Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

Although rightfully famous for his novels, Straub has also penned short stories, which have been showcased in his collections Houses Without Doors, Magic Terror, and 5 Stories. In 2016, he published Interior Darkness: Selected Stories. That book, originally conceived as a two-volume edition of his collected stories, features sixteen shorter works, written over the course of some three decades. Writing about the collection in the Washington Post, reviewer Bill Sheehan stated, “There may be no better introduction to Straub’s accomplishments than this new, aptly titled career retrospective” (Sheehan 2016).

  Besides his work as a novelist and short story writer, Straub has paid his dues as an editor, helming the Horror Writers Association anthology Peter Straub’s Ghosts in 1995, guest editing an edition of Conjunctions in 2002 (Issue 39, titled The New Wave Fabulists), selecting stories for the Library of America’s H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (2005) and editing a volume titled Poe’s Children, subtitled “The New Horror” (2008). Most recently, he served as editor for a two-volume set, again from the Library of America, titled American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now (2009). As an editor, Straub has sought to point out the richness and diversity of the genre, including stories from horror stalwarts such as Ramsey Campbell and Stephen King, but also promoting the talents of relative newcomers to the genre such as Kelly Link, Glenn Hirschberg, and Nalo Hopkinson, or such unlikely suspects as Dan Chaon and Jonathan Lethem.

  Jazz informs much of Straub’s work. His novella “Pork Pie Hat” is a good example, featuring a character based on jazz legend Lester Young. This influence extends to the titles he has used and the names he has chosen for his characters over the years. Jazz-influenced titles include Koko, “The Blue Rose,” and The Skylark. Names such as Teagarden, Mobley, and Parker, and characters such as Henry Leyden of Black House in his guise as Symphonic Stan, the Big Band Man, proliferate. The final few pages of Koko are especially illuminating. There, a minor character named Spanky Burrage explores the differences between two tunes with the novel’s name, one by Duke Ellington and another by Charlie Parker, who borrowed his song’s chord progression from the song “Cherokee,” written by Ray Noble. Parker’s improvisation “bends” those chords, producing an entirely new tune. In a way, this is what Straub does with his stories, using variations on a theme to explore ideas and search for meaning; he often turns his stories inside out, looking at the same events from other angles, all in an effort to get at core truths.

  Childhood trauma has always played an important part in Straub’s fiction, from the sexual molestation endured by the narrator of the extremely disturbing short story “The Juniper Tree” (1988) to the terrible car accident that Tom Pasmore, the protagonist of Mystery, suffered in that novel. Not surprisingly, pieces of Straub’s fiction are deeply informed by the events in his own life. In the May 1993 edition of the Village Voice Literary Supplement, Straub described one such event: “As a child, I was hit by a car. I was killed in effect, momentarily, and slowly and to some degree unwillingly returned to an unhappy, pain-ridden, angry frustrated life. I was crazy both with the physical pain and the horrible dread that kind of pain brings—and also, I now know, with anger at having been slapped down so severely” (Stokes 1993, 25). Fortunately for readers of horror fiction, the author has found ways to channel that anger and frustration into some of the most exquisite horror and thriller writing of the modern era.

  Hank Wagner

  See also: Bram Stoker Award; Ghost Story; International Horror Guild Award; King, Stephen.

  Further Reading

  Bosky, Bernadette L. 1996. “Mirror and Labyrinth: The Fiction of Peter Straub.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, 68–84. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

  Collings, Michael. 2000. Hauntings: The Official Peter Straub Bibliography. Woodstock, GA: Overlook Connection Press.

  King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.

  Sheehan, Bill. 2000. At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press.

  Sheehan, Bill. 2016. “‘Interior Darkness’ for Those Who Love Horror—and Even Those Who Don’t.” Washington Post, February 8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/interior-darkness-for-those-who-love-horror--and-even-those-who-dont/2016/02/08/53b1210a-ce6f-11e5-b2bc-988409ee911b_story.html.

  Stokes, Geoffrey. 1993. “Ghosts: The Many Lives of Peter Straub.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 115 (May): 25–26.

  Tibbets, John C. 2016. The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

  Wolfe, Gary K., and Amelia Beamer. 2010. “Peter Straub and Transcendental Horror.” In Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, 151–163. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

  STURGEON, THEODORE (1918–1985)

  Over the course of a publishing career that spanned nearly five decades, Theodore Sturgeon established himself as one of the most important short story writers in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His nearly 200 published stories, the best of which were published in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, are characterized by emotional depth and stylistic maturity unmatched by other writers in the field at the time. Even his lighter stories demonstrate a quality and craftsmanship achieved by few of his contemporaries. His attention to matters of narrative style and character was profoundly important for a field that was at the time moving away from its roots in the pulp magazines, and his influence has helped shape the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field that we have today. While he is best known as a science fiction writer who addressed issues of difference and sexuality—as in his best-known work, More Than Human (1953), and in works such as Venus Plus X (1960) and “The World Well Lost” (1953)—Sturgeon’s work often makes use of supernatural elements or pathological behavior to create a sense of terror.

  As early as 1940, with the publication of the story “It,” Sturgeon was crafting polished and intense tales of horror. The titular It in this case is a swamp creature, prefiguring DC Comics’ Swamp Thing by more than thirty years. Motivated by neither anger nor revenge, the creature nevertheless cuts a violent swath across the countryside in its futile attempts to come to terms with its environment and its emerging consciousness. The destruction It wreaks on one family, and on one teenaged girl in particular, is especially heart-wrenching, all the more so for the creature’s total lack of awareness of the consequences of its actions. “Killdozer” (1944) presents a very different kind of monster, a bulldozer possessed by an ancient alien entity that has been unintentionally unearthed by a construction corps. A story of possession masquerading as a hard science fiction story, “Killdozer” presents the entity’s exorcism as an engineering problem to be solved, which of course it is by the highly competent engineer who is the story’s lead. It remains a readable and at times intense working out of what would be an absurd notion in the hands of a lesser writer. In this sense Sturgeon laid the foundation for what followed decades later in Richard Matheson’s Duel and Stephen King’s “Trucks” (1978) and Christine (1983). Another story of possession, and one of Sturgeon’s finest, “The Perfect Host” (1948) explores the emotional devastation a body-hopping entity leaves in its wake—and does so through a narrative ploy that contemporary audiences would consider postmodern.

  These stories and most others in Sturgeon’s oeuvre can be characterized as horror, fantasy, or science fiction, but “Bianca’s Hands” (1947) eschews these trappings for a study in psychological pathology that is all too believable and all the more disturbing for it. The story follows a man who becomes obsessed with the hands of a possibly mentally deficient teenaged girl, the titular Bianca. After a brief courtship, Bianca’s mother agrees to let them marry, and the man moves in. His obsession grows and worsens, and the ensuing downward spiral that all their lives take is vividly rendered in Sturgeon’s polished prose. An even more powerful portr
ayal of deviance is played out in “Bright Segment” (1955), in which a solitary man rescues a woman after an auto accident and nurses her back to health in his apartment. As she becomes the focal point of his life, his ministrations turn to imprisonment and torture.

  Sturgeon’s work often features protagonists, often children or young adults, confronted by threatening or overwhelming forces. “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” (1948) incorporates time travel into a story of a possessed teddy bear that affects its owner from childhood into adulthood, with a terrifying resolution that effectively undermines its innocuous imagery.

  In “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall” (1951) an entity, either alien or supernatural, inhabits the shadow of a child’s room and wreaks destruction on his family. “Prodigy” (1949), one of Sturgeon’s shortest but best stories, relates the fate of a special child and raises disturbing questions about how society manages and reacts to difference. The monstrous child motif, in this case an all-powerful adolescent who can do anything he thinks, appears in “Talent” (1953)—the same year that Jerome Bixby’s classic short story “It’s a Good Life,” about an omnipotent child terrorizing a small town (adapted as the iconic Twilight Zone of the same title), was published. “Twink” (1955) demonstrates Sturgeon at his most humane in a story that explores the burgeoning telepathic relationship between a child in utero and her father. The terror here is one of birth, but it is a trauma elided by familial and human connection—another dominant theme in Sturgeon’s work.

  Surgeon was adept at producing stories in various modes. Examples of his lighter, if still darkly tinged work include “Shottle Bop” (1941), “Blabbermouth” (1947), and “Fluffy” (1947), all of which can be read as prefiguring the popular urban fantasy that emerged in the late 1980s and the paranormal romance that has existed as a marketing category since the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. “So Near the Darkness” (1955) is a noir mystery that hints at a lurking supernatural presence. “The Graveyard Reader” (1958), with its protagonist who learns how to read the life stories of the dead by examining their gravestones, anticipates in tone and mood the early work of Neil Gaiman. And “Vengeance Is” (1980) anticipates the HIV/AIDS crisis through a disturbing exploration of rape and revenge via the transmission of a sexually transmitted virus.

  Of Sturgeon’s handful of novels, Some of Your Blood (1961) is most relevant here. Told through a series of letters and personnel files, the novel gradually unpacks the life of a soldier committed to a psychiatric ward. What gradually emerges is a childhood history of abuse and neglect and an adult life marked by loss, instances of extreme violence, and blood drinking. It is a remarkable study of aberrant psychology that implies a supernatural underpinning that is left tantalizingly unconfirmed.

  The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1994–2010) collects in thirteen volumes all the short fiction along with insightful story notes from the editors. Taken as a whole, the retrospective illuminates a career of importance, influence, and sustained brilliance.

  Javier A. Martinez

  See also: Novel versus Short Fiction; Possession and Exorcism; Psychological Horror.

  Further Reading

  Hartwell, David G. 1989. “An Interview with Theodore Sturgeon, Part 1.” New York Review of Science Fiction 7 (March): 1, 8–11.

  Hartwell, David G. 1989. “An Interview with Theodore Sturgon, Part 2.” New York Review of Science Fiction 8 (April): 12–15.

  Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. “Theodore Sturgeon.” In Science Fiction Voices #1, 4–18. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.

  Stableford, Brian M. 1985. “Theodore (Hamilton) Sturgeon.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, Volume 2, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler, 941–946. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Williams, Paul. [1976] 2010. “Theodore Sturgeon: Storyteller.” In Case and the Dreamer, Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, 327–354. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Also at http://www.theodoresturgeontrust.com/williams.html.

  THE SUBLIME

  “Sublime” is a term belonging to aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy devoted to the study of artistic values. It designates an affect (subjective emotional state) or experience that exceeds the ordinary limits of an individual’s capacities. Since horror fiction often deals with overwhelming emotions—whether fear, disgust, or denial—as well as the existence of some other realm beyond the everyday world, the concept of the sublime can be an important tool in understanding horror.

  The sublime in ancient literature signified some event or person, or perhaps a thing, that rose above its own level and took on something of a divine aspect. The sublime was the object of considerable attention among eighteenth-century thinkers who endeavored to define laws governing the human response to beauty in art and nature. One of these thinkers, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), published a treatise titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756, which would become an important early critical text for scholars of horror literature. Rather than seeing the sublime as a form of superior beauty, Burke separated it from beauty and identified the sublime instead with horror. Much of the current discussion of horror literature still draws on Burke’s idea that horror exerts its own kind of attraction, independent from beauty. It seems clear that Burke’s ideas influenced the development of Gothic fiction. Horace Walpole celebrated Gothic architecture in part because it was grotesque in comparison with the more stately classical architecture of the eighteenth century, which was modeled on ancient Greek and Roman aesthetic ideas of beauty and dignity.

  The Strongest Emotion

  In a section of his Philosophical Enquiry titled “On the Sublime,” Edmund Burke not only begins to define the sublime and identify its sources, but he characterizes it as the single strongest emotion a person can feel:

  Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (Burke 1757, 131)

  In a later section titled “Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime,” Burke, in addition to refining and clarifying the nature of the sublime, describes it as so powerful and primal that it precedes reason and compels its course:

  The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. (95)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Entry into the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-mall.

  Romantic philosophy took a modified view of the sublime, largely inspired by the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). While Burke made the sublime an aspect of certain kinds of naturally occurring events, such as natural catastrophes, Kant saw the sublime as an aspect of the human mind. The mind, according to Kant, seeks to understand whatever it encounters in reality. Some encounters, however, are overwhelming; the event is simply too large or too powerful for the mind to comprehend. The mind falls short, but, in its failure, still finds something to admire in itself anyway: namely, the heroic effort of the mind to understand something far larger than itself. This mixed feeling of incomprehension and self-respect is what Kant considers the sublime. Later Romantic writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose importance for horror fiction is considerable, would adopt something resembling Kant’s idea, seeing the sublime in ways that mixed psychology with aesthetics.

  Edgar Allan Poe pr
ovides a good example of the way this altered idea of the sublime affects horror fiction. He pays close attention to both the physical and psychological aspects of overwhelming experiences in order to depict them as intensely as possible, which gives his work its exceptional power. In his essay on horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft wrote: “Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal” (Lovecraft 2012, 55).

  The sublime tends to fade in significance, while the psychological aspect of horror grows more important in horror criticism, as the twentieth century begins. The domain beyond, which was once considered sublime, is approached by more contemporary authors in a way having to do with the philosophy of existence, rather than aesthetic philosophy.

  Michael Cisco

  See also: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; The Numinous; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Walpole, Horace.

  Further Reading

  Brown, Marshall. 1987. “A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel.” Studies in Romanticism 26: 275–301.

  Burke, Edmund. [1756] 2013. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Doran, Robert. 2015. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. New York: Routledge.

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

  Mishra, Vijay. 2015. “The Gothic Sublime.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 288–306. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

  Voller, Jack G. 1994. The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.