GAIMAN, NEIL (1955–)
Born in Hampshire, United Kingdom, and currently living in the United States, Neil Gaiman is a celebrated writer of dark fantasy. His works cross over from many genres and mediums. He is known for writing comics, short stories, novels, children’s picture books, essays, and more. Although Gaiman does not consider himself to be a horror writer, he loves the genre and regards it to be a “condiment rather than a meal” (Gaiman and Olson 2002) in his works.
Gaiman started his writing career as a journalist, but moved on to comic books in the late 1980s. After meeting with some success in titles like Marvel Man and Black Orchid, he was offered an opportunity to take on a long-forgotten detective character from the golden age of comics named the Sandman and reinvent the comic as he wished. Gaiman’s The Sandman was a huge departure from the detective character. It was instead an adult take on dark fantasy, centered on the god-like living personification of dreaming, one of the Endless, named Dream or Morpheus. It often featured stories of mythic gods and figures, complications of magic set upon the human world to horrific effect, and explorations into the power of dreams and nightmares. Some of the impactful characters that have come from this title include the Corinthian, a living nightmare; Death, another aspect of the Endless; and Lucifer Morningstar, Gaiman’s take on the biblical figure of the Devil. Many scholars consider Gaiman’s seventy-five-issue run on The Sandman to be a seminal work in the graphic novel field, and it is thought of as “highly allusive, psychologically astute, and brilliantly conceived” (Wolfe 2003). The Sandman won numerous Eisner Awards, and even the World Fantasy Award in literature. It is credited for being a major influence in putting comics into the hands of adult readers.
Gaiman firmly established himself in the literary world with the 2001 release of his dark fantasy novel American Gods. The book’s premise, gods from the Old World surviving and fighting to exist in America, allowed Gaiman to write a travel narrative featuring fantastic American places and eccentric personalities. Charles De Lint describes Gaiman’s ability to balance the light and dark aspects of the storyline to have moments that are “utterly whimsical” or “filled with doom and dread” (2001). American Gods won several speculative fiction awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Stoker.
Coraline (2002), the follow-up to American Gods, maintained the common Gaiman theme of finding magic or the unworldly in unexpectedly everyday locales, but focused it through a child’s eye and her new home. Coraline took Gaiman ten years of sporadic writing to complete. It features a monster made to channel the fear of the familiar turned distorted and terrible. The “Other Mother” is a wonderful combination of the temptations a child Coraline’s age would want from a parent and the hauntingly dreadful and unexplainable: she wants Coraline to live with her forever at the cost of having her eyes replaced by buttons. Coraline won several accolades and awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Stoker. Gaiman went on to garner even more success with his next children’s novel, The Graveyard Book. Featuring Nobody Owens, a young boy who escapes his own death on the night of his family members’ grisly murders, The Graveyard Book was heavily influenced by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Both texts feature a young boy raised by unconventional guardians. In the case of The Graveyard Book, ghosts teach important life lessons to the young boy as he develops. The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal and other prestigious speculative fiction awards. When asked why he would choose to write a children’s horror novel, Gaiman replied by arguing for “inoculation” to the frightful and terrorizing.
Laurie Penny noted that while other writers may “have a political agenda, however covert,” with a few exceptions in his early years, “Gaiman’s work is pure escapism” (Penny 2013). His form of fantasy draws from the urge to discover and find wonders or horrors, whether they are behind a mysterious door or beyond the world of dreaming. Gaiman remains active in the dark fantasy genre, having returned in 2013 to write The Sandman: Overture and promising a sequel to American Gods. He is well known for his readings and speeches, which are often crowded media events. In 2012 his commencement address “Make Good Art” at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia garnered viral attention and eventually became a publication of its own.
Chun H. Lee
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Kipling, Rudyard; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
De Lint, Charles. 2001. “Review of American Gods.” Fantasy & Science Fiction 101 (3): 97–98.
Gaiman, Neil, and Ray Olson. 2002. “The Booklist Interview: Neil Gaiman.” Booklist 98 (22): 1949.
“Neil Gaiman: Keynote Address 2012.” 2012. The University of the Arts. May 17. http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012.
Neil Gaiman. 2016. Neilgaiman.com. June 8. http://www.neilgaiman.com.
Penny, Laurie. 2013. “An Interview with Neil Gaiman, the Internet’s Favorite Fantasy Writer.” New Republic. November 21. https://newrepublic.com/article/115682/neil-gaiman-interview.
Wolfe, Gary K. 2003. “Gaiman, Neil 1960–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 369–375. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Yuen, Wayne, Rachel Luria, and Tracy Lyn Bealer. 2012. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild! Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2012. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost).
GAUTIER, THÉOPHILE (1811–1872)
Théophile Gautier was a leading figure in the French Romantic movement whose principal works—most notably Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), whose introduction is a manifesto of sorts—champion the doctrine of “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake). In his introduction to the third edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, published after that poet’s death, he provided a similar championship of “Decadent style,” taking up an adjective first hurled at romanticism as a term of abuse by the critic Desiré Nisard, but reconstrued as praise by Baudelaire. Gautier’s own works, especially his stories employing horrific motifs, are archetypal models of Decadent prose style, and perfect illustrations of the manner in which focus on style, employing the artistry of representation for its own sake, transfigures horrific imagery into something beautiful as well as sublime, producing a distinctive aesthetic effect.
Gautier pioneered a rich French tradition of lush historical fantasies in “Une nuit de Cléopâtre” (1838), translated by Lafcadio Hearn as the leading items in the classic collection One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882), which also contains the classic erotic vampire story “La Morte amoureuse” (1836; tr. under various titles, usually “Clarimonde”) and another femme fatale story, “Arria Marcella” (1852). Gautier’s other supernatural fantasies include Avatar (1856), about an identity exchange undertaken for erotic purposes, and Jettatura (1857; tr. as “The Evil Eye”), a more straightforwardly horrific account of a man who falls prey to the eponymous curse. Spirite (1866) is an account of a love affair between a young man and a female ghost written for the dancer Carlotta Grisi, although it was Carlotta’s sister Ernesta who bore him two daughters, including the writer Judith Gautier (1845–1917), whose own work included several Decadent horror stories, and who was married for a while to another important Decadent fantasist, Catulle Mendès.
Gautier’s short stories sometimes contained transfigured elements of horror, most notably the doppelgänger story “Le Chevalier Double” (1840; tr. as “The Duplicated Knight”) and “Deux acteurs pour un rôle” (1841: tr. as “Two Actors for One Role”). The great majority of his works were collected in twenty-two volumes as Oeuvres (1855–1874; tr. in twenty-four volumes edited by F. C. Sumichrast). Gautier’s key works represented the ultimate in Romantic fantasy; his feverish idealizations of erotic sensibility crystallized the imagery of the femme fatale, arguing flamboyantly that death might be a price worth paying for the rewards such magically attractive sexual partners might have to offer. He pointed the way for many subsequent writers to reinterpret the imagery of horror as a form of fabulously perverse eroticism, “La Morte amoureuse” being the most pivotal work in the process of the symbolic reconfiguration of vampiric lust, which eventually extended far beyond Decadent fantasy to become a staple of modern popular fiction.
Brian Stableford
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dark Fantasy; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Vampires.
Further Reading
Richardson, Joanna. 1958. Théophile Gautier: His Life and Times. London: Max Reinhardt.
Smith, Albert Brewster. 1977. Théophile Gautier and the Fantastic. University, MS: Romance Monographs.
“THE GHOST SHIP”
A perennial entry in ghost-fiction anthologies, “The Ghost Ship” is not actually a horror story, but more a gentle whimsy. It contains much that is echoed in later fantasies ranging from Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist to Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. In a rural English town, people treat their ghosts like ordinary citizens, making it the “ghostiest” place in the land. One night a storm blows a ghost ship inland, into the middle of a turnip patch. The captain proves a genial fellow, whose tasty rum is having a scandalous effect on the local ghosts. The narrator and a local parson confront the captain, who assures them that he will be leaving soon. Another storm blows the ship away with most of the local ghost population aboard and the village idiot aboard too. The captain, we learn, is the infamous pirate Bartholomew Roberts (early eighteenth century) who continues his piratical career in the hereafter. The idiot returns after two years, but, yearning for that ghostly rum, soon runs away again.
Arthur Machen wrote, “I would not exchange this sort, crazy, enchanting fantasy for a whole wilderness of seemly novels” (Machen 1913, xiv). The story is actually quite unusual for its author, most of whose output is melancholy and frequently grim. Richard Middleton (1882–1911) was of a romantic disposition and wildly impractical in day-to-day life. He tried to make his living as a poet, but the result was poverty and depression. Even though he enjoyed some success in magazines, he could not get any publisher to bring out a book of his poems or stories. He would have appreciated (and probably anticipated) the irony that as soon as he was dead (by suicide) he was proclaimed a lost genius and virtually his entire literary output, five volumes, appeared in book form within another year. A final collection followed in 1933, but in the long run he is mostly remembered for this one story, often cited as the most successful humorous ghost story in English.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Gaiman, Neil; Machen, Arthur.
Further Reading
Machen, Arthur. 1913. Preface to The Ghost Ship and Other Stories by Richard Middleton, vii–xiv. New York: Mitchell Kennerly.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 1998. “Richard Middleton: Beauty, Sadness, and Terror” in Windows of the Imagination, 115–120. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
GHOST STORY
Ghost Story is a 1979 novel by Peter Straub. Its significance for modern horror literature is almost incalculable, both because of its intrinsic brilliance and because of its timing. The novel appeared right at the beginning of the late twentieth-century “horror boom,” and was in fact one of the central texts that helped to launch it. Ghost Story acknowledged its deep debt to the long tradition of ghost stories and Gothic literature that had come before it, while simultaneously presenting an original, striking, and frightening treatment of the tradition’s core themes. Straub’s fourth published novel, it represented a watershed both for his career and for the horror genre.
Reduced to its bare essentials, Ghost Story can be described as a superior tale of supernatural revenge. Five young men—Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Edward Wanderley, Lewis Benedikt, and John Jaffrey—accidentally kill a woman named Eva Galli. They panic and decide to cover up her death by putting her body in a car and driving it into a lake. But as the car is sinking, they glimpse Eva’s face through the rear window, and for a moment it appears that she is still alive. Deeply shaken, they take a vow to keep her death a secret. The incident will, however, haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Fifty years later, the five men, now prosperous and content, still live in their (fictional) hometown of Milburn, New York, and call themselves “The Chowder Society.” Although they meet regularly to swap ghost stories, they never speak of Eva. This all changes when Edward dies of fright during a party given in honor of a mysterious young woman, an actress who goes by the name Anne-Veronica Moore. The remaining members experience a series of disquieting dreams in which several of them die, leading them to conclude that Eva Galli has somehow reentered their lives and is seeking revenge.
Unable to admit fully to themselves that their past deeds have come back to haunt them, they reach out to Ed’s nephew, Don Wanderley, for help. Don is a writer who has produced a horror novel titled The Nightwatcher, which is based on his own experiences with Eva, whom he knew by the name of Alma Mobley; the old men sense that he may have insights into their situation that may be key to their very survival. Don’s arrival in town appears to serve as a signal to the evil threatening the group, resulting in the deaths of Lewis and John. The surviving members, Sears and Ricky, band together with Don and Peter Barnes, a young man who has also suffered at the hands of Eva—who has become a supernatural shape-shifter—and the supernatural minions that she now commands. Together they struggle to locate and eliminate their nemesis as Eva slowly goes about destroying all that is dear to them.
From the novel’s very first sentences, Straub sets a tone that defines the whole book. Those sentences take the form of a question and response: “‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ ‘I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing’” (Straub 1980, 3). Straub then proceeds, through the novel as a whole, to explore the terrifying notion that ghosts may be unique to those they haunt, that victims may somehow summon their torturers from some dark place within their own psyches. Stephen King has described this as “a very Henry Jamesian theme. . . . the idea that ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them” (King 2010, 271). Straub leaves it unclear whether Eva/Alma/Anne-Veronica could thrive if she were not sustained by the belief of her victims. It is never made clear whether her existence is objective and independent, symbiotic, or dependent on those she seeks to destroy, and Straub’s clues muddy the waters—apparently deliberately—as when Eva and another shape-shifter are asked, “Who are you?” and they answer with maddening ambiguity, “I am you” (Straub 1980, 26).
Straub has openly acknowledged the debt Ghost Story owes to Stephen King’s second novel, ’Salem’s Lot, which was published four years earlier, in 1975, and which likewise had a seismic impact on the shape of modern horror fiction. Although both books do share similar themes, plot points, and even settings—a small American town besieged by a supernatural horror—’Salem’s Lot seems to have provided a template of sorts, a kind of guide or catalyst that enabled Straub to intuit larger possibilities in the literary form of the horror novel. In the final analysis, Ghost Story may be seen as the marriage of two sensibilities: King’s, from which it derives its more operatic moments, and Straub’s, who used it to fulfill his ambition to enlarge the boundaries of the traditional ghost story. Notably, it also stands as the first example of Straub’s trademark exploration of the dormant power of secrets, and of the power of storytelling to uncover core truths. Much as King’s book pays homage to writers such as Bram Stoker and Richard Matheson, who had produced canonical vampire novels before him, Straub’s stands as a tribute to previous writers in the long tradition of ghost stories, including some who are specifically referenced in the book (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James) and some who are not (such as Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and M. R. James).
Hank Wagner
See also: James, Henry; King, Stephen; Psychological Horror; Straub, Peter.
Further Reading
Andriano, Joseph. 1993. “From Fiend to Friend: The Daemonic Feminine in Modern Gothic.” In Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction, 135–144. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Bosky, Bernadette. 1999. “Peter Straub: From Academe to Shadowland.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 3–17. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.
King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.
Neilson, Keith. 1980. “Ghost Story.” Magill’s Literary Annual 1980, 1–4.
Straub, Peter. 1980. Ghost Story. New York: Pocket Books.
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
The Girl Next Door is an extreme horror novel written by Jack Ketchum. It was first published by Warner Books in 1989; Leisure Books published the mass market paperback in 2005. Though it has elements of horror, particularly in the stark depictions of violence, Ketchum’s book is best categorized as crime fiction, as it is loosely based on the true-life events of the torture and eventual murder of Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1965. It has been called “Suburban Gothic,” given its setting and how Ketchum is able to describe such horrendous violence in what is otherwise considered a safe place.
The novel is narrated by David, an adult who is remembering his youth in what appears to be a typical 1950s suburban neighborhood, not unlike many that can be found almost anywhere across the United States. The innocuous setting only serves to intensify the horrific events that happen. Teenager Meg, along with her younger sister, Susan, are sent to live with Ruth, a single mother who is raising three boys of her own. Ruth, struggling with poverty, stress, depression, and substance abuse, allows her sons—and eventually other boys from the neighborhood—to imprison Meg in the basement and perform increasingly vile acts of torture, including rape, on the captive girl.
In 1996, a limited edition of the book was published, featuring an introduction from fellow horror writer Stephen King. In describing Ketchum, he wrote, “Jack Ketchum is a brilliantly visceral novelist whose bleak perception of human nature is perhaps only rivaled by that of Frank Norris and Malcolm Lowry” (quoted in Beahm 1998, 113). The extreme violence in Ketchum’s novel divides critics and readers. While some are turned off by the gore, some, like King, understand that Ketchum has a unique ability to look into the dark soul of humanity and to plumb the depths of human depravity in order to ask why evil exists in the world.
In 2007 the novel was adapted into a film, Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. Reviews were mixed, as most critics and audiences considered the violence too graphic to be shown on screen. The same year saw the release of another film inspired by the story of Sylvia Likens. Titled An American Crime, this one did not use Jack Ketchum as a source, instead choosing to go to the original murder case as inspiration.
Lisa Kröger
See also: Ketchum, Jack.
Further Reading
Beahm, George. 1998. Stephen King from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of His Life and Work. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel.
Hipson, Richard. 2007. “Jack Ketchum Talks About the Horrors That Live ‘Next Door.’” Dark Scribe Magazine, November 15. http://www.darkscribemagazine.com/feature-interviews/jack-ketchum-talks-about-the-horrors-that-live-next-door.html.
“Retold: Torture Death of Sylvia Likens.” 2015. Indianapolis Star, October 22. http://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2013/10/24/sylvia-likens/3178393.
Rhyne, Leah. 2014. “Prose and Conversation: ‘The Girl Next Door’ by Jack Ketchum.” LitReactor, February 21. https://litreactor.com/columns/prose-conversation-the-girl-next-door-by-jack-ketchum.
“THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES”
Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) is a classic vampire story that updates the genre’s conventions for the world of modern consumerism. Its protagonist—a lean young advertising model known simply as “The Girl”—is essentially the undead embodiment of consumer desire itself, of half-formed cravings that can never be fully satisfied. The narrator, a down-on-his-luck photographer who snaps the Girl’s first promotional glossies, almost succumbs to her eerie blandishments, yet manages at the last minute to shake free. Meanwhile, the Girl goes on to infest the urban marketplace, her face gazing down from billboards, her appetite as unquenchable as the inchoate longings of the hapless consumers upon whom she preys.
Like a number of Leiber’s other works of the 1940s, such as “Smoke Ghost” (1941) and Conjure Wife (1943), “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” takes a perennial horror icon and situates it within a contemporary milieu. In essence, Leiber asks: what would a vampire look like in a world dominated not by the Gothic trappings of the past but by the most up-to-date technologies and ideologies? A major innovation of the story is to see the vampire not as a physical predator, sucking blood, but as a psychological parasite, battening on and draining emotional energy. A possible influence was Mary Wilkins-Freeman’s “Luella Miller” (1902), with its eponymous psychic leech; yet “The Girl” in Leiber’s story is no shrinking violet but rather a boldly libidinous huntress stalking the modern world. Like Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel (1897), who advances his undead campaign by means of real estate agents and railway timetables, Leiber’s “Girl” draws victims to her via photography agencies and fashion magazines.
“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” is the forerunner of an entire subgenre of contemporary vampire stories that link feral appetite with modern communications media and high-tech consumption. S. P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction (1984) and Anne Billson’s Suckers (1992), for example, both connect vampiric thirst with consumer desire, its undead creatures animated by marketing strategies. David J. Schow’s World Fantasy Award–winning story “Red Light” (1986) is virtually an homage to Leiber in its tale of a beautiful photographer’s model who is both a victim of male lust and a subtle predator upon it. Leiber’s tale has been filmed twice: in 1972 as an episode of Rod Serling’s anthology series Night Gallery, and then in 1995 as a low-budget horror movie directed by Jon Jacobs.
Rob Latham
See also: Conjure Wife; Dark Fantasy; Incubi and Succubi; Leiber, Fritz; Psychological Horror; Vampires.
Further Reading
Auerbach, Nina. 1995. “Vampires and Vampires.” In Our Vampires, Ourselves, 101–111. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Langan, John. 2008. “Feed Me, Baby, Feed Me: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Fritz Leiber’s ‘The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.’” In Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays, edited by Benjamin Szumskyj, 101–115. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
GOGOL, NIKOLAI (1809–1852)
Nikolai Gogol was a Ukrainian Russian writer and dramatist. Best known for his tales set in St. Petersburg, Russia, and for his macabre, absurdist, and grotesque style, Gogol also achieved literary prominence in his lifetime for stories inspired by Ukrainian folklore. His work demonstrates a profound attention to psychological complexity, everyday life, and the common person, prompting nineteenth-century critic Vissarion Belinsky to name him the father of the “natural school” of Russian literary realism. However, Romantic writers such as Aleksandr Pushkin and E. T. A. Hoffmann also influenced Gogol’s writing, resulting in an idiosyncratic fantastic realism in which the supernatural, grotesque, and surreal violently intrude upon the banal realities of everyday life.
A tendency toward chaos, a preoccupation with the vulgarity of life, an overriding belief in evil as a ubiquitous presence, and a characteristic dark humor permeate Gogol’s work from his earliest collection, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831–1832). Heavily influenced by Gogol’s Ukrainian childhood and by traditional Ukrainian culture and folklore, Evenings contains eight stories that present the Ukrainian countryside as a place of myth, magic, and the supernatural. Cossacks, maidens, witches, devils, sorcerers, ghosts, and deadly acts of vengeance haunt its pages, combining folkloric figures with Gothic literary tropes, a highly developed dark wit, and a Romantic sense of the sublime. “A Terrible Vengeance”—an unsettling tale of sorcery, dark magic, and obsession—offers an early example of Gogol’s talent for depicting the grotesque, while “Christmas Eve,” with its humorous portrayals of vanquished devils and comely maidens, exhibit Gogol’s absurdist, cynical dark humor.
Evenings was followed by the short story collections Mirgorod (1835) and Arabesques (1835). Ranging from satire to the Gothic to the absurd, these tales demonstrate both Gogol’s expansive talent and his tendency to defy classification. With Mirgorod, Gogol presented a cycle of tales that returned to rural Ukrainian settings and folklore. “Viy,” a tale of witchcraft, demons, vengeance, and a less-than-pious clergyman, has left a particularly pronounced impression on both the Soviet and Russian Gothic-horror traditions and has been adapted for film numerous times both within and outside Russia. With Arabesques, Gogol moved his tales from rural Ukraine to his adopted city of St. Petersburg. “The Portrait,” “Nevsky Prospect,” and “Diary of a Madman” are perhaps the most Gothic tales in this collection, presenting a labyrinthine city dominated by rigid social hierarchies, pettiness, and vice. Gogol’s characters in these tales are often young and relatively powerless artists and petty bureaucrats, easily overwhelmed by the temptations of—and social barriers to—a luxurious urban lifestyle. Here, it is both the urban environment and a pervasive bureaucracy that destroys the common person: “Diary of a Madman” and “Nevsky Prospect,” for instance, depict St. Petersburg as a disorienting force overlaid by a mechanical, pointless bureaucracy that crushes the individual, while “The Portrait” is a tale of demonic ambition that recalls earlier themes from Evenings.
Gogol’s later work prominently featured St. Petersburg as an indifferent, imposing city largely controlled by the administrative class. “The Nose” (1836) and “The Overcoat” (1842) are perhaps Gogol’s most well-known short works and are both exemplars of Gogol’s late absurdist, grotesque style. “The Nose,” a masterful tale of pure absurdity and dark humor, depicts a civil servant of average rank who awakens to discover that his nose has not only gone missing but has also begun to pose as a human and, to his horror, has even surpassed him in rank. In “The Overcoat,” obsessions with rank, social status, and the meanness of urban life drive a lowly civil servant to increase his social standing by saving for a new overcoat. When the coat is finally purchased and immediately stolen, the civil servant falls into a fever and dies, returning as a ghost to haunt—and steal overcoats from—passersby on the city streets. The tale is considered a masterwork of Russian literature and exerted a profound influence on later writers, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is famously said to have proclaimed, “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’”
Though Gogol’s oeuvre was composed over the relatively short period of 1830–1842, ending with his satirical and widely praised novel-poem Dead Souls (1842), Gogol’s influence on writers, directors, and composers has been monumental and long-lasting, resulting in numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations of his work, including the famous Soviet horror film Viy (1967). Gogol died in 1852 after falling into a deep depression, during which time he burned his final manuscript.
Brittany Roberts
See also: The Grotesque; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Fanger, Donald. 1979. The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gippius, Vasilii. 1981. Gogol. Translated by Robert A. Maguire. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1944. Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, CT: New Directions.
THE GOLEM
The Golem is a novel by Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932). Written in German under the title Der Golem, it was published first as a serial between 1913 and 1914, and then as a book in 1915. The first English translation appeared in 1928.
The setting is Prague, a city with a large Jewish population and a reputation for alchemy and sorcery. Meyrink draws on a Jewish legend about a wonder-working rabbi who is able to bring to life the massive clay statue of a man, the Golem, who protects the Jews of Prague from persecution. (This same legend inspired several silent films by the German Expressionist director Paul Wegener, but despite the identical titles, his films are not adaptations of Meyrink’s novel.)
While Prague is the setting of the novel, it is also almost a character as well, actually manifesting itself as the Golem. The novel is alive with Meyrink’s own preoccupations, involving the blending of psychology and mysticism in a way that aligns him with other contemporary writers such as Carl Jung and William Butler Yeats. The plot does not follow conventional lines of cause and effect, preferring instead to connect events using a subtle inner logic of correspondences that hints at the unfolding of an ineffable cosmic plan. This plan is impossible to understand for those who lack some form of spiritual enlightenment.
The first section of the book tells the story of a young man named Athanasius Pernath, who is framed for murder and loses everything. In the second section, however, the reader learns that Pernath’s story is all a dream; the dreamer, who is also the narrator, has taken Pernath’s hat away with him from a restaurant by mistake, and evidently for this reason has dreamed about him. Haunted by the dream, the narrator begins searching for Pernath. In his search, he seems to become lost in a phantasmagorical delirium of Prague. He meets the Golem, who is like the spirit of the city, a man-made thing animated by human activity but somehow lacking human consciousness. Eventually, the narrator finds Pernath, and, through him, a higher spiritual plane of existence.
The Golem is an example of the artistic movement known as expressionism. Expressionist art tries to capture the ways in which a single person’s point of view alters, or distorts, experience. In painting, film, poetry, and fiction, the result is typically a work that tries to make the audience aware of the way an individual’s desires shape his or her perspective. In effect, expressionism sacrifices conventional realism, the attempt to record events objectively, in order to be more realistic about the experience of an event for an individual. For this reason, much expressionist fiction is structured by affinities, rather than modeled on everyday events. Instead of depicting the way one event leads to another, expressionist novels like The Golem will often set events side by side because they share the same mood, or seem to point to the same mysterious idea beyond experience.
It may be noted that The Golem is also an important novel for its Jewish characters, some of whom correspond to the viciously anti-Semitic stereotypes of the time. Others, as if in compensation, have an equally exaggerated saintliness.
Michael Cisco
See also: Meyrink, Gustav.
Further Reading
Barnett, David. 2014. “Meyrink’s Golem: Where Fact and Fiction Collide.” The Guardian, January 30. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jan/30/the-golem-gustav-meyrink-books.
Irwin, Robert. 1985. “Gustav Meyrink and His Golem.” In The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, 1995, translated by Mike Mitchell, 15–20. Monroe, OR: Dedalus.
“GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE”
Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People” was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1955 and then in O’Connor’s collection of short stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). It stands among the most anthologized tales that she ever wrote, alongside “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” The story is highly representative of O’Connor’s dark humor as well as the Southern Gothic style: it features grotesque characters from the rural South with physical deformities and moral failings who bring about their downfall through their own stubbornness.
Mrs. Hopewell is a well-off widow who runs a farm in rural Georgia with the help of her tenants, Mrs. Freeman and her two daughters, whom she believes are “good country people.” They contrast heavily with Mrs. Hopewell’s own daughter, a thirty-two-year-old spinster called Joy who lost a leg in a gunshot accident. Joy came back to live on the farm after earning a PhD in philosophy but failing to make it in academia because of her physical deformity. As a consequence, she is bitter and condescending to the country people’s lack of philosophical insight.
One day, a Bible salesman named Manley Pointer shows up at the farm. He shows interest in Joy and invites her on a date. Overnight, Joy pictures herself seducing the young man to mock his country ways and his faith. During the picnic, Pointer convinces Joy to go in a barn loft and to take off her prosthetic leg. He confesses that he pretends to be an innocent Bible seller in order to steal prosthetic limbs. He then runs away with the leg, leaving Joy to go back to her mother, humbled and limbless.
The story, labeled by O’Connor as a “low joke” (O’Connor 1969, 98), follows the narrative pattern of the trickster being tricked. Priding herself on her philosophical knowledge and atheism, Joy devises a scheme to expose the bigotry of country folks, but her intellectual arrogance and contempt for the material world are exposed when Pointer seduces her and steals her prosthetic leg. Joy turns out to be greatly attached to her fake limb, and the loss of it shatters her image of a detached and independent intellectual. She has to admit that her physical impairment makes her reliant on her mother and the Freeman women, whether she likes it or not.
Joy is one of O’Connor’s most grotesque creations. Her moral failings and physical handicap make her amusing and horrifying to the reader. There is humor in her condescending attitude, as it becomes clear to the reader that she is a caricature of an intellectual, but there is something deeply unsettling in the sexual farce Pointer plays on her. His fetish for the leg as well as the pleasure he takes in humiliating Joy contradicts the idea that country people are inherently “good” and gives the story a dark turn. “Good country people” can be as cruel as anyone, and the fault lies both in Joy’s cynical attitude toward them as well as in her mother’s blindness to their potential evil, as the latter insists, until the end of the story, that they are indeed good.
Elsa Charléty
See also: Body Horror; The Grotesque; O’Connor, Flannery.
Further Reading
Di Renzo, Anthony. 1995. American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Kirk, Connie Ann. 2008. Critical Companion to Flannery O’Connor. New York: Infobase.
O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. New York: Macmillan.
GOTHIC HERO/VILLAIN
The Gothic hero/villain is a type of male character, especially found in Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century, who appears to have the qualities of both good and evil. Contrary to a traditional romance hero, represented as a dutiful, sensitive, and pious gentleman, the Gothic hero/villain is dark, brooding, and sometimes cruel or abusive, but also capable of displaying strong, passionate feelings. The aura of mystery that surrounds him makes him both attractive and repulsive to the Gothic heroine who usually falls under his influence, and his moral ambiguity makes it difficult for the reader to place a definite judgment on him.
Heroes with moral ambiguities can be found all through the history of literature, from the protagonist Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey to Elizabethan theater (Hamlet, Macbeth, Faust), but the hero/villain of nineteenth-century Gothic literature finds his origin in the real-life figure of the English poet Lord Byron. As the author of narrative poems such as Don Juan (1823) and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), Lord Byron is both the creator and the inspiration for this character whom Lord Macauley described as a “proud, moody, cynical man, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart” (Christiansen 1989, 201). Byron’s tumultuous life, made of scandalous affairs and excess, bore so many echoes of the male characters found in his poetry that this type of hero would be called “Byronic.”
The Gothic hero/villain is a flawed but passionate figure who challenges the ideas of his time. He conforms to neither morals nor religion, and is a believer in the ideologies of the Enlightenment, mainly those of freedom and knowledge. However, the relentless pursuit of his ideals often leads him to extremes as he indulges in abuse, excess, or self-destruction. The Gothic hero/villain embodies the darker side of romanticism, as he constantly questions and defies authority by destructive means.
Even though this male character is defined by his ambiguity, three main types of Gothic hero/villain can be identified: the satanic, the Promethean, and the Caliban hero/villain. The satanic hero/villain, much like the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, possesses a brilliant mind and a power of persuasion over weaker individuals. He manipulates people around him with subtle words and action, and seduces them, regardless of their gender. The magnetic aura that surrounds him makes him a dangerously attractive character, often to the detriment of the good hero. Examples include John Polidori’s Ruthven (in “The Vampyre”), the original vampire of English literature, who was modeled directly on Byron; Ann Radcliffe’s Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); and Bram Stoker’s titular vampire in Dracula (1897).
Recalling Prometheus, the ancient Greek deity who defied the gods by giving fire to humankind, the Promethean hero/villain transgresses the essential laws of nature in pursuit of a greater good. He acts not out of love, but out of passion for science and knowledge. He is ready to cross all boundaries for the advancement of humanity, even the sacred one between life and death. Victor Frankenstein, the eponymous tragic protagonist and “mad scientist” from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), is a telling example, since the book’s full title is Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.
The Caliban hero/villain is a raw force of nature. Like Shakespeare’s creature in The Tempest, the Caliban hero/villain has failed to be fully subjugated to modern civilization. He is brutal, impulsive, and cruel to humans and animals alike. His feelings are strong and unconditional, and his love is as intense as it is destructive. The best example of this type is Heathcliff, the dark and haunted lover of Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).
Twentieth-century incarnations of the Gothic hero/villain tend to be stripped of their Gothic component while keeping the complex moral ambiguity of the character. Crime fiction and psychological thrillers often resort to this type of character. Both genres owe much to the figure of the Gothic hero/villain for achieving some of their most characteristic effects, as he is useful for heightening tension and allowing for major plot twists. The figure of the private detective, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (an obsessive-compulsive maniac addicted to morphine) and Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (grumpy alcoholic loners emblematic of noir fiction), embody this hero/villain of a new genre. Other modern examples may include the mysterious phantom from The Phantom of the Opera (1910), the sociopathic antihero Alex in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), the masked anarchist freedom fighter V. in Allan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta (1988); and Dexter, the vigilante serial killer from the HBO series of the same name.
Elsa Charléty
See also: The Brontë Sisters; Byronic Hero; The Castle of Otranto; Dracula; Frankenstein; Mad Scientist; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Phantom of the Opera; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Vampires; “The Vampyre.”
Further Reading
Behr, Kate E. 2002. The Representation of Men in the English Gothic Novel, 1762–1820. Vol. 69. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Christiansen, Rupert. 1989. Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age, 1780–1830. London: Random House UK.
Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marshall, Bridget M. 2000. “The Face of Evil: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Gothic Villain.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 6, no. 2: 161–172.
Morrison, Robert, and Chris Baldick. 1997. Introduction to The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. New York: Oxford University Press.
Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. 2004. The Gothic. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.
GRABIŃSKI, STEFAN (1887–1936)
Stefan Grabiński was a Polish writer of what he termed “psychofantasy” or “metafantasy,” tales of the dark fantastic that explore the inner realm of psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical concerns. He enjoyed a brief period of critical and popular acclaim early in his career, but his renown waned and he died impoverished and forgotten. However, after World War II interest in his work was rekindled, and his reputation has grown.
Grabiński was born on February 26, 1887, in Kamionka Strumiłowa, a small town in the eastern provinces of Poland, now part of the Ukraine. He had a quiet and comfortable childhood, though marred by ill health; he inherited a genetic form of tuberculosis from his father, which, starting in his bones and later spreading to his lungs, was to cause him suffering his whole life. After Grabiński’s father’s death, the family moved to Lwów, capital of Polish Galicia, where Grabiński studied Polish and classical literature. After graduating, he began working as a teacher of Polish, mostly in local schools. He would remain a provincial teacher the rest of his life, a job he found frustrating, as he felt it sapped his creative energy. He was, though, by all accounts, a good teacher.
As a child, encouraged by his mother, who was a great lover of books, Grabiński would read while laid up on his sickbed. It is likely Grabiński’s sickness, a constant reminder of his mortality, and his introspective personality led him to dark fantasy and to an interest in the esoteric. In his own writing he took influences from Edgar Allan Poe and writers of the Polish Decadent and avant-garde movements. He was also inspired by classical thinkers, such as Heraclitus and Plato, and contemporary philosophers, particularly Henri Bergson and Maurice Maeterlinck. And he was intensely spiritual throughout his life, a pantheist who read the Christian mystics, Eastern religious texts such as the Indian Vedas, and works of theosophy and demonology.
In 1906, supported by his mother, Grabiński began writing. In 1909, he self-published a collection of stories under a pseudonym. This book did not find an audience, but his second volume of tales, On the Hill of Roses (1918), published some time later, after the upheaval of World War I, had a more encouraging critical reception. In 1919 The Motion Demon followed, a compilation of fantastical railway stories written for magazines and newspapers. It was a very popular collection, partly due to the interest in rail travel of the time, and was well regarded by critics. Karol Irzykowski, a leading writer of the Polish avant-garde, called it a perfect example of its genre and hailed Grabiński as the “Polish Poe.” Grabiński’s take on the railways is mystical, based on an esoteric theory of motion. He merged Bergson’s theory of élan vital—the idea that evolution can be explained by an internal vital impetus that drives organisms to develop—with scientific theories of motion from Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
The Motion Demon sold well enough that it was expanded and reprinted in 1922. It was followed by further collections: Pilgrim’s Madness (1920), A Mystery Tale (1922), and Book of Fire (1922). The latter, like The Motion Demon, had a unified theme.
In his stories, Grabiński is modern and does not turn to the past, to the rich folklore of Poland. But he was also an opponent of mechanization; he had a sense that the modern world was a place where humankind’s original sense of self and of harmony with nature was being erased by machines, materialism, and bureaucracy. In his work, and in particular his railway tales, demonic forces are fused with modern machines.
Grabiński had a close relationship with his mother and lived with her for most of his life. Though he was married in 1917, the relationship did not last, ending in 1921 when his wife left him, taking their two daughters with her. These things may have affected his attitudes toward women: in his fiction they are often sweet, pliant, and voluptuously monstrous at the same time. Many of his stories, such as “In Sarah’s House,” “The Black Hamlet,” and “Passion,” deal with the destructive power of lust. Grabiński’s focus on the erotic can also be explained by his interest in in the human mind, psychoanalysis, and madness—he relished writing the lunatics in his fiction, for they shared his maverick perspective.
In the essay “Wyznania” (“Confessions,” 1926), Grabiński writes, “Wonder and fear—these are my guiding motives” (Lipinski 2014, 7). And he was as much a writer of ecstasy as he was of horror, balancing and mixing the two emotions in his stories.
The heights of Grabiński’s early tales were never regained, and the fame and material comfort they bought faded quickly. He tried his hand at novels and dramas, but they lacked the tautness and economy that made his short fiction catch fire and were too dependent on obscure occult iconography and terminology.
During this time, Grabiński’s deteriorating health increasingly kept him housebound. He became bitter. In 1929, his tuberculosis spread to his lungs, with hemorrhaging. His financial situation also grew increasingly precarious. Still he continued to work, and in 1936 he published a novel, Itongo Island. It received bad reviews, and it was to be his last book.
Grabiński died on November 12, 1936. On his deathbed, he complained bitterly about having been misunderstood and forgotten in his native land. But interest in his work was revitalized in Poland in the late 1940s, and he was later championed by Stanisław Lem, the great Polish science fiction writer, who edited a collection of Grabiński’s work and his influence has grown since. Several Polish films have been based on his work, and in the English-speaking world, thanks largely to the pioneering translations of Miroslaw Lipinski, begun in the 1980s, Grabiński’s work has found favor among writers and readers of weird fiction. In Poland, the Year of Grabiński was held in 2012, with scholarly works and symposia dedicated to the writer.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: The Dark Domain.
Further Reading
Lipinski, Miroslaw. 2012. The Stefan Grabiński Website. January 9. http://www.stefangrabinski.org.
Lipinski, Miroslaw. 2014. Introduction to The Motion Demon by Stefan Grabińksi, 7–11. New York: NoHo Press.
Mills, Adam. 2012. “Interview: Translator Miroslaw Lipinski on Stefan Grabiński.” Weird Fiction Review, July 10. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/07/interview-translator-miroslaw-lipinski-on-stefan-grabinski.
GRANT, CHARLES L. (1942–2006)
Charles Lewis Grant was an American novelist, short story writer, and editor/anthologist who specialized in dark fantasy and what he called “quiet horror,” a term that became associated with his name and eventually came to define his work in the minds of his many admiring readers. He was born in 1942 in New Jersey, and he spent most of his life as a resident of the northwestern part of the state.
Grant’s first novel, The Shadow of Alpha (1976), was a work of science fiction. He published a number of books in that genre before the end of the 1970s, switching to horror when the market for science fiction weakened. His first work of horror was a werewolf novel titled The Curse (1977). Grant would subsequently publish a total of eighty-five novels in myriad genres under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, many of which had their origins in bodies of water; thus, the pen names Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Timothy Boggs, and Simon Lake. He penned dozens of short stories that were later collected in six books. He also edited twenty-five anthologies, among them twelve volumes of one of the enormously influential horror anthology series Shadows (1978–1991). As an editor, he worked with some of the biggest names in the genre, and he also gave many fledgling writers their start.
He was known as a master and champion of quiet, subtle horror, as opposed to the more visceral and gaudy horror pioneered by Clive Barker in his Books of Blood and by the other so-called “splatterpunks” who rose to prominence in the late 1980s. While appreciating the effects those authors created, Grant preferred to suggest the horrific rather than render it explicitly. His great influence on the field is indicated by an insightful comment from author David Morrell in Douglas Winter’s book of interviews, Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror (1985): “Stephen King and Peter Straub are like the luxury liners of the horror field. They’re always visible on the horizon when you look over these deep, dark waters. But Charlie Grant—he’s the unseen power, like the great white shark, just below the surface” (Winter 1985, 109). Besides creating a vivid mental image, the quote is notable for the accurate portrayal of Grant acting as a secret master of the genre, subtly exerting profound influence on all those in his orbit. Grant led by example, publishing the best prose he could craft, and by educating the rest of his colleagues through the numerous anthologies he edited, announcing by their inclusion in these volumes that certain writers had “arrived” and that these stories were worthy of readers’ attention.
Of particular importance in Grant’s own body of work is his fictional Connecticut town of Oxrun Station. Although many writers have explored the subject of small town horror—including, notably, Shirley Jackson in “The Lottery” (1948), Thomas Tryon in Harvest Home (1973), and Stephen King in ’Salem’s Lot (1975)—few have done it as well, or as long, or in as many and varied ways, as Grant. Starting with The Hour of the Oxrun Dead in 1979, he went on to write a total of eight novels and a series of four collections of novellas set in the secluded Connecticut hamlet, concluding in 1995 with the collection The Black Carousel. As a set, the Oxrun books represent a grand, wildly successful experiment in horror, as Grant effectively explores dread and disquiet in many forms, whether it be the threat of harm from satanic cults; classic monsters like vampires, werewolves, or mummies; the pain of loneliness; or the confusion and despair caused by mental illness. Individually, many of these stories are classics of the genre, expertly evoking fear, terror, and horror, and providing readers with fleeting, disturbing, and memorable glimpses of what lurks in the shadows.
Grant won many awards over the course of his career, including two Nebulas plus multiple World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild awards. Late in his career he was honored with awards for lifetime achievement from the Horror Writers Association, the World Horror Convention, the British Fantasy Society, and the International Horror Guild. His profound influence on the horror genre is also evidenced by two tribute collections. The first, Quietly Now (2004), edited by Kealan Patrick Burke, presents tributes to Grant by various writers and critics in the field. The second, Scream Quietly (2011), edited by Stephen Jones, presents the best of Grant’s short fiction.
Grant suffered from declining health in his later years. He was residing in Newton, New Jersey, with his second wife, the speculative fiction writer and editor Kathryn Ptacek, when he died of a heart attack on September 15, 2006.
Hank Wagner
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; International Horror Guild Award; Vampires; Werewolves; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Mcdonald, T. Liam. 2003. “Grant, Charles L. 1942–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, 391–402. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Neilson, Keith. 1983. “The Subtle Terrors of Charles L. Grant.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Volume 3, edited by Frank N. Magill, 1191–1195. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “Charles L. Grant.” In Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of Supernatural Horror, 47–57. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Winter, Douglas E. 1985. Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. New York: Berkley Books.
“THE GREAT GOD PAN”
“The Great God Pan” is a classic horror novella by the Welsh author Arthur Machen. It caused something of a sensation when it was published, and it has become one of the central texts in the history of weird fiction in the English language.
The novella’s first section, “The Experiment,” was originally published as “The Great God Pan” in the short-lived Whirlwind in 1890, which styled itself a “lively and eccentric newspaper” and whose contributors included Stéphane Mallarmé, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Walter Sickert. Machen expanded this original iteration into its final form for publication in The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894), one of John Lane’s “Keynotes,” a book series associated with the literary Decadent movement of the 1890s.
Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s conceit in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Machen was convinced that a similarly “scientific” plot device was necessary for the modern reader to accept an unusual narrative, where traditional supernatural horror tropes would no longer be convincing. Thus the opening section of “The Great God Pan” relates a scientific (or rather, pseudoscientific) experiment on the brain of a young girl by Dr. Raymond, intended to give her access to other realms of perception.
The ensuing narrative is fragmented, offering different perspectives on the events precipitated by the experiment, provoking the reader into active construction and interpretation of the central plotline. During her ordeal, the girl encounters what is (perhaps only euphemistically) described as the Greek deity Pan, rendering her both insane and mysteriously pregnant. The resulting child, Helen Vaughan, is shunned by the rural Welsh community in which she grows up and where she is the subject of disturbing rumors. As an adult, Vaughan moves through London society leaving in her wake insanity and a series of suicides. She is eventually tracked down by two men, Villiers and Clarke, who have learned something of her history and become convinced of how dangerous she is. They confront Vaughan and coerce her into killing herself. The final paragraphs describe Vaughan’s preternatural “dissolution,” through a reverse evolutionary process, into protoplasmic material.
“The Great God Pan” received largely negative reviews upon publication for its gruesome subject matter as well as its association with controversial new literary freedoms. Its theme of pagan resurgence destabilizing bourgeois metropolitan society resonated with fin-de-siècle (literally “end of the century,” a phrase used at the close of the nineteenth century to define what was perceived as a significant cultural and historical moment) anxieties provoked by the erosion of old religious certainties. Although the climactic physical dissolution of Vaughan has been regularly discussed in the context of the fin de siècle preoccupation with degeneration (biological, cultural, and racial), it is likely Machen was as much influenced by his formidable knowledge of medieval alchemy as he was by specific contemporary discourse.
The story has occasionally been criticized as misogynistic and cited as evidence that Machen had a morbid fear of human sexuality. Recent critics who have advanced this view include S. T. Joshi in his Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012/2014), China Miéville in his essay “Weird Fiction” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009), and Andrew Smith in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2012) (although Smith also notes that “the silence of the central female character”—which has been the focus of claims of the story’s misogyny—also contributes to the story’s overall narrative effect, since it increases “the mystery and terror at the heart of the story, linked to a predatory female sexuality” by maintaining the mysterious ineffability of what it means to glimpse “the Great God Pan”; see Smith 2012, 225). However, when considered within the wider context of Machen’s life and work, the notion that he had a particular animus against women, or that he was squeamish about sex, seems unconvincing. Indeed, the renowned literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has used Machen as an example to demonstrate his concern that “too direct application” of psychoanalysis to literature can result in both misrepresentation of the author and simple reiteration of “initial presuppositions” regarding the text (Todorov 1975, 152–153).
Indicative of the impact of “The Great God Pan” is the fact that it was almost immediately parodied, in Arthur Sykes’s “The Great Pan-Demon” and Arthur Compton-Rickett’s “A Yellow Creeper.” However, it was also a commercial success and established Machen’s reputation as a writer of weird horror in the Stevenson mold. Vernon Lee’s “Dionea” (from Hauntings, 1890) is an interesting comparison, although Lee uses an epistolary form to relate her similar tale of a destabilizing pagan influence channeled through an amoral female character never directly represented. Machen’s presentation of his story as a puzzle of different testimonies from a variety of sources anticipates the similar structure used by Bram Stoker in Dracula, and its influence in this respect can be clearly seen in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” also uses a near-identical central conceit of a child born of congress between a human and a supernatural entity. Stephen King has stated that Machen’s novella is “one of the best horror stories ever written. . . . Maybe the best in the English language,” and M. John Harrison’s 1988 story “The Great God Pan” is so titled in explicit homage.
James Machin
See also: “The Call of Cthulhu”; The Ceremonies; “The Dunwich Horror”; Machen, Arthur; “The Novel of the Black Seal.”
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Luckhurst, Roger, ed. 2005. Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miéville, China. 2009. “Weird Fiction.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 510–515. London: Routledge.
Smith, Andrew. 2012. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard and Robert Scholes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
“GREEN TEA”
One of the most frequently anthologized of supernatural stories, “Green Tea,” by the Irish author J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), first appeared in the journal All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens (1812–1870), in 1869. It was subsequently incorporated in Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly in 1872. The “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to “Green Tea” are integral to the narrative and should be read in conjunction with the main body of the tale.
The “Prologue” is written by an anonymous English editor responsible for disseminating the clinical and philosophical work of the deceased German physician Martin Hesselius. The narrative of “Green Tea”—and, by implication, the four stories that follow it in In a Glass Darkly—have been selected by the editor not for their clinical insight but rather for the amusement they might bring to a general reader. That amusement is implicitly somewhat sardonic, for the story that follows is one of medical mismanagement and purblind dogmatism. The date of the narrative is not given, but the events of “Green Tea” appear to take place in London and southern England during the earlier years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Hesselius encounters the Reverend Mr. Jennings, an Episcopalian clergyman, at a London gathering. Realizing that there is something amiss with the cleric, he visits him at his London residence and learns that the scholarly gentleman is subject to a recurrent and distressing hallucination. Jennings has, for some time, been subject to periodic visitations by a malevolent monkey, visible only to him, which at first merely stalked him silently but which latterly has begun to speak, to utter blasphemies that interrupt the sermons he delivers in his rural parish, and to encourage him to take his own life.
Hesselius counsels Jennings that the monkey is a delusion brought about by the clergyman’s excessive consumption of green tea as a stimulant to support his nocturnal researches into paganism, and promises to return to him should the monkey again manifest itself to the cleric’s sight. He neglects, however, to leave an address at which he might be contacted, and when the monkey returns, angry at Jennings having consulted a physician, the apparition goads his victim into suicide. Hesselius’s “Conclusion,” subtitled “A Word for Those Who Suffer,” is a consummate exercise in deflecting the blame from the irresponsibility of the physician onto the hereditary disposition of the unfortunate patient.
“Green Tea” is a significant narrative for a number of reasons. First, it is very much implicated in the popular medicine of its day, and the notion that Jennings’s vision might be affected by the innocuous beverage he has consumed parallels Ebenezer Scrooge’s interpretation of why he sees the ghost of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Second, it is a narrative that, like Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), is heavily influenced by the writings of the visionary philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Third, as a self-contained and disturbing short work it typifies, despite the absence of a conventional human specter, the genre of the ghost story, a tradition that is associated with, but distinct from, the Gothic novel.
William Hughes
See also: In a Glass Darkly; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Occult Detectives.
Further Reading
Crawford, Gary William, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers, eds. 2011. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Hughes, William. 2005. “The Origins and Implications of J. S. Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea.’“ Irish Studies Review 13, no. 1: 45–54.
Sullivan, Jack. 1981. “‘Green Tea’: The Archetypal Ghost Story.” In Literature of the Occult, edited by Peter B. Messent, 117–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wegley, Mark. 2001. “Unknown Fear: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Literary Fantastic.” Philological Review 27.2 (Fall): 59–77. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, vol. 84, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, 2006, Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale.
THE GROTESQUE
The grotesque in horror literature is conventionally defined by representations of human excess, the abnormal, the repulsive, the ugly, and the nightmarishly or ludicrously fantastic. Rather than being the shock that horror elicits, or the dread and imminent sense of fear that terror connotes, the grotesque is rooted in physicality and the visual. It is a physical manifestation of horror and terror that is created by deviation, dichotomy, and excess. The grotesque and horror are inextricably connected. How “the elusive nature of the grotesque” (Barasch 1968, v) is defined in relation to horror has been debated by scholars and critics from the seventeenth century into the present.
The term “grotesque” has undergone redefinition since it was first used during the Italian Renaissance to describe unearthed Roman frescos at Domus Aurea as “grottesca” from grottos or caves. As an aesthetic mode applied to visual mediums, the “grottesche” implied the fantastic imaginings of Roman artists (in the era of Vitruvius). The frescos were seen to depict chimeric images of decadence and absurdity made more sepulchral and ethereal by their discovery in grottos. Early literary usage of the term appears in the sixteenth century with Montaigne, who linked the grotesque to monstrosity and experimentation.
The grotesque as an element of horror literature became enmeshed with the Gothic mode through Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Walpole imbued grotesque horror with buffoonery and the sublime in the preface to his second edition. In the nineteenth century, Mary Shelley stitched the grotesque body to horror fiction in Frankenstein.
Victor Hugo’s Preface de Cromwell (1827) popularized the use of the term. With Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), and a century later H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), the concept of the grotesque moved toward the current idiom.
Important recent scholars of the grotesque include Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Frances K. Barasch, Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund, and Wolfgang Kayser. The latter’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1963) emphasizes the horror, estrangement, and demonic as central to its definition. Theories of the grotesque that rely on power structures, aberration, and horror are visible in Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and John Ruskin. Tzvetan Todorov examines the grotesque in relation to the fantastic, and Freud through the uncanny. In the nineteenth century, Ruskin’s study of the symbolic grotesque merges horror with the ludicrous, where the grotesque’s playful comic tendency threatens to descend into terror. He separates the noble from the barbarous grotesque, which is associated with terror and the horror genre. Mikhail Bakhtin’s text Rabelais and His World (1965) emphasizes the carnivalesque, realism, and structures within the grotesque. Significant contributions to the literature of the term include Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, Lovecraftian horror, the religious visions of Flannery O’Connor, the realistic aesthetics of Sherwood Anderson and Cormac McCarthy, the self-reflexive grotesque of Patrick McGrath, and others.
Today the grotesque is still a complex and diffuse theme with little clear consensus. Often critics describe it as a structure in which estrangement and deviation are expressed. It is tied to paradoxical combinations of the ludicrous and the terrifying. Grotesque, as a literary term, has been connected variously with the uncanny, the sublime, and the absurd as it has transformed over time. Recent scholars such as Edwards and Graulund connect a global definition of the grotesque to these associated literary themes through reliance on multiple grotesques and sociocultural contexts, thus further obscuring a concise definition. Conversely, Shun-Liang Chao and Frances S. Connelly root the grotesque back within the physical or visual, where some combination of the ridiculous and horrific is always at play.
Naomi Simone Borwein
See also: Body Horror; Hugo, Victor; Koja, Kathe; McGrath, Patrick; O’Connor, Flannery; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; The Uncanny; Welty, Eudora.
Further Reading
Barasch, Frances K. 1968. “Introduction.” In A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, by Thomas Wright (1865), vii–ix. New York: Frederick Ungar.
Edwards, Justin, and Rune Graulund. 2013. The Grotesque. London: Routledge.
Kayser, Wolfgang. 1963. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nelson, Victoria. 2001. “Grotto, an Opening.” In The Secret Life of Puppets, 1–24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.