Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  His last horror writing period, after a brief slew of thrillers published from 1995 to 1999, began in the new millennium. Apart from the collection Elvisland (2004) and the novels Phantom Nights (2004), You Don’t Scare Me (2007), and his first werewolf novel, High Bloods (2009), also his last work to date, the rest of Farris’s postmillennial books have been dedicated to reviving The Fury.

  Although Farris’s books are now largely out of print, a number of his “classics” have recently become available in eBook format, a venture that has rescued some of his best novels from oblivion. In the 2010s, specialist publisher Centipede Press also paid homage to Farris by publishing five of his novels in deluxe limited editions.

  Xavier Aldana Reyes

  See also: The Exorcist; King, Stephen; Psychological Horror; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “John Farris.” In Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic: Essays on Fifty-Four Neglected Authors, Actors and Others, edited by Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy, 80–82. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Errickson, Will. 2015. “Evil Eighties: The Paperback Horrors of John Farris.” Tor.com, February 13. http://www.tor.com/2015/02/13/evil-eighties-the-paperback-horrors-of-john-farris.

  FAULKNER, WILLIAM (1897–1962)

  William Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel laureate who is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which illustrate the intricate links between race, class, and gender in the U.S. South at the turn of the twentieth century. His fiction is characterized both by distinctive writing techniques—including deconstructed timelines, shifting points of view, stream of consciousness, and unreliable narrators—and recurrent motifs such as moral and social decay in the American South, rape, lynching, incest, miscegenation, psychological distress, physical and mental disability, and pathological bonds between individuals, families, and the community.

  “A Rose for Emily”: Classic Southern Gothic

  “A Rose for Emily” was first published in the April 1930 issue of the Forum, and it went on to become Faulkner’s most anthologized story. Integral to the Southern Gothic tradition, it is noted for its twist ending, involving necrophilia. It is narrated in the first-person-plural point of view by the collective voice of the citizens of the fictional city of Jefferson, Mississippi, and the story unfolds in nonlinear fashion, beginning with the funeral of Emily Grierson, the last in the long line of a Southern aristocratic family. The story then examines the peculiar events of her life: a rotting smell coming from her house; the time she bought poison; and her romance with a Northern man named Homer Barron, who mysteriously disappears. It all ends with Emily’s death and the townspeople’s discovery of Homer’s decayed corpse lying on a bed in a locked upstairs room, where Emily’s silver hair is found on the pillow next to him. The clear implication is that Emily, who had long been feared and viewed as an eccentric crank by the townspeople, murdered Homer and then slept beside his corpse for years in the solitude of her reclusive abode.

  “A Rose for Emily” explores the tropes of death and decay, nostalgia for a romantic past (as exemplified by the modern world’s encroachment on the decaying Old South), and the iron-fisted control of Southern patriarchy. With its striking viewpoint and voice, it is an early example of a modernist take on literary horror, and it has been widely anthologized and included in high school and college literature textbooks. A PBS short film adaptation of “A Rose for Emily” was produced in 1983, starring Anjelica Huston as Emily.

  Chun H. Lee

  Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner spent most of his life at his estate of Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, from which he also derived the inspiration for much of his writing. The innovative quality of his prose and his attachment to his Southern background have often led him to be categorized as an author of both the modernist movement and the Southern Renaissance. However, Faulkner’s taste for disturbing, often macabre storylines, as well as uncanny atmospheres, also made him responsible, alongside authors such as Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe, for the emergence of Southern Gothic fiction in the early 1930s. Major figures of the genre have acknowledged their debt to Faulkner, such as Flannery O’Connor, who wrote that “the presence of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do” (O’Connor 1969, 45).

  Although Faulkner’s reputation as a writer is currently well established, his fame came relatively late. Prior to achieving success, he spent several years in California and New Orleans publishing screenplays for Hollywood, essays and sketches, and poetry. While in New Orleans, he became acquainted with Sherwood Anderson, who recommended he should write about his native region and the idiosyncrasies of the “southern character.” Following this advice, Faulkner proceeded to write the first book of the Yoknapatawpha saga, which would be published under the name Sartoris (1929). While waiting for it to be published, Faulkner embarked on a second novel that would be his ticket to fame: The Sound and the Fury.

  Published in October 1929, the novel is widely regarded as a revolutionary masterpiece. It recounts the gradual decay of a Southern bourgeois family through the successive points of view of four of its members: Benjy, the youngest son, whose mental disability prevents him from having any sense of time, place, and people, to the point that he does not recognize his own image in the mirror; Quentin, the eldest son, whose incapacity to deal with his ambiguous feelings for his sister leads him to flee the South and commit suicide in the Charles River; Jason, the last son of the lineage as well as a bachelor who abuses the women of his family and drunkenly drives around the town of Jefferson chasing after his young niece; and finally, Dilsey, the black maid who has lived through the family’s downfall and is the last one standing to take care of the disabled son and the estate. The Sound and Fury is a challenging book in both form and content. To learn the truth about the Compson family, the reader must piece together many different plot elements scattered through the broken timeline and the stream of consciousness narrations. The horror and the violence of the plot are made apparent in the process of reading, through careful innuendos, ellipsis, and understatements. This novel set the tone for the other novels and stories to come: through convoluted narrative techniques and baroque prose, Faulkner was to paint life in the South as a horror story made of violence, unruly bodies, and perverted morals and manners. Exploring the whole social, racial, and gender spectrum from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Faulkner spares his reader no gruesome details.

  His next novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a macabre and ludicrous mock-epic in which a family of poor farmers embark on a disastrous journey to bury the body of the mother that has just died. The many obstacles they face see their task put to a gruesome test, especially when the corpse inside the coffin starts rotting and carrion birds start following them everywhere they go. The macabre humor of As I Lay Dying is also to be found in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), a short story now considered a foundational text of Southern Gothic literature. Told from the collective point of view of the townspeople of Jefferson, the story tells of Emily Grierson, an old maid from an aristocratic family of Jefferson who has probably gone mad. In a final plot twist, the town realizes on the day she dies that she murdered her lover some fifty years ago and has been sleeping next to his decaying body every night since.

  With Sanctuary (1931), Faulkner’s sulfurous detective-story, he earned the nickname “the corncob man”: the story follows a young white girl named Temple Drake as she runs away from college. She falls into the hands of an impotent thug named Popeye who eventually rapes her with a corncob in an abandoned grange. Even though the rape itself is left out of the text, the suggested violence of the scene was such that the novel was almost banned, under claims that no one but a pathological reader could enjoy being sadistically aroused by it.

  Light in August (1932) is a collection of intersected stories that all come together through the violent
beheading of Joanna Burden by her lover Joe Christmas, who consequently gets lynched by a white supremacist bearing the ominous name of Percy Grimm. Though Joanna’s murder seems to be the peak of violence in the novel, the rest of the novel is seething with racial hate and sexual abuse that is only solved through explosions of violence such as murders or lynching.

  Absalom, Absalom (1936) is Faulkner’s Gothic grand oeuvre. Very much in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it depicts the downfall of a family, brought about through generations of incestuous desires, greed, envy, and racial divides, climaxing in the literal destruction of the family home. Haunted by the presence of a member of the family whom everybody thought long gone, the Sutpen mansion goes down in flames, leaving nothing of the patriarch’s dream of grandeur but a couple of ghost stories told by the elders of the community.

  Faulkner’s artistic vision stood in complete contradiction to the predominant discourse of the time that portrayed the South as a lost Eden. His callous prose earned him the ire of the Southern literary scene, which, as early as 1935, labeled him and other writers of the time as “the real equerries of Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones,” “merchants of death, hell and the grave,” and “horror-mongers in chief” (Bassett 1997, 352). Fellow Southern writer Ellen Glasgow called Faulkner out for letting his literature “crawl too long in the mire” (Bassett 1997, 359). She found his style too macabre, labeling it “Southern Gothic” in a pejorative way; in an attempt to disparage Faulkner, Glasgow both coined the term and tied it forever to his name. The label stuck, and distinguished authors such as O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Toni Morrison, all of whom wrote in a Southern Gothic vein themselves (with the term eventually losing its negative connotation), held Faulkner as a major point of reference.

  Elsa Charléty

  See also: The Grotesque; Morrison, Toni; O’Connor, Flannery; The Uncanny; Welty, Eudora.

  Further Reading

  Bassett, John Earl, ed. 1997. Defining Southern Literature: Perspectives and Assessments, 1831–1952. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

  Faulkner, William. 2003. The Portable Faulkner. New York: Penguin.

  Fiedler, Leslie A. [1960] 1997. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

  O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, 36–50. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

  Sundquist, Eric J. 1983. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  FEAR

  Fear is a novel of psychological horror by L. Ron Hubbard that was first published in the July 1940 issue of the pulp fantasy magazine Unknown. Editor John W. Campbell touted it as the type of horror story that he hoped other authors would contribute to his magazine of modern fantastic fiction.

  The protagonist of Fear is James Lowry, a professor of anthropology and ethnology at Atworthy College. A scientific rationalist, Lowry has just published an article in the Newspaper Weekly dismissing humanity’s belief in devils and demons as a type of mental illness promulgated in times past by witch doctors who hoped to control the masses through their fear of the supernatural. The head of Lowry’s department interprets the article as an attack not just against superstition but against religion, and he fires Lowry for besmirching the university’s reputation with what he considers an exploitative attempt at self-aggrandizement. Reeling from this unexpected twist of fate, James visits the home of his friend and colleague, Tommy Williams, who disagrees with James’s rationalism and warns him that “that man is the safest who knows that all is really evil and that the air and earth and water are peopled by fantastic demons and devils who lurk to grin at and increase the sad state of man” (Hubbard 2000, 14).

  At the start of the novel’s second chapter, James comes to his senses, disoriented, and discovers that four hours have passed since he left Tommy’s house for which he cannot account. Furthermore, he has lost the hat that he was wearing, and his hand bears a cut and a bruise whose cause he can’t recall. At first James attributes his disorientation to a recent bout of malaria that he picked up during his overseas travels. But over the next few hours, he moves through landscapes of seemingly impossible topography—among them, a stairway that leads to impossible subterranean depths—and as he tries to conduct his life normally with Tommy, his wife Mary, and his students, he experiences a variety of increasingly eerie and enigmatic visions, among them the legendary hangman Jack Ketch, a young girl, an invisible thing that keeps nudging his leg at a table, and an elderly crone who warns him that “if you find your hat you’ll find your four hours, and if you find your four hours then you will die!” (29). These visions culminate in a final one in which James is told that he is the only real person in the surreal universe that he is navigating, at which point he acknowledges what happened during his lost four hours—he mistakenly assumed that Tommy and his Mary were having an affair, killed them, and tried to conceal their bodies—and accepts that all of his encounters and experiences following this have been completely illusory, the product of his psychotic break with reality.

  The thunderclap revelation at the end of Fear is that the world James has moved through for most of the novel is a completely internal landscape shaped by his denial and feelings of personal guilt over his actions. In that landscape, demons—incarnated in a pair who hover on the periphery of the narrative, speaking in editorial asides, and who present themselves as enacting Lowry’s ordeal in order to teach him a lesson—do exist. As Brian Stableford observes in his critique of Hubbard’s novel, “there are demons and they do torment us, but they are one with ourselves and haunt us from within” (Stableford 1979, 764). Praising the rigorous internal logic that gives the story its narrative cohesion, Stableford notes the parallels between Hubbard’s novels and the tenets of Scientology, the psychoanalytic discipline he would later found: “There is surely a moral in the fact that Hubbard went on to invent a new school of psychoanalysis based on the thesis that all the ills of mankind stem from blotted out memories (‘engrams’), suppressed because of their inherent unpleasantness, which plague and torment us, and that this new psychoanalysis was ultimate reincarnated as a religion whose dramatic revelation is that we are all potentially godlike if only we can clear away our inner demons and ‘audit’ ourselves back to our inherent superpowers” (764–765).

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Devils and Demons; Hubbard, L. Ron; Psychological Horror; Pulp Horror.

  Further Reading

  Budrys, Algis. 1991. “Books.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 80, no. 4: 28–29.

  Hubbard, L. Ron. [1940] 2000. Fear. Los Angeles, CA: Galaxy Press.

  Stableford, Brian. 1979. “Fear and Typewriter in the Sky.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, edited by Frank N. Magill, 761–765. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.

  FÉVAL, PAUL (1816–1887)

  Paul-Henri-Corentin Féval was born in Rennes in Brittany, France, and his interest in the history, legends, and folklore of Brittany was a strong element in his literary work, providing the basis for his early collections Contes de Bretagne (1844) and Les Contes de nos pères (1845), and a frequent stimulus to the newspaper serials he produced in great abundance, especially during the Second Empire (1851–1870), when he became famous as the chief proponent of swashbuckling “cape-et-épée fiction.” Such serial fiction traded very heavily in suspenseful melodrama and employed horrific motifs as a staple element of the threats prolifically addressed to their heroes and (more particularly) heroines.

  Convention favored the rationalization of seemingly supernatural materials, and Féval constantly found his far-reaching imagination forced to operate within an editorially imposed straitjacket that required tokenistic explanation of supernatural manifestation in naturalistic terms, which resulted in extravagant novels like Le Livre des mystères (1852; also known as La soeur de fantômes and Les Revenant
s; tr. as Revenants) and La Vampire (1856; tr. as The Vampire Countess) becoming strangely awkward hybrids. More license was granted to writers when employing shorter formats, so Féval was allowed to let his love of the supernatural run riot in such exuberant novellas as La Fille de Juif-Errant (1864; tr. as The Wandering Jew’s Daughter), Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1867; tr. as Knightshade), and Le Ville-Vampire (1875; tr. as Vampire City), which juxtapose their horrific elements with humor in a fashion that was not to become commonplace until the late twentieth century. Le Chevalier Ténèbre introduces a “double act” of two brothers who are ingenious in all kinds of evil, who also excel in telling creepy stories to divert their intended victims, while the classic Le Ville-Vampire features the English Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe as a heroine, visiting the other-dimensional vampire city of Selene as an eccentric literary ancestor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  Féval made considerable use of naturalistic horrific motifs in his pioneering crime fiction, especially Jean Diable (1862; tr. as John Devil) and the classic series launched by Les Habits Noirs (1863; tr. as The Parisian Jungle), featuring a criminal gang with elaborate connections in all strata of society, whose nefarious exploits are masterminded by the sinister Corsican Colonel Bozzo-Corona and his brutal right-hand man Monsieur Lecoq.