ELLISON, HARLAN (1934–)
Extremely prolific, frequently controversial, and consistently brilliant, the acerbic American speculative fiction author and editor Harlan Ellison is known as much for his confrontational personality as for his hundreds of short, sharp stories. His first publication in 1956, and the early work that followed, established Ellison’s distinctly angry narrative voice, even if it was expressed in derivative stories that were otherwise indistinguishable from other magazine fodder. By the early 1960s, however, Ellison began to hit his imaginative stride with important contributions to genre fiction in various outlets not limited to genre publications and including television (he wrote the screenplay for the 1967 Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”) and comics (with short but memorable 1–2 issue stints on Detective Comics, The Avengers, Daredevil, and The Hulk). He is considered to be one of the giants in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His influence has been widespread and his impact, if problematic, no less profound.
Now in his sixth decade as a published writer, Ellison has never stopped writing. As recently as 2011 he was awarded a Nebula Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America for his story “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” (2010). But the stories he is best known for were produced during an especially fertile period that ran from the mid-1960s to the late-1970s. Such stories as “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman” (1965); “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967); “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (1968); “A Boy and His Dog” (1969); “The Deathbird” (1973); “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” (1973); “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54’ N, Longitude 77° 00’ 13” W” (1974); and “Jeffty Is Five” (1977) showcase Ellison’s remarkable strengths as a writer during this time: his efficient and creative use of language, his inventiveness, his sheer readability—remarkable given his often brutal subject matter and often grisly approach. He moves effortlessly between fictional and nonfictional genres, and while much of his output is categorized as science fiction, his work can be read just as easily as horror or dark fantasy—all the more so, perhaps, given that science fiction’s concern with understanding the world is secondary to Ellison, who is more invested in highlighting the world’s continued failings and the psychic fallout that results.
Many of the stories collected in Deathbird Stories (1975) and Strange Wine (1978) are significant for readers interested in horror fiction. In Deathbird Stories these include “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54’ N, Longitude 77° 00’ 13” W,” “Paingod,” and “The Deathbird.” In Strange Wine these include “Croatoan,” “Hitler Painted Roses,” “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet,” “Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time,” “Emissary from Hamelin,” “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” and “Strange Wine.” (Stephen King, in his nonfiction study of the horror genre, Danse Macabre [1981], refers to “Strange Wine” as one of the finest horror fiction collections since 1950.) A sampling of other stories of interest include “Jeffty Is Five” and “All the Lies That Are My Life” in Shatterday (1980); “Djinn, No Chaser” in Stalking the Nightmare (1982); “Paladin of the Lost Hour” in Angry Candy (1988); and “Chatting with Anubis” and “Mefisto in Onyx” in Slippage (1997).
Ellison’s best stories are often fueled by anger at what he perceives to be, and very often is, injustice and ignorance. When this anger subsumes the narrative it may come across as didactic or judgmental. But that same anger, channeled effectively, lends great weight and power to Ellison’s stories. Even when his work presents problematic characterizations of women and nonwhite characters, there remains nonetheless an abiding authorial concern for the individual. Despite this empathy on his part, Ellison might also be accused of introducing into the world the very same pain to which, as the speculative literature critic John Clute has observed, he also serves as an eloquent witness. Ellison has been notoriously difficult to work with, as evidenced by the many lawsuits he has brought against companies and individuals, especially those associated with the film and television industries. He has also infuriated female writers and critics in and outside genre fiction with stories like “A Boy and His Dog,” where the male protagonist chooses to cook and eat his love interest rather than sacrifice the dog he shares a psychic connection with. Though not necessarily negative, there is a quality to Ellison’s oeuvre and to the author himself that seeks controversy, or at the very least attention. Some of the stories in Strange Wine, for example, were written in a bookshop window, allowing crowds a view of the artist at work, and the vignettes that were written in response to Jacek Yerka’s art and collected in Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka/The Fiction of Harlan Ellison (1994) can also be considered performances of a sort. Ultimately, Ellison’s polarizing personality and the contradictions found in both him and his stories point to the complexity and importance of the artist and his work.
Ellison has also been active as an editor, with his best and most important work being Dangerous Visions (1967) and, to a lesser degree, its companion Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). Compiled as in dialogue with the (mostly British) New Wave movement in science fiction, these anthologies focused perhaps too much on some aspects of the New Wave (its emphasis on sexuality and breaking of taboos) and not enough on others (its genuine concerns for injecting into science fiction literary elements modeled in part after literary Modernism). Still, there are some stories of interest to horror genre readers, especially Ellison’s “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” which appears in the first volume. Medea: Harlan’s World (1985) is more formally an experiment, and a successful one, in science fiction world building (and self-mythologizing). Ellison’s nonfiction includes autobiographical essays, reflection pieces on his work, and commentary, usually scathing, on the media industry, The Glass Teat (1970) being perhaps the best known of these.
Ellison has received numerous accolades for his work over the years, including eight Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, five Bram Stoker Awards, two Edgar Awards, two World Fantasy Awards (including one for lifetime achievement), the Eaton Award, and an unprecedented three Writers’ Guild of America Awards. In 2011 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Javier A. Martinez
See also: Bram Stoker Award; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Francavilla, Joseph, ed. 2012. Critical Insights: Harlan Ellison. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press.
Weil, Ellen R., and Gary K. Wolfe. 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
ETCHISON, DENNIS (1945–)
Dennis William Etchison is arguably the best American author of horror short fiction since Ray Bradbury. Starting in the 1960s, Etchison began publishing brilliant stories that won him a devoted following among horror connoisseurs—especially in Great Britain, where his savagely bleak “The Dark Country” won the 1981 British Fantasy Award—and led eventually to a series of beautifully wrought collections published by Scream Press: The Dark Country (1982), Red Dreams (1984), and The Blood Kiss (1987). These collections, along with The Death Artist (2000) and Talking in the Dark (2001), contain what are considered some of the finest works of horror literature published in English during the last four decades.
Etchison’s short fiction explores the ambiguous landscapes of Southern California with a corrosive precision that recalls Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West. The characteristic scenes of his stories—half-empty multiplex cinemas, all-night laundromats and convenience stores, bleak highway rest-stops, neon-lit beachside motels—evoke the aimlessness and weary boredom of contemporary suburban experience, a spiritual wasteland in which sinister forces incubate. Stylistically, the tales are models of concision, stark montages of hallucinatory details pregnant with psychological nuance. “It Only Comes Out at Night” (1976) captures the accumulating dread of a driver who realizes he is being tracked by a killer, while “The Nighthawk” (1978) offers a subtle study of a young girl who suspects that her brother is a shape-shifting monster. Only a few of the tales—such as “The Late Shift” (1980), in which dead-end service jobs are staffed by reanimated corpses—are overtly supernatural, most conveying mere glimpses of the numinous that remain inscrutable, hauntingly elusive. Filled with grim hints and nervous portents, his stories amount to a collection of cryptic snapshots of contemporary suburbia and the lost souls who inhabit it.
Etchison’s novels have failed to capitalize on the brilliance of his short fiction, upon which his considerable reputation rests—although he has shown skills as an editor, with award-winning anthologies such as Meta-Horror (1992) to his credit. His novels—Darkside (1986), Shadowman (1993), California Gothic (1995), and Double Edge (1997)—feature the author’s shrewd eye for telling social detail, especially regarding California lifestyles, but they are all flawed in significant ways, informed by a retrograde nostalgia altogether lacking in his more hard-edged short stories. While his portraits of middle-class characters struggling in the ruins of their shattered ideals have at times a genuine poignancy, they also tend to degenerate into polemical disquisitions on cultural malaise. Ultimately, Etchison will be remembered for his muted, haunting, and ferociously downbeat short stories, which are among the best that modern horror has produced.
Rob Latham
See also: Bradbury, Ray; Novels versus Short Fiction; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 1994. “Dennis Etchison: Spanning the Genres.” Studies in Weird Fiction 15 (Summer): 30–36.
Mathews, David. 1998. “Arterial Motives: Dennis Etchison Interviewed.” Interzone 133 (July): 23–26.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 1985. “The Dark Side of the American Dream: Dennis Etchison.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, 48–55. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
EWERS, HANNS HEINZ (1871–1943)
Few literary figures blurred the boundary between their fiction and their biography as thoroughly as Hanns Heinz Ewers. The fascination with blood, eroticism, and the occult exhibited by many of his characters was apparently shared by the author himself. His horror stories and novels have been admired by everyone from H. P. Lovecraft to Dashiell Hammett to Adolf Hitler. During his lifetime Ewers was among the most popular authors in his native Germany.
Born Hans Heinrich Ewers in Dusseldorf in 1871, he came by his artistic inclinations honestly; his mother Maria was a raconteur and his father Heinz was court painter for the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. As a boy Ewers would often serve as the model for the grand duke’s court children. Forced to stand still for hours while wearing regal finery, young Hans learned the power of storytelling from his mother’s telling of fairy tales and German folklore, which she did to keep Hans entertained while he modeled for his father’s canvases. Along with literary leanings, Ewers also shared with his mother a hunger for diablerie (demonic sorcery); in girlhood Maria Ewers spoke of her earnest desire to meet the Devil in the flesh. Her son would eventually tour Europe giving a lecture entitled Die Religion des Satan (The Religion of Satan).
Ewers began his publishing career in 1898 with the poem “Mutter” (“Mother”). His debut short story collection, Das Grauen (The Grey) was published in 1907, and its contents reflected many of his personal experiences from both travel and his deepening interest in Spiritualism (he was reportedly a gifted medium). In 1908, Die Besessenen (The Possessed) featured Ewers’s most reprinted story, “The Spider,” in which a medical student falls under the sinister spell of a hotel room where a chain of suicides have occurred. “The Spider” featured a morbidly erotic femme fatale–type character, which Ewers considered a manifestation of “the Eternal Feminine.” This was to become a recurrent theme in his fiction.
He penned a trilogy of novels featuring the character of Frank Braun, a scholar, occultist, traveler, and Nietzschean soul (one aspiring to superhuman greatness of the type written about by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche); in other words, a thinly veiled idealization of Ewers himself. Alraune (1911), a gory, sexual riff on both Frankenstein and the mandrake myth, became the author’s most successful book.
Ewers continued to write and travel until the First World War. In America, his propagation of German Nationalist literature around New York aroused the attention of the U.S. Secret Service, and in 1918 Ewers was arrested as an enemy agent. He remained imprisoned until the summer of 1920.
The Germany he returned to was embroiled in political and social turmoil. Ewers’s innate nationalism seemed to flourish through the 1920s as he began to make contacts within the burgeoning Nazi Party. While these affiliations very likely saved his life, eventually Ewers’s philosemitism (respect for Jews and Judaism), along with his morbidly decadent imagination and hedonistic views of sex and intoxicants (he had been using and praising hashish and alcohol since 1893), led him to being declared an unperson by the Third Reich. His books were ordered to be burned. He lived until June 12, 1943, when tuberculosis and heart failure claimed him.
In the wake of World War II, Ewers’s legacy disintegrated. However, new English translations began to appear at the dawn of the twenty-first century, sparking a resurgence of interest in his grisly, passionate, and singular fiction.
Richard Gavin
See also: Alraune; Meyrink, Gustav; Spiritualism.
Further Reading
Ewers, Hanns Heinz. 2012. Brevier. Edited by Arthur Gersel and Rolf Bongs. Newcastle: Side Real Press.
“Hanns Heinz Ewers.” 2003. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.
Koger, Grove. 2007. “Hanns Heinz Ewers.” Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works 1. Salem, MA: Salem Press.
The 1971 publication of American author William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist signaled a radical change in supernatural horror fiction. Exploiting a deep-seated and practically universal human anxiety about the loss of self, autonomy, and identity to invading, invisible forces, the novel presents readers with a vividly detailed depiction of the demonic possession of a twelve-year-old girl named Regan MacNeil. Written in the third person, the novel reveals the progress of Regan’s possession primarily through the eyes of her mother, actress Chris MacNeil, and Catholic priest and psychiatrist Damien Karras. Attempting to liberate Regan from her possessed state, Karras enlists the aid of an experienced exorcist, Jesuit priest and archaeologist Lankester Merrin, whose character is loosely based on British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. The novel is among the most iconic works of twentieth-century horror fiction and remains the most influential fictional account of demonic possession ever written.
Though The Exorcist was Blatty’s fifth novel, it was both his first foray into supernatural horror and his first major popular success. While its sales were initially slow and critical response was mixed, Blatty’s appearance on The Dick Cavett Show helped bring the novel, and the phenomenon it treated, into the spotlight. The Exorcist went on to spend more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list, its popularity further boosted by the 1973 release of a film adaptation, scripted by Blatty and directed by William Friedkin. The film broke a number of box office records and was an unprecedented commercial success, spawning dozens of imitations in the following decades and irrevocably establishing demonic possession as among the most popular tropes of horror film. It shocked and traumatized many filmgoers, inspiring religious revivalism, moral panic, and eventually the creation of a clinical psychiatric category, “cinematic possession neurosis,” to describe those who became convinced they were demonically possessed after viewing the film.
The Exorcist draws on a long history of writings about demonic possession, from those that appear in the Gospels and early Patristic writings to modern literary treatments. While not a staple of either early or Victorian Gothic fiction, demonic possession had been obliquely treated by Dark Romantic writers including E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, who linked it most often to mesmerism as much as traditional theology. Aldous Huxley wrote about the phenomenon in The Devils of Loudun (1952), a lightly fictionalized treatment of a historical case that Blatty’s novel makes repeated reference to. Huxley’s book in turn served as the source for Ken Russell’s cinematic extravaganza The Devils, released contemporaneously with Blatty’s novel in 1971. However, where Huxley and Russell focused on the dangers of sexual repression and religious irrationalism, Blatty took an entirely different approach, producing a fast-paced thriller that fused anxieties about social change, Catholic theology, and visceral horror into an original and powerful compound.
The Exorcist was written during a period of radical social change in the United States. The civil rights movement, feminist activism, and anti–Vietnam War peace protests formed its backdrop and are implicated in the plot, as Regan’s actress mother is playing the lead role in a film about student activism on the campus of Georgetown University when Regan’s possession occurs. The novel also reflects conservative and Christian anxieties about the rising popularity of “New Age” and occult spiritual beliefs and practices, causally implicated as Regan is shown innocently experimenting with a Ouija board prior to her possession. Both novel and film suggestively link this experimentation to Regan’s adolescent sexuality; it is her playing (Ouija) with herself that seems to trigger her possession.
Blatty, a practicing Catholic, has stated that the novel was partially inspired by his own crisis of faith, a crisis given its most acute expression through Karras, who wrestles with despair and disbelief throughout the novel. Blatty drew some of the details of the exorcism from a case he had read about while a student at Georgetown University, in which a young boy was supposedly successfully exorcised by Jesuit priest and educator William S. Bowdern. Blatty’s decision to make the possessed child female both reflects the majority of reported cases of possession and plays into the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking, in which it is most often the body of a threatened woman that bears the viewer’s gaze and is used to generate dramatic tension.
While Blatty’s novel of satanic supernatural horror came in the wake of the popular success of Ira Levin’s best-seller Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and Roman Polanski’s even more successful film of the same title (1968), the two novels are radically different creatures. Levin’s is urbane, often sardonic, and satirical of, among other things, religious irrationalism and middle-class materialism. Blatty eschews liberal irony in favor of emotional immediacy, spiritual intensity, and an emphasis on visceral body horror, anticipating much of what would come during the mass market “horror boom” that followed in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The Exorcist’s popularity influenced the creation of numerous horror novels focused on spirit possession, from “horror boom” titles including Frank di Felitta’s Audrey Rose (1975), Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Christine (1983), and James Herbert’s Shrine (1983) to more contemporary reinventions including Sara Gran’s Come Closer (2003), Andrew Pyper’s The Demonologist (2013), and Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015).
Sean Moreland
See also: Devils and Demons; Possession and Exorcism; Rosemary’s Baby.
Further Reading
Ballon, Bruce, and Molyn Leszcz. 2007. “Horror Films: Tales to Master Terror or Shapers of Trauma?” American Journal of Psychotherapy 61, no. 2: 211–230.
Clover, Carol J. 1992. “Opening Up.” In Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 65–113. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mäyrä, Frans Ilkka.1999. “The Inarticulate Body: Demonic Conflicts in The Exorcist.” In Demonic Texts and Textual Demons, 143–168. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press.
Morgan, Chris R. 2016. “Archetypes of Exorcism.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life 263(May): 63–64. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/04/archetypes-of-exorcism.
Szumskyj, Benjamin, ed. 2008. American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Winter, Douglas E. 1996. “Casting Out Demons: The Horror Fiction of William P. Blatty.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale, 84–96. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.