by Matt Cardin
Hell House undoubtedly has its adherents. Dean Koontz praised it and predicted its endurance as a major novel of supernatural horror in an introduction written for one edition of the book and later reprinted in editors Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve’s The Twilight Zone and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. Laudatory blurbs from the likes of Straub and Stephen King were printed on some of the book’s various published editions, with the latter declaring that it “may be the scariest haunted house novel ever written.” Nevertheless, Hell House could be judged a rare miss for Matheson, if success is measured in terms of content and relevance.
Jason V Brock
See also: The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; Matheson, Richard.
Further Reading
Bradley, Matthew R. 2010. “Richard Matheson—Storyteller: Fresh Hell.” Tor.com, November 9. http://www.tor.com/2010/11/09/richard-matheson-storyteller-fresh-hell.
Koontz, Dean. 2009. “Introduction to Hell House.” In The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson, edited by Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, 100–107. New York: Citadel Press Books.
Pulliam, June M., and Fonseca, Anthony J. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
HERBERT, JAMES (1943–2013)
James John Herbert was an English writer of horror fiction who achieved fame with his first novel, The Rats, in 1974. Over a 40-year career he became Britain’s best-selling author of popular fiction, and his novels played a significant role in the horror publishing boom of the 1970s through the 1990s.
Herbert was born in London in 1943, the son of market stall traders, and grew up in the postwar bomb-damaged East End area of Whitechapel. Having studied graphic design and printing, he worked for an advertising agency in London, and it was there that he wrote The Rats, which was an instant best seller upon its publication. He went on to publish twenty-three more novels during his career, plus two nonfiction books and a graphic novel.
In his landmark survey of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, Stephen King describes Herbert as “probably the best writer of pulp horror fiction to come along since the death of Robert E. Howard” (King 1981, 336). King suggests that the way Herbert approaches horror is uncompromising: Herbert “seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces” (339), and this became evident early in his career. In books such as The Rats, The Fog (1975), and The Dark (1980), Herbert reveled in graphic depictions of violence, including a gym teacher stripped and beaten to death by his aroused students, a child eaten by rats, and an entire football stadium crowd descending into frenzied murder. King felt the need to defend Herbert, who he said was held in “remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre” (336). Arguably it was this tendency toward the explicit that branded Herbert the lesser, more “pulpy” writer, yet a lack of critical appreciation was compensated for by popularity. At the time of his death, Herbert had sold more than 50 million books.
Herbert shattered the British tradition of historically set, Gothic-inflected horror featuring middle-class intellectual heroes and aristocratic monsters. Instead, his stories are contemporary, urban, and working class. His main characters are mostly ordinary, professional men who are ill-equipped to deal with the forces against them, from bodyguard Liam Halloran facing ancient Sumerian evil in Sepulchre (1987) to the sleazy paparazzo Joe Creed beset by disenfranchised demons in Creed (1990).
Often these characters’ investigations lead them from their London flats to large country estates, blue-collar men drawn into the murky world of the wealthy country elite, and Herbert never shied away from political or social commentary. He earned the wrath of the British neo-Nazi movement with The Spear (1978), in which Nazi sympathizers worship a zombiefied Heinrich Himmler. In The Secret of Crickly Hall (2006) he wrote about child abuse in orphanages, while Others (1999) addressed the mistreatment of disabled children. In later years he critiqued big business, such as the Magma Corporation in Sepulchre and the powerful yet mysterious Illuminati-like The Inner Court in Ash (2013).
Such commentary stemmed from Herbert’s roots. Growing up in the East End, he saw successive governments fail to improve the living conditions of the poor, and his distrust of authority became the backdrop to his stories, with his heroes lifting the veil on the rich, powerful, and corrupt. Another key theme drew on his Catholicism, explored in detail in Shrine (1983), which tells the story of Alice, a deaf-mute girl who, after apparently seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary, can hear, speak, and perform miracles. Herbert’s story involves a Catholic church that exploits the miraculous Alice and the blind followers who idolize her, only to find that she is possessed by Elnor, a seventeenth-century nun who was a witch and a spirit of evil. Herbert’s critique here is aimed at all forms of blind faith and fanaticism. Alice is ultimately murdered by a lonely young man who is obsessed with Mark Chapman (John Lennon’s killer) and John Hinkley (would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan).
While graphic scenes of death and sex in his first novels gave Herbert a reputation as an enfant terrible of pulp horror, other early works demonstrated a softer side to his writing that would eventually come to the fore. The Survivor (1976) downplayed horror in favor of the supernatural in its tale of pilot David Keller, the single survivor of a plane crash that kills 300 people. The book is part mystery thriller, as Keller investigates the crash and a series of other bizarre deaths that occur around the crash site, but it also increasingly becomes a Catholic-inflected musing on the afterlife. Herbert expanded on this in his next book, Fluke (1977), a fable about a man who dies and is reborn as a dog, and who tries in his canine form to discover the circumstances of his death. Both Fluke and The Survivor were filmed, the former in Hollywood in 1995 and the latter in Australia in 1981. Fluke was sold as a children’s film, while The Survivor was a little seen and even less loved horror movie, as was Deadly Eyes (1982), a Canadian adaptation of The Rats. It was arguably the lack of success in transforming Herbert’s work into movies in the early 1980s that contributed to his becoming less of a cultural icon than King.
Although he returned to gore in novels such as The Spear, The Dark, and Sepulchre, increasingly Herbert focused on the supernatural, with later novels such as The Magic Cottage (1986) and Haunted (1988) becoming progressively elegiac in tone. Herbert’s softer side and huge achievement led to his eventual acceptance by the establishment. He was awarded the Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010, and the same year he received the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award from Stephen King. In the year before his death, after a checkered relationship with screen adaptations, Herbert saw his The Secret of Crickley Hall adapted by the BBC into a well-received three-part miniseries.
Herbert died at his home in West Sussex in March 2013. No cause of death was given. While the gentle Fluke was his personal favorite, his true legacy is found in the savage early works that revolutionized British horror writing and inspired a generation of young British readers to embrace the genre.
Simon Brown
See also: Psychological Horror; The Rats.
Further Reading
Cabell, James. 2013. James Herbert—The Authorised True Story 1943–2013. London. John Blake.
Jones. Stephen. 1992. James Herbert: By Horror Haunted. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
King, Stephen. 1981. Danse Macabre. New York. Everest House.
Spark, Alasdair. 1993. “Horrible Writing: The Early Fiction of James Herbert.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 147–160. London and Boulder: Pluto Press.
HICHENS, ROBERT (1864–1950)
Robert Smythe Hichens was a prolific English novelist and short-story writer. He did not originally claim credit for a successful roman à clef (a fictional story about real people) about Oscar Wilde, The Green Carnation (1894), but was deeply affected by a tour
of the Nile made in the company of Lord Alfred Douglas, transfigured in his phantasmagoric novel An Imaginative Man (1895), and seems to have retained traumatic guilt feelings from it that also fueled his work.
Lord Frederick Hamilton, editor of the Pall Mall Magazine, was sufficiently impressed by Hichens’s account of a transmigration of souls in “A Reincarnation” (1895) to commission him to develop a plot of his own in “A Tribute of Souls,” featuring a diabolical bargain. But Hamilton subsequently found Hichens’s “The Cry of the Child” too nasty-minded to print. That harrowing tale of a man haunted by the ghostly cries of a child whom he allowed to die of neglect appeared in Hichens’s finest collection, Tongues of Conscience (1900), a book of five horror stories that also featured his masterpiece, “How Love Came to Professor Guildea.” The more sedate Bye-Ways (1897) had previously reprinted “A Tribute of Souls” alongside “The Charmer of Snakes,” in which a man loses his wife to the seductive music of a snake-charmer.
“How Love Came to Professor Guildea”: A Neglected Masterpiece of Ghostly Horror
Hichens’s novella “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” was first published in the collection Tongues of Conscience (1900) but is based on a shorter story, “The Man Who Was Beloved,” published in the October 1897 issue of Pearson’s Magazine. The central character, a scientist, is fond of explaining to his only friend, a priest, that there is no scope in his well-ordered life for emotion or affection, but he then becomes the object of the slavish infatuation of a ghostly stalker that suffers from a severe mental deficiency. The ghost is invisible to him but not to his pet parrot, whose mimicry of the moronic phantom reveals her fawning all too clearly. In the first version of the story, the idea of the parrot’s mimicry is simply used as a twist in the tale, but the fuller version brings out the desperate unease of a man who has eliminated love from his existence but finds himself persecuted by it in an insidious fashion that seems uniquely horrible to him.
Although many ghost stories are, in effect, tales of stalking, those prior to the publication of Hichens’s story that credited amorous motives to the specters tended to render the eroticism more rewarding, unless or until spoiled by jealousy. Hichens provides a far more distinctive and intense psychological study, which makes the novella one of the great English ghost stories. It has been widely anthologized, although it has somehow escaped the attention of most scholars of horror and supernatural fiction. It has also been adapted several times for radio and television, including an episode of the popular 1940s CBS radio show Escape and an episode of the pioneering 1950s horror-suspense television series Lights Out.
Brian Stableford
Flames (1897) is a remarkable novel in which an effortlessly moral socialite wants to feel the temptations that torment his imperfect friend, and so he proposes a magical exchange of souls that goes awry. The friend’s body is possessed by the soul of an evil occultist, whose influence threatens to corrupt him irredeemably. The Dweller on the Threshold (1911) revisits the theme of Flames, and Hichens wrote a third, more enigmatic version of the plot in “The Sin of Envy,” published in his The Gardenia and Other Stories (1934). In the title story of The Man in the Mirror (1950) a portraitist attempts to paint his doppelgänger, with disastrous consequences.
Hichens never quite made up his mind where he stood on the matter of the fashionable occultism that pervaded British and American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This uncertainty in the face of supernatural phenomena weakened many of his horror stories, but the strange psychology of his work remains a fascinating case study.
Brian Stableford
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Cooper, Frederic T. [1912] 2008. “Robert Hichens.” In A Hideous Bit of Morbidity: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 307–324. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Stableford, Brian. 1998. “Robert Smythe Hichens.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 268–270. Detroit: St. James Press.
HILL, JOE (1972–)
Joe Hill is the pen name for Joseph Hillstrom King, an American author. Born in 1972 to horror writer Stephen King and his wife Tabitha, also a writer, Hill chose a pseudonym to achieve success on his own, apart from his famous family name. He was able to write for nearly a decade, publishing a collection of short stories, while keeping his identity secret. He is best known for horror and science fiction novels and comic books.
His first book, a critically acclaimed short story collection titled 20th Century Ghosts (2005), garnered numerous awards, including a Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection and two British Fantasy Awards. Hill has said that his fiction, particularly his short fiction, is greatly influenced by Bernard Malamud, especially the idea that short stories can contain elements of fantasy and magic next to stark reality. Critics have described his writing style as “slipstream,” which crosses and combines genre elements of horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and literary fiction.
With the publication of his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Hill won literary success, but he also found that he could no longer hide the connection to his famous father. Eventually, he gave in to the family connection and published several Kindle Singles with his father, including In the Tall Grass (2012) and Throttle (2012). Like Stephen King, Hill is probably best known for his horror novels: Heart-Shaped Box, Horns (2010), NOS4A2 (2013), and The Fireman (2016). In 2014, Horns was adapted into a feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple, directed by Alexandre Aja. NOS4A2 inspired a comic series called Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland (2013–2014). Wraith followed on the heels of Locke and Key (the first in the series debuted in 2008), another comic book series penned by Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez. In 2011, a television series adapted from Locke and Key was highly anticipated by fans, and a pilot was filmed, though the Fox network ultimately passed on the project. Hill has continued to work with various artists and IDW Publishing on several horror comic projects, including The Cape (2012) and Thumbprint (2013).
In 2016, a landmark year in Hill’s writing career, The Fireman hit #1 on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, the first work of his to reach the top spot. In interviews, Hill has said that he identifies more as a comic writer than anything else, though he continues to write across mediums. At the time of this writing, a new television adaptation of Locke and Key was rumored to be still in the works, with Hill saying that he did not want to give up on the project.
Lisa Kröger
See also: King, Stephen.
Further Reading
Dionne, Zach. 2013. “Owen King and Joe Hill on Their New Novels, Sibling Rivalry, and Stephen King’s Shadow.” Vulture, May 2. http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/joe-hill-owen-king-interview.html.
“Joe Hill.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
Joe Hill Fiction. 2016. Accessed June 15. http://www.joehillfiction.com.
Niehart, Ben. 2007. “Prince of Darkness.” New York Times Magazine, March 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/magazine/18hill.t.html?_r=0.
HILL, SUSAN (1942–)
British author Susan Hill, winner of the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham, and John Llewellyn Rhys awards and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is well known as an accomplished author of contemporary ghost stories: The Woman in Black (1983), The Mist in the Mirror (1992), The Man in the Picture (2007), several short stories, and also crime and other contemporary fictions. Both her tales of the strange living and of the dead impinging on the living depict individual feelings and the confusion of relationships and hidden family secrets. She creates social microcosms with delicacy, vulnerability, and a sense of threat.
Hill’s revival of the British ghost story in The Woman in Black (1983) engages readers with the power of Gothic horror to reveal horrible secrets of the past and their deadly legacy in the present, putting s
pectral flesh on hidden, repressed stories, versions, perspectives, and lives, and inviting readers to look again at social mores and understand them differently. The titular woman in black is the marginalized and maddened ghost of Jennet Humfrye, who wreaks fatal revenge on local children for the loss of her illegitimate child Nathaniel, who, after being adopted by Jennet’s wealthy sister, Mrs. Drablow, drowned in an accident crossing the marshy spit to her remote mansion. The novel is interpretable in light of Julia Briggs’s feminist exploration of women’s ghost stories, which recuperated and emphasized their importance for reading the hidden lives of women in periods when they had no property and little education, and were expected to be silent. Ghosts, says Briggs, lure readers into a space of tension “between certainty and doubt, between the familiar and the feared, between rational occurrence and the inexplicable” (Briggs 2012, 176).
In Hill’s The Mist in the Mirror, on a dark and rainy night Sir James Monmouth returns to England after a lifetime of traveling, intent on discovering more about himself and his obsession, explorer Conrad Vane. Sir James, warned against following Vane’s trail, experiences disturbing events leading to questions concerning a sad little boy, an old woman hidden behind the curtain, chilling screams, and desperate sobbing. Travel and entrapment reappear in The Man in the Picture, set in Cambridge, London, a remote country house, and Venice at Carnival time, a popular city for tales of ghosts, death, confusion, and loss (as in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, 1912; Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now,” 1971; and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, 1981). Here people wear masks concealing secrets, which are revealed in a terrifying painting in which the man in the picture comes to life. Hill’s dark short stories also dramatize ghostly revenge. For example, in “The Small Hand” (2010) a murdered child leads a researcher close to death, reenacting his own drowning at the hand of the man’s brother, who, faced with his own guilt, commits suicide. Retribution, malice, and uncanny returns dominate Hill’s socially engaging horror.