Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  The novel has been the subject of a multitude of adaptations for stage, cinema, television, comic books, video games, and other media. The most famous adaptation is Universal Studios’ 1931 film Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, which gave the world the iconic image of the rectangular-headed, bolt-necked monster.

  Neil McRobert

  See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Frame Story; Gothic Hero/Villain; Mad Scientist; Monsters; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary.

  Further Reading

  Botting, Fred. 1991. Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

  Moers, Ellen. 1979. “Female Gothic.” In The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, edited by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, 90–98. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Shelley, Mary. 2012. Frankenstein. Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

  Tropp, Martin. 1976. Mary Shelley’s Monster: The Story of Frankenstein. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

  G

  GAIMAN, NEIL (1955–)

  Born in Hampshire, United Kingdom, and currently living in the United States, Neil Gaiman is a celebrated writer of dark fantasy. His works cross over from many genres and mediums. He is known for writing comics, short stories, novels, children’s picture books, essays, and more. Although Gaiman does not consider himself to be a horror writer, he loves the genre and regards it to be a “condiment rather than a meal” (Gaiman and Olson 2002) in his works.

  Gaiman started his writing career as a journalist, but moved on to comic books in the late 1980s. After meeting with some success in titles like Marvel Man and Black Orchid, he was offered an opportunity to take on a long-forgotten detective character from the golden age of comics named the Sandman and reinvent the comic as he wished. Gaiman’s The Sandman was a huge departure from the detective character. It was instead an adult take on dark fantasy, centered on the god-like living personification of dreaming, one of the Endless, named Dream or Morpheus. It often featured stories of mythic gods and figures, complications of magic set upon the human world to horrific effect, and explorations into the power of dreams and nightmares. Some of the impactful characters that have come from this title include the Corinthian, a living nightmare; Death, another aspect of the Endless; and Lucifer Morningstar, Gaiman’s take on the biblical figure of the Devil. Many scholars consider Gaiman’s seventy-five-issue run on The Sandman to be a seminal work in the graphic novel field, and it is thought of as “highly allusive, psychologically astute, and brilliantly conceived” (Wolfe 2003). The Sandman won numerous Eisner Awards, and even the World Fantasy Award in literature. It is credited for being a major influence in putting comics into the hands of adult readers.

  Gaiman firmly established himself in the literary world with the 2001 release of his dark fantasy novel American Gods. The book’s premise, gods from the Old World surviving and fighting to exist in America, allowed Gaiman to write a travel narrative featuring fantastic American places and eccentric personalities. Charles De Lint describes Gaiman’s ability to balance the light and dark aspects of the storyline to have moments that are “utterly whimsical” or “filled with doom and dread” (2001). American Gods won several speculative fiction awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Stoker.

  Coraline (2002), the follow-up to American Gods, maintained the common Gaiman theme of finding magic or the unworldly in unexpectedly everyday locales, but focused it through a child’s eye and her new home. Coraline took Gaiman ten years of sporadic writing to complete. It features a monster made to channel the fear of the familiar turned distorted and terrible. The “Other Mother” is a wonderful combination of the temptations a child Coraline’s age would want from a parent and the hauntingly dreadful and unexplainable: she wants Coraline to live with her forever at the cost of having her eyes replaced by buttons. Coraline won several accolades and awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Stoker. Gaiman went on to garner even more success with his next children’s novel, The Graveyard Book. Featuring Nobody Owens, a young boy who escapes his own death on the night of his family members’ grisly murders, The Graveyard Book was heavily influenced by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Both texts feature a young boy raised by unconventional guardians. In the case of The Graveyard Book, ghosts teach important life lessons to the young boy as he develops. The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal and other prestigious speculative fiction awards. When asked why he would choose to write a children’s horror novel, Gaiman replied by arguing for “inoculation” to the frightful and terrorizing.

  Laurie Penny noted that while other writers may “have a political agenda, however covert,” with a few exceptions in his early years, “Gaiman’s work is pure escapism” (Penny 2013). His form of fantasy draws from the urge to discover and find wonders or horrors, whether they are behind a mysterious door or beyond the world of dreaming. Gaiman remains active in the dark fantasy genre, having returned in 2013 to write The Sandman: Overture and promising a sequel to American Gods. He is well known for his readings and speeches, which are often crowded media events. In 2012 his commencement address “Make Good Art” at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia garnered viral attention and eventually became a publication of its own.

  Chun H. Lee

  See also: Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Kipling, Rudyard; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  De Lint, Charles. 2001. “Review of American Gods.” Fantasy & Science Fiction 101 (3): 97–98.

  Gaiman, Neil, and Ray Olson. 2002. “The Booklist Interview: Neil Gaiman.” Booklist 98 (22): 1949.

  “Neil Gaiman: Keynote Address 2012.” 2012. The University of the Arts. May 17. http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012.

  Neil Gaiman. 2016. Neilgaiman.com. June 8. http://www.neilgaiman.com.

  Penny, Laurie. 2013. “An Interview with Neil Gaiman, the Internet’s Favorite Fantasy Writer.” New Republic. November 21. https://newrepublic.com/article/115682/neil-gaiman-interview.

  Wolfe, Gary K. 2003. “Gaiman, Neil 1960–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 369–375. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Yuen, Wayne, Rachel Luria, and Tracy Lyn Bealer. 2012. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild! Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2012. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost).

  GAUTIER, THÉOPHILE (1811–1872)

  Théophile Gautier was a leading figure in the French Romantic movement whose principal works—most notably Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), whose introduction is a manifesto of sorts—champion the doctrine of “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake). In his introduction to the third edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, published after that poet’s death, he provided a similar championship of “Decadent style,” taking up an adjective first hurled at romanticism as a term of abuse by the critic Desiré Nisard, but reconstrued as praise by Baudelaire. Gautier’s own works, especially his stories employing horrific motifs, are archetypal models of Decadent prose style, and perfect illustrations of the manner in which focus on style, employing the artistry of representation for its own sake, transfigures horrific imagery into something beautiful as well as sublime, producing a distinctive aesthetic effect.

  Gautier pioneered a rich French tradition of lush historical fantasies in “Une nuit de Cléopâtre” (1838), translated by Lafcadio Hearn as the leading items in the classic collection One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882), which also contains the classic erotic vampire story “La Morte amoureuse” (1836; tr. under various titles, usually “Clarimonde”) and another femme fatale story, “Arria Marcella” (1852). Gautier’s other supernatural fantasies include Avatar (1856), about an identity
exchange undertaken for erotic purposes, and Jettatura (1857; tr. as “The Evil Eye”), a more straightforwardly horrific account of a man who falls prey to the eponymous curse. Spirite (1866) is an account of a love affair between a young man and a female ghost written for the dancer Carlotta Grisi, although it was Carlotta’s sister Ernesta who bore him two daughters, including the writer Judith Gautier (1845–1917), whose own work included several Decadent horror stories, and who was married for a while to another important Decadent fantasist, Catulle Mendès.

  In Gautier’s “La Morte amoureuse” (English: “The Dead in Love,” but most commonly translated as “Clarimonde”), a young Catholic priest named Romauld is seduced by a woman named Clarimonde, who turns out to be a vampire. His elderly spiritual guide, Sérapion, stands against Clarimonde and helps to rescue him from her. The story is one of the most famous nineteenth-century vampire fictions, and it contains a number of scenes that are recognizable as “classic” motifs in the world of vampire literature as a whole. Among these is the scene when Sérapion opens Clarimonde’s coffin and destroys her in front of Romauld:

  He wrenched apart and tore up the lid, and I beheld Clarimonde, pallid as a figure of marble, with hands joined; her white winding-sheet made but one fold from her head to her feet. A little crimson drop sparkled like a speck of dew at one corner of her colourless mouth.

  Sérapion, at this spectacle, burst into fury: “Ah, thou art here, demon! Impure courtesan! Drinker of blood and gold!” And he flung holy water upon the corpse and the coffin, over which he traced the sign of the cross with his sprinkler. Poor Clarimonde had no sooner been touched by the blessed spray than her beautiful body crumbled into dust, and became only a shapeless and frightful mass of cinders and half-calcined bones. (Gautier 1908, 50).

  “Clarimonde” was adapted as a 1998 episode of the vampire-themed horror television series The Hunger.

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Gautier, Théophile. [1836] 1908. “Clarimonde.” In Stories. Translated by Lafcadio Hearn. New York: E. P. Dutton.

  Gautier’s short stories sometimes contained transfigured elements of horror, most notably the doppelgänger story “Le Chevalier Double” (1840; tr. as “The Duplicated Knight”) and “Deux acteurs pour un rôle” (1841: tr. as “Two Actors for One Role”). The great majority of his works were collected in twenty-two volumes as Oeuvres (1855–1874; tr. in twenty-four volumes edited by F. C. Sumichrast). Gautier’s key works represented the ultimate in Romantic fantasy; his feverish idealizations of erotic sensibility crystallized the imagery of the femme fatale, arguing flamboyantly that death might be a price worth paying for the rewards such magically attractive sexual partners might have to offer. He pointed the way for many subsequent writers to reinterpret the imagery of horror as a form of fabulously perverse eroticism, “La Morte amoureuse” being the most pivotal work in the process of the symbolic reconfiguration of vampiric lust, which eventually extended far beyond Decadent fantasy to become a staple of modern popular fiction.

  Brian Stableford

  See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dark Fantasy; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Richardson, Joanna. 1958. Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times. London: Max Reinhardt.

  Smith, Albert Brewster. 1977. Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic. University, MS: Romance Monographs.

  “THE GHOST SHIP”

  A perennial entry in ghost-fiction anthologies, “The Ghost Ship” is not actually a horror story, but more a gentle whimsy. It contains much that is echoed in later fantasies ranging from Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist to Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. In a rural English town, people treat their ghosts like ordinary citizens, making it the “ghostiest” place in the land. One night a storm blows a ghost ship inland, into the middle of a turnip patch. The captain proves a genial fellow, whose tasty rum is having a scandalous effect on the local ghosts. The narrator and a local parson confront the captain, who assures them that he will be leaving soon. Another storm blows the ship away with most of the local ghost population aboard and the village idiot aboard too. The captain, we learn, is the infamous pirate Bartholomew Roberts (early eighteenth century) who continues his piratical career in the hereafter. The idiot returns after two years, but, yearning for that ghostly rum, soon runs away again.

  Arthur Machen wrote, “I would not exchange this sort, crazy, enchanting fantasy for a whole wilderness of seemly novels” (Machen 1913, xiv). The story is actually quite unusual for its author, most of whose output is melancholy and frequently grim. Richard Middleton (1882–1911) was of a romantic disposition and wildly impractical in day-to-day life. He tried to make his living as a poet, but the result was poverty and depression. Even though he enjoyed some success in magazines, he could not get any publisher to bring out a book of his poems or stories. He would have appreciated (and probably anticipated) the irony that as soon as he was dead (by suicide) he was proclaimed a lost genius and virtually his entire literary output, five volumes, appeared in book form within another year. A final collection followed in 1933, but in the long run he is mostly remembered for this one story, often cited as the most successful humorous ghost story in English.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Gaiman, Neil; Machen, Arthur.

  Further Reading

  Machen, Arthur. 1913. Preface to The Ghost Ship and Other Stories by Richard Middleton, vii–xiv. New York: Mitchell Kennerly.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. 1998. “Richard Middleton: Beauty, Sadness, and Terror” in Windows of the Imagination, 115–120. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

  GHOST STORY

  Ghost Story is a 1979 novel by Peter Straub. Its significance for modern horror literature is almost incalculable, both because of its intrinsic brilliance and because of its timing. The novel appeared right at the beginning of the late twentieth-century “horror boom,” and was in fact one of the central texts that helped to launch it. Ghost Story acknowledged its deep debt to the long tradition of ghost stories and Gothic literature that had come before it, while simultaneously presenting an original, striking, and frightening treatment of the tradition’s core themes. Straub’s fourth published novel, it represented a watershed both for his career and for the horror genre.

  Reduced to its bare essentials, Ghost Story can be described as a superior tale of supernatural revenge. Five young men—Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Edward Wanderley, Lewis Benedikt, and John Jaffrey—accidentally kill a woman named Eva Galli. They panic and decide to cover up her death by putting her body in a car and driving it into a lake. But as the car is sinking, they glimpse Eva’s face through the rear window, and for a moment it appears that she is still alive. Deeply shaken, they take a vow to keep her death a secret. The incident will, however, haunt them for the rest of their lives.

  Fifty years later, the five men, now prosperous and content, still live in their (fictional) hometown of Milburn, New York, and call themselves “The Chowder Society.” Although they meet regularly to swap ghost stories, they never speak of Eva. This all changes when Edward dies of fright during a party given in honor of a mysterious young woman, an actress who goes by the name Anne-Veronica Moore. The remaining members experience a series of disquieting dreams in which several of them die, leading them to conclude that Eva Galli has somehow reentered their lives and is seeking revenge.

  Unable to admit fully to themselves that their past deeds have come back to haunt them, they reach out to Ed’s nephew, Don Wanderley, for help. Don is a writer who has produced a horror novel titled The Nightwatcher, which is based on his own experiences with Eva, whom he knew by the name of Alma Mobley; the old men sense that he may have insights into their situation that may be key to their very survival. Don’s arrival in town appears to serve as a signal to the evil threatening the group, resulting in the deaths of Lewis and John. The surviving members, Sears and Ricky, band together with Don and Peter Barnes, a young man who has also su
ffered at the hands of Eva—who has become a supernatural shape-shifter—and the supernatural minions that she now commands. Together they struggle to locate and eliminate their nemesis as Eva slowly goes about destroying all that is dear to them.

  From the novel’s very first sentences, Straub sets a tone that defines the whole book. Those sentences take the form of a question and response: “‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ ‘I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing’” (Straub 1980, 3). Straub then proceeds, through the novel as a whole, to explore the terrifying notion that ghosts may be unique to those they haunt, that victims may somehow summon their torturers from some dark place within their own psyches. Stephen King has described this as “a very Henry Jamesian theme. . . . the idea that ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them” (King 2010, 271). Straub leaves it unclear whether Eva/Alma/Anne-Veronica could thrive if she were not sustained by the belief of her victims. It is never made clear whether her existence is objective and independent, symbiotic, or dependent on those she seeks to destroy, and Straub’s clues muddy the waters—apparently deliberately—as when Eva and another shape-shifter are asked, “Who are you?” and they answer with maddening ambiguity, “I am you” (Straub 1980, 26).