AICKMAN, ROBERT (1914–1981)
Robert Fordyce Aickman was a British writer of fiction and nonfiction, best known for his supernatural “strange” tales. His interests were many and various: he was a noted conservationist, a champion of the restoration of the British canal system; he loved to travel; he was a passionate patron of the arts; and he was a lifelong believer in ghosts and the paranormal, an advocate and theorist of supernatural literature, as well as a writer of it.
Aickman was born just before World War I (1914–1918). He would never quite feel that he “fitted in” in the modern world, feeling instead that he rightly belonged to a lost era of gentility that the war had ended forever. He had a fraught upbringing. His parents were unsuited to each other, and they fought continuously. He survived his early years by taking refuge in books, his imagination, and the supernatural, which provided him with a sense of profound communion. Aickman also had a Gothic family inheritance: Richard Marsh, a popular author who was most famous for the horror novel The Beetle, was his grandfather.
After World War II, Aickman met the author Elizabeth Jane Howard through his conservation work, and the two had an affair. Howard encouraged Aickman to write his first ghost stories, and they published a volume together in 1951, We Are for the Dark. From that point on, Aickman concentrated more and more on his writing. In 1964, he published a novel, The Late Breakfasters, and a collection of ghost stories, Dark Entries. He also began editing the Fontana series Great Ghost Stories.
Over the next sixteen years, Aickman published a volume of autobiography, The Attempted Rescue (1966), and six more volumes of supernatural tales. He also received recognition for his writing, winning a World Fantasy Award for the story “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” in 1975 and a British Fantasy Award for his short story “The Stains” in 1980.
Very few of Aickman’s supernatural tales contain anything like a conventional haunting. In fact, though We Are for the Dark was subtitled “Six Ghost Stories,” he later adopted, for the subtitle of his 1968 collection Sub Rosa, “Strange Stories.” And he would use the term “strange” to describe his work throughout the remainder of his life. The term has become synonymous with the Aickmanesque story.
In various critical writings, Aickman outlines a unique philosophy of the supernatural tale and a singular mode of composition. Aickman had a strong interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, which may well have stemmed from therapy undergone to make sense of the damage his childhood did him. He believed in Freud’s notion that only one-tenth of the mind is conscious, and that the remaining nine-tenths is unconscious. Because he felt the conscious one-tenth, the intellect, to be responsible for the ills of modernity, he thought it important to get in contact with the other nine-tenths. Of all literature, he considered the ghost story best equipped to do this. But though he believed in the supernatural, he didn’t think that the “ghost” in a ghost story had to be an actual revenant, though it did have to be, in Freudian terms, a return of the repressed, something rising up from the unconscious mind.
Aickman had particular ideas about the compositional strategies that might be used to draw out the submerged nine-tenths of the mind. He felt that the best ghost stories are close to poetry in that they are only partly constructions of the conscious mind. He wrote that his most successful tales came to him in a half-trance. Aickman’s strange stories, then, arising from the unconscious, are akin to dreams. And they work because they are dream-like; though they have no surface logic, they hang together because they are the emanations of Aickman’s psyche and have a clear symbolic skeleton. The reader cannot shake the idea that there might be solutions to their puzzles. Of course, as is often remarked, there is nothing duller than someone relaying a dream, and sometimes Aickman’s stories miss their mark. But when they do work they are as strange and off-kilter as the oddest dreams, as chilling as the worst nightmares. And, like dreams, they are often startling in their frankness and grotesquery, comical in their bizarreness, melancholy in their affect, and chilling in their insinuation. Aickman’s novel The Late Breakfasters and his posthumously published novella The Model (1987) take the same themes and techniques, and develop them in different modes—satire in the case of The Late Breakfasters and magical realism in the case of The Model.
In the autumn of 1980, Aickman became ill with cancer. He refused conventional treatment, choosing instead to consult a homeopathic physician. Following a brief illness, he died in London’s Royal Homeopathic Hospital on February 26, 1981.
Since Aickman’s death, his reputation as one of the most significant British writers of supernatural short fiction of the late twentieth century has grown. His influence can be seen in the work of writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Joel Lane, Reggie Oliver, and M. John Harrison. His stories have been adapted for television. He has also influenced comedy: the bizarre and unsettling British troupe called the League of Gentlemen took much from Aickman’s tales. His work has been reprinted. And a new generation of writers has been influenced by him: 2015 saw the publication of an anthology, Aickman’s Heirs, edited by Simon Strantzas, which contains a number of British, U.S., and Canadian authors, including Lisa Tuttle, writing stories of Aickmanesque strangeness.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: Dreams and Nightmares; “Ringing the Changes”; Surrealism; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Crawford, Gary William. 2011. Robert Aickman: An Introduction. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash Tree Press. Kindle edition.
Crawford, Gary William. 2012. Insufficient Answers: Essays on Robert Aickman. Baton Rouge: Gothic Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Russell, R. B., and Rosalie Parker. 2015. Robert Aickman: Author of Strange Tales. Leyburn, North Yorkshire, UK: DVD. Tartarus Press.
Strantzas, Simon, ed. 2015. Aickman’s Heirs. Pickering, ON, Canada: Undertow Publications.
AINSWORTH, WILLIAM HARRISON (1805–1882)
William Harrison Ainsworth was a popular English novelist who, though trained in law, chose to write creatively, specializing in historical romances. An immensely prolific writer, he published forty novels over a span of five decades, many of which contained elements of horror. In the words of H. P. Lovecraft, Ainsworth’s “romantic novels teem with the eerie and gruesome” (Lovecraft 2012, 46).
His early stories often involved crime and criminals, and made use of such Gothic motifs as thwarted heirs, secret passages, ruined edifices, burial vaults, corpses, and ghosts, the latter genuine as well as rationalized. His first success, Rookwood (1834), is ramshackle in plotting and construction but utilizes all of these devices, as well as a legend involving the fall of a tree branch leading to a death; it describes a dispute over an inheritance and the legitimacy of an heir. (There are, additionally, false identities, gypsies, and excessive praise of highwaymen, particularly the infamous Dick Turpin, as the story gradually resolves itself in favor of the legitimate claimant.) Though not supernatural, Jack Sheppard (1839) is more genuinely horrific, describing the monstrously villainous thieftaker (someone hired to capture criminals) and thief Jonathan Wild (1682?–1725) and his role in the creation, persecution, and ultimate destruction of the titular criminal (1702–1724). Although it proved popular with readers, Jack Sheppard reveals problems that were increasingly to affect Ainsworth’s prose, specifically weak characterizations and narrative padding. Even allowing for the market, the latter is egregious.
Ainsworth’s next significant successes were a trio of overtly historical novels—The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), and Old St. Paul’s (1841)—whose turgid plots combined with historical events proved initially popular with contemporaries. These, too, often contained horrific material, as in the latter’s depiction of the spread of the black plague and the Great Fire of 1666; their success permitted Ainsworth to establish his own magazine (Ainsworth’s Magazine, 1842–1854). He thus serialized Windsor Castle (July 1842–June 1843), a historical romance describing the events around Henry VIII’s courtship of Anne Boleyn; a strong Gothic element involves the presence of the supernatural Herne the Hunter, who haunts Windsor Forest, who leads ghostly hunts through the forest, and whose origins are variously given. Windsor Castle proved very popular, not because of the uninspired retelling of the historical narrative, but because of Herne, who is more vital and convincing than the humans surrounding him.
Following this relatively promising beginning, Ainsworth’s fortunes began a long, slow, and sad decline. His once large readership dwindled, as did his income, and where he was once considered almost Charles Dickens’s equal, he gradually became no more than another impoverished second-rater, though it would be inaccurate and unfair to refer to him as a hack, as he undoubtedly cared about his writing. Late in his life, the City of Manchester honored him for his writings featuring the history of that city, but the accolades did not include financial security, and he died shortly thereafter. His obituaries tended to be dismissive and sometimes included erroneous material.
Though specialists and scholars still occasionally read Ainsworth and note that his fiction often possesses narrative drive, he is unlikely to be rediscovered by later audiences. The general academic consensus is that he was neither an innovator nor particularly talented as a writer or a creator of character, and that he provided a popular readership with historical novels featuring familiar and generally uninspired horrific devices. Still, there are some who appreciate his fleeting and faded charms. Rosemary Mitchell, a British scholar of Victorian literature and history, writes that Ainsworth may well have been forgotten because his “attraction was to the gothic historical, to the black and the bloody, to haunted history,” which made his writings serve in effect as “the dark side of those progressive Victorians we all know about, with their trains and telegraphs, their technological advances and their scientific discoveries, their liberal politics and their enlightened skepticism.” She characterizes Ainsworth as a “precursor of [legendary Hollywood director and producer] Cecil B. DeMille and [best-selling author of The Da Vinci Code] Dan Brown, a master of the spectacle and the sinister, king of the colourful and the clichéd” (Mitchell 2011).
Richard Bleiler
See also: Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition.
Further Reading
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Mitchell, Rosemary. 2011. “‘What a Brain Must Mine Be!’: The Strange Historical Romances of William Harrison Ainsworth.” Open Letters Monthly, August 1. http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/what-a-brain-must-mine-be-the-strange-historical-romances-of-william-harrison-ainsworth.
Schroeder, Natalie. 1985. “William Harrison Ainsworth.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 1, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler, 187–194. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
AJVIDE LINDQVIST, JOHN (1968–)
Of Algerian descent, horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist is popularly referred to as Sweden’s answer to Stephen King, an appropriate soubriquet given the author’s interest in childhood and the decidedly supernatural bent of his fiction. Ajvide Lindqvist is notable for having produced one of the most original vampire novels of the twenty-first century, but also because he is one of a very few number of horror auteurs to have broken into the international market without writing in English. His novels are transnational enough to appeal to a wider public, yet remain decidedly Swedish in references and subject matter.
Ajvide Lindqvist was born in Blackeberg, Sweden. He rose to fame with his first and, to date, most famous novel, Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In, published in his home country in 2004 and translated into English in 2007. The novel was made into a successful Swedish film in 2008 and was remade for the American market in 2010. Thematically, his writings have thus far covered, and updated, traditional horror figures such as the vampire (lonely and sympathetic in Let the Right One In), the zombie (an empty, post-traumatic shell of her/his former self in Hanteringen av odöda / Handling the Undead [2005; 2009]), and the ghost (capable of physically possessing the living in Människohamn / Harbour [2008; 2010]). But Ajvide Lindqvist has also conjured up less familiar scenarios, such as those of Lilla stjärna / Little Star (2010; 2011), in which a psychic child is capable of sucking the life out of humans, and of the surreal mood pieces collected in Let the Old Dreams Die (2010), a translation of Pappersväggar (2006) that included the story “Låt de gamla drömmarna dö” / “Let the Old Dreams Die” (2011). In the latter, Oskar and Eli from Let the Right One In make a brief reappearance.
One of the things that separates Ajvide Lindqvist from other contemporary authors is the allegorical quality of his writings, which work narratively as well as more metaphorically. This personal trait is particularly obvious in his last novel to be translated to English, I Am behind You (2017; published in Swedish as Himmelstrand in 2014), where an apocalyptic scenario serves as an excuse to probe the dark recesses of human despair. Similarly, in Harbour, what starts off as a fairly standard haunting turns into a reflection on Sweden’s historical connection to the sea.
Xavier Aldana Reyes
See also: Vampires; Zombies.
Further Reading
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “Post-Millennial Horror, 2000–16.” In Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, 189–214. London: British Library Publishing.
Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Henriette Thune. 2011. “Parallel Worlds of Possible Meetings in Let the Right One In.” Word and Image, 27, no. 1: 2–14.
Costorphine, Kevin. 2010. “Panic on the Streets of Stockholm: Sub/urban Alienation in the Novels of John Ajvide Lindqvist.” In The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries, edited by Eoghain Hamilton, 137–144. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.
ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832–1888)
Louisa May Alcott was the renowned writer of The Little Women Trilogy (1868–1886), and her Gothic and sensation fictions were often pseudonymous, anonymous, or lost. Her children’s fiction (Jo March’s tabloid fiction in Little Women), correspondence, journals, and scholars occasionally referenced her shadow oeuvre of thrillers before their recovery by Madeline Stern in six volumes (1975–1993). As the daughter of Bronson Alcott, she was connected to the Transcendentalist movement and progressive educational initiatives from birth, with her circle of family friends including the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy recovered Alcott’s unpublished first novel The Inheritance (1849, 1997), with Gothic landscapes and a secret family history influenced by Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Brontë. Alcott published sentimental yet sensational tales in 1850s Boston weeklies, but her 1860s thriller career involved two cheap publishing empires, Frank Leslie’s and Elliot, Thomes, & Talbot. Three different Leslie publications ran at least twenty-seven original Alcott tales (1863–1870), beginning with prizewinner “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” (1863, 1975) about a U.S. femme fatale marrying a Cuban planter to aid her revenge against her U.S. ex-fiancé. Another confidence woman tale, “V. V.” (1865, 1976), is an early detective fiction and initiated Alcott’s run with Elliott, Thomes, & Talbot (1865–1867). That firm published several poems and six novelettes (four as A. M. Barnard and two relatively upbeat Gothics with her own name), including her final two con artist narratives. These con narratives exhibit Alcott’s career-long interests in gender struggles, often defined in terms of mastery and slavery, as well as theatricality and masquerade, which threaten family structure in “Pauline’s” and “V. V.” but prove liberating for characters marginalized by gender and/or class hierarchy in “Behind a Mask” (1866, 1975) and “The Mysterious Key” (1867, 1975).
Alcott’s thrillers invoke the supernatural, the Orientalist, and drugged states. “The Abbot’s Ghost” (1867, 1975), a late Barnard tale, is a Christmas ghost story with her usual theme of secret family history. “Lost in a Pyramid” (1869, 1998), a late Leslie work rediscovered by Dominic Montserrat, expands upon Théophile Gautier with a sorceress-mummy’s cursed flower seeds, and holds the distinction of being one of the earliest stories about defilers of an Egyptian tomb being hounded by a curse. Her anonymous novel A Modern Mephistopheles (1877) reprises Faustian bargains, foreign drugs, and moral or physical confinement from Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Alcott’s “A Whisper in the Dark” (1863, 1976) and A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866, 1995), a novel rejected by Elliott and recovered by Kent Bicknell. Before her death, Alcott agreed to reprint (1889) under her own name Mephistopheles and “Whisper.” Alcott’s parallel oeuvre illustrates supernatural and sensational themes and imagery informing nineteenth-century sentimental literature as well as dilemmas of female authorship in a patriarchal literary market.
Alcott suffered from ill health for many years, and she died of a stroke in Boston at the age of fifty-five. She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, near Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and many other notable U.S. writers in the section of the cemetery now known as Authors’ Ridge.
Bob Hodges
See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Haunted House or Castle; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Mummies.
Further Reading
Eiselein, Gregory, and Anne Phillips, eds. 2001. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Porter, Nancy, and Harriet Reisen, eds. 2008–2016. Alcott Project. www.alcottfilm.com.
Smith, Gail. 1995. “Who Was That Masked Woman? Gender and Form in Alcott’s Confidence Stories.” In American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Julie Brown, 45–59. New York: Garland.
Stern, Madeline. 1995. Introduction to Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
ALONE WITH THE HORRORS
Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961–1991 was published in 1993 by Arkham House. It is a revision and expansion of Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell (1987) and was fittingly published by the firm that issued Campbell’s first book, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), when he was a teenager. The selection of stories is Campbell’s own, and the stories are dated by year. These dates do not indicate date of publication but date of composition. Campbell has kept a scrupulous record of the writing, publication, and translation of his work. Campbell does not include a story for every year of his literary career since 1961; both early in his career and later on, when he turned his attention to writing novels, he wrote few or no short stories; in this volume, there are no stories for the years 1962–1965, 1969–1972, 1981–1982, and 1988–1990.
The volume is a scintillating assemblage of some of the best weird fiction written during the years it covers. “Cold Print” (1966) constitutes Campbell’s ultimate refinement of his adaptation of motifs borrowed from the work of H. P. Lovecraft, which was the focus of the juvenile pastiches of his first volume. Campbell reprints several stories from his second—and, arguably, best—story collection, Demons by Daylight (1973), which embody his distinctive melding of dream imagery, sexuality, and luminous prose.
A full eight stories are taken from Dark Companions (1982), in which Campbell’s exposition of urban horror reaches its pinnacle. “Mackintosh Willy” (1977), for example, finds terror in a homeless person who appears to live in a bus shelter and is mercilessly tormented by two adolescent boys—but they pay for their cruelty when Mackintosh Willy revives from the dead to exact vengeance. “The Depths” (1978) features a prototypical mingling of dream and reality, where a writer discovers that if he doesn’t write down the horrible nightmares he suffers, the events they depict occur in the real world.
Later stories feature grim and sardonic humor (“Seeing the World” [1983], in which a couple who have returned from an overseas trip are revealed to be zombies); a focus on aberrant psychological states (“Boiled Alive” [1986], where a man cannot distinguish between the real world and the pseudo-reality of film); and a clever use of modern technology to incite terror (“End of the Line” [1991], in which a telemarketer may be receiving calls from his deceased ex-wife and child).
Overall, Alone with the Horrors includes the full range of Campbell’s short fiction and exhibits the wide-ranging imagination, the relentless focus on aberrant psychological states, and the manipulation of evocative, smooth prose that distinguish Campbell’s work in both the novel and the short story. In 1994 the book was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.
S. T. Joshi
See also: Campbell, Ramsey; “Mackintosh Willy”; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Campbell, Ramsey, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and S. T. Joshi. 1995. The Core of Ramsey Campbell: A Bibliography & Reader’s Guide. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
ALRAUNE
Alraune is the second novel in a loose trilogy that focuses on the character of Frank Braun, a thinly veiled idealization of its author, Hanns Heinz Ewers. Alraune was originally published in Ewers’s native Germany in 1911, and it went on to become the most successful book of his career. S. Guy Endore’s original English translation first appeared in 1929, published by the John Day Company of New York in an illustrated edition with drawings by the acclaimed artist of the grotesque, Mahlon Blaine.
Named after the novel’s main character, Alraune is a play on the legend of the mandrake root (Alraune is German for mandrake) that was said to grow from the spilt semen of a hanged man at the foot of the gallows tree. In the novel, Braun, buried under gambling debts, retreats to the secluded home of his uncle Ten Brinken, a wealthy biologist and collector of arcana and oddities. Among this collection is a mandragora root. Braun appeals to his uncle’s prideful and curious temperament by suggesting that he could be the first scientist in history to create a living Alraune-creature, the first to, as Braun phrases it, “make truth out of the old lie” (Ewers 1929, 58). The requirements for the task were the seed of a condemned criminal and a prostitute who would serve the Mother Earth role in the myth. Braun posits that “earth is also the eternal prostitute. Does she not give herself to all, freely?” (59).
Thus was spawned Alraune. Her diabolical conception resulted in her body being poisonous, her soul evil. Frank Braun returns, after further travel and adventures, to find that the “project” has matured into a woman. In keeping with Ewers’s fascination with the Lilith archetype of the demonic or otherworldly female, Alraune is practically irresistible to men, whose blood is enflamed by her presence. This, naturally, is a disastrous attraction, as Alraune leaves a string of corpses in her wake before love itself leads to her ultimate destruction.
The double current of Alraune herself, that of Eros and Thanatos, not only makes for a stimulating novel, but it also resonates with the structure of the classical mandragora myth, which was said to bring boons to one person and disaster to another. Alraune’s poisonous flesh and callous soul give the novel something of a Sadean flavor (that is, reminiscent of the notorious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writer and libertine the Marquis de Sade), while its embrace of blasphemy, individualism, and the Gothic arguably qualifies the book an example of Germany’s famous Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) literary movement from the latter half of the eighteenth century.
While the creation of life by artificial means links Alraune directly to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it lacks some of the philosophical integrity of its predecessor. Where Victor Frankenstein strove for a Promethean leap in human abilities and comprehensions of life, Ewers’s protagonists seem to approach the endeavor with a certain mouth-watering zeal for sin for sin’s sake. The theme of parental responsibility, which served as Frankenstein’s moral anchor, tends more to float in Alraune like textual driftwood. The novel’s substance also bears the clear marks of the author’s interest in the question of genetics and environment, or alternately, blood and soil.
Alraune was filmed no fewer than five times, beginning with three silent versions. It was also loosely adapted as a German comic book between 1998 and 2004. The novel itself was brought back into print in the twenty-first century in a new translation by Joe E. Bandel, and the original English translation by Endore was also given a new edition.
Richard Gavin
See also: Ewers, Hanns Heinz.
Further Reading
Ashkenazi, Ofer. 2012. “Assimilating the Shrew: Alraune and the Discussion of Biological Difference in Weimar Horror Film.” In Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity, 77–110. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ball, Jerry L. 1996. “Alraune.” Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature 1–2.
Ewers, Hanns Heinz. [1929] 2013. Alraune. Translated by S. Guy Endore. London: Birchgrove Press.
Koger, Grove. 2007. “Hanns Heinz Ewers.” Guide to Literary Masters and Their Works 1. Salem, MA: Salem Press.
ANCESTRAL CURSE
Curses are forms of magical thinking that give intercessionary power to gods and spirits. An ancestral or family curse is one that accompanies a family and causes misfortune across multiple generations.
Many ancient cultures have ritual forms of curses on rivals and enemies, or which are used to protect family and property, or preserve memory. Assyrian memorial stones laud the powerful, but condemn those who dishonor their name. Egyptian scribes formalized “execration texts” in which the names of the enemies of the pharaoh were written on clay pots and smashed. These “threat formulas” could also be addressed to personal enemies. In the Greco-Roman tradition, defixiones, or curse tablets, appealed to the infernal gods or spirits with messages written on thin lead sheets that were then rolled and buried (sometimes in graves). In Greece, many shadowed legal disputes. Roman curses could be more personal and were composed in an obscure, occult language designed to address the gods in their own language. The Semitic god of the Old Testament issued regular curses that traveled down family lines, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5) for disobeying the jealous god. There is rich evidence of curses in northern tribes, particularly in Gaelic and Icelandic traditions.
Highly formalized, curses promise oblivion to the enemy, usually by ending the family line. “May his name and his seed disappear in the land,” reads one Assyrian curse on a memorial stele (Holloway 2014). The content of curses has remained remarkably consistent across millennia and cultures. Curses are often paired with “lucks,” talismans that bring good fortune, countermagics that work to block the hexes of enemies. This is the purpose of the evil eye: it neutralizes the threat by cursing those who curse first. Curses are also recursive, in that it has long been feared that to come into contact with one is to become bound to its logic and suffer its consequences.
Curses are associated with premodern thought, the kind of superstitious belief that Enlightenment thinkers believed a rational and scientific worldview would eradicate. To Victorian anthropologists, belief in curses was a sign of “primitive” thought. Yet just as Gothic literature emerged in the eighteenth century, so did a revamped idea of the family or ancestral curse. The Gothic and family curses are linked from the first avowed Gothic romance, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole’s fiction concerns the perversion of the proper patriarchal line, and the usurper Manfred meets his end in accord with an ancestral curse. This plot was repeated across many key early Gothic novels, from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).
In response to the social and economic transformations of eighteenth-century England, a new interest in genealogy was common. Families sought legitimacy and security by digging for aristocratic or even royal roots (the Walpoles being a prime example). Hence, alongside the Gothic, stories of ancestral lucks and curses became a new kind of folklore, the stories commonly told and widely known.
Family curse stories might be typified by the Cowdray Curse, in which the nobleman Sir Anthony Browne was rewarded for his loyalty to Henry VIII by the gift of lands during the dissolution of the monasteries. Browne’s family was cursed by a monk cast out at the dissolution. Over the centuries, several disasters among the descendants culminated in the extinguishing of the line in 1793. The most notorious family curse concerned the Tichbornes. The luck of the ancient family was said to depend on the annual payment of a dole to the local poor. When the family discontinued the Tichborne Dole in 1796, the curse was activated. The heir to the baronetcy was lost at sea in 1854; ten years later a man in Australia declared himself the lost baronet. The “Tichborne Claimant” dragged the family through the courts at vast expense and much public scandal in two trials in the 1870s. The Tichbornes restored the dole, but the family was ruined.
Many fictional family sagas followed patterns of ancestral curses. Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1818) typified the ubiquity of clan curses in the Scottish imagination and his use of these plots, tinged with the supernatural, were hugely influential. The Gothic or horror version was common to tales published by Blackwood’s Magazine. The anonymity of Blackwood stories such as “The Curse” (1832) left a shivery boundary of uncertainty as to the truth status of these narratives. Soon, family curses bled into mainstream fiction, such as the doom that haunts the Dedlock family in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). The sensation fiction boom of the 1860s was dominated by melodramas driven by family secrets and ancestral shame, a device often used by writers like Ellen Wood and Wilkie Collins. By the late nineteenth century, biological determinism colored the imagination of family inheritance. The curse in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) turns out not to be a spectral dog but the evolutionary taint of criminality in the family blood.
Another key element of curse stories is that they are often a kind of exercise of primitive retributive justice of the weak against the strong. They are populated by monks, shepherds, the itinerant, and the dispossessed who curse feudal power, challenging its absolute rights with the promise of supernatural retribution. This class resentment figured strongly in the case of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, the wealthy aristocrat who funded years of excavation in Egypt only to die six weeks after the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1923. The recursive logic of “Tut’s Curse” allegedly killed many associated with the opening, although such a curse had no basis in ancient Egyptian belief. The story fitted into the Western tradition of ancestral curses perfectly, however. The pattern of revenge against transgression in Tut’s Curse is the model for horror films from The Mummy (1932) all the way to Drag Me to Hell (2009).
Curses are effective in horror fiction and film because they evoke this premodern underpinning of nasty and vengeful supernatural agencies, but also because they exist in the shadowy space of rumor, hovering between fact and fiction, the perfect fodder for sensational tabloid reportage. A curse can crawl out of a museum relic, or rest with a mummy, or rise up out of the floors of a house imbued with a hidden, traumatic history. The cursed house is central to the American Gothic from Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) or Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1977). Magical thinking still assigns misfortune, poverty, illness, and death to purposive malignant forces: horror fiction simply meets us halfway to disavowed belief.
Roger Luckhurst
See also: The Castle of Otranto; The Hound of the Baskervilles; The House of the Seven Gables; Melmoth the Wanderer; The Monk; Mummies; The Shining.
Holloway, April. 2014. “Assyrian Stele Containing Ancient Curse Will Not Be Reunited with Its Other Half.” Ancient Origins, March 29. http://www.ancient-origins.net/comment/14174.
Lockhart, J. G. 1938. Curses, Lucks and Talismans. London: Geoffrey Bles.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mighall, Robert. 1999. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, 78–129. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nordh, Katarina. 1996. Aspects of Ancient Egyptian Curses and Blessings: Conceptual Background and Transmission. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press.
ARKHAM HOUSE
As soon as he received news in March 1937 of the death of H. P. Lovecraft, writer August Derleth immediately began to make plans for the preservation of Lovecraft’s stories. He had never met Lovecraft, but through correspondence he had developed a close relationship with him. Derleth was by this point a successful writer, both in the pulps and in the literary mainstream. He first submitted a volume of Lovecraft’s stories to his regular publisher, Scribner’s, but when this failed, he collaborated with fellow writer Donald Wandrei to bring the book out under his own imprint. Derleth had to surreptitiously borrow the money from a bank loan on his house, and Wandrei pitched in what he could. The result was The Outsider and Others (1939) under the imprint of Arkham House (the name taken from the imaginary Massachusetts town featured in Lovecraft’s fiction). Nothing would ever be the same again. Not only was the Lovecraft volume of paramount importance, but the publishing precedent Derleth had set would have wide repercussions.
Derleth’s sole intention had been to preserve Lovecraft. Further volumes were planned, including at least one volume of Lovecraft’s brilliant letters. But at the same time Derleth had submitted a collection of his own weird stories to Scribner’s, and the editor there suggested that a specialized firm, like Arkham House, could publish the book more effectively. This proved to be the case. Despite good reviews, The Outsider and Others sold slowly, and Derleth’s Someone in the Dark actually made a profit first. Derleth and Wandrei then began to consider preserving the work of other Weird Tales writers, beginning with Clark Ashton Smith’s Out of Space and Time in 1942. Another Lovecraft volume, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, appeared in 1943, followed by Henry S. Whitehead’s Jumbee (1944) and another Smith collection. Whether he had planned to or not, Derleth had become a publisher. Wandrei joined the army in 1942, after which Arkham House was mostly Derleth’s business.
Derleth was in new territory, but he was well prepared. Prior to him, there had only been sporadic efforts to publish Lovecraft’s work in book form, such as William Crawford’s very amateurish edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). But Derleth came on the scene as a professional whose books were taken seriously by critics and the book trade. Within a few years, in the period following World War II, there were many such firms publishing fantasy, horror, and science fiction, such as Fantasy Press and Gnome Press, but it was Derleth who had shown the way. Mainstream publishing was not ready, and small presses run by enthusiasts had to demonstrate that there was a market for such material.
Derleth knew there was a market for Lovecraft. He released Marginalia in 1944 as a stopgap, intending to bring out at least one volume of Lovecraft’s letters shortly thereafter. But, as frequently happened with Arkham House, economic realities put the project on hold. The Selected Letters eventually ran to five volumes, but the first one did not appear until 1965.
After World War II, Derleth had to decide in what direction Arkham House should go. He brought out the first collection of Robert E. Howard’s fantasy Skullface and Others in 1946. He experimented tentatively with science fiction, and his edition of A. E. van Vogt’s popular Slan (1946) was the first science fiction book published in hardcover after the war. He sought the newest talent and published the first story collections of Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber Jr. He also reprinted the work of older writers, including J. Sheridan Le Fanu and William Hope Hodgson. He signed up as many of the still-living classic ghost story writers as he could: Algernon Blackwood, H. R. Wakefield, Lord Dunsany, L. P. Hartley, and Cynthia Asquith. He also brought out an extremely important anthology of supernatural poetry, Dark of the Moon (1947).
Not all of this worked out well. By the early 1950s, Derleth had to be bailed out by a $2,500 loan from author-physician David H. Keller. Arkham House survived the 1950s on a reduced scale, publishing several volumes of poetry (by Robert E. Howard, Leah Bodine Drake, and Clark Ashton Smith), a collection of Keller’s stories, and more Lovecraft. The 1960s saw a general reprinting of all of Lovecraft’s work, plus his Collected Poems (1963), and the last volumes of Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction (ultimately six in all), plus his monumental Selected Poems (1971). There were major discoveries: the first books by Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. By the time of his death in 1971, it was clear that Derleth had been a major force in twentieth-century fantasy publishing, and he had done his job superbly, producing attractive volumes much prized by collectors.
Derleth probably did not expect Arkham House to outlive him, but his heirs continued. New volumes by Campbell and Lumley appeared, along with other backlog. In 1975 the dynamic James Turner took over as managing editor. He oversaw the reissue of Lovecraft in carefully revised texts (edited by S. T. Joshi), published a Cthulhu Mythos anthology, and brought out horror collections by Charles L. Grant and Tanith Lee, but outraged Arkham House traditionalists by turning heavily to modern science fiction, so that when a rival firm, Fedogan and Bremer, began to appeal to the old Arkham House market (starting with a collection by Donald Wandrei), fans called it “the new Arkham House.” There is no doubt that Turner’s books—by Michael Bishop, James Tiptree, Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Lucius Shepard, J. G. Ballard, and others—sold extremely well. His departure in 1996 left Arkham House in a difficult position. Fedogan and Bremer had captured their old readership and Turner had walked off with the new, founding the Golden Gryphon Press, which published the same sort of books that he would have done for Arkham House. The post-Turner Arkham House has seemed to drift. It has brought out some interesting nonfiction, notably E. Hoffmann Price’s book of pulp-era memoirs, Book of the Dead, plus a biography of Hugh B. Cave and two volumes of stories by pulp writer Nelson Bond. These may not have sold very well. The firm still exists but has not published a new title in several years.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Campbell, Ramsey; Derleth, August; Hartley, L. P.; Howard, Robert E.; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lumley, Brian; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wakefield, H. R.; Wandrei, Donald.
Further Reading
“Arkham House: Home to Horror, Sci-Fi Writers.” 2004. Weekend Edition Sunday. NPR, October 31. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4133870.
Barrett, Mike. 2013. “Arkham House: Sundry Observations.” In Doors to Elsewhere, 17–43. Cheadle, Staffordshire, UK: Alchemy Press.
Joshi, S. T. 1999. Sixty Years of Arkham House: A History and Bibliography. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.
At the Mountains of Madness is the longest story that H. P. Lovecraft published during his lifetime, although legend has it that he had set it aside in 1931 when it was rejected by his usual market, Weird Tales, and was subsequently submitted by Donald Wandrei without Lovecraft’s knowledge to Astounding Stories of Super-Science, where it was serialized in a heavily edited version in 1936. A version much closer to the original was included in the Arkham House omnibus The Outsider and Others in 1939 and reprinted as the title story of an Arkham House collection in 1964; a corrected version of the latter collection was issued in 1985.
The novella follows the standard format of an archepological mystery story, in which investigators of long-buried ruins disturb entities that might have been better left to lie. The narrative takes the similarly standardized form of an account by geologist William Dyer of a scientific expedition to the Antarctic in 1930–1931, supposedly relating facts previously unrevealed, with the motive of warning future prospective explorers of the dangers they might face.
Dyer explains how the expedition discovered traces of a civilization established there fifty million years ago by extraterrestrial colonists, called Elder Things by the expedition’s ill-fated biologist Professor Lake, but probably identical to entities previously introduced in other Lovecraft stories and allegedly known in arcane writings as the “Old Ones.” The colonists’ cities were built with the aid of monstrous biologically engineered slaves called shoggoths, whose eventual revolution brought the civilization to an end. In the course of the story the members of the expedition realize that the city’s final inhabitants were only in suspended animation; having been disturbed, they are now returning to life, apparently continuing their ancient conflict. After a climactic encounter with a shoggoth, the narrator reports that his companion, the graduate student Danforth, was driven insane by the sight of even worse horrors that he was fortunate enough not to glimpse.
Along with the other Lovecraft story published in Astounding, “The Shadow out of Time,” At the Mountains of Madness became a pivotal item of the retrospectively constructed “Cthulhu Mythos,” ingeniously redefining entities that had been deemed supernatural in previous stories within a science fictional context, as products of alien biology, and thus decisively altering the assumed metaphysical context of that schema. In consequence, its substance offered more scope than its predecessors for future development and elaboration by the many other hands who added later works to the Mythos, and more temptation to exercise the imagination in extrapolation and variation. It is, therefore, one of the most extensively plundered and supplemented narratives in the sequence, and one of the most influential texts in modern weird fiction.
At the Mountains of Madness has been the subject of various extraliterary adaptations, including a graphic novel and audio dramatizations and readings by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society and the BBC. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro spearheaded an effort to make a big-budget movie adaptation, with James Cameron being named as producer and Tom Cruise attached as a lead actor at one point. However, the project ran into roadblocks at Warner Brothers, and del Toro was reportedly dismayed and discouraged by similarities between his vision of the film and director Ridley Scott’s 2012 science fiction–horror film Prometheus. At the start of 2017, the project was still in limbo.
Brian Stableford
See also: Arkham House; “The Colour out of Space”; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.
Further Reading
Collis, Clark. 2012. “‘Prometheus’ Kills Guillermo del Toro’s Dream Project.” Entertainment Weekly, June 10. http://www.ew.com/article/2012/06/10/prometheus-ridley-scott-guillermo-del-toro-lovecraft.
Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, 148–172. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Long, Christian. 2015. “The Story of Guillermo del Toro’s Fight to Bring Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ to the Screen.” Uproxx, August 20. http://uproxx.com/movies/guillermo-del-toro-mountains-madness.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1936] 2005. At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. New York: Modern Library.
Mosig, Dirk W., and Donald R. Burleson. 1979. “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, vol. 1, edited by Frank N. Magill, 97–101. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.
“On At the Mountains of Madness: A Panel Discussion.” 1996. Lovecraft Studies 34 (Spring): 2–10.