by Matt Cardin
The IHG Awards, which were spearheaded in their last years of existence by editor and critic Paula Guran, were decided by a jury of notable, knowledgeable horror/dark fantasy critics and reviewers. Over the years, Edward Bryant, Stefan Dziemianowicz, William Sheehan, Ann Kennedy Vandermeer, Fiona Webster, and Hank Wagner served as judges for the awards. Although it was a juried award, the IHG judges requested recommendations from the public to help them in their search for the most deserving candidates. Those recommendations were then considered when determining the nominees for the awards. The judges decided on winners in each category from the final ballot of nominees. The list of categories included Novel, Long Fiction, Mid-Length Fiction, Short Fiction, Collection, Anthology, Periodical, Illustrated Narrative, Nonfiction, and Art.
The IHG Awards were usually announced annually during a special presentation at a convention or other event. The awards were hosted by the World Fantasy Convention (WFC), World Horror Convention (WHC), and Dragon*Con. The IHG was in no way officially affiliated with WFC, WHC, or with Dragon*Con, nor was it considered a sponsor of any event.
Each year, the IHG presented a “Living Legend” award for outstanding contributions to the field. Harlan Ellison was the first recipient in 1995, and Peter Straub was the last in 2008. Along the way, several other notables were recognized, including Ramsey Campbell, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Gahan Wilson, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Hugh B. Cave, E. F. Bleiler, William F. Nolan, Ray Bradbury, and Clive Barker.
A lasting legacy of the IHG Awards is their usefulness to readers who are interested in discovering high-quality work in the fields of horror and dark fantasy, since the works of those named as Living Legends by the IHG can provide a valuable guide to recommended reading, as provided by a knowledgeable group of judges who loved and respected genre fiction. The annual listings of the nominees in each award category are also helpful. As of this writing, a listing of all nominees and winners is still being maintained at www.horroraward.org.
Hank Wagner
See also: Barker, Clive; Bleiler, E. F.; Bradbury, Ray; Bram Stoker Award; Campbell, Ramsey; Dark Fantasy; Ellison, Harlan; King, Stephen; Matheson, Richard; Nolan, William F.; Shirley Jackson Awards; World Fantasy Award; Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn.
Further Reading
International Horror Guild. 2008. http://www.horroraward.org/index.html.
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE
Interview with the Vampire is the first novel by Anne Rice. Published in 1976, it raises existential questions about the meaning of good, evil, life, and death in the modern world, and it contributed to a renewed cultural fascination with the vampire by abandoning the conventionally tyrannical villain in the Dracula mold that had become a staple of the genre.
The novel is presented as an interview with one Louis de Pointe du Lac, who, in the late twentieth century, recounts the story of how he was turned into a vampire in the eighteenth century by a vampire named Lestat; how he struggled against his vampire nature, regularly clashing violently with his maker, who encouraged him to embrace this dark gift; and how the two settled into an unsettling domestic unity in New Orleans, following their “creation” of Claudia, a vampire destined to remain a child in body, if not mind, for eternity. Through Claudia, Rice introduces one of the more disturbing characters in horror literature. Claudia is a taboo-breaking creation who crosses many cultural and social boundaries, embodying both innocent victim and monstrous creation; child and lover; the dead child but also the child who will never die. While Louis is the narrator, it is Claudia’s story that haunts the novel, bubbling beneath the surface, generating unease and discomfort because she is fundamentally unknowable. Through this unholy union between Louis, Lestat, and Claudia, the novel offers a fascinating and perverse representation of family, bound by blood and death.
A Template for Goths
Interview with the Vampire was not commercially successful when it was first published, but its reputation steadily grew, and this was linked in part to its profound influence on the nascent Goth subculture. As Gothic scholar Catherine Spooner has observed, “Despite preceding the first wave of Goth, Interview with the Vampire (1976) created, in its angst-ridden hero Louis and hedonistic anti-hero Lestat, Goth fictional icons. . . . The novel provided a template for the emergent Goth scene to project itself onto” (Spooner 2012, 358).
Matt Cardin
Source: Spooner, Catherine. 2012. “Goth Culture.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 350–366. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Key influences on Rice’s novel were Richard Matheson, whose horror and science fiction writing reimagined familiar genres through a contemporary lens, and the Universal horror film Dracula’s Daughter (1936), which is notable for its sympathetic and yet morally complex female vampire, who longs for release from the curse of vampirism, while remaining driven by her insatiable physical desire for blood. Rice would draw into her novel the film’s exploration of the tension between desire and guilt, between self-loathing and the sensual pleasure in being a vampire. These characteristics were enhanced by the novel’s first-person narration.
While Rice did not originate the figure of the sympathetic vampire, her novel emphasized the importance of the vampire having its own voice, making the novel particularly significant in a period when marginalized groups sought to articulate their perspective through the civil rights, gay rights, and women’s movements. This is one reason, alongside the novel’s evocation of polymorphous sensuality among its primarily male vampires, that it was perceived to operate as an elongated allegory for homosexual desire, an exploration of identity, and a celebration of alternative sexualities. Ultimately, Rice offered a new model of a soulful vampire that continues to haunt contemporary literature and media.
Interview with the Vampire was adapted to film in 1994 by director Neil Jordan, with Tom Cruise as Lestat, Brad Pitt as Louis, and Kirsten Dunst as Claudia. The film version was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Stacey Abbott
See also: Rice, Anne; Vampires; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond.
Further Reading
Benefiel, C.R. 2004. “Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” Journal of Popular Culture 38 (2): 261–273.
Tomc, S. 1997. “Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 95–113. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Wood, Martin J. 1999. “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature.” In The Blood Is the Life, edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr, 59–78. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
THE INVISIBLE MAN
The Invisible Man, published in 1897 by H. G. Wells, is a novel that explores the moral and social consequences of scientific progress through a tale of a scientist who renders himself invisible. The story begins as a mysterious man, wrapped from head to toe, takes a room in the West Sussex village of Iping. The man’s strange and solitary behavior attracts the curiosity of the villagers. In a dispute over money, the stranger throws off his clothing to reveal he is entirely invisible. After causing a panic, the Invisible Man takes shelter in the home of a university friend, Kemp, and reveals himself as Griffin, a young physics student who has discovered how to render living tissue invisible. Griffin had experimented on himself to ensure he would have full credit for his discovery. His desperate escape from London, however, has left him without money, clothing, or access to the equipment he needs to become visible again, driving him insane. Rather than assist in Griffin’s declared “Reign of Terror,” Kemp alerts the police. After a struggle, Griffin is overwhelmed by a mob and killed, his bo
dy again becoming visible in death.
As a moral tale, Wells’s novel dramatizes the Ring of Gyges episode from Plato’s Republic, which questions whether or not morality is really the product of the fear of being caught. In addition, Wells draws much symbolism from who can and cannot “see” Griffin; Wells uses visibility in a similarly symbolic way in the 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind.”
The initial horror of the Invisible Man comes from his coverings, which mark him as a man-machine hybrid. Later, when Griffin has shed his disguise, it is not his otherness that is unsettling, but his ability to move unseen into private spaces and homes. Not only a tale of scientific overreach, The Invisible Man also demonstrates how society rejects the abnormal: Griffin’s inability or unwillingness to find help pushes him from marginal figure to antagonist.
As with Wells’s other “scientific romances,” scientific pursuit holds an occult power over the scientist figure, in which the abstractions of scientific research are somehow more “real,” Also typical for Wells, however, the Invisible Man’s extraordinary nature must contend with everyday life. Wells pits the conflict of the Invisible Man against the villagers of Iping in terms of the antagonism of town and country, of cosmopolitan progress versus tradition and superstition.
The story has since been adapted numerous times, notably in a 1933 film by director James Whale. The Invisible Man is an equally engaging investigation into experimentation on the body and society’s resistance to scientific pursuit.
Miles Link
See also: Gothic Hero/Villain; Mad Scientist; The Uncanny; Wells, H. G.; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction.
Further Reading
Beiderwell, Bruce. 1983. “The Grotesque in Wells’s The Invisible Man.” Extrapolation 24 (4): 301–310.
The Invisible Man. 2014. Directed by James Whale. Los Angeles: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, DVD.
MacLean, Steven. 2009. The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells: Fantasies of Science. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
IRVING, WASHINGTON (1783–1859)
Born April 3, 1783, in Manhattan, New York, to Scottish-English parents, Washington Irving was a writer of short stories as well as an essayist, historian, and biographer, who became one of the first American authors to achieve international notoriety and commercial success for his work. Named after General George Washington, the revolutionary hero (and, later, first president of the United States), who had negotiated the British ceasefire the same week in which young Irving was born, Washington Irving is most famous for his 1819–1820 publication The Sketch Book, written under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, in which his best-known stories “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) first appeared.
Irving’s career as a writer began in the Morning Chronicle, in which he wrote scathing social and cultural commentaries under a pseudonym (a habit he would maintain throughout his fictional works), before he founded Salmagundi, a literary magazine, in 1807, which also satirized New York cultural life. After the success of his first book, A History of New York (1809), Irving edited Analectic Magazine and began writing biographies. From 1819 to 1820, Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. was published in installments, and with its great success Irving lobbied hard for stronger legal practices to protect his lucrative copyright on both sides of the Atlantic.
Though he was and is famed more for his fictional histories and biographies of well-known historical figures than his horror fiction, Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a romantically Gothic tale of the headless Hessian horseman who haunts the eponymous town of Sleepy Hollow, has long been preserved in America’s cultural imagination. Noted for its Gothic imagery and for its representation of local superstitions, myths, ghost stories, and the dreamy quality of pastoral life in upstate New York, “Sleepy Hollow” is lent a haunting gravitas by Irving’s earlier experiences in the real-life town of Sleepy Hollow near Tarrytown, New York, where Irving recuperated from illness as a child. The story has provided the basis for one of director Tim Burton’s most beautifully realized Gothic films, Sleepy Hollow (1999), as well as Fox TV’s supernatural drama of the same title.
Other short stories published in The Sketch Book included “Rip Van Winkle,” a Gothic pastoral folk tale cum ghost story set in the haunting Catskill Mountains, and “The Spectre Bridegroom,” a Gothic drama in which a slain bridegroom returns to fulfill a promise to his bride-to-be, set in a German castle near the Rhine. Tales of a Traveller, published in 1824 (which includes the supernatural horror story “The Devil and Tom Walker”), was also published under Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon pseudonym. Later in his life, Irving published famed biographies on Christopher Columbus, Oliver Goldsmith, the prophet Muhammad, and George Washington, as well as other works of fiction inspired by his time in Spain, where he lived from 1842 to 1846, serving as the U.S. minister to Spain.
Irving died on November 28, 1859, at seventy-six years of age. His literary reputation and his impact on American culture is one of the greatest among his contemporaries. A little-known fact is that Irving was the first to call New York City “Gotham,” the name that later became famous in the Batman comic book universe. The surname of his fictional historian persona, Diedrich Knickerbocker, has become the colloquial name for New Yorkers. Irving is also responsible for reimagining American Christmastime in his writing, and he was the first to introduce the (false) idea that Europeans previously believed the earth to be flat, prior to European voyages of discovery. As a writer of Gothic horror, Irving’s output was minimal, but the influence of his most well-known works on the genre (particularly “Sleepy Hollow”) cannot be overstated.
Ian Kinane
See also: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.
Further Reading
Burstein, Andrew. 2007. The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. New York: Basic Books.
Irving, Pierre M. 1862. Life and Letters of Washington Irving, edited by Richard D. Rust. New York: G. P. Putnam.
Irving, Washington. 1969–1986. The Complete Works of Washington Irving, edited by Richard D. Rust. Wisconsin: Twayne.
Williams, Stanley T. 1935. The Life of Washington Irving. Two Volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
The Island of Doctor Moreau, published in 1896 by H. G. Wells, is a novel about scientific ethics and human identity. The story is told by Edward Prendick, sole survivor of a shipwreck in the South Pacific. He is rescued by Montgomery, a former medical student fleeing scandal, now carrying a consignment of animals to an isolated island. On the island, Prendick discovers several menacing, strange-looking men. Prendick initially fears that Moreau is transforming humans into animals; Moreau explains, however, that his experiments shape animals into human form. The resulting “Beast People” are held in check by a strict set of laws meant to suppress their instincts, especially the tasting of blood.
One day, Moreau is accidentally killed by a half-finished creation. Without their supreme authority figure, the Beast People revolt, and Montgomery is killed as well. Prendick lives an uneasy existence with the Beast People, who revert slowly to animal instinct, until he escapes the island by boat.
Moreau echoes the tale of Circe from the Odyssey, and also John Milton’s Comus. Both of these older works depict a malevolent magician transforming lost travelers into animals. The book also draws from Jonathan Swift’s inverted critique of society in Gulliver’s Travels, especially the ending: upon his return to England, Prendick finds it difficult to distinguish human beings from animals, and, like Gulliver preferring the company of his horse, chooses to live out his days in isolation.
The novel’s primary concern is the ethics of scientific experimentation. Moreau was driven out of England following a sensationalist exposé, “The Moreau Horrors.” However, Moreau himself is untroub
led by any moral objections to vivisection. Prendick is impressed by Moreau’s scientific resolve, yet repulsed by the carelessness with which Moreau discards his finished experiments. The novel asks what responsibility scientists hold for their creations.
Most importantly, Wells blurs the dividing line between humans and animals. Moreau’s laws, which recast instinct as sinful behavior, are an early form of the Freudian view that civilization is only possible by suppressing desire, or a jaded version of Thomas Hobbes’s social contract. In addition, Prendick’s conjecture that the Beast People have been hypnotized into submission suggests a critique of mass culture, drawing a parallel with the newspaper-led controversy that drove Moreau from England. The Beast People’s ritual cry, “Are we not Men?” is thus a poignant question, picked up by subsequent film adaptations (notably in 1996, and in 1932, as The Island of Lost Souls). “Moreau” has subsequently become a byword for unethical scientific practice.
Miles Link
See also: Body Horror; Mad Scientist; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Wells, H. G.; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction.
Further Reading
Glendening, John. 2002. “‘Green Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2): 571–597.
The Island of Lost Souls. [1932] 2011. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. New York: Criterion Collection. DVD.
Parrinder, Patrick. 1995. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.