Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Jim Rockhill

  See also: Campbell, Ramsey; James, M. R.

  Further Reading

  Gevers, Nick. 2013. “An Interview with Reggie Oliver.” SF Site. https://www.sfsite.com/12a/ro405.htm.

  Griffin, Jude. 2015. “Author Spotlight: Reggie Oliver.” Nightmare 36 (September). http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-reggie-oliver.

  Lewis, D. R. 2013. “Flowers of the Sea—Reggie Oliver.” Dreamcatcher—Gestalt Real-Time Reviews, November 15. https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/flowers-of-the-sea-reggie-oliver.

  Oliver, Reggie. 2007. Masques of Satan: Twelve Tales and a Novella. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.

  Schettin, Silvia. 2013. “Reggie Oliver: The Art of the Short Story.” Fata Libelli, September 16. http://fatalibelli.com/blog/2013/09/16/reggie-oliver-the-art-of-the-short-story.

  Slatter, Angela. 2015. “Horrorology Interviews: Reggie Oliver.” Horrorology, September 22. http://www.angelaslatter.com/horrorology-interviews-reggie-oliver.

  ONIONS, OLIVER (1873–1961)

  Oliver Onions was a prolific English author, best known for his ghost stories. Onions made his living as a writer of novels in almost every popular genre, including romance, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction. His horror fiction, however, consists of short stories, tending to focus on the theme of insanity.

  “The Beckoning Fair One”: Haunting of the Artist

  Paul Oleron, the protagonist of Oliver Onions’s classic story, rents a house with an eye toward completing his new novel there. But shortly after moving in, Paul finds it impossible to get any writing done, and his attitude begins to change toward his characters. Whereas Paul had previously believed that this novel would be his masterpiece, he now thinks everything about it is wrong, especially the title character, whom he has based on his girlfriend, Elsie. She grows increasingly concerned at his changing personality and erratic behavior. When Paul inquires about the house’s previous history, he is informed that it has been vacant for twelve years and that the previous tenant, an artist, died there of apparent intentional starvation. During her visits to the house, Elsie is repeatedly injured by loose boards and exposed nails—almost as though the house is trying to hurt her. Elsie and Paul become estranged, and when Paul finds it more and more difficult to leave the premises, he realizes that a presence the house is imbued with is clinging to him like a terribly jealous lover. In the end Elsie dies under mysterious circumstances—maybe murdered by Paul—and Paul is removed from the house in a terrible state, suffering from starvation.

  As a ghost story, “The Beckoning Fair One” is notable for its complete absence of any ghostly manifestations. The impact of the haunting is seen entirely in Paul’s psychological and physical decline under the influence of the presence that has taken hold of him. The story’s denouement resonates strongly with the fate suffered by the house’s previous tenant, and it suggests that Oleron’s is just one in a succession of similar fates suffered by others under the house’s influence. The identity of who—or what—is haunting the house is never definitively established. “The Beckoning Fair One” has been praised by Robert Aickman, Everett F. Bleiler, and other authorities on supernatural fiction as one of the best ghost stories in the English language.

  Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

  During his lifetime, Onions published five collections of ghost stories: Back o’ the Moon (1906), Widdershins (1911), Ghosts in Daylight (1924), The Painted Face (1929), and Bells Rung Backward (1953). His Collected Ghost Stories appeared in 1935. Of these, it was his second collection, Widdershins, which contains his most highly regarded work, particularly an influential tale called “The Beckoning Fair One,” which was first published in Widdershins. This story is considered the single best treatment of Onions’s preferred theme in horror: an artist who becomes so engrossed in his own imagination that he loses touch with reality. In this case, that loss of contact is facilitated by an invisible, feminine presence that is apparently the heroine of the novel he is writing; he imagines her so vividly that she appears to take on an independent existence and begins to dominate his life entirely.

  Whether or not this “Beckoning Fair One” is anything more than his hallucination is never demonstrated clearly one way or the other. The story is distinguished not only by its thoughtful approach to the theme, but by the sophistication and beauty of its prose, which establishes Onions among the most skilled stylists in the genre.

  Many of Onions’s other stories likewise involve a mysterious figure who may or may not be real, and who acts as a focal point for the fantasies of an imaginative main character. In this, Onions may be said to extend a line in weird fiction that runs back through Henry James and E. T. A. Hoffmann. In his novella entitled “The Real People,” a writer’s characters take on an independent existence. In stories such as “The Rosewood Door” and “The Rope in the Rafters,” characters assume past identities, or are taken over by archaic consciousnesses; the subject is treated largely psychologically, not unlike Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return. However, Onions tended to specialize in main characters who are more aware of the suicidal or self-destructive aspects of their fantasies, but who are unable to resist them anyway. His characters often reach a point when they embrace demise rather than abandon a dream, which imparts a special mood of despair or fatalism to their tales. He adopts the figure of the doppelgänger, the fear of death by possession or replacement, in stories like “Rooum” and “The Painted Face,” although in the latter story the main character commits suicide in order to save the one she loves from an evil spirit.

  Onions is best remembered for his extreme attention to plausibility in his stories. His ghosts have no conventional trappings and are represented only in highly subtle, unsensational ways, which not only make it more difficult to discern what is and what is not psychological in the story, but which also ensures that the ghostliness is not ruined by clichés. In this way, he also carries forward the legacy of writers like Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who began the process of separating horror fiction from Gothic backgrounds and introducing it into contemporary settings that would have been more familiar, and more close to home, for the reading audience.

  Michael Cisco

  See also: Psychological Horror.

  Further Reading

  Ashley, Mike. 1992. “Oliver Onions: The Man at the Edge.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 120–126. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

  Donaldson, Norman. 1985. “Oliver Onions.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 505–512. New York: Scribner’s.

  THE OTHER

  The Other (1971) was the first novel by American novelist and former Hollywood actor Thomas Tryon, and it offers much in terms of horror. The narrator, thirteen-year-old Niles, is twin to his brother Holland, who seems to be one of the most destructive individuals in fiction. The novel is set in 1935 on an ancestral family farm in Connecticut, and it details the increasingly sinister and sociopathic acts of Holland, as told from Niles’s viewpoint, during a summer when their family has gathered to mourn the passing of the boys’ father, who died in a horrible accident. It is eventually revealed that the portrayal of Holland is false, and is a fantasy of Niles’s, who is the novel’s real villain.

  Tryon’s authorial skill is evident throughout, from the lushness of his descriptive writing in portraying the bucolic setting to his effective creation of a believable narrator in Niles, who truly seems to be reliable through much of the story as he draws readers from one episode of horror to another. This renders the final reveal all the more shocking and unsettling.

  Like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Tryon’s Harvest Home, The Other offers a picture of what initially appears to be an inviting rural life, where all is idealistic and pleasant, only to expose, gradually, the horrors that may lurk—and lurk not very deeply—beneath seemingly pleasant surfaces. Reviewer I. P. Heldman has cha
racterized the novel as “a Jamesian nightmare of psychological tension in a brooding atmosphere of insidious terror and madness” (quoted in “Thomas Tryon” 2003). Horror scholar S. T. Joshi has asserted that both The Other and Tryon’s next novel, Harvest Home, had a significant impact on the horror genre itself: ““What The Exorcist did for the tale of supernatural horror, The Other and Harvest Home did for the non-supernatural tale of psychological horror: they legitimized it and showed that in the hands of a master it formed a genuine sub-genre of the weird tale” (Joshi 2001, 190). The Other was adapted for film in 1972 by director Robert Mulligan.

  Benjamin F. Fisher

  See also: Harvest Home; Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Chaon, Dan. 2012. “Afterword.” In The Other by Thomas Tryon, 253–258. New York: New York Review of Books.

  Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.

  “Thomas Tryon.” 2003. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.

  OUR LADY OF DARKNESS

  Fritz Leiber’s 1977 novel Our Lady of Darkness, expanded from a novella published in 1971 as “The Pale Brown Thing,” is a compelling work of contemporary urban Gothic. Winner of the 1978 World Fantasy Award for best novel, it capped Leiber’s long career as a pioneer of tales of urban dread and modern occult horror.

  Set in San Francisco, the novel features as protagonist an aging horror writer and bibliophile named Franz Westren, who is clearly an autobiographical projection; indeed, Westren occupies the Geary Street apartment house where Leiber himself lived during the 1970s. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Our Lady of Darkness offers a subtle evocation of the City by the Bay’s buried history of supernatural legend, deeply connected to a local tradition of the fantastic that goes back to Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith. The story centers on a (fictitious) secret book, Thibaut de Castries’s Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, which elaborates a theory of “paramental entities” (Leiber 2010, 39), hostile emanations of “all that stuff accumulating in big cities, its sheer liquid and solid mass” (22). In an eerie echo of the narrative of Leiber’s classic short story “Smoke Ghost” (1941), our hero hurries anxiously through a city growing more estranged, “searching the dark sea of roofs” for “a swift pale brown thing stalking him,” confident in its mastery of the landscape and “taking advantage of every bit of cover” (105) to stalk him relentlessly. Each feature of the skyline is a latent menace, each familiar scene transformed into an incipient wasteland of “electro-mephitic city-stuff” (81), the entropic sediment of human conglomeration rife with ghostly predators.

  The culmination of a lifetime of reading in the field, Our Lady of Darkness not only draws upon influences as diverse as M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft, it weaves them into a tapestry that takes on an almost metafictional dimension in its direct and self-conscious allusions to classic works of horror fiction and the biographies of major horror writers. At the same time, Leiber develops a unique and compelling form of modern occultism, the aforementioned “megapolisomancy,” a form of secret knowledge that permits adepts to scry the city as one would a crystal ball, searching for portents and prophecies unleashed by the local concentration of paramental energies. Our Lady of Darkness is similar to Whitley Streiber’s The Wolfen (1978) and Ken Eulo’s The Brownstone (1980) in depicting the contemporary city as a breeding ground for malign supernatural presences, but it is considerably more ambitious in conception and more skillful in execution.

  Rob Latham

  See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraftian Horror; Smith, Clark Ashton; World Fantasy Award.

  Further Reading

  Leiber, Fritz. [1977] 2010. Our Lady of Darkness. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.

  Pardoe, Rosemary. 2004. “Our Lady of Darkness: A Jamesian Classic?” Fantasy Commentator 11 (Summer): 151–168.

  Waugh, Robert. 2004. “Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness: Lovecraft, the Compound Ghost.” Studies in Modern Horror 3: 7–17.

  “OUT OF THE DEEP”

  Published originally in 1923 as part of the collection The Riddle and Other Stories, Walter de la Mare’s short psychological horror story “Out of the Deep” is one of the author’s most well-known inconclusive ghost stories. In keeping with de la Mare’s usual themes of the supernatural, “Out of the Deep” is also one of the author’s foremost examples of the haunted house story.

  The narrative follows Jimmie, who has returned to the house in which he was raised, following the death of his uncle. De la Mare’s flair for suspenseful atmospheric writing can be seen throughout, as Jimmie is besieged by fearful memories of his childhood that take the form of ghostly apparitions of the household’s serving staff. Unable to discern between the present reality and his ghostly memories, Jimmie dies mysteriously at the story’s climax.

  Much like the protagonist, the reader undergoes several psychological turns throughout the story, and the characteristic ambiguity of de la Mare’s storytelling leaves the reader haunted by the narrative’s lack of resolve. The descriptively Gothic elements of the household setting—particularly the shadowy and adorned recesses of the room in which Jimmie sleeps—are visually representative of de la Mare’s unwillingness to cast a light upon the latent supernatural horrors that underlie the more explicit psychological horror.

  Freudian psychology is, once again, not far from the heart of the narrative, and de la Mare makes it clear that it is from the recesses of the human psyche—from memory, from our childhood past—that long-buried and unrealized fears arise out of the deep and most successfully inhabit and augment our fearful imaginations.

  Jimmie’s childhood fears seem to be overtly linked to the bell cord that his aunt and uncle pulled to summon the servants. Moreover, the overwhelming terror that afflicts Jimmie at the thought of summoning the household’s serving staff—compounded by the appearance of several phantoms in answer to his summons—suggests, perhaps, that a deeply ingrained classism is to be found at the center of the story.

  Much like the silent crowd of phantoms that throng the seemingly empty house in de la Mare’s most famous poem, “The Listeners” (1912), Jimmie is haunted by the collective presence of others. In particular, the phantasmic presence of the servants is not only supernatural, a reversal of the natural order; it is also an inversion of the social order, in which those who should remain invisible within the household (the serving staff) become visible to its occupants. In this way, “Out of the Deep” very much details the upper class’s fears of their subordinates.

  Ian Kinane

  See also: de la Mare, Walter; “The Listeners”; The Return.

  Further Reading

  Clute, John. 1985. “Walter de la Mare.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror Vol. 1, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 497–504. New York: Scribner Sons.

  Crawford, Gary William. 1992. “On the Edge: The Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare.” Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 53–56. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press.

  de la Mare, Walter. 1923. The Riddle, and Other Stories. London: Selwyn & Blount.

  Stableford, Brian. 2005. “Walter de la Mare.” In The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

  P

  PALAHNIUK, CHUCK (1962–)

  Charles Michael “Chuck” Palahniuk is an American novelist and journalist. As of 2016, he has published fourteen novels, a short story collection, and several pieces of non-fiction. Though only a small portion of his work can categorically be considered “horror,” his transgressive style and bleak worldview have made him a central figure in the contemporary macabre.

  Palahniuk is best known for his first novel, Fight Club (1996). The novel met with lukewarm attention upon release, but after being adapted for film by director David Fincher it has gathered a cult following. Fight Club’s cynical and at times nihilistic indictment of contemporary corporat
e life has cemented its status as a key text of the Generation-X literary zeitgeist. All of Palahniuk’s fiction is marked by an inclination toward the grotesque, the transgressive, and the nihilistic. Yet his contribution to the horror genre is largely concentrated within a sequence of three novels that Palahniuk has himself termed his “horror trilogy.”

  Lullaby (2001) concerns the search for a poem that, when read aloud, has the power to kill. At the beginning of the novel this “culling song” has resulted in the accidental death of the protagonist’s family. The plot concerns his attempt to track down and eradicate the threat. In addition to this basic plot, which is clearly influenced by the success of urban-legend horror in films such as Ringu (1998), Lullaby also features a necrophiliac paramedic and an estate agent who specializes in haunted houses.

  Diary (2002) is a more conventional piece of American Gothic. Its depiction of the sinister recesses of small-town America is clearly influenced by the work of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Diary is the story of Misty Wilmot, an aspiring artist who relocates to her husband’s isolated island community. Once there she discovers that she is part of a sinister conspiracy in which her art, and her life, are to be sacrificed for the good of the town. Though there is little of the body horror that typifies Palahniuk’s other work, Diary achieves a quiet eeriness that stands alone in his writing so far.

  Of all Palahniuk’s novels, Haunted (2005) is most clearly situated in the horror genre. It has an unusual structure, comprising nearly two dozen short narratives, framed within a wider story of confinement and abuse. The protagonists have each volunteered to be part of a writing retreat under the control of the elderly Mr. Whittier. They are taken to an abandoned theater and locked inside, under the proviso that they will be released once their writing is complete. Soon, however, the group descends to barbarity, eschewing literary creation in favor of a horror story that they can make (and sell) out of their own experience. They each tell their own tales, while brutalizing themselves and each other. Cannibalism and bodily dismemberment ensues. Nothing in the violence of the framing narrative can compete with the opening tale, “Guts.” This story is infamous for making audience members faint during live readings.