  1847

  Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all have their first novels published: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (published under the pen name “Currer Bell”), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (as “Ellis Bell”), and Anne’s Agnes Grey (as “Acton Bell”).