Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  KOONTZ, DEAN (1945–)

  Dean Koontz is arguably the most famous horror writer who does not want to be regarded as a horror writer. And indeed, despite the fact that he was widely identified as one of the driving forces behind the horror publishing boom of the 1980s, much of his fiction has defied typical horror genre expectations and stereotypes. Often, his stories are profoundly spiritual or uplifting. They frequently deal with tales of love and friendship defeating the evil forces of chaos and destruction. His protagonists are highly sympathetic heroes who are not two-dimensional, cardboard cutout supermen (or superwomen), but who are instead characters possessing great depth, for whom the reader has great empathy.

  Born in Everett, Pennsylvania, and raised in Bedford, Pennsylvania, Koontz was a single child in a family with an abusive alcoholic father. Koontz said in an interview about this period of his life: “As a lonely child growing up in poverty, in the shadow of a violent and alcoholic father who repeatedly threatened to kill my mother and me . . . I found relief from fear and privation only in books” (Koontz 1997, 33). He attended Shippensburg University, part of the University of Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and later taught English at Mechanicsburg High School in Pennsylvania. After publishing his first novel, Star Quest, as part of a paperback “Ace Double” in 1968, Koontz went on to write prolifically in a variety of fiction styles ranging from fantasy, science fiction, and suspense to, of course, horror. Discussing his versatility as a popular writer, Koontz claims, “I’ve not only written SF and horror but psychological suspense like Shattered [1973] . . . and caper novels like Blood Risk [1973], Surrounded [1974], and The Wall of Masks [1975] as ‘Brian Coffey.’ And international intrigue as in The Key to Midnight [1979] as ‘Leigh Nichols’” (Munster 1988, 5). Koontz, in fact, published under a variety of pseudonyms early in his literary career, including “David Axton,” “Deanna Dwyer,” “K. R. Dwyer,” “John Hill,” “Anthony North,” “Richard Paige,” “Owen West,” and “Aaron Wolfe.”

  Today, Koontz may perhaps be more precisely defined as a writer of best-selling thrillers that contain elements or motifs of horror and terror within a larger narrative structure that also features a number of other popular genre tropes, such as romance, mystery, and action and adventure. Regarding his ability to work across genre boundaries, Koontz has said that “there’s an infinite way to combine genres, and some are bound to please more than others. The fun for me is the challenge of it, finding new forms of fiction, new ways of telling stories, unexpected juxtapositions of mood and material” (Morrish 1999, 3). A perfect example of Koontz’s use of “unexpected juxtapositions” can be found in his 1996 novel Ticktock (1996), which can be characterized as a wacky cross between screwball comedy and horror.

  Addressing the limitations of the horror genre in an article entitled “Genre in Crisis,” Koontz stated: “When a form of writing has become as inbred and self-consuming as the horror genre in the 1980s, frankness is not well received by its practitioners . . . in a spirit of boosterism that has . . . arisen from a sub-conscious awareness of the current lack of quality in the genre” (Greenberg, Gorman, and Munster 1994, 207). Koontz attempted to address that perceived lack of quality by reinventing stale genre fiction in novels such as 1988’s Lightning. In her definitive Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography, Katherine Ramsland quotes Koontz as saying, “Lightning was a bear of a novel to write because I was developing an idea that had never been used before—time travel from the past instead of from the future—plus a very unusual mix of genres” (Greenberg, Gorman, and Munster 1994, 334).

  Transcendentalism of one sort or another also is an important concept in Koontz’s fiction, whether it is seventeen-year-old Slim Mackenzie of Twilight Eyes (1987), who is able to see behind the façade of evil people the goblins that reside within, or Odd Thomas (appearing in a popular series beginning with the 2003 novel of the same title), a twenty-year-old small-town fry cook who is able to see the spirits of dead people and attempts to help them move on. Koontz’s abused past as a child in a dysfunctional home also helped provide background material for such classic suspense novels as Intensity (1996), a story about twenty-six-year-old Chyna Shepherd, who is terrorized by a sociopathic madman named Edgler Vess.

  Perhaps the best summation of Koontz’s efforts as a horror writer can be found in Joan G. Kotker’s study, Dean Koontz: A Critical Companion (1996), in which she argues that talking about Koontz’s work as horror is inaccurate, unless the discussion “emphasizes that in most of Koontz’s work, horror is based on the inhumanity of one human being to another rather than on stock supernatural devices” (Kotker 1996, 14). Kotker goes on to add that the reason Koontz’s fiction affects his readers so profoundly is because “there is nothing comforting about Dean Koontz’s descriptions of the horrors that we can and do inflict on each other” (Kotker 1996, 14).

  Yet many of Koontz’s heroes possess profound levels of compassion and understanding for those who suffer because of their own travails. Travis Cornell and his golden retriever Einstein (a genetically engineered dog that serves as an important protagonist) in the classic thriller Watchers (1987) are effective examples of these types of characters, as is the genetically challenged Christopher Snow from Fear Nothing (1998) and Seize the Night (1999). Often, Koontz’s message to his readers is that courage and perseverance, along with love and the ability to overcome intense suffering, can triumph over the most despicable of human or inhuman behavior. Because of this foundational strain of indefatigable optimism, horror itself, for Koontz, becomes something that strengthens human will rather than destroying it.

  Many film adaptations of Koontz’s novels have been produced, including Odd Thomas (2013), Phantoms (novel 1983, movie 1998), and Demon Seed (novel 1973, movie 1977). In 1996 he received the World Horror Convention’s Grandmaster Award.

  Gary Hoppenstand

  See also: Phantoms; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years.

  Further Reading

  Greenberg, Martin H., Ed Gorman, and Bill Munster, eds. 1994. The Dean Koontz Companion. New York: Berkley Books, 1994.

  Koontz, Dean. 1997. “Koontz on Koontz.” In Mystery Scene 59, edited by Ed Gorman, 30–33. Cedar Rapids, IA.

  Kotker, Joan G. 1996. Dean Koontz: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

  Morrish, Bob. 1999. “Dean Koontz.” In Speaking of Murder, Volume II, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Berkley Prime Crime.

  Munster, Bill. 1988. “Interview with Dean Koontz.” In Sudden Fear: The Horror and Dark Suspense Fiction of Dean R. Koontz, 5–31. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.

  KUTTNER, HENRY (1915–1958)

  Henry Kuttner was an American writer best known for his contributions to Astounding Science-Fiction and other Golden Age science fiction magazines, many of which he collaborated on with his wife, C. L. Moore, under his own name and a score of pseudonyms, notably Lewis Padgett. For the first decade of his career he wrote mostly weird fiction and contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared world of stories by diverse hands extrapolated from the myth patterns elaborated in H. P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror.

  Kuttner’s first professional fiction sale, “The Graveyard Rats,” appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. The story of an unscrupulous New England gravedigger who gets his horrifying comeuppance when he plunders a grave for jewelry interred with a corpse, it showed the influence of Lovecraft, whom Kuttner had been introduced to as a correspondent by Robert Bloch. “The Secret of Kralitz,” published in the October 1936 issue of Weird Tales, was Kuttner’s first tale to explicitly reference elements from Lovecraft’s fiction. “It Walks by Night” (1936) and “The Eater of Souls” (1937) were also imitative of Lovecraft, and indeed, much of Kuttner’s early weird fiction was derivative of writers whose work he admired.

  Ov
er the next three years, under his own name and the pseudonym Paul Hammond, Kuttner wrote nearly a dozen stories for Weird Tales and Strange Stories that evoked the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft’s fiction, his most accomplished being “The Salem Horror,” a variation on the theme of Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” that appeared in the May 1937 issue of Weird Tales. Kuttner’s other contributions to Weird Tales included “I, the Vampire” (1937), one of the first sympathetic vampire stories, and four stories—beginning with “Thunder in the Dawn” (1938)—that featured Elak of Atlantis, a sword-and-sorcery hero derivative of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror, and companions to two similar tales, “Cursed Be the City” and “The Citadel of Darkness,” featuring the supernatural adventures of swordsman Prince Raynor, that appeared in Strange Stories in 1939. Two of Kuttner’s best-known Weird Tales stories were collaborations: “The Black Kiss” (1937), written with Robert Bloch, about a sea creature who seduces a man through his dreams in order to exchange bodies with him, and “Quest of the Starstone” (1937), written with C. L. Moore and bringing together Moore’s science-fantasy hero Northwest Smith and her fantasy heroine Jirel of Joiry.

  At the same time that he wrote for Weird Tales and Strange Stories, Kuttner placed more than a dozen stories in Thrilling Mystery, Terror Tales, and other so-called “shudder pulps,” which featured modern Gothic stories with rationalized horrors. Formulaic by nature and often preposterous in their plots, Kuttner’s contributions to these magazines showed some elements of originality, as in “A Skull Has No Ears,” published in the July 1941 issue of Thrilling Mystery, which tangentially referenced the Lovecraft mythos, and “Hunger in the Dark,” published in the March 1941 issue of Terror Tales, which left ambiguous whether its seeming supernatural horrors could be logically explained.

  Some of Kuttner’s best short weird fiction was published in Unknown (later Unknown Worlds), the magazine of “logical fantasy” fiction created as a companion to Astounding Science-Fiction, where Kuttner placed nine stories. “Threshold,” published in the December 1940 issue, and “The Devil We Know,” published in the August 1941 issue, were clever variations on the traditional deal-with-the-devil story in which deal-makers who think they have outwitted the devil are themselves outwitted. In “Compliments of the Author,” published in the October 1942 issue, a vengeful sorcerer’s familiar relentlessly stalks the killer of its master, systematically neutralizing the limited safeguards against death that a grimoire filched from the sorcerer has given him. The wit and sophistication of Kuttner’s work for Unknown spread into his other writing at the time, including “Masquerade,” a comic vampire tale published in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales that was adapted memorably for the television program Boris Karloff’s Thriller in 1961, and “Housing Problem” (1944), an amusing fantasy about a household’s fairy infestation that was purchased for Unknown Worlds but published in the publisher’s slick magazine Charm after the pulp suspended publication.

  Several stories that Kuttner placed in science fiction magazines are ostensibly weird tales, including “The Touching Point,” published in the April 1941 issue of Stirring Science Stories, a story of magical transformations dressed up as a tale of extradimensional adventure, and “The Tree of Life,” published in the September 1941 issue of Astonishing Stories, which features a man-eating plant. In “Call Him Demon,” published in the fall 1946 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, the children in a family discover that a beloved uncle is actually an extraterrestrial in disguise who feeds upon human beings. With C. L. Moore, Kuttner also wrote several short novels redolent of the lost world fantasies of A. Merritt, among them Earth’s Last Citadel (1943), The Dark World (1946), and The Valley of the Flame (1946).

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  See also: Bloch, Robert; Cthulhu Mythos; Howard, Robert E.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  D’Ammassa, Don. 1996. “Henry Kuttner: Man of Many Voices.” In Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction: Essays on the Antecedents of Fantastic Literature, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 122–125. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan, and Robert Morrish. 2001. “Introduction.” In Masters of the Weird Tale: Henry Kuttner, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press.

  Moskowitz, Sam. 1967. “Henry Kuttner.” In Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, 319–333. New York: Ballantine.

  Ramsey, Shawn. 1990. “Henry Kuttner’s Cthulhu Mythos Fiction: An Overview.” In The Horror of It All, edited by Robert M. Price, 120–124. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont. Originally published in Crypt of Cthulhu 51 (1987).

  Roberts, Garyn G. 2013. “Henry Kuttner: Often-Overlooked Pillar of the Weird Tale and the Pulpwood Magazine.” In Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, 109–127. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press.

  KWAIDAN: STORIES AND STUDIES OF

  STRANGE THINGS

  The title of this 1904 collection is an archaic Japanese word (sometimes rendered “kaidan”) meaning “ghost story” or “weird tale.” It is the most famous of Lafcadio Hearn’s many books of Japanese supernatural stories. How much of it constitutes creative literature (i.e., original writing by Hearn) and how much is translation from Japanese sources is not clear. In some instances, Hearn refers to a word or line in an original Japanese text, but his beautifully rendered versions hover somewhere between translation and retelling. Certainly Hearn, in this book, did more than anyone else to introduce Japanese ghostly fiction to Western audiences, and he did so at the precise moment that Japan was rapidly modernizing. These are visions of Japan’s past. Modern Japanese horror writers use other terms to describe their work. A story is only “kaidan” if it is intended to evoke an old-fashioned atmosphere.

  In the world of Japanese fantasy, malevolent spirits abound. There are, for instance, the dangerous samurai ghosts of “The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi,” vanquished warriors who summon a blind minstrel to perform for them the tragic story of their own defeat. It is clear they will tear him to pieces when he is done. To protect him, a priest and his assistant paint texts from sacred sutras all over Hoichi’s body to render him invisible to the spirits. But they forget to protect his ears, which the spirits tear off. In “Mujina” the reader meets a faceless demon. In “Rokuro-Kubi” there is a whole group of ghastly beings whose heads detach from their bodies and fly around at night. In “Yuki-Onna” a beautiful snow demon has killed one man, but spares another because of his youth on the condition that he never tell what has happened. Later, he meets and marries a woman who looks much like the demon. They have children and live together for ten years. Then one night he confides the story to her, and she is revealed as the demon. She spares him again because of the children, but leaves, threatening to kill him if they ever have cause to complain about his parenting. This was apparently a folktale Hearn had heard from a farmer. “Jikiniki” tells of a corpse-eating monster, the ghost of a greedy priest being punished for his sins.

  Overall, the stories represent a combination of romance and horror, and are occasionally closer to fairy tales. Instances of the latter variety include “The Dream of Akinosuke,” in which a man goes to fairyland and marries a princess, spending many years there. When his wife dies, he snaps back into the normal world, only to find that just a few moments have passed and he was dwelling in an anthill. Some other stories are sentimental or moralistic. Also in the fairy tale vein is “The Story of Aoyagi,” about a man who marries the spirit of a tree.

  Kwaidan was memorably filmed by Masaki Kobayashi in 1964, although two of the four episodes are based on Hearn stories from other books.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Hearn, Lafcadio; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.

  Further Reading

  “The Ghost Story.” 2003. In Short Story Criticism, vol. 58, edited by Janet Witalec. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  Williams, Vera, 1946. Lafcadio Hearn. Bost
on: Houghton Mifflin.

  L

  LANE, JOEL (1963–2013)

  Joel Lane was one of the most accomplished writers of short horror fiction to emerge in Britain during the 1990s. Like Iain Sinclair and Nicholas Royle, he chronicled the dark underside of London life, exploring the experiences of disturbed individuals subsisting on the tattered fringes of modern society. Following in the footsteps of such brilliant urban portraitists as Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell (the latter an acknowledged influence), Lane crafted a series of elliptical, hallucinatory short stories, released in small-press outlets such as Ambit and Winter Chills, that surreally collapse psychic and physical topographies, evoking a crumbling, dreamlike Britain peopled with alienated losers, drug-addled visionaries, and other noir-esque hard cases.

  Lane’s reputation rests exclusively on his stories, which have been gathered in The Earth Wire (1994), The Lost District (2006), and the World Fantasy Award–winning Where Furnaces Burn (2012). While compellingly written, his two novels, From Blue to Black (2000) and The Blue Mask (2003), generally shun fantastic elements. A committed socialist, Lane brought to his work a serious social consciousness that exposed the flaws in post–Margaret Thatcher, post-welfare-state Britain. When he died in 2013 with a number of major works unfinished or unpublished, horror fiction lost a crucial voice.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Body Horror; Campbell, Ramsey; Dreams and Nightmares; Etchison, Dennis; Novels Versus Short Fiction; Psychological Horror; Surrealism.

  Further Reading

  “Joel Lane.” 2014. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  Valentine, Mark. 2013. “R.I.P. – Joel Lane, Author, Poet, Scholar.” Wormwoodiana. Retrieved from http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2013/11/rip-joel-lane-author-poet-critic.html.