You may ask: Why Northern Frights? Doesn’t this old world contain enough real horror without our inventing more?
The Scottish philosopher David Hume believed it is part of human nature to subject ourselves to fear. He attributed this to a perverse desire to make ourselves as miserable as possible. Personally, I have another theory: Fear is fun. Vicarious fear, that is. It is a release valve for the genuine anxieties that confront us daily.
The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of the public’s appetite for dark fantasy and supernatural literature. Unfortunately, much of the appetite has been left unsated by junk-food fiction saturated with nihilism, sadism, and adolescent morbidity. What the trash merchants have not understood is that the one essential element of the classic horror story is neither shock nor revulsion but fear. Fear of the unknown and fear of the unknowable. It is a basic human emotion, and one guaranteed to maintain reader involvement.
Perhaps that is why early American literature was so enriched by tales of the fantastic, the fabulous, the downright horrific. Europeans who first encountered the New World’s primeval forests may have sensed an ancient, faceless enemy lurking in the shadows. Their fear of the unknown, perhaps the lure of the unknown, haunted the dark masterpieces of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Ambrose Bierce, and, of course, Edgar Allan Poe.
If New England’s witch-ridden woods and the haunted Gothic South have so inspired authors, it occurred to me that the Canadian North—that brooding land of unexplored wildernesses—should provide similar phantasmic raw material. Indeed, the natural features of Canada—the vast forests, the wild mountain ranges, and the awesome frozen void above the tree line—are enough to stretch anyone’s imagination.
The aboriginal people, who for so long had this country happily to themselves, painted symbols on rocks and birch bark illustrating a time when strange beasts and men were believed to have roamed the wilderness as equals. Our eastern woods were infested by the awesome cannibal Windigo, our western mountains by the hirsute Sasquatch, and our maritime and inland waters by sea serpents and lake monsters. Even the clouds above cradled giant Thunderbirds large enough to carry off humans.
As recently as 1990 the Canadian postal service validated these home-grown creature features with sets of postage stamps bearing their images. They ranged from Ogopogo, an aquatic beast with shiny scales and whipping tail, to the elusive Sasquatch, whose giant footprints and wolf-like howls announce his terrifying presence.
When the first European settlers came, they found themselves hostage to similar beliefs, some of which were caused by fear of the unknown and some of which were based on experience. Faced with the wilderness threats of isolation, starvation-induced cannibalism, and sudden death or disappearance, natives and newcomers alike came to share belief in the man-eating Windigo as well as in the loup-garou, the French-Canadian version of the European werewolf.
One of the first storytellers to transport the werewolf theme to Canada was Henry Beaugrand (1855-1929). His short story, “The Werewolves,” was set in 1706. It told of a band of cannibal Iroquois at the mouth of the Richelieu River, south of Montreal. The Indians not only drank the blood and ate the flesh of their victims, but turned into loups-garous during the process of their horrible feast. Beaugrand’s story was adapted into a movie in 1913 by the Canadian director Henry McCrae, and is recognized today as the first werewolf film.
Until recently, many of the authors who utilized Canada as an exotic and fantastic set piece were outsiders. Chief among these was Algernon Blackwood, long recognized as one of the greatest horror writers in the world. Blackwood was an English remittance man who prospected for gold in Rainy River, Ontario, and who spent months living on an island in the Muskoka wilderness. His Canadian tales of dark fantasy include “The Wendigo,” “A Haunted Island,” “The Valley of the Beasts,” and the excellent werewolf story, “Running Wolf.”
Even John Buchan, Governor General of Canada from 1935 to 1940, imagined Canada’s Northwest as the epicentre of unexplained fear (“a thing beyond humanity and beyond time”) in his final, melancholic novel, Sick Heart River. A story of metaphysical terror, it involved a native tribe dying from disease and what its chief described as “fear of the North.” And pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s often featured tales of fantasy and horror with Northern settings. Some of the stories were based on persistent rumours of a lost valley said to be a jungle oasis replete with savage creatures belonging to an era when the North was tropic swale.
But what of today? Statisticians tell us that over seventy percent of Canadians now live in urban settings. Denatured by a veneer of high-rise cocoons, shopping malls, and freeways, we are no longer a nation of pioneers who face the terrors of an alien wilderness. Has fear of the unknown, then, become obsolete? The answer lies within this book. There are seventeen stories here. Each in its own way deals with archetypal fear. Some are set in the physical wilderness of Blackwood and Buchan (it’s still out there, beyond the city limits), while others base their fears on urban terror, modern alienation, and that scary maze inside our own skulls. The stories differ in theme and style, but all share a common thread: they feature Canadian authors or Canadian settings.
Northern Frights was conceived as a companion to Mosaic Press’s pioneer mystery series, Cold Blood. Like its sister publication, it aims to supply a market and a showcase for talented short story writers. In the absence of a regular newsstand magazine specifically devoted to horror and dark fantasy, much of the better short story material has seen publication in anthologies such as this—publication in other countries, that is. Until now, such a market has not existed in Canada.
While sales of formulaic horror novels dwindle (proving you can get too much of a bad thing), dark fantasy is alive and well, thank you. It has even regained some of its dignity by way of the short story form. This is only fitting, since its earliest adherents practically invented the form and since so many of its finest modern practitioners (Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, John Collier, Robert Bloch, and Richard Matheson, among others) are at least as famous for the quality and quantity of their short fiction as they are for their book-length material.
I label our series “dark fantasy” rather than “horror” not because I’m fond of euphemisms or embarrassed by the depreciated “h” word, but simply to announce a wider range of possibilities. The best horror stories are, after all, stories first and horrors second. They deal not only in fear but in all things central to the human conflict.
Future volumes of Northern Frights will continue to present well-known names and newcomers alike. Contents will run the gamut from outright horror and pulp-style thrills to atmospheric fantasy and a whiff of the Gothic spirit—in short, the widest range of top-drawer fiction that can be found in the pages of a book promising true shudders, not false shocks.
Happy chills.
Don Hutchison