Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  LANSDALE, JOE R. (1951–)

  Joe R. Lansdale is a prolific and multiple award–winning American author whose work spans several genres and numerous media. He has written Western, horror, mystery, and science fiction novels and short stories, and his work has been adapted for film and television. He has also written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites, and has edited or co-edited several anthologies. Lansdale has produced more than forty-five novels and numerous stories, which have been collected in thirty volumes. Texas born and bred, he resides in the East Texas town of Nacogdoches with his wife, Karen.

  Both Lansdale’s affection for horror and his penchant for genre bending are evidenced by the fact that many of his works have been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. He has received a total of nineteen nominations and has won ten times. Among his winning works are the visceral “Night They Missed the Horror Show” (1988), the zombie apocalypse novella On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks (1989), The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance (1992), The Big Blow (2000), the short fiction collection Mad Dog Summer (2004), and the graphic novel Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo (1993). In both his horror writings and his other work, Lansdale’s unique, folksy, compelling voice unfailingly shines through. A typical Lansdale story will start out grounded in the mundane and everyday, and veer off into the unknown, as his characters suddenly find themselves under extreme duress with no hope in sight. Lansdale then proceeds to milk those extreme situations, squeezing every drop of humor, suspense, and tension out of them.

  He is perhaps best known for his crime novels featuring the duo of Hap and Leonard (appearing in nine books and three novellas since 1990), and for Southern Gothics such as Freezer Burn (1999), The Bottoms (2000), A Fine Dark Line (2002), Sunset and Sawdust (2004), Leather Maiden (2008), and The Thicket (2013). These tales, which bring to mind the works of authors as diverse as Flannery O’Connor and James M. Cain, often take dark and bizarre turns, and include many elements that could be considered horrific.

  Lansdale’s novella Bubba Ho-Tep (1994) is one of his most widely known horror-related works, a fact aided by the story’s adaptation to film by director Don Coscarelli (of the Phantasm horror movie franchise) in 2002. The novella features Elvis Presley (played in the movie by horror legend Bruce Campbell) and John F. Kennedy (played in the movie by Ossie Davis) as two senior citizens in a nursing home who battle a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy. The movie version is considered a cult classic.

  Other extraliterary adaptations of Lansdale’s work include his story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” (1991), which was adapted as the first episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series in 2005; his zombie novella Christmas with the Dead (2010), which was adapted for the screen in 2012 by Lansdale’s son Keith, and which features his daughter, Kasey, in a starring role; and the crime novel Cold in July (1989), adapted as a 2014 film starring Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, and Don Johnson. The latter movie was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2016 Lansdale’s novel Savage Season (1990) was adapted for television, serving as the basis for the first season of the Sundance original series Hap and Leonard.

  Lansdale takes a practical, pragmatic view of his craft and profession. In the introduction to his miscellaneous fiction collection For a Few Stories More, titled “Livestock, Roses, and Stories,” he famously offered a “Guide to (Not Rules of) Writing,” setting forth two tenets:

  1.Put your ass in a chair and write. (Okay. I lied. This one is a rule.)

  2.Turn off the TV and read. All kinds of things. Not just what you want to write. (This one is also a rule.) (Lansdale 2002, 17)

  Seemingly fearless in his own writing, Lansdale explores both the best and worst aspects of humanity and infuses his work with an abiding sense of the absurdity of human existence.

  Hank Wagner

  See also: Bram Stoker Award; Mummies; Splatterpunk.

  Further Reading

  Benson, Eric. 2016. “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Texas Monthly, February 2016. http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/darkness-on-the-edge-of-town.

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2003. “Lansdale, Joe R. 1951–.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 2, edited by Richard Bleiler, 603–612. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Hynes, James. 1997. “Joe R. Lansdale: Black Belt in Pulp Fiction.” Publishers Weekly, Sept. 29: 59–60.

  Lansdale, Joe. 2002. For a Few Stories More. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press.

  Williamson, Chet. 2005. “Joe R. Lansdale: Dark Master of Texas Gothic.” Weird Tales 62, no. 1: 30–35.

  Interview with Joe R. Lansdale

  October 2016

  In this brief interview, Lansdale talks about his reasons for writing horror and for infusing horror frequently into the vast span of different genres and types of writing that he has produced. He goes on to talk about the reasons why readers are drawn to horror, and he ruminates on the long-term effects of the 1970s–1990s horror publishing boom. He also lists some of his major influences—ranging from the likes of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and he recommends a few horror authors whose work is worth seeking out.

  Matt Cardin: As an author, you have been not just prolific but strikingly broad in your focus, writing in multiple genres and forms for multiple media. Yet one of the notes you continue to hit over and over is that of horror—sometimes in outright works of horror as such, and other times as a mode that you bring to bear on works that are formally classified as something else. What keeps you coming back? Why does horror play such a critical role in your writing?

  Joe R. Lansdale: I grew up a great fan of horror, so it only seems natural that it has become part of my writerly DNA. Now and again I specifically try and write a story that fits comfortably into one genre, but most of my work doesn’t start out with as solid an intent. I just borrow from the things that interest me, and horror is one of them. I think of it and suspense as close cousins, and horror doesn’t always have to be grisly or shocking, it can be creepy and unsettling as well. It depends on how you define it, but it is certainly a fine tool in any writer’s tool box. As is understanding mystery and suspense. Loving and studying and writing all those genres led me eventually to whatever it is I do most of the time, which is, well, just me, but I’m very much aware of the tools available to me.

  MC: Moving from the writer’s to the reader’s end of things, why do you think people are drawn to read horror? What draws you personally?

  JRL: A delicious sense of the unknown. Controlled fear, something you can lay aside and go, “Wow, that’s not real, but it sure is fun when I’m reading it, but now I can continue my life, which is far less stressful.” I think it is a release system for a lot of us. I think that’s true of all stories, but horror allows a kind of vibrant release.

  MC: You made it onto the map as a writer in the very middle of the big horror boom of the late twentieth century. The story of how that particular publishing phenomenon flared and then flamed out is well known to everyone. What are some of the major differences between then and now when it comes to writing and/or publishing things that may be classified as “horror”? Do you see or feel any lasting impact on your own writing or that of others? Basically, what’s different today because of what happened circa 1975 to 1995?

  JRL: I don’t think the story is nearly as well known as it should be. I think in its own way it was as important to horror, as well as crime, suspense, and other genres, as the New Wave in science fiction was to literature in general. In fact, I think the boom of that era, especially from mid-seventies to mid/late-eighties, was more instrumental in how it changed fiction in general. No one has really written about it or the authors of that time in an insightful manner. It collapsed under the weight of its own popularity and bad publishing choices. I would say that th
e writers of short fiction were what drove the undercurrent, and of the novels, there were several writers who pushed that forward, but in that arena Stephen King almost stands by himself. What he was doing really influenced short fiction as well, but I think it was more the eighties that represented this new trend in all its blooming glory. By the end of the eighties it was pretty much dead, though a few residual works floated on the dead waters for a few years to come. The influence of that time made its way into crime and suspense fiction specifically, but writers of literary fiction eventually embraced it as well. Its impact continues, if not directly under the label of horror.

  MC: In the past you have named Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Bloch as among your favorite writers and most important influences. What do you find particularly compelling about each? For someone just learning for the first time about one or all of these writers, what would you say is important to know?

  JRL: They were my most important influences early on. But Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Chandler, James Cain, William Goldman, Chester Himes, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many other writers influenced me. They were engaging in a simple way that invited you in, but their styles are all very complex when you analyze them. They feel natural, but they have hidden items beneath the surface of their waters. All of those writers in one way or another are poetic, perhaps Cain less obviously so, but I would suggest his poetry is of a more subtle nature. They are all visual and for the most part character-driven. I never thought of Bradbury as particularly strong on character in the classic sense. But his stories themselves were the characters. Another thing about all of them, the obvious thing, is they are style-driven.

  MC: Are there any additional authors and works that you would recommend to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Which ones strike you as especially important both for this genre and for literature as a whole?

  JRL: One that has elements of horror, but transcends genre, is Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, and to dive down into the blood and thunder of the old pulps, his They Thirst. Ramsey Campbell for creep-up-on-you nastiness. Stephen Graham Jones, who writes his own books, but many of which certainly have a lot of horror in them. I could be here all night, so on this subject, try the Jones and tip your waitress.

  MC: If you had one insight or nugget or wisdom to offer readers interested in horror fiction, what would it be?

  JRL: Horror never dies. It merely, as horror should, mutates.

  “THE LAST FEAST OF HARLEQUIN”

  Thomas Ligotti’s story “The Last Feast of Harlequin” was first published in the April 1990 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine and was reprinted in his collections Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) and The Nightmare Factory (1996). Arguably his most famous tale—and the earliest written of his published works—“Harlequin” is dedicated “To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft” (Ligotti 1994, 48).

  Strongly echoing Lovecraft’s “The Festival” (1923) and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931), “Harlequin” follows the narrator, an anthropologist who specializes in clowns, as he investigates a midwinter festival held in Mirocaw, a strangely lifeless town in the American Midwest. Fashioning a costume that mimics the threatening aspect of some of the less gregarious clowns that roam the town’s streets, he discovers that these unnerving figures transform into giant worms every year and feast on the flesh of young local women.

  While the Lovecraftian elements are explicitly indicated in the dedication, “Harlequin” also draws on a wider tradition of American horror. Descriptions of the town as made up of unlikely angles and skewed perspective recall both Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), while a poster for the state lottery calls to mind Jackson’s infamous tale of small-town horror, “The Lottery” (1948). A scene in which the narrator follows one of the drab clowns harks back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), while the depictions of mindlessly threatening townsfolk converging slowly around a horrified narrator allude both to zombie narratives and to Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot (1975).

  Ligotti often asserts in interviews that he feels human existence is little more than endless suffering and confusion. Many other stories in his Grimscribe collection, such as “The Spectacles in the Drawer” and “The Dreaming in Nortown,” attempt to literalize this, set as they are in a nightmare realm with few historical or geographical markers, a postmodern version of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s timeless fairy-tale settings. By contrast, “Harlequin” is situated within a relatively realistic, contemporary world, rendering its horrific revelations particularly effective.

  Dara Downey

  See also: The Haunting of Hill House; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror.

  Further Reading

  Harris, Jason M. 2012. “Smiles of Oblivion: Demonic Clowns and Doomed Puppets as Fantastic Figures of Absurdity and Misanthropy in the Writings of Thomas Ligotti.” Journal of Popular Culture 45, no. 6 (December): 1249–1265.

  Langan, John. 2007. “Thomas Ligotti’s Metafictional Mapping: The Allegory of ‘The Last Feast of Harlequin.’” Lovecraft Annual 1: 126–144.

  Ligotti, Thomas. 1994. Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. New York: Jove.

  Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. 2003. The Thomas Ligotti Reader: Essays and Explorations. Holicong, PA: Wildside.

  “LAZARUS”

  This 1906 story by the Russian expressionist and symbolist writer Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919) was first published in English in 1918, translated for an anthology by the then head of the Slavic Division of the New York Public Library, Avrahm (Abraham) Yarmolinsky. Andreyev was a successful and critically acclaimed author in Russia, although he became increasingly isolated politically after the 1905 revolution, eventually dying in poverty as an exile in Finland at the relatively young age of forty-eight.

  “Lazarus” concerns the biblical figure of the same name, but rather than focusing on the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s restoration of Lazarus to life, Andreyev creates a vivid and starkly pessimistic account of the consequences of an event usually cast as miraculous. Lazarus, it transpires, has been irrevocably altered by the experience of death. After the “sinister oddities” (Andreyev 1918, 9) of Lazarus first become evident at a celebratory feast, he is cast out of his community, and rumors of the sanity-shattering effect of his gaze spread quickly to Rome. An Epicurean artist named Aurelius tries to glean Lazarus’s secrets in order to apply them to his creations, but is instead rendered unable to do anything other than ruminate on the revelation that all beauty is “a lie” (22). Lazarus is eventually summoned before Emperor Augustus, and although Augustus is, like others, irrevocably altered by the encounter, he breaks Lazarus’s gaze just in time to avoid permanent madness and despair. Lazarus returns to the Holy Land having been blinded on Augustus’s orders.

  The Horror of the Void in His Eyes

  Andreyev conveys the galling, life-draining power of the resurrected Lazarus’s gaze by describing it as a

  horror which lay motionless in the depth of his black pupils. Lazarus looked calmly and simply with no desire to conceal anything, but also with no intention to say anything; he looked coldly, as he who is infinitely indifferent to those alive. Many carefree people came close to him without noticing him, and only later did they learn with astonishment and fear who that calm stout man was, that walked slowly by, almost touching them with his gorgeous and dazzling garments. The sun did not cease shining, when he was looking, nor did the fountain hush its murmur, and the sky overhead remained cloudless and blue. But the man under the spell of his enigmatical look heard no more the fountain and saw not the sky overhead. Sometimes, he wept bitterly, sometimes he tore his hair and in frenzy called for help; but more often it came to pass that apathetically and quietly he began to die, and so he languished many years, before everybody’s very eyes, wasted away, colorless, flabby, dull, like a tree, silen
tly drying up in a stony soil. And of those who gazed at him, the ones who wept madly, sometimes felt again the stir of life; the others never.

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Andreyev, Leonid. 1918. “Lazarus.” In Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev and The Gentleman from San Francisco by Ivan Bunin, translated by Abraham Yarmolinsky, 9–21. Boston: The Stratford Company.

  Allegorical in tone, “Lazarus” is startling in its subversive reiteration of the biblical message of hope into one of profound dread and anguish. There are distinct elements of cosmic horror conveyed in the testimony of those who have been “stricken” by the baleful gaze of Lazarus and now understand that “wrapped by void and darkness the man in despair trembled in the face of the Horror of the Infinite” (17). The celebrated social-realist writer Maxim Gorky described it as “the best . . . that has been written about death in all the world’s literature” (Jackson 1993, 131). After its initial publication in English as an example of contemporary Slavic literature, it was included by Dorothy Scarborough in her 1912 collection Famous Modern Ghost Stories, which, by placing the story in the context of work by Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, and others, established it as a horror classic. The story was included in the 1927 issue of Weird Tales, where it proved popular with the readership, with one correspondent describing it several years later as “the greatest weird tale ever written” (“The Eyrie” 1932, 150). It has subsequently become a staple of horror anthologies and in 2009 was even co-opted into the zombie genre by its inclusion in the anthology Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead.

  James Machin

  See also: Weird Tales; Zombies.

  Further Reading

  Andreyev, Leonid. 1918. “Lazarus.” In Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev and The Gentleman from San Francisco by Ivan Bunin, translated by Abraham Yarmolinsky, 9–21. Boston: Stratford.