Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  JAMES, HENRY (1843–1916)

  Henry James was an expatriate American writer who spent most of his adult life living in England and on the European continent. He was a prolific author of novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and travel writing, and was best known in his fiction writing for his sharp and incisive portraits of the psychological lives of his characters. James’s vast output includes eighteen stories, most written before the turn of the twentieth century, which his biographer, Leon Edel, collected as The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (1948). Charles L. Elkins, writing in Supernatural Fiction Writers, speculates that James may have been drawn to the tale of the supernatural because ghost stories were a very popular type of fiction in the Victorian era and James wanted to be successful financially as well as critically. His most famous ghost story is an undisputed classic of the form, the short novel The Turn of the Screw (1898).

  Although James’s ghost stories are not traditional by most genre standards, some feature genuine ghostly presences. In “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), a woman who is set on marrying the widower of her dead sister rummages through a trunk of clothes that her sister forbade anyone but her daughter to have, and is found dead beside it, her face and brow bearing “the marks of ten hideous wounds from two vengeful ghostly hands.” “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891) literalizes the idea of the sins of the parents being visited upon the children when a mother is dismayed to see the ghost of a lover she once jilted pursuing her daughter, presumably to inflict misery upon her. In “The Real Right Thing” (1899), a journalist intent on writing the biography of a deceased writer with the cooperation of his widow changes his mind when the writer’s ghost appears to them both to dissuade them.

  In a number of James’s stories, the ghosts and hauntings are more ambiguous. “The Ghostly Rental” (1876) concerns an elderly man, Captain Diamond, who is convinced that he sees the ghost of his dead daughter in the house where he disowned her for a past indiscretion. When his daughter later reveals to the narrator that she is alive and has been maintaining the charade of her death to punish her father, she is convinced that she sees his ghost in the house after he dies, although this may just be an expression of her own guilty feelings. In “Owen Wingrave” (1892), a young man who refuses to follow his family’s tradition of entering military service agrees to sleep in a room supposedly haunted by the ghost of a colonel ancestor who killed his own son in it in a fit of rage. When the room is entered the next day the young man is found dead. The protagonist of “The Jolly Corner” (1908) returns to his boyhood home in New York as part of his quest to discover how his life might have turned out had he not left thirty years before, and encounters what appears to be the alternate identity that he might have had. The Turn of the Screw has long been regarded a masterpiece of ambiguous supernaturalism. Its heroine, a newly hired governess at a country estate, is convinced that the two children she is supervising have fallen under the malignant influence of the ghosts of her employer’s ex-valet and her predecessor, although it is never clear whether the spectral figures she sees are real or projections of her own emotionally overwrought mind. The story was adapted memorably for the screen in 1961 as The Innocents.

  Like the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, with whom James was friends, his ghost stories differ little from his more mainstream writing as regards the development of their characters and the insights provided for their motivations and behaviors. They are important examples of how the tale of the supernatural is just one of many possible approaches to fiction in a literary writer’s repertoire.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; The Turn of the Screw; Unreliable Narrator; Wharton, Edith; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

  Further Reading

  Edel, Leon. 1970. “Introduction.” In Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, v–xiv. New York: Taplinger.

  Elkins, Charles. 1982. “Henry James.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, Volume I: Fantasy and Horror, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 337–344. New York: Scribners.

  James, Henry. 1996. “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” In American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, 103–120. New York: Penguin.

  Lustig, T. J. 1994. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Tuttle, Lisa. 1988. “Henry James.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by Richard Bleiler, 298–301. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.

  JAMES, M. R. (1862–1936)

  Montague Rhodes “Monty” James was the youngest son of an evangelical Anglican divine (clergy). As indicated by his memoir’s title, Eton and King’s (1926), he attended Eton College, then King’s College at Cambridge University, and worked at those two institutions for most of his life as a medievalist, biblical scholar, translator, museum director, and administrator. However, James’s contemporary reputation rests not on a prolific academic output but on his occasional pastime as writer of about three dozen ghost stories, which some critics see as the apogee of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English ghost story tradition. He published relatively few of these stories in periodicals, and some, such as “After Dark in the Playing Fields” (1924) and “Rats” (1929), appeared in small Eton magazines.

  James’s stories were often honed as oral tales to rapt fireside academic audiences on Christmas Eve nights or read at meetings of various literary societies. They often maintain informal, laconic, and understated tones appropriate to their original telling, glaze over plot details, and exhibit a flair for the minutiae of Edwardian academics’ lives. For example, “The Mezzotint” (1904) includes a side gag about academics golfing.

  Many of James’s stories made their first print appearances in four thin collections of five to eight stories: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). A darkly humorous tale to scare Boy Scouts, Wailing Well (1928) first appeared as a chapbook. The nearly comprehensive The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931) appeared in his lifetime. S. T. Joshi’s two-volume The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (2005–2006) rounds up remaining early and fugitive stories as well as James’s limited but provocative theoretical writings on the form of the ghost story, mostly from prefaces to his own work or others’ collections.

  James is best remembered for his first two collections, especially Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The enthusiasm of James’s illustrator friend James McBryde spurred James to assemble the collection. However, McBryde’s untimely death came after he produced only two illustrations each for “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” (1895) and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904). James refused to let any other illustrator finish the work. McBryde’s detailed rendering from a photograph of the interior of Saint Bertrand de Comminges Cathedral, the location of Canon Alberic’s haunted scrapbook, became the frontispiece for the collection’s first edition. McBryde models his drawing of the story’s academic protagonist on James himself, and that character, Dennistoun, is mentioned again by the narrator of “The Mezzotint” and establishes the type for subsequent James protagonists. Another of McBryde’s illustrations, the sheet-wrapped specter attacking in “Oh, Whistle,” is iconic and graces many subsequent covers of James’s work. As a tribute to his friend, James also oversaw the publication of The Story of a Troll-Hunt (1904), a fantasy story written and drawn by McBryde and based on his and James’s trip with a third friend to Jutland. Another James editorial project was the recovery and publication of often anonymous ghost stories from his favorite writer of the genre, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, in Madame Cowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923).

  “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”

  This story, which takes its title from a song by Robert Burns, first appeared in 1903 in a reading by M. R. James before a Christmas gather
ing in King’s College, Cambridge, before its inclusion in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary the following year. It has been widely anthologized and was adapted for television three times in Britain: as a reasonably faithful short film (1968), a dramatic reading (1986), and a loosely reworked metaphor for dementia (2010).

  Professor Parkins, a resolute rationalist, notes someone following him at a distance the moment he uncovers a bronze whistle in the ruins of a Templar church, and he assumes this is merely another guest at his hotel. When he discovers inscriptions on both sides of the whistle, he ignores the Latin puzzle in the first, but feels sufficiently confident in his translation of the second—“Who is this who is coming?”—to set the whistle to his lips, bringing a gust of shrieking wind round the hotel, which bursts into the room and blows out the candles (James 2005, 88). Thereafter, dreams of pursuit along the beach join puzzling activity on the empty bed adjacent to his own, and sightings of a waving figure at his window, until he encounters a hideous “face of crumpled linen” (100).

  James cleverly combines traditional motifs—the sheeted ghost, Gothic ruins, folk belief in whistling for the wind, and a skeptical observer—with an abbreviated form of the accumulated tension and inexorable weight of history that he had learned from J. Sheridan Le Fanu, then adds elements specific to his own interests, such as Latin tags, medieval artifacts, and an ironic detachment bordering on black humor. The result is as seamless as myth and as vivid as nightmare.

  Jim Rockhill

  Source: James, M. R. 2005. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. New York: Penguin Classics.

  James appeared to hold some contempt for the occult detective fiction of contemporaries William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, but his work has overlays of detective fiction. He admired Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, referenced The Strand in “A School Story” (1911), and wrote an introduction (1926) to Le Fanu’s sensation novel Uncle Silas (1864). One might connect the Holmes cases’ emphases on clues and physical objects and use of them for titles to James’s practice. The vast majority of James’s stories are titled after objects and places, the sources of the haunting. The haunted art of “The Mezzotint” is the most self-reflexive example, a motif James returns to in “The Haunted Dolls’ House” (1923). Scholars dispute the interpretation of James’s title “The Malice of Inanimate Objects” (1933), but it aptly summarizes his oeuvre. More direct influences from detective fiction are present. Despite his contempt for Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838), James’s “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1904) owes much to the cryptography of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843). Other stories like “The Rose Garden” (1911) and “Two Doctors” (1919) are highly elliptical and rely on the reader to make inferences from their sparse details.

  Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2017) contrasts two categories of horror that many James stories straddle. James’s playful, understated ghost stories might seem inimical to the cosmic bombast often associated with Weird Tales writing. As Joshi points out, James slyly criticizes weird writers in print, and in letters rails against H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and others. But Lovecraft admires James, and not just for their shared disinterest in plots (Joshi 1990, 141–42). Lovecraft singles out the grotesque, bestial, and tactile qualities of James’s ghosts, which can suggest weird writers’ fascination with viscera, sinister evolutions, and the nonhuman. One might think of the burned giant spiders and the witch’s black-haired skeleton revealed in the immolation of “The Ash-Tree” (1904) or the dried, cobwebbed baldness of the apparition in “The Tractate Middoth” (1911). As Joshi points out, many of James’s tales operate on a strident binary between the academic, reserved, bourgeois qualities of his English male protagonists and the bestial violence of his sometimes feminine specters. In “Count Magnus” (1904), an overinquisitive English academic foolishly thrice wishes to gaze upon a dead Satanist Swedish nobleman and finds himself pursued back to England and to a grisly end by two mysterious cloaked figures, the revenant count and his nonhuman familiar. For Lovecraft and China Miéville, this story is the apotheosis of James’s synthesis of the ghost story’s typical religious and folkloric overtones, as well as indirect style, with the weird tale’s characteristic madness and inexplicable otherness.

  Robert Macfarlane intimately associates the mode of the eerie with James, both as a technique of slow-mounting dread and as a fascination with landscapes and what lies beneath: brutal histories of struggles for property and more overt supernatural intrusions. Macfarlane’s central example is James’s “A View from a Hill” (1925) as haunted binoculars reveal the ghosts of people and architecture of an English landscape. James’s post–World War I stories largely surrendered his occasional prior interest in French and Scandinavian settings, and James’s fiction turned to an English setting eerie with hidden landscapes and threatening yet never fully apprehensible history, such as “A Warning to the Curious” (1925). As Macfarlane traces it, this mode of James’s inflects contemporary trends in music, poetry, and painting. Most notably, one can see its role in the filmic subgenre of folk horror, which had a heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–1975), an annual television film series of James adaptations. This tradition has lately been revived in the films of Ben Wheatley, especially A Field in England (2013), and revivals of A Ghost Story for Christmas.

  The most comprehensive collection of television film adaptations of James is the British Film Institute’s Ghost Stories for Christmas (2013), which includes twenty-one different adaptations of James’s stories along with adaptations of a few other ghost story writers, including Dickens and occasional James-imitator Ramsey Campbell. Many were broadcast on the BBC at Christmas. These adaptations range from eleven to fifty-two minutes in length and were made from 1968 to 2010. About half dramatize James’s narratives; the other half are single actors performing partially dramatized readings, including three done by Christopher Lee playing M. R. James himself. Both visual and audio adaptations of James proliferate far beyond that single British Film Institute (BFI) collection. One volunteer-based, public domain source of audio adaptations of James is the website LibriVox, which hosts recordings of James’s first three story collections as well as his only novel, the surreal children’s fantasy The Five Jars (1922).

  Bob Hodges

  See also: Campbell, Ramsey; “Casting the Runes”; The Haunted House or Castle; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Occult Detectives; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Occult Fiction; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.

  Further Reading

  Briggs, Julia. 1977. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber.

  Ghost Stories for Christmas: Expanded 6 Disc Collection. 2013. DVD. London: BFI.

  Joshi, S. T. 2005–2006. Introductions to The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James. 2 vols. New York: Penguin.

  Joshi, S. T. [1990] 2003. The Weird Tale. Maryland: Wildside Press.

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

  Macfarlane, Robert. 2015. “The Eeriness of the English Countryside.” The Guardian, April 10. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane.

  Miéville, China. 2011. “M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?” Weird Fiction Review, November 29. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/m-r-james-and-the-quantum-vampire-by-china-mieville. Originally published in Collapse IV (May 2008): 105–126.

  Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press.

  THE JEWEL OF SEVEN STARS

  The Jewel of Seven Stars is Bram Stoker’s best-known novel after Dracula, and the only other of his works
to have been adapted for the cinema. It was released in two very different versions in 1903 and 1912, the latter being significantly shorter, with a conventional romantic ending and a central, introspective chapter excised.

  The novel opens in Edwardian London, where Abel Trelawny, a British Egyptologist, lies unconscious after having been mysteriously attacked during the night. The narrator, Malcolm Ross, is enamored of Margaret, Trelawny’s daughter, and joins the beleaguered household in their nightly vigils. Ross learns through Corbeck, another Egyptologist, that Trelawny has plundered the grave goods of the female pharaoh Tera, transporting her mummy, its detached seven-fingered hand, a mysterious ruby—the jewel of the title—a sealed coffer, and some ritually significant lamps to London. The attacks appear to have been perpetrated supernaturally by Tera’s mummified polydactyl cat, who acts as a sort of guardian both to the severed hand and the jewel. Having transported the whole assemblage to a cave in Cornwall, Trelawny attempts to revive the remarkably preserved mummy of Tera. In the first edition, a violent storm breaks into the chamber, disrupting what appears to be a successful revival of the body, and Ross, the sole survivor, is left to describe the horror that characterizes the fixed faces of his dead companions who have, clearly, witnessed something unspeakable. In the second edition, the mummy is destroyed without having been revived, nobody dies, and Ross and Margaret marry, the bride wearing Tera’s robe and jewelry.

  The Jewel of Seven Stars is, in many ways, a quite conventional Gothic work. It has an ambivalent supernatural content, and there is a suggestion of the promethean overreacher in the characterization of Trelawny. The novel is, further, saturated with doppelgängers—Margaret resembles Tera; her polydactyl cat may be confused with its mummified counterpart; the dead are at times mistaken for the living. As in Dracula, there is a central group of professional, educated gentlemen, accompanied by an appendant and resourceful woman, to balance the supernatural revenant—though here they appear to be easing, rather than opposing, the undead’s access to British soil. The settings, both in urban London and rural Cornwall, are claustrophobic and sublime in their literally shadowed obscurity.