Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  St. Germain has been portrayed in settings that range from ancient Rome to post–World War II France, and Yarbro continues to plan novels featuring him. He has featured in several of her short stories as well. Yarbro has also produced two spin-off novels, Out of the House of Life (1990) and In the Face of Death (2004), featuring Madelaine de Montalia, St. Germain’s protégé, whom he transforms into a vampire in Hotel Transylvania. A second spin-off series features another prominent lover of St. Germain’s, Atta Olivia Clemens, who stars in a trilogy of her own: A Flame in Byzantium (1987), Crusader’s Torch (1988), and A Candle for D’Artagnan (1989).

  Of her other novels and short stories, Yarbro has not written much science fiction since the early 1980s, and much of her fictional output consists of horror and fantasy, including two books devoted to the vampire’s close cousin, the werewolf: Beastnights (1989) and The Lost Prince (originally published as The Godforsaken in 1983). The former focuses on a bestial murderer and rapist stalking the streets of San Francisco, while the latter is a total contrast in that it focuses on the heir to the Spanish throne when the Inquisition was at its most powerful. These novels were inspired by a conversation with her then-editor in which she explained that lycanthropes did not interest her, as she perceived them as victims of fate who were incapable of dealing with their lycanthropy. She wondered why they would not simply end things if life became intolerable. When her editor queried what would happen if suicide was not an option, Yarbro was sufficiently intrigued to begin writing the story of the cursed Spanish prince. The novel is yet another example of how Yarbro typically endeavors to explore established horror themes and motifs from different perspectives and undermine the clichés that have arisen.

  Of her nonfiction, Yarbro has authored a book on Middle Eastern history, entitled Empires, Wars, and Battles: The Middle East (2007), and on a naval battle between the Turks and European Crusaders, titled Confrontation at Lepanto (2006). Her works on Spiritualism, Messages from Michael, have also drawn considerable attention. What have become known as the Michael Teachings—a series of four books, the first published in 1979—record the three-decade-long conversations between a spiritual entity known as Michael and a group of friends based in San Francisco. The teachings endorse reincarnation and explore the experiences souls undergo during each lifetime.

  She has received a number of award nominations for her writing and has been the recipient of three lifetime achievement awards: a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award, and an International Horror Guild Living Legend Award. Strangely, despite the popularity of St. Germain and other stories Yarbro has written, there have yet to be any TV or film adaptations of her work. She continues to be a prolific writer.

  Carys Crossen

  See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Spiritualism; Vampires; Werewolves.

  Further Reading

  Bogstad, Janice M. 2003. “Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 1942–” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Edited by Richard Bleiler, 993–1002. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Fitzgerald, Gil. 1988. “History as Horror: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 128–134. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.

  Howison, Del. 2015. “Inkslinger of the Highest Degree: Exclusive Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” Blumhouse.com, December 31. http://www.blumhouse.com/2015/12/31/inkslinger-of-the-highest-degree-exclusive-interview-with-chelsea-quinn-yarbro.

  Phin, Vanessa Rose. 2015. “An Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” Strange Horizons, September 21. http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20150921/4yarbro-a.shtml.

  Swift, Sondra F. 1999. “Toward the Vampire as Savior: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain Series Compared with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni.” In The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature, edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr, 155–164. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

  Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  October 2016

  In this interview Yarbro shares some of the reasons behind several prominent aspects of her authorial career: her reasons for writing across a very broad spectrum of genres, her reasons for writing about vampires and werewolves, and her reasons for approaching established generic and mythic tropes in a way that subverts them. She also talks about her personal interest in Spiritualism and the occult, and she offers a list of recommended genre reading—not just horror but also science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. She closes with some thoughts on the purpose of horror fiction and the reasons why people seek it.

  Matt Cardin: In a career spanning five decades, you have not only written a huge number of books, but you have written across a huge span of forms and genres. What is it that drives you toward such diversity in your authorial output? And is there any central impulse lying behind that diversity, a kind of core mission that threads its way through your work and unites it into an organic whole?

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: Most simply put, I like to read in a wide variety of genres, and as a result, I like to write in a wide variety of genres. Doing the same mindset book after book tends to slow me down, but by genre-jumping and genre-straddling, my story sense stays fresh. As to a thematic element in my work, I’m sure there is one, but I don’t worry about it, since paying attention to it would make me self-conscious and that is pure poison to fictionists.

  MC: The character of Comte de St. Germain has now entered the canon of vampire literature. What led you to write about vampires in the first place? And why do you think they continue to exert such a mesmerizing power over the minds of not just the reading public but people in general? What’s the fascination?

  CQY: I wrote about vampires because there is something fascinating about them, and that’s still true. As I have said before, after reading Dracula at fourteen, I read a lot more vampire fiction, and after a while, I wondered how far the Dracular model of vampires could be turned to the positive and still have a recognizable vampire. I’m still exploring that issue. I think some of the fascination comes from the high level of the ambiguity of the vampire—improperly dead, dependent on the living for its continued survival—which is at the heart of the whole vampire myth.

  MC: How about werewolves, which have also played a part in your novels? What fascinates people about them? What fascinates you about them?

  CQY: Werewolves are trickier beasties, and not nearly so engaging as vampires, although they, too, are ancient mythic archetypes in all known present and historical human societies. If vampires are The Other outside us, werecreatures are The Other within us. The most fun I’ve had with were-ness has been in The Vildecaz Talents, with Ninianee, who for the three nights of the full moon turns into a mammal, but she doesn’t know which mammal until her first transformation for the month.

  MC: In your horror writing you have tended to approach established themes, tropes, and motifs in a way that overturns and undermines them. You greet clichés and then explode them. Is this something you consciously set out to do? Is it perhaps linked to that core sense of authorial mission alluded to above?

  CQY: Yes, you’re right—I like to turn mythic figures upside down, back-to-front, inside-out, and so forth, and I do it deliberately, especially where there are inconsistencies in the archetype I’m dealing with. It lets me explore those figures in ways I couldn’t do if I were dealing directly with the folkloric image, and what’s the fun in that?

  MC: The fact that you write supernatural horror while also writing about, and being personally involved in, Spiritualism, as expressed in your Messages from Michael series, puts you in relationship with a venerable line of authors in the horror and Gothic traditions—such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Shirley Jackson—who have likewise held personal beliefs about the supernatural that worked its way into their written fictions. How do you personally understand the striking doubleness or duality of the supernatural, which in o
ne context is the standard subject matter for stories about fear and horror, and in another is a source of much more benign and comforting notions and emotions about the nature of reality?

  CQY: First, I don’t believe in the supernatural—I believe everything that’s happening, no matter how weird or creepy, is natural, or it wouldn’t be able to occur. What is causing these things to happen is what interests me, and why I’ve been involved in occult studies for years, and so far, continue to do so. My work may reflect my interests in occult matters, but rarely do they reflect my opinions, since one of the most important aspect of writing, at least for me, is to take a story on its terms, and to reveal the experiences and opinions of the characters who inhabit it. The Michael material, which is taken from a real group and actual channeled information, is fictional only in that the identities of group members are not revealed, and most of those characters in the group in the Michael books are amalgamations of members, not portraits.

  MC: Having made your mark on horror, what authors and works would you recommend in general to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Or feel free to aim the question at the larger universe of speculative fiction as a whole, since you have worked for so long in all areas of it. Which books and authors strike you as especially important and profound both for speculative fiction and for literature as a whole?

  CQY: I’m not very good at recommendations for newcomers to the various genres—I’ve read far too much over the years to be able to know what to point out as a first step. But I can make some generalities. If you haven’t read Dracula and you like vampires, by all means do so. A lot of people like Lovecraft (I don’t very much) for horror, and M. R. James (me, too). Of course, I recommend Robert Bloch for that most difficult of all forms, the funny horror story. If you like science fiction, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, C. L. Moore, and Theodore Sturgeon were among my early favorites; Sturgeon and Moore remain so to this day. If you like mysteries, Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Thorne Smith, James Ellroy, and Dick Francis are some writers whose work sticks with me. As fantasy goes, Roger Zelazny, Tanith Lee, and Ursula Le Guin held my interest more fully than some others. Sitting in his own multi-universe between fantasy and science fiction, R. A. Lafferty was a unique voice in my developmental period. I mention these because they were the ones I liked early in my career, when I was eager to see how the Big Names did it. On the other hand, some of my opinions are colored by having known a number of the ones listed, which probably flavors my understanding [of] their work. Almost all of them are senior citizens now, or no longer with us, and don’t reflect the current array of Big Names, though I like Neil Gaiman very much, and Charles de Lint. I hope this might provide some useful ways to begin; they certainly did for me.

  MC: Finally, do you have any thoughts on the purpose or meaning of horror fiction? What does it give us? Why do people actually seek the distressing emotional experiences of fright, dread, disgust, and dismay?

  CQY: Most human beings don’t mind being frightened if they’re not in any real danger—think of roller-coasters and films—because it is thrilling to have that frisson that horror provides. A great many folk-stories and fairy tales are not only cautionary but scary because that cold finger down the spine is a lot of fun when it is imaginary, and we seek it out in stories for that reason. Such tales make it okay to be frightened and promise you a kind of vaccine against the very actual dangers and threats of real life. If you know how to handle a Lovecraftian sea monster, there’s a chance that you can deal with dry rot under the deck or the political news from the Middle East.

  “THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER”

  “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a horror story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, written in June 1890 in Pasadena, California and published in the New England Magazine (January 1892) under her married name, Stetson. She had suffered from postpartum depression while with her first husband in New England and was ordered by the prominent neurologist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell to take his rest cure, consisting of enforced bed rest for a month, followed by a prescription ordering her to limit her intellectual activities to two hours a day and never to write again. The result brought her to the edge of suicide, until she fought back, left the East Coast for California, and wrote the story over two days in 103-degree weather. She sent the published story to Mitchell, but contrary to rumor, he never responded or changed his therapy.

  The semi-autobiographical story, in the form of a diary, recounts the experience of a clinically depressed woman given a rest cure similar to Mitchell’s. The entire story is set in an upper room of a rented house where the woman is allowed nothing but rest, and she has nothing to do but stare at the ugly wallpaper. Eventually, she begins to see something moving behind the wallpaper’s patterns. She soon realizes it is a woman who appears to be trapped behind the twisting pattern and is trying to get out. She decides to free the other woman by stripping off the wallpaper. By the end she has seemingly become the other woman.

  More than two decades after the publication of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman explained the “story behind the story” in a brief piece that she published in her magazine The Forerunner. “For many years,” she said, “I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond.” She described how a “noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country,” gave her the “rest cure,” sending her home and instructing her to curtail her intellectual life, “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again.” The result of this treatment, she said, was well-nigh disastrous:

  I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

  Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again—work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite—ultimately recovering some measure of power.

  Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1913. “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper?” At The Literature of Prescription: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/literatureofprescription/b2Reading.html. Originally published in The Forerunner, October 1913.

  Several interpretations are possible. Initially “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was seen as a powerful, Poe-esque description of a woman’s psychological descent into madness. This fits with the author’s stated intention in writing it.

  Gilman was a feminist activist, and a later view interprets it as a feminist allegory in which the hallucinated woman behind the wallpaper is the narrator’s doppelgänger, and the imprisoning wallpaper pattern symbolizes the contemporary patriarchal social norms. The room where the protagonist is confined is described as a nursery, which has been interpreted as symbolizing the way women were treated as children.

  It can also be interpreted as a tale of possession. The woman in the wallpaper is the spirit of a madwoman who had previously been imprisoned in the room and had died there. The room’s barred windows, rings in the walls, nailed-down bed, and deep gouges in the plaster are more suggestive of a prison than a nursery. At the end, the madwoman’s soul possesses the narrator’s mind.

  “The Yellow Wall-Paper” has been filmed more than once, by the BBC for Masterpiece Theater (1980) and as a student film by Alyssa Lundgren (2011). A feature film, The Yellow Wallpaper (2012), directed by Logan Thomas, is about Gilman’s creation of the story.

  Lee Weinstein

  See also: Psychological H
orror; Unreliable Narrator.

  Further Reading

  Dock, Julie Bates, ed. 1998. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

  Golden, Catherine, ed. 1992. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” New York: Feminist Press.

  Scharnhorst, Gary. 1985. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne.

  Wagner-Martin, Linda. 1989. “Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Centenary.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, edited by Sheryl L. Meyering, 51–64. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.