by Matt Cardin
Paul M. Sammon, who edited the 1990 anthology Splatterpunk: Extreme Horror, called this group of writers the “outlaws” of the horror genre. Not all writers who have been classified as splatterpunk, however, accept the label. Joe R. Lansdale has said in interviews that he does not like it, mainly due to the fact that it restricts his writing to just one idea, and he wants to be more than just a label. Other authors have also spoken out against the categorization, such as Richard Laymon, who said in a New York Times article, “I don’t want to be identified with that group, especially that one” (Tucker 1991).
Lisa Kröger
See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Brite, Poppy Z.; Ketchum, Jack; Lansdale, Joe R.; McCammon, Robert; Pulp Horror; Shea, Michael.
Further Reading
Bail, Paul. 1996. John Saul: A Critical Companion. Westport and London: Greenwood Press.
Errickson, Will. 2015. “Evil Eighties: The Hollywood Horrors of David J. Schow.” Tor.com, March 13. http://www.tor.com/2015/03/13/evil-eighties-david-j-schow.
Joshi, S. T. 2004. “David J. Schow and Splatterpunk.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Kern, Louis J. 1996. “American ‘Grand Guignol’: Splatterpunk Gore, Sadean Morality and Socially Redemptive Violence.” Journal of American Culture 19, no. 2: 47–59.
Latham, Rob. 2007. “Urban Horror.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 591–618. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ross, Jean W. 1989. “Bloch, Robert (Albert).” In Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, vol. 5. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.
Sammon, Paul. 1990. Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Tucker, Ken. 1991. “The Splatterpunk Trend, and Welcome to It.” New York Times, March 24. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/24/books/the-splatterpunk-trend-and-welcome-to-it.html?pagewanted=all.
“SREDNI VASHTAR”
“Sredni Vashtar,” the tenth story in Saki’s second collection The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), is widely considered to be a masterpiece of short fiction and one of Saki’s most horrifying tales. Ten-year-old Conradin is a delicate boy, treated harshly by his domineering female guardian, Mrs. de Ropp, whom he eventually contrives to do away with via a large polecat ferret he keeps hidden away in a hutch as his only solace. The story concludes with the child calmly eating a previously forbidden treat of buttered toast as his guardian’s mauled body is discovered.
Similarities exist between the life of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) and Conradin, the protagonist of “Sredni Vashtar.” Like Conradin, young Hector was thought to be a sickly boy, subjected to “illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dullnesses” (Saki 1976, 136). Hector spent his childhood in his grandmother’s house under the reign of two aunts, who are supposed to be the originals for Conradin’s guardian. Like Mrs. de Ropp, the aunts did their duty by the Munro children, but showed little love, imposing “a regime of seclusion, restraint and arbitrary rules” marked by beatings and “coldness, removal of privileges and guilt” (Byrne 2007, 17). In “Sredni Vashtar,” Mrs. de Ropp’s treatment of Conradin leads to the development of a fierce hatred in the boy, “which he was perfectly able to mask” (Saki 1976, 137). In fact, “Sredni Vashtar” may be interpreted as one of the first sightings of that twentieth-century human monster, the amoral psychopath, and Conradin an ancestor of Robert Bloch’s Psycho, with its outwardly meek, mother-obsessed serial killer who cleverly masks his violent impulses. As much as the reader may sympathize with the bullied boy and enjoy his revenge, the conclusion that a cold-blooded murderer might have been unleashed upon the world still lingers.
As in other Saki stories, the animals that Conradin keeps hidden away in his haven, a disused toolshed, represent the feral impulses of Nature versus the oppressive artifice of adult institutions. Thus, the “lithe sharp-fanged beast” (137), the polecat-ferret itself, mirrors Conradin in its eventual escape from the toolshed, passing bloodstained but free into the world after killing Mrs. de Ropp. Like his fictional counterpart, Hector kept a Houdan fowl as a pet. It had to be euthanized, and his sister Ethel described the “hateful smile” on their aunt’s face when this occurs (Byrne 2007, 21). In “Sredni Vashtar,” the first animal to succumb to Mrs. de Ropp’s incursions on Conradin’s retreat is his Houdan hen. In taking this pet from him, she crosses the line, unleashing Conradin’s hatred and inspiring him to pray to his idol, the ferret, for her to be punished.
The transformation of the mundane by the supernatural is a perennial horror trope. In “Sredni Vashtar,” Saki leaves open the possibility that more may be at work than the natural world reasserting itself. Conradin comforts himself by inventing a “god and a religion” around Sredni Vashtar, which is the exotic name he gives the polecat-ferret. Conradin’s worship, in contrast to Christ’s injunction to make peace, values “the fierce impatient side of things” and calls for the death of Sredni Vashtar’s enemies. Mrs. de Ropp’s churchgoing is contrasted with these bloodthirsty rites. Saki leaves it to the reader’s imagination as to what exactly happened to Mrs. de Ropp in the toolshed; Conradin’s “simple brown ferret” may indeed have been a god after all.
Aalya Ahmad
See also: Saki.
Further Reading
Byrne, Sandi. 2007. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Drake, Robert. 1963. “Saki’s Ironic Stories.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 5.3 (Autumn): 374–388.
Harding, James. 1994. “Sredni Vashtar: Overview.” In Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, 1038. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.
Saki (H. H. Munro). 1976. The Complete Works of Saki. Introduction by Noël Coward. New York: Doubleday.
Salemi, Joseph S. 1989. “An Asp Lurking in an Apple-charlotte: Animal Violence in Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 4: 423.
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850–1894)
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, travel writer, and short story writer. An extremely productive figure, he is best known for his longer narratives The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island. Although he was a literary celebrity within his own time, Stevenson was, after his death, critically regarded as being a second-rate writer, known for children’s stories and horror narratives. In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of critical interest in Stevenson, with greater attention being given to his imaginative writing, religious and folkloric interests, and deeply nuanced explorations of guilt, duality, and morality. His works have been adapted numerous times, and he is the twenty-sixth most translated author in the world.
“Olalla”: Ancestral Sin and Biological Degeneration
Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “Olalla” was first published in 1885 in The Court and Society Review Christmas issue. Like his longer and more famous work The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), this story draws on issues such as degeneration and tendency toward violence in human nature.
The story follows an English soldier’s residence in a once-noble Spanish household. The unnamed protagonist falls for the daughter of the house, Olalla, who lives with her brother and her mother. The protagonist admits his love for Olalla, who tells him he must leave. Later he cuts his hand and seeks assistance from the mother, who, on seeing the blood, attacks him. Olalla tells him that her family is cursed. He leaves, seeing Olalla only once more, while she prays.
The Spanish setting draws on traditional Gothic narratives from the late eighteenth century as well as anti-Catholic sentiments. The protagonist finds himself disgusted and horrified by the behavior of Olalla’s brother and mother, who are described as like animals. He is also perturbed by the resemblance between Olalla and ancestral portraits. The curse on the family has been read variously as lycanthropy or vampirism.
Stevenson fuses the traditional Got
hic elements of ancestral sin with the horror of degeneration. Though Olalla suggests that she is cursed, the narrative also suggests that the family is returning to an animal-like state. Moving away from superstition and toward scientific explanations for human violence, “Olalla” is indicative of the addition of science to Gothic horror that can be seen in the literature of the late nineteenth century.
Kaja Franck
Source: Wasson, Sara. 2010. “Olalla’s Legacy: Twentieth-Century Vampire Fiction and Genetic Previvorship.” Journal of Stevenson Studies 7: 55–81.
Born in Edinburgh to a leading lighthouse engineer of the day, Stevenson was a rather ill child, and poor health would dog him his entire life. Often confined to bed, he was impacted from an early age by his nanny, Alison Cunningham, a devoutly Calvinist woman who was herself deeply influenced by Scottish folk stories. Religious ideas and the folklore of Scotland were to be enduring influences on Stevenson throughout his work. After a sporadic but thorough education, including studying both engineering and law, Stevenson left Scotland for London and by late 1873 was active on the London literary scene, publishing his first essay in The Portfolio. Much of his time was spent occupied in travel (often to warmer climes) for the benefit of his deeply fragile health. His first full-length publication was An Island Voyage (1878), inspired by a canoe trip taken around France and Belgium. The following year he traveled to America to be with his then lover and future wife Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. The trip would result in the publication of The Amateur Emigrant but would also result in his health failing completely—it almost cost Stevenson his life. Between 1880 and 1887, Stevenson traveled extensively, seeking a climate beneficial to his health, summering in various places across the United Kingdom. In this period he was at his most productive, writing Treasure Island (1883)—his first successful book—Kidnapped (1886), and, most famously, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), as well as several notable short stories. Over the course of the next two years, Stevenson resumed traveling, spending time in New York, Tahiti, and the Samoan Islands. In 1890, he purchased a tract of land of around 400 acres on one of the Samoan Islands, and it was there he wrote The Beach of Falesa, Catriona (titled David Balfour in the United States), The Ebb-Tide, and the Vailima Letters, as well as enjoying excellent relations with the local people.
While Stevenson was well regarded during his lifetime, the rise of modernism left him behind. His work was seen as being inferior, less realistic, and thus less skilled. This is principally attributable to Stevenson’s own views on the creative act. Unlike his close friend Henry James, who believed that art should be a reflection of reality, Stevenson argued that the novel exists and thrives through emphasizing its difference from the actualities of life. As a result, much of Stevenson’s fiction does not aim for the unity and psychological insight that the modernist writers so praised, preferring instead to show the divided nature of existence. This duality between the appearance of things and their actuality is a consistent theme throughout his writing and a strong contribution to the tradition of horror literature, as Stevenson explored the divisions between public respectability and private vices on multiple occasions. This was best exemplified in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which has gone on to enter the cultural vernacular in reference to a divided self and become one of the most adapted horror texts of all time. This division between the public and private, between the benign and the immoral, also appears in several of his short stories, drawing upon the Calvinism of his youth and the folklore of Scotland that he was raised with. As a result, Stevenson’s narratives frequently tend toward psychological simplicity and the fantastic, which explains his enduring popularity. However, this also contributed to his critical neglect during the advent and rise of literary modernism soon after his death.
The burgeoning interest in Stevenson has sought to connect him to other more plot-based writers of the day, seeing him as a contemporary of figures such as Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, 1899) and H. Rider Haggard (She, 1886–1887), as well as J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan, 1904) and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901–1902). Rather than praising psychological sophistication and narrative realism, Stevenson’s focus on imaginative and fantastic plot with the aim of provoking readers into emotional investment lends itself well to Gothic and horror writing and has been highly influential and much imitated. With the increasing popularity of horror fiction and the commensurate rise of horror scholarship, proper and much overdue critical work is more common on Stevenson as one of the most successful and popular writers of the Gothic canon. His wide range of literary works, including children’s stories, poetry, novels, short stories, literary theory, and essays, shows a great breadth of talent, and his enduring popularity is testament to the power his works still hold in engaging the imagination of readers.
Stevenson died very suddenly at the age of forty-four on December 3, 1894, possibly from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was buried at Mount Vaea on the island of Upolu in Samoa, overlooking the sea.
Jon Greenaway
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Psychological Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “Thrawn Janet.”
Further Reading
Ambrosini, Richard, and Richard Dury, eds. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fielding, Penny. 2010. The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gray, William. 2004. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harman, Claire. 2010. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: HarperCollins.
Livesey, Margot. 1994. “The Double Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.” The Atlantic (November): 140–146.
STOKER, BRAM (1847–1912)
Abraham (“Bram”) Stoker is best remembered today as the author of the most famous vampire novel ever written, Dracula (1897), but in his day he was most notable for his association with his friend and employer, the celebrated English actor-manager Sir Henry Irving of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker served as business manager for Irving’s Lyceum for nearly thirty years and published in the interim a number of fictional works (many of which appropriated Gothic themes), including more than seventeen short stories and works of poetry, three short story collections (one posthumously), and twelve novels. One of these, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), although it was long considered a relatively minor work, has gradually (with the help of multiple movie adaptations) come to be regarded as a semiclassic mummy novel. Stoker continued to write until his death in London in 1912.
Stoker was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. Born a sickly child, he suffered from a mysterious illness that kept him bedridden through much of his youth. During his bedridden years he was kept entertained by his mother’s stories and legends from her native town of Sligo. Her stories bore themes of the supernatural, as well as death and disease, themes that would resurface in Stoker’s fiction, especially Dracula. Stoker entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1864, but by then he was a strong young man who competed in athletics and received awards for debate and oratory.
Meeting Dracula for the First Time
Stoker imagined Dracula quite differently from the way most later representations have painted him. Here is the initial description of the eponymous count in Stoker’s novel:
His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and str
ong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.