Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Though comprising a relatively fractional amount of his literary output, de la Mare’s horror and supernatural writings are among the best of his work. Most of this writing can be characterized by the inconclusive nature of its horror and/or supernatural elements, as de la Mare deliberately hints at but never explicitly reveals to the reader the source of apparent supernatural happenings within his stories. For example, in one of his most disturbing psychological horror stories, “Seaton’s Aunt” (1922), de la Mare intimates that the title character, the elderly aunt of the narrator’s school friend, Seaton, with whom he visits, may be a psychic vampire in communion with the devil, and that she is out to hurt her nephew. While nothing explicit is ever shown, de la Mare carefully manipulates the reader’s perceptions of Seaton’s aunt and Seaton himself, so as to heighten the story’s ambiguity. At the end, when Seaton dies under mysterious circumstances, both the narrator and the reader remain unsure as to the cause, and the potentially supernatural elements of the story are left unexplained.

  In addition to the supernatural, much of de la Mare’s work is concerned with the power of the human imagination and with the psychological connections between the human world and the paranormal realm. Spirit possession is a common trope in de la Mare’s work, particularly in The Return (1910), the author’s second novel, in which the protagonist falls asleep on a grave on unconsecrated ground and awakes bearing the physical appearance of the grave’s occupant. Spirits and ghosts also feature heavily, or are certainly strongly hinted at. The haunting central image of “The Listeners” (1912), for example, is of the crowd of silent, phantom listeners who throng the seemingly empty house to which the protagonist has journeyed. In many of his short stories, de la Mare’s spirits and ghosts are intricately tied to literature or to literary figures: in “The Green Room” (1925), a young man is haunted by the ghost of a poet when he publishes her poetry posthumously; and in the novelette “A Revenant” (1936), a literature academic is haunted by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe after he insults the writer’s work.

  Haunted houses also feature greatly in de la Mare’s writing. In “Out of the Deep” (1923), the hero-protagonist returns to his dead uncle’s house, in which memories of his childhood proceed to haunt him before he dies. In “A Recluse” (1930), the owner of a house, with whom the protagonist visits, discovers his host’s dead body and realizes he has been conversing with the dead man’s ghost all along. In “The House” (1936), the protagonist is so haunted by his own childhood memories that he becomes absorbed within the walls of his old home.

  The great stylistic strength of de la Mare’s atmospheric supernatural writing is matched by the keen insight he possesses into humankind, and by his reflections on the very real-world, human tragedies that befall us all. In his work, de la Mare ruminates on isolation, human existence, and the limits of love, and it is perhaps for his consideration of these deeper emotions that we might recognize the painful human element underlining all of his supernatural work.

  While his 1921 novel, Memoirs of a Midget, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and his Collected Stories for Children won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in 1947, de la Mare was also a great literary critic who published some very insightful nonfiction works on contemporary literature, including Some Women Novelists of the Seventies (1929) and Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (1930). His writing proved a great influence on later authors of supernatural fiction, particularly H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Aickman, and Ramsey Campbell. Declining the offer of a knighthood in both 1924 and 1931, de la Mare continued to write until his death on June 22, 1956, following which he was buried in the crypt in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  Ian Kinane

  See also: “The Listeners”; “Out of the Deep”; The Return.

  Further Reading

  Adrian, Jack. 1998. “De la Mare, Walter.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 174–177. London: St. James Press.

  Crawford, Gary William. 1992. “On the Edge: The Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 53–56. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.

  Whistler, Theresa. 1993. Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare. London: Gerald Duckworth.

  “THE DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER”

  Widely considered one of Ambrose Bierce’s finest tales of horror, “The Death of Halpin Frayser” was first published in The Wave on December 19, 1891. Two years later, it appeared in his short fiction collection Can Such Things Be? It is significant both as one of Bierce’s finest horror tales and as a kind of forerunner of the figure of the zombie that later became so central to horror fiction and film.

  The tale begins with the eponymous protagonist waking in an eerie forest from a “dreamless sleep” and uttering the name “Catherine Larue.” He journeys through the forest and encounters the corpse of his mother. The second section of the story moves to Frayser’s early life in Nashville, Tennessee, where it is revealed that he is a bad poet and that he and his mother possess an inordinately close bond. Despite her objections, she allows her son to travel to San Francisco, where he is kidnapped and spends a number of years at sea. The tale then moves back to the present, where bounty hunters—a deputy named Holker and a detective named Jaralson—are seeking a criminal named Branscom, who is wanted for murder. As they enter a graveyard, they find Frayser’s strangled corpse lying atop a grave that, as they soon discover, is that of Catherine Larue. Putting together the facts, Holker recalls that Larue is Branscom’s real name and that the woman he murdered was named Frayser. The story ends with Holker and Jaralson hearing “the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh which had no more of joy than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert. . . . a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread unspeakable!” (Bierce 1984, 71).

  “That Most Dreadful of All Existences”: “The Death of Halpin Frayser” as an Early Zombie

  “The Death of Halpin Frayser” is often described as one of the forerunners of modern zombie fiction, and it is easy to see why when reading passages like the following. Notably, it not only features what inevitably appears to the modern reader as a zombie or zombie-like creature (right down to the familiar motif of the reanimated loved one who is horribly like and yet unlike the former self), but it does so in the context of the exquisite tone of dreadful nightmare that Bierce generates throughout the story.

  The apparition confronting the dreamer in the haunted wood—the thing so like, yet so unlike, his mother—was horrible! It stirred no love nor longings in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories of a golden past—inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear. He tried to turn and run from before it, but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his feet from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes only he retained control, and these he dared not remove from the lustreless orbs of the apparition, which he knew was not a soul without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting that haunted wood—a body without a soul! In its blank stare was neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence—nothing to which to address an appeal for mercy. (Bierce 1914, 141)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Bierce, Ambrose. 1914. “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” In Neale’s Monthly Magazine. Volume 3. New York: Neale’s Publishing.

  Dark and unsettling in tone, oblique in upshot and meaning, “The Death of Halpin Frayser” contains two notable features that have particularly interested readers and critics alike: the Oedipus complex and a nascent form of what would later emerge as the major horror archetype of the zombie. Regarding the former, the tale does, in fact, suggest an unnatural and too-close relationship between mother and son, resulting in tragedy. Regarding the latter, the story is widely regarded as one of the progenitors of zombie fiction, as attested by, among many other things, the fact that both it and Bierce merit
ed inclusion in 2014’s Encyclopedia of the Zombie (2014), where the story is described as “bleak and elliptical,” and as one of several stories illustrating the fact that “In Bierce’s world, the dead rarely lie still, and at times may not even be dead” (Bleiler 16). One reading of “Halpin Frayser” has it that Frayser was killed by his mother’s corpse, but the matter is inconclusive since the story’s events can be interpreted both supernaturally and naturally. In any event, the judgment of H. P. Lovecraft, who counted Bierce as a major influence, is generally shared by those who are familiar with the story; in his groundbreaking essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft grouped “The Death of Halpin Frayser” among several others in Bierce’s body of work that have a “grim malevolence stalking through all of them,” and that “stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing” (Lovecraft 2012, 66).

  E. Kate Stewart

  See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Zombies.

  Further Reading

  Bierce, Ambrose. 1984. The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, compiled with commentary by Ernest Jerome Hopkins. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

  Bleiler, Richard. 2014. “Ambrose Bierce.” In Encyclopedia of the Zombie: The Walking Dead in Popular Culture and Myth, edited by June Michele Pulliam and Anthony J. Fonseca, 15–17. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.

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

  Talley, Sharon. 2009. “The Failed Journey to Self-Understanding in ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” In Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death, 17–28. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

  “THE DEMON LOVER”

  Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” (1944) is a compelling and ambiguous ghost story in the mold of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Bowen, in fact, was one of the most important Jamesian writers of the twentieth century, a savvy chronicler of middle-class life who was deeply attentive to the subtlest shifts of psychological mood in her characters. This sensibility served her well in the modest handful of truly eerie ghost stories she wrote during her lifetime, vivid evocations of the eruption of the uncanny into mundane contemporary settings.

  Set during World War II, “The Demon Lover” centers on Mrs. Drover, a prosaic middle-aged housewife who has come to check on her shuttered London home, her family having decamped to the country to escape the blitz. There she finds a letter, apparently from a former lover who died during the First World War, promising to return to claim her. Mrs. Drover at first refuses to believe the evidence of her senses: that some strange supernatural agency has intervened into her stolid middle-class life, disrupting its orderly norms forever. Bowen sustains an atmosphere of mounting dread, bordering on hysteria, as Mrs. Drover struggles to come to grips with her experience, and it culminates in an explosion of shrieking terror that lingers long in the reader’s mind.

  The story’s title cites the folkloric tradition of demon-lover ballads, in which deceased suitors haunt and possess their former flames, but Bowen gives the genre a Freudian twist, as Mrs. Drover’s passionate past wells up, like the return of the repressed (the Freudian psychoanalytic term for the tendency of unconscious thoughts and emotions to reappear spontaneously in altered form in consciousness and behavior), and overwhelms her mundane present. As in James’s pitch-perfect novella, the reader is kept in suspense with regard to the reality of the demonic threat: it could be authentic, or it could be the product of a disordered mind. The tale also captures the wartime climate vividly, conveying a sense of everyday life disrupted and besieged by malign forces. It is significant that Mrs. Drover lost her lover during an earlier spasm of military violence; indeed, the story strongly suggests that the cataclysm of war is so powerful, it can shake loose potent demons of memory and regret.

  Bowen, who died in 1973, was one of the finest British short story writers of the twentieth century. “The Demon Lover” is a classic.

  Rob Latham

  See also: James, Henry; Psychological Horror; The Turn of the Screw.

  Further Reading

  Fraustino, Daniel V. 1980. “Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’: Psychosis or Seduction?” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (4): 483–487.

  Hughes, Douglas A. 1972. “Cracks in the Psyche: Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover.’” Studies in Short Fiction 10, no. 4: 411–413.

  Thompson, Terry W. 2010. “‘A Face You Do Not Expect’: The Female Other in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 54 (Spring). http://jsse.revues.org/1036.

  DERLETH, AUGUST (1909–1971)

  August Derleth was an American writer and editor of fantasy, horror, and science fiction whose reputation is inextricably bound up with that of H. P. Lovecraft, the writer for whom he was a leading exponent and advocate. As a publisher, Derleth was instrumental in establishing the specialty press as a driving force in genre publishing.

  Derleth’s first professional sale, “Bat’s Belfry,” appeared in the May 1926 issue of Weird Tales when he was just seventeen years old. Over the next twenty-eight years, he published several hundred more stories in virtually every magazine that catered to readers of horror and fantasy fiction, and became the second most published author in Weird Tales. Among Derleth’s influences, as he noted in the introduction to his first short fiction collection, Someone in the Dark (1941), were M. R. James and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and although he wrote on a wide variety of horror themes, many of his stories were in the genteel ghost story tradition associated with those writers. Derleth acknowledged that most of his short weird fiction was written as filler, and he seems to have thought more highly of his mainstream fiction concerned with the people and history of Wisconsin’s Sac Prairie, which was earning him a reputation as a distinguished writer of regional fiction in the1930s and 1940s. In the introduction to his third weird fiction collection, Not Long for This World (1948), Derleth dismissed as mediocre most of his weird fiction for his first two decades as a writer, but he did produce several outstanding weird tales, among them the humorous ghost story “Pacific 421” (1944), the amusing vampire story “Who Shall I Say Is Calling?” (1952), the “invisible friend” story “Mr. George” (1947, as by “Stephen Grendon”), and the “evil place” story “The Lonesome Place” (1948). The simplicity of Derleth’s weird tales made them ideal for adaptation to other media, and thus “The Return of Andrew Bentley” (1933) and “Colonel Markesan” (1934), both written in collaboration with Mark Schorer, as well as “A Wig for Miss Devore” (1943), were all televised for Boris Karloff’s Thriller. “Logoda’s Heads” (1939) was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

  Derleth began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s, and he was one of the first writers to attempt a pastiche of Lovecraft’s fiction when “The Lair of the Star Spawn” (written in collaboration with Mark Schorer) was published in the August 1932 issue of Weird Tales. In the 1940s and 1950s, in a cycle of Lovecraft pastiches published mostly in Weird Tales and later collected in The Mask of Cthulhu (1958), and in the episodic novel The Trail of Cthulhu (1962), Derleth began to codify as the Cthulhu Mythos the myth pattern behind much of Lovecraft’s weird fiction and the tales that Lovecraft’s Weird Tales colleagues had written in the spirit of his fiction. This entailed recasting Lovecraft’s extradimensional monsters as earth elementals and rethinking Lovecraft’s horror of cosmic indifference in terms of battles between good and evil entities. Derleth pursued the same strategy in his so-called posthumous collaborations with Lovecraft, in which he expanded on incomplete fragments left among Lovecraft’s papers, as in The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), or elaborated on ideas in Lovecraft’s commonplace book for stories that appeared in The Survivor and Others (1957), The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959), and The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966). This culminated in the anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969), for which Derleth collected stories from Lovecraft and his weird fictio
n colleagues as well as new works by writers whom Derleth had authorized to contribute to the Cthulhu Mythos, having discouraged other writers over the preceding decades. Derleth’s regulation of the Cthulhu Mythos and his protection of it as a brand associated with Arkham House, the publishing company that he founded, is regarded as controversial by many of his critics.

  Derleth founded Arkham House with fellow Lovecraft acolyte Donald Wandrei in 1939 when the two were unable to interest trade publishers in a collection of Lovecraft’s fiction. Initially, Derleth planned only to publish Lovecraft’s fiction and letters under the Arkham House imprint, but he expanded his program and eventually published first hardcover collections of short fiction by many of the best writers from Weird Tales, including (among others) himself, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Henry S. Whitehead, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Frank Belknap Long, Seabury Quinn, and Mary Elizabeth Counselman. While running Arkham House, Derleth edited anthologies of weird fiction for other publishers—among them Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks? (1946), The Night Side (1947), and The Sleeping and the Dead (1947)—that were top-heavy with contributions from Arkham House authors. Arkham House was the first of many specialty fantasy, horror, and science fiction publishers to come into existence in the twentieth century, and its success made a considerable impact on modern genre publishing.