HAGGARD, H. RIDER (1856–1925)
Like his close friend Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Rider Haggard was a quintessential literary spokesman for the British Empire, a devotee of the imperial ideology bringing order to the world and uplifting “uncivilized” peoples. He was of enormous cultural significance in his own day, inspiring a generation of young Englishmen to seek careers in the service of the empire. His main subjects were Africa, ancient Egypt, and the occult. His depictions of Africa in particular captured the imagination of the public. In this, he can be seen as a predecessor of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, although unlike Burroughs he had actually been to Africa in the imperial service and was describing peoples and landscapes he knew firsthand. His racial attitudes are of his time. He never sees black Africans as equals, but desires benevolent rule for them. He thought himself a friend of the Africans, and by Victorian standards, he was. He first achieved prominence with the African adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), written on a bet from his brother that he could not write a better book than Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Haggard was something of a believer in the occult, or at least in supernatural destiny, and it is largely for this that his work is relevant to weird fiction. His most famous novel, She: A History of Adventure (1886), spawned an entire subgenre of imitations: the Lost Race novel, which invariably deals with the discovery of some isolated remnant of an ancient civilization, found in a remote place, replete with some wondrous phenomenon unknown to the rest of the world. In She the heroes reach a lost city in Africa where Ayesha, a 2,000-year-old white queen, rules over a tribe of “savages.” She is under a romantic curse, having killed her lover, Kallikrates, in ancient times, and is doomed to wait, undying, for his return. One of the explorers is the reincarnation of Kallikrates. When she tries to make him immortal and renew her own immortality, she steps into the flaming Pillar of Life, its effects are disastrously reversed, and she withers away.
The novel was a smash bestseller, and there were sequels. Ayesha herself was reincarnated as the awesome femme-fatale/sorceress in countless subsequent fantasy novels. Indeed, part of the Lost Race formula all but requires that one of the European heroes becomes romantically entangled with a fabulously beautiful princess or temptress. The influence of She extended ever further when Edgar Rice Burroughs transported the entire scenario to another planet in A Princess of Mars in 1911.
Haggard made a similar mistake in killing off the main character in his bestselling Allan Quatermain (1887), but then “discovered” several memoirs of earlier adventures, including the reincarnation story The Ancient Allan (1920), set in prehistoric times. Quatermain met Ayesha in She and Allan (1921).
Supernaturalism in Haggard’s work otherwise varies widely. One of his rare short stories, “Only a Dream . . .” (1905), is horror. The ghost of a man’s dead wife haunts him on the eve of his second marriage. She leaves her skull behind. In the novella “Smith and the Pharaohs” (1913), a man lingers in a museum after closing time and witnesses a gathering of ancient Egyptian spirits returning to their mummies. Eric Brighteyes (1890) is a surprisingly effective pastiche of a medieval Norse saga, with a vivid mix of heroism, dooms, and sorceries. A later novel of particular interest is Red Eve (1911), which begins as a costume romance set in fourteenth-century Europe, but becomes genuine weird fiction with the introduction of the character Murgh, a personification of the Black Death, who arrives in Venice on a corpse-laden ship. The hero develops a strange acquaintance with Death, and for a time he is spared. The 1903 novel Stella Fregellius involves a disastrous attempt to contact the dead by scientific means. There are many fantastic elements in most of Haggard’s African novels. Nada the Lily (1892) is an epic set among the Zulus, featuring omens, fate, a sky goddess, and a supernatural wolf pack. The Ghost Kings (1908), which Kipling helped plot, introduces the sorcerous Ghost People, who are linked to trees and die if their trees are destroyed. However dated Haggard’s ideas may sometimes seem, he remains an extremely entertaining writer, strong on both authentic detail and eerie atmosphere when the story requires it.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Kipling, Rudyard; She.
Further Reading
Cohen, Morton, 1960. H. Rider Haggard, His Life and Work. London: Macmillan.
Katz, Wendy, 1987. H. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. “Rider Haggard among the Mummies.” In The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, 185–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
HAINING, PETER (1940–2007)
Peter Alexander Haining was a British journalist and publishing professional who wrote and compiled numerous nonfiction books on horror, fantasy, and mystery themes, including An Illustrated History of Witchcraft (1975), The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-Heeled Jack (1977), The Mystery and Horrible Murders of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), and the illustrated The Art of Horror Stories (1976). He also compiled “scrapbooks” and miscellanies concerned with the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, and H. G. Wells, and collections of macabre fiction by John Buchan, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Bram Stoker.
Haining is best known as a compiler of both general reprint anthologies, among them Beyond the Curtain of Dark (1966) and The Unspeakable People (1969), and thematically specific anthologies: The Ghouls (1971) featured horror stories that had been adapted as movies, and The Hollywood Nightmare (1970) stories were concerned with show business; The Fantastic Pulps (1976) and Weird Tales (1976) both drew from the rich legacy of twentieth-century pulp fiction magazines; and The Midnight People (1968) collected vampire stories. The themes of The Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse (1988), Supernatural Sleuths (1986), Zombie: Stories of the Walking Dead (1985), and Werewolf: Horror Stories of the Man-Beast (1987) are self-evident. A number of Haining’s best anthologies combined scholarship with their fiction reprints, including The Penny Dreadful; or, Strange, Horrid and Sensational Tales (1976) and The Shilling Shockers: Stories of Terror from the Gothic Bluebooks (1978).
Haining compiled a number of anthologies under the pseudonyms Ric Alexander, William Pattrick, and Richard Peyton, and he authored three novels. Although the reliability of his research and sources has been questioned by some scholars, his work as an anthologist helped to shape perceptions of the anthology as a vital medium for genre fiction. He was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award in 2001.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: James, M. R.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Pulp Horror; Stoker, Bram; Weird Tales; Wells, H. G.; Wharton, Edith.
Further Reading
Haining, Peter, ed. 1972. Gothic Tales of Terror: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, Europe, and the United States 1765–1840. New York: Taplinger.
Haining, Peter, ed. 1976. The Penny Dreadful; Or, Strange, Horrid & Sensational Tales! London: Victor Gollancz.
Haining, Peter. 1976. Terror! A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines. New York: A & W Visual Library.
“Peter Haining.” 2007. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
HAND, ELIZABETH (1957–)
Elizabeth Hand is an American writer of dark fantasy, horror, and neo-noir. She is perhaps best known for her thrillers featuring Cass Neary, a hard-boiled photographer and reluctant crime fighter who has been compared to Liz Salander, the lead character in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. Hand has lived in rural Maine in the United States since 1988, but she also spends a significant amount of time in London, England. She has won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Waking the Moon (1994); the World Fantasy Award for her collection Bibliomancy (2002), her novel Illyria (2008), and “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” (2010); and the Shirley Jackson Award for the first Cass Neary novel, Generation Loss (2007), which is set in Maine.
Her characters are generally troubled individuals living on the very rough edges of society, but they are also often highly creative: artists, musicians, photographers, and writers, whose interests give them access to the darker realms of modern life and culture. Hand began her career as a fantasy and science fiction writer not unlike the American feminist science fiction writer Sheri S. Tepper in style; her first novel, Winterlong (1990), and its sequels, Aestival Tide (1992) and Icarus Descending (1993), are set in an alternate, dystopian universe. However, it was with Waking the Moon, centering on a fictional university in a broadly realist Washington, D.C., that Hand gained critical recognition and began to engage with horror motifs such as ritual murder and Lovecraftian monstrosity. Waking the Moon, which revolves around gory sacrifices to a newly awakened Mother Goddess, is also particularly noteworthy for its subtle critique of 1990s neo-paganism and Wicca, a critique successfully balanced with a more pragmatic feminist message. This complex mix of feminism and images of genuinely frightening feminine evil is continued through the postapocalyptic Glimmering (1997, reissued in a new, updated edition in 2012), the historical fantasy Mortal Love (2004), and the haunted house novella Wylding Hall (2015).
Hand’s work overall is heavily allusive, integrating song lyrics; references to real artists, writers, and photographers; and quotations from and echoes of the work of T. S. Eliot, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, and Peter Straub, among many others.
She published Hard Light in 2016, the third Cass Neary novel, even as she was working on the fourth thriller in the series, The Book of Lamps and Banners. In many respects, this marks a move away from horror as such, though as with much crime writing, Hand’s work repeatedly integrates gothic tropes. She also indicated that she was working on another novella and some short fiction, which may extend the ongoing centrality in her oeuvre of violence, personal demons, and the darker aspects of myth and fantasy.
Dara Downey
See also: Bradbury, Ray; Dark Fantasy; Jackson, Shirley; Shirley Jackson Awards; Straub, Peter; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Attebery, Brian. 2014. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“Elizabeth Hand.” 2011. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Mendlesohn, Farah, and Edward James. 2009. A Short History of Fantasy. Faringdon: Middlesex University Press.
Thirsty. 2016. “A Conversation with Novelist Elizabeth Hand.” Stay Thirsty Magazine, Spring. www.staythirstymedia.com/201604-092/html/201604-hand.html.
Wein, Cherie. 2003. “Hand, Elizabeth 1957–.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 1, edited by Richard Bleiler, 413–417. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
THE HANDS OF ORLAC
The Hands of Orlac is an influential French 1920 horror novel written by Maurice Renard (1875–1938). Renard, who is today better known by French critics and readers than English or American ones, was a literary theorist as well as a writer who called his work “le roman merveilleux-scientifique” (the scientific-marvelous novel), which he considered a new literary genre. Renard’s most successful novel, Les Mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac), was published in 1920 and translated into English in 1929.
Orlac is the story of a famous pianist, Stephen Orlac, who loses both his hands in a train accident and receives the hands of an executed murderer in a transplant operation. He begins to believe that he is being controlled by his newly transplanted hands, and he starts to experience violent urges. When he discovers that his father has been killed by the same knife that was used by the murderer, he begins to fear he may be the culprit. Struggling for the truth and his own sanity, he eventually discovers that he has been set up by a con man.
The Hands of Orlac reflects Renard’s interest in the scientific developments of his time, including in the fields of psychology, biology, and surgery. It also reflects his interest in adapting science to tales of horror and the marvelous. In practicing this approach, Renard followed the lead of H. G. Wells, who employed the same structure in his novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), which Renard acknowledged as an influence.
Today The Hands of Orlac is best known as the source for director Robert Wiene’s silent 1924 German Expressionist film adaptation, starring Conrad Veidt as Orlac. German Expressionism was an extreme anti-realistic cinema style in which the external images of the film, such as unusual camera angles and lighting, as well as exaggerated acting and makeup, represent the internal states of the characters. Wiene’s film, now considered a classic, was a critical and financial success and has been remade several times, most successfully by director Karl Freund in 1934 as Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. The film was also remade in 1960 in a version that starred Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee.
Both the original novel and the film adaptations of The Hands of Orlac are significant for a number of reasons. First, Renard’s novel is an excellent early example of speculative fiction, a genre that combines diverse interests and forms. Renard took contemporary developments in biology, psychology, and medical practice in the early twentieth century and placed them in the world of horror, using rational means to explore the irrational. Second, the original 1924 film adaptation is one of the earliest and best examples of body horror cinema, in which horror is caused by the disfiguration, decay, or mutilation of the body. Other well-known body horror narratives include the films Freaks (1932), The Fly (1958; remade in 1986), The Blob (1958; remade in 1988), Alien (1979), and American Mary (2012), all of which owe some debt to Orlac because of its seminal position in the subgenre. This influence can be seen even more directly in a number of horror films that offer new takes on the idea of individual body parts possessing an evil will of their own, such as Body Parts (1991) and Idle Hands (1999).
Jim Holte
See also: Body Horror; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Goldberg, Ruth. 2002. “Of Mad Love, Alien Hands and the Film under Your Skin.” Kinoeye 2, no. 4 (February 18). http://www.kinoeye.org/02/04/goldberg04.php.
Olney, Jan. 2006. “The Problem Body Politic, or ‘These Hands Have a Mind All Their Own!’: Figuring Disability in the Horror Film Adaptations of Renard’s Les mains d’Orlac.” Literature/Film Quarterly 34, no. 4: 294–302.
Reyes, Xavier Aldana. 2014. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
HARDY, THOMAS (1840–1928)
A poet, novelist, and short story writer whose most significant work spans the final three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, Thomas Hardy is a major figure in English literary history, renowned for his realistic treatment of rural settings and his pessimistic view of human existence as tragedy. Influenced by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley, Hardy’s poetry and “Novels of Character and Environment” (also known as the “Wessex Novels”) dramatize “the plight of mankind trapped in a universe oblivious to human feelings and ethical aspirations” (Schweik 1999, 63), usually by presenting passionately aspiring characters who become victims of indifferent forces that exceed their control and ultimately master or destroy them.
Born in the southwestern county of Dorset into a working-class family steeped in local folk traditions, Hardy also became an avid antiquarian and folklorist, committed to preserving in his fiction and poetry “a fairly true record of a vanishing life” (Hardy 1967, 22) during a period when industrialization, modernization, and urbanization were dismantling the traditional communities and folkways of the English countryside. Among the numerous traditional customs, stories, and superstitions that Hardy incorporated into his depictions of rural life in “Wessex” (a fictionalized version of his native Dorset), several figure with particular prominence throughout his career: the belief in ghosts (Tess of the d’Urbervilles; “The Superstitious Man’s Story”; “A January Night”; “The Harvest Supper”; “A Sound in the Night”; “At Shag’s Heath”), fairies (The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Tess of the d’Urbervilles), witchcraft (“The Withered Arm”; Under the Greenwood Tree; The Return of the Native; The Woodlanders), and assorted predictive superstitions such as omens, premonitions, and divination (The Return of the Native; Far From the Madding Crowd; Jude the Obscure; The Woodlanders).
In addition to providing Hardy’s fiction and poetry with authentic touches of local color that are ornamental and atmospheric, the evocation of occult folk belief serves narrative and thematic purposes as Hardy routinely adapted folk traditions to the needs of plotting, tone, and symbolism. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), for instance, the tale of the phantom coach presaging death and perceptible only to those of true d’Urberville ancestry has a basis in the Dorset tradition of a haunted carriage that could only be seen by members of a family named Turberville. Narrative accounts by the heroine’s two lovers of this spectral coach of ill-omen, in which a beautiful woman was once abducted and possibly murdered by a d’Urberville, heighten suspense around the fates of Tess and her lovers, which it obliquely foreshadows. More profoundly, the fatal coach is also a microcosm symbolizing the prison-like universe ruled by Fate against which Hardy’s archetypal heroine struggles. The ghost-coach in Tess, which functions both as a symbol of death and as an omen, epitomizes the role of supernatural belief in Hardy’s fiction, which is to create the uncanny atmosphere of fatality and predetermination that characterizes Hardy’s conception of a universe that is grotesquely indifferent to human striving.
As a narrative realist, Hardy did not generally grant the ghosts of his novels objective phenomenal existence; for the most part, they exist only as stories told by rustics and believers. Yet Hardy, in spite of his religious skepticism, was himself profoundly drawn to a belief in ghosts, and following his turn away from fiction toward poetry, Hardy became less coy about depicting ghostly phenomena, which acquire objective existence in his many ghost poems.
Hardy died in 1928, and his ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey. His heart is buried in the grave of his first wife, Emma Gifford, in Stinsford Churchyard.
Brian Johnson
See also: The Uncanny.
Further Reading
Firor, Ruth A. 1968. Folkways in Thomas Hardy. New York: Russell & Russell.
Gatrell, Simon. 2000. “Ghosts.” In Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy, edited by Norman Page, 138–139. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hardy, Thomas. [1911] 1967. “General Preface to the Novels and Poems.” In Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, edited by Harold Orel, 44–50. London: Macmillan.
Robson, Peter. 2011. “Thomas Hardy’s Ghosts.” Tradition Today: The Journal for the Centre of English Traditional Heritage 1: 26–34. http://centre-for-english-traditional-heritage.org/traditiontoday1a.html.
Schweik, Robert. 1999. “The Influence of Religion, Science, and Philosophy on Hardy’s Writings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, 54–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
HARRIS, THOMAS (1940–)
Thomas Harris is a writer of Gothic thrillers. He was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and is most well known for creating the character of Hannibal Lecter. He has published five novels and currently resides in South Florida.
Harris started his writing career after graduating from Baylor University and working as a local newspaper reporter in Waco, Texas (something he had done while earning his English degree at Baylor). Jason Cowley notes that Harris spent time working for the Associated Press in New York “where he excelled as a crime reporter, showing an unusual curiosity in the finer details and nuances of the crimes he wrote about, no matter how bleak” (2006). In 1975 Harris published his first novel, Black Sunday, while also working as a reporter. It is a thriller about a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl using a blimp loaded with explosives. It met with only moderate success, but its rights were purchased by Hollywood. This gave Harris the freedom to write fiction for a living.
Harris’s second book, Red Dragon (1981), features FBI profiler Will Graham assisting in the hunt for serial killer Francis Dolarhyde or “the Tooth Fairy.” It also introduces the character of Hannibal Lecter as a psychopath that Graham must speak with in order to capture Dolarhyde. The novel is notable for its carefully detailed look into the world of FBI profiling. The research that Harris undertook for this was extensive; he even attended some behavioral science classes at the FBI Academy in Quantico. This detail-oriented focus became a signature element in Harris’s writing, enhancing his horror with procedural realism and journalistic integrity.
In 1988 Harris made Lecter a major character in his next book, The Silence of the Lambs. This part of the Lecter series switched protagonists with the introduction of Clarice Starling as an FBI trainee who is asked to speak with the psychopath in order to find the serial killer, Buffalo Bill. The book was well received, winning the Bram Stoker and the Anthony awards for best novel. In 1991 it was adapted to film by director Jonathan Demme, with Sir Anthony Hopkins taking on the role of Lecter. The film won several Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and cemented Hannibal Lecter into American culture.
The third book in the Lecter series, Hannibal (1999), features Lecter returning to Clarice while also escaping the clutches of the deformed magnate Mason Verger. The novel’s controversial ending, which involves Lecter brainwashing Clarice and taking her as a lover, divided critics and readers.
Harris’s final venture into the Lecter world was a prequel titled Hannibal Rising (2006). It tells the story of a young Lecter extracting revenge on his sister’s killers. This book met with mixed reviews, and it was suggested that the book was only written because movie producer Dino De Laurentiis intended to move forward on a cinematic version of the project with or without Harris’s help.
Harris’s work and his signature character of Hannibal Lecter were reconceptualized for television with the three-season run of NBC’s Hannibal (2013–2015). Harris, known as a reclusive author, has not signaled an intent to publish another novel.
Chun H. Lee
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Cowley, Jason. 2006. “Creator of a Monstrous Hit.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/19/fiction.thomasharris.
Fierman, Daniel. 2007. “Hannibal Lecter Meets His End: One of the Best Horror Franchises in History Falls Apart.” Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/article/2007/02/16/hannibal-lecter-meets-his-end.
Grixti, Joseph. 1995. “Consuming Cannibals: Psychopathic Killers as Archetypes and Cultural Icons.” Journal of American Culture 18: 87–96.
Magistrale, Tony. 1996. “Transmogrified Gothic: The Novels of Thomas Harris.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, 27–41. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
HARTLEY, L. P. (1895–1972)
Leslie Poles Hartley was an English writer and reviewer who achieved considerable fame in the mid-twentieth century, especially for his 1953 novel The Go-Between, a best seller that was adapted multiple times for stage and screen. In addition to publishing popular novels, he wrote many short stories, thirty-seven of which are fantastic, often horrifically so.
Hartley’s most horrific stories tend to work by indirection, a deliberate vagueness that adds emphasis to the horrors. The titular story of Night Fears (1924), his first collection, thus describes a secure and set night watchman whose snowy vigil is interrupted by a nameless stranger who, with but a few questions and sneers, destroys everything the watchman holds dear; the watchman commits suicide, and the stranger’s departing footprints lead to a blind alley. “A Visitor from Down Under” (1926) uses clues and indirection to show a newly returned colonial being pursued, haunted, and ultimately removed by James Hagberd, the revenant of the man he murdered in Australia. In “Podolo” (1948) the peripherally seen horror may resemble an ape, but as the visitors to its island learn, it is devastatingly hungry and vicious.
Indirection likewise plays a role in “Someone in the Lift” (1955), which is told largely through a child’s eyes: little Peter Maldon glimpses a shape in the elevator that no one else can see; he discovers its horrible identity on Christmas, when his father does not return. The admirably brief “The Waits” (1961) shows an apparently happy family visited by a pair of carolers on Christmas Eve: the ghosts of the people the father drove to murder and suicide. Several stories seem to pile on the horrors, then conclude just before anything is seen, letting the reader determine whether or not they are supernatural. For example, the nameless narrator of “A Summons” (1954) has agreed to assist his sister if she dreams of being murdered in her bed and knocks on the adjoining wall; he elects not to assist, and the knocking grows fainter and fainter. The question of what he will find remains unresolved, as it does in the marvelous “The Shadow on the Wall” (1969), in which houseguest Mildred Fanshawe learns that the room adjacent to hers is being held for the mysterious Count Olmütz. Fanshawe glimpses in the shadows a corpse with its throat cut, and from its head she recognizes it as a man she knows, but whether there is really a body is left unanswered; the story concludes with the opening of the count’s door.
In his introduction to Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Third Ghost Book (1955), Hartley provided a rationale of the ghost story: “even ghosts must have rules and obey them. In the past, they had certain traditional activities; they could squeak and gibber, for instance; they could clank chains. They were generally local, confined to one spot. Now their liberties have been greatly extended; they can go anywhere, they can manifest themselves in scores of ways” (Hartley 2001, xiii). For all that Hartley chose to show these manifestations, he recognized that too much horrific material can lose its effectiveness, and a black humor thus enlivens many stories: “The Travelling Grave” (1929), for example, contains a conversation in which baby carriages are confused with coffins. Death assumes physical reality in “Mrs. Carteret Receives” (1971), but he is very ordinary and prosaic, “ugly, dirty, and wet through” (Hartley 1986, 648).
In the past several decades, Hartley’s stories have been made conveniently available to current readers in collected editions. Significantly for those who are interested in his fantastic and horrific writings, The Collected Macabre Stories, published by Tartarus Press in 2001, contains several stories that do not appear in The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley, published by Beaufort (1973).
Richard Bleiler
See also: Arkham House; Machen, Arthur.
Athos, John. 2009. “L. P. Hartley and the Gothic Infatuation.” In Short Story Criticism, vol. 125, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic. Detroit: Gale. Originally published in Twentieth Century Literature 7.4 (Jan. 1962): 172–179.
Hartley, L. P. 1986. The Complete Short Stories of L. P. Hartley. New York: Beaufort Books.
Hartley, L. P. 2001. The Collected Macabre Stories. Leyburn, UK: Tartarus Press.
Wright, Adrian. 2001. Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley. London and New York: Tauris Park.
HARVEST HOME
Harvest Home (1973) was the second novel by former Hollywood actor Thomas Tryon. It received both critical and popular acclaim, and is generally regarded as one of the most significant novels in the subgenre of rural horror. In the novel, myths that rural life is superior to urban life because it is more innocent and natural are inverted, along with gender roles. S. T. Joshi has described Harvest Home as “one of the great weird novels of our time, and a virtual textbook on how to update the form while simultaneously drawing upon history to lend texture and substance” (Joshi 2001, 200).
The plot is centered on Ned and Beth Constantine and their daughter, Kate, who move from New York City to Cornwall Coombe, Connecticut, a farming community whose inhabitants resist any changes to their longstanding way of life. These ways are derived from ancestry in Cornwall, England, where fertility rites were significant in growing corn as a staple crop. Ned, who narrates the novel, proves to be something of an unreliable narrator specifically in this area, because the information given to him about the longstanding traditions and practices of Harvest Home is oblique, and this contributes, with progressively increasing suspense, to the horror of the novel’s final revelation.
The Constantines are initially welcomed into this usually closed community because the Widow Fortune—who has been mother, nurse, midwife, and overall guiding spirit to the community for many years—thinks that permitting them to move into Cornwall Coombe will provide new bloodlines to promote high-quality physical and mental health among the citizenry. Ned, however, is sterile, and this contributes to disharmony in his and Beth’s marriage. Beth, for her part, proves receptive to the Widow Fortune’s influence, which Ned finds increasingly oppressive and sinister. He does not readily comprehend or participate in Cornwall Coombe beliefs and customs, and thus he is ultimately ostracized and accorded drastic physical punishment for his scoffing at and interfering with “the old ways.” Ironically, he does not realize that his efforts to befriend various persons, notably young Worthy Pettinger, who becomes the designated Harvest Lord for the community’s climactic Harvest Festival that year—but who refuses to act as such—are deemed outrageous and dangerous by the locals. Several betrayals by community members, especially by several females (ultimately including Kate, who has adopted the area’s traditions), lead to his downfall.
In the rural Gothic, pastoral settings are used for Gothic or horrific effects, often by placing city dwellers in a geographically and socially isolated pastoral environment where the local inhabitants and the landscape itself become the locus of a claustrophobic, “backwoods” type of horror as dark secrets and dreadful cultural practices are revealed. Harvest Home illustrates this pattern as Ned’s probing of the mysteries of local life in Cornwall Coombe ultimately exposes physical and emotional violence and horrors, most appallingly in the novel’s climactic scene, where Ned spies on a forest ceremony and discovers that the community’s seasonal agricultural cycle is climaxed by a pagan ritual of human sacrifice. As the novel closes, Kate is teamed with local boy Jim Minerva, upcoming Harvest Lord, whose union with her will presumably produce offspring who will in turn contribute new life to the community. Kate is fully and joyfully enfolded within the community’s life and traditions. And Ned inhabits his own home as a prisoner, having had his eyes put out for his transgression.
The idea of protagonists from late twentieth-century urban-technological societies stumbling upon evidence of pagan nature-based sacrificial rituals surviving in isolated rural locales was popular in early 1970s horror, with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and writer Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy’s film The Wicker Man (1973) both being released the same year as Harvest Home, and both dealing with this very thing. A decade later, T. E. D. Klein’s novel The Ceremonies (1984) mined the same territory. It has since become a recognized and established trope in the genre—a development that can be traced in no small part to the influence of Harvest Home.
Benjamin F. Fisher
See also: Burnt Offerings; The Ceremonies; The Other; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 2001. The Modern Weird Tale, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.
“Thomas Tryon.” 2003. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
THE HAUNTED HOUSE OR CASTLE
A haunted house may be defined simply as a dwelling that is inhabited by or visited regularly by a ghost. But the variants of this—the building, the circumstances, the type of supernatural intrusion, and the potential physical and emotional repercussions—are limitless. As a classic trope and setting in horror literature, the haunted house or castle has thus been subjected to a multitude of variations.
As Sigmund Freud points out in his famous essay (1919), the very notion of “The Uncanny” could not exist without the concept of “home.” The haunted house story has to have, needless to say, a house—or, as it may be, a castle, chateau, of other place of assumed safety. In terms of plot line, the haunted house has to be the nexus of a series of supernatural events, and the best tales have a backstory (the history behind the situation that exists at the start of the main story) of the provenance and discovery of these events.
Horace Walpole (1717–1797) first elevated the haunted castle from a mere setting to part of the narrative fabric in The Castle of Otranto (1764). Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) contributed skeletal remains under the floor, weird portraits turned toward the wall, and a suit of bloodstained armor. Ann Radcliffe developed these motifs to the fullest in her signature work The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
The House of the Seven Gables (1851) is the father of the modern haunted house novel. Nathaniel Hawthorne weaves the theme so finely into the fabric of the story that it dominates the novel without overpowering the plot and characterizations. J. Sheridan Le Fanu has several masterly instances of the haunted house. In “Ghost Stories of the Tiled House” (1861), a woman is literally scared to death in what may be the worst possible encounter of its kind. Even infants—as in “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” (1853) and “The Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand” (1863)—are not spared Le Fanu’s terrors. “Who Knows?” (French: “Qui sait?”; 1890) is a haunted house tale that is both horrifying and amusing in manner unique to Guy de Maupassant. Returning at night from the theater, the solitary narrator feels uneasy as he approaches his house and hears a commotion. Then he realizes what the noise is: all his possessions are animate and fleeing his domicile. His efforts to recover them are correspondingly eerie.
The twentieth century saw new variants of the traditional theme. In Walter de la Mare’s “A Recluse” (1926), the narrator is out for an automobile ride, but is compelled to pull over to look at what appears to be an unoccupied house. Ray Bradbury created a poignant new variant in “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950): a mechanized house that can speak and maintain itself expires after its human occupants are vaporized by a nuclear explosion.
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), widely recognized as the greatest haunted house novel, is emphatically supernatural in its premise: four individuals sensitive to psychic phenomena come to Hill House to analyze its odd manifestations, and one seems to become so psychically fused with the house that she is unable to leave it. The novel was adapted to film in The Haunting (1963). Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) is a haunted house novel perhaps second only to Jackson’s. In it, a family rents a strange old house for an unusually cheap rate. There is an elderly woman upstairs who is never seen. The wife becomes attached to the woman and to the house, which seems to regenerate in threatening ways. The novel was adapted by Hollywood in 1973. Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971) has a plot roughly similar to Jackson’s Hill House—four people gather in a purportedly haunted house to investigate—and was adapted for film in the 1973 British production The Legend of Hell House.
The haunted house story has proved amazingly flexible in accommodating a wide variety of themes: good versus evil, science versus the supernatural, economic conflict, class, gender, and so on. Over three centuries, the theme has been a compelling vehicle for the horror narrative, and it will doubtless continue to be so.
Steven J. Mariconda
See also: Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; Burnt Offerings; The Castle of Otranto; de la Mare, Walter; The Haunting of Hill House; Hell House; The House of the Seven Gables; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Maupassant, Guy de; The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Uncanny; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.
Further Reading
Bailey, Dale. 2011. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Janicker, Rebecca. 2015. The Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King and the Horror in Between. Jefferson NC: McFarland.
Mariconda, Steven J. 2007. “The Haunted House.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 267–306. Westport and London: Greenwood Press.
Railo, Eino. 1927. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. London: G. Routledge & Son.
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
The Haunting of Hill House is a Gothic novel written by Shirley Jackson, first published in 1959 by Viking/Penguin. In the novel, Jackson created Hill House, which has come to be the prototype for the haunted house. The book not only helped secure Jackson’s legacy as a horror writer, earning her a nomination for the 1960 National Book Award for Fiction, but it also inspired decades of writers to pen their own ghost stories.
Jackson’s novel is the quintessential haunted house story. A group of people is invited to Hill House, an old mansion, by Dr. Montague, a specialist in the occult hoping to prove the existence of a true haunting. Among his guests are Eleanor, a young woman seeking a place in the world; Theodora, a free spirit; and Luke, the heir to Hill House. The story is largely told from Eleanor’s perspective, and Jackson spends a great deal of time examining Eleanor’s relationship with Theodora. Both women are unique in that they explode the traditional gender roles of the day (neither woman is the typical wife and mother that would be considered the norm). These psychic detectives encounter what has now become commonplace in haunted house tales: unexpected cold spots, mysterious and ominous messages scribbled on the wall, a child’s cry when no children are around. Jackson deviates from the traditional haunted house tropes by introducing Eleanor as an unstable and unreliable witness, leaving readers to speculate whether the haunting is indeed real or only a manifestation of a troubled mind. In this way, The Haunting of Hill House could be considered the literary heir to Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw, in which readers are never told whether the ghosts that plagued the governess and her two charges are real or not. Jackson was intrigued with psychic phenomenon and those who studied it; it was a scholarly interest for much of her adult life. She had the idea of writing a ghost story after learning about the Society for Psychic Research, a nineteenth-century group formed to study the possibility of ghosts. One such group rented a house that was rumored to be haunted for exactly such a purpose; once Jackson read the account, Hill House was born.
Hill House and the people who come to study the mansion have become the prototype for nearly every haunted house story that has followed the first printing of Jackson’s book. Richard Matheson’s Hell House, published in 1971, and the film adaptation that followed (The Legend of Hell House, 1973) are both greatly influenced by Jackson’s story. Matheson’s Belasco House, like Hill House, is haunted, and like Hill House, it draws a team of psychic researchers. Unlike Jackson, however, Matheson favored shock over subtlety, making the ghosts in the house undeniably real. The idea of the house that was “born bad” (as opposed to human monsters or some other outside evil) became prevalent in the horror novels of the following decades. Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978) deviates in that the house in question is not an old Gothic manor—it’s a sleek modern design—but the premise is still the same: the house is a living, breathing organism that has evil intent toward any occupants who dare to step across the threshold. Stephen King has mentioned his admiration for Shirley Jackson in his nonfiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre (1981), and readers can see the influence of The Haunting of Hill House throughout his works. Both the novel (and the later film) The Shining (1977) and the television miniseries Rose Red (2002) feature remote places that attract the paranormal. King’s novel Carrie (1974) even includes a brief nod to Hill House’s Eleanor: both Carrie and Eleanor have experienced psychic phenomena at a young age, specifically in the form of rocks raining down on the roofs of their childhood homes.
In 1963, director Robert Wise brought Jackson’s novel to the silver screen with his adaptation, The Haunting. Wise cast Julie Harris as Eleanor and Claire Bloom as Theodora. The film was a critical success and earned Wise a Golden Globe nomination for best director. In 2014, Wise’s film was nominated for a Saturn Award by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films. In 1999, director Jan de Bont made another adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, likewise titled The Haunting. Though the film was cast with popular stars (Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta Jones, Owen Wilson), de Bont’s film was not met with the same critical acclaim.
Lisa Kröger
See also: The Haunted House or Castle; Hell House; The House Next Door; Jackson, Shirley; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Anderson, Melanie R. 2016. “Perception, Supernatural Detection, and Gender in The Haunting of Hill House.” In Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, 35–53. London: Routledge.
Haggerty, George E. 2006. “‘Queer Company’: The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House.” In Queer Gothic, 131–150. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. 2003. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Hodges Holt, Shari. 2016. “The Tower or the Nursery? Paternal and Maternal Re-visions of Hill House on Film.” In Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences, edited by Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger, 160–182. London: Routledge.
King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.
Lootens, Tricia. 2005. “‘Whose Hand Was I Holding?’: Familial and Sexual Politics in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” In Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, edited by Bernice M. Murphy, 150–168. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Wilson, Michael T. 2015. “‘Absolute Reality’ and the Role of the Ineffable in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.” Journal of Popular Culture 48.1: 114–123.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL (1804–1864)
Born Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne, like Jane Austen, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, and Alexander Pushkin, is a major nineteenth-century writer from European traditions whose work is speckled with but not exhausted by Gothic effects and supernatural overtones. In his twenties, Hawthorne added a letter to his surname (much as fellow Gothic regionalist William Faulkner would do about a century later). He almost suppressed his anonymous first Gothic romance, Fanshawe (1828), after its commercial failure. Romance is a term Hawthorne used for novel-length fictions in marvelous or imaginative modes beyond the strict, mannered realism he saw novels demand.
Hawthorne toiled on tales and literary sketches in the 1830s and 1840s for initially obscure publications, until collected reprints began to attract critical and commercial notice. Twice-Told Tales (2 vols., 1837, 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846, expanded 1854), and The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852) collect the bulk of his short fiction. Hawthorne follows Washington Irving in using detailed U.S. locales and histories for his tales, something New England predecessors John Neal, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child also explored in their longer romances.
Some of the best commentary on Hawthorne comes from his successors: Herman Melville, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and Jorge Luis Borges. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) draws an extended contrast between the short fiction of Hawthorne and his contemporary Edgar Allan Poe. Poe represents a more calculated and impersonal supernatural fiction aimed at producing specific horrific effects on the reader often via violence, sensation, a general sense of cosmic indifference, and/or more indefinite, hence universal, settings and situations. In contrast, Hawthorne’s supernatural fiction poses indefinite but persistent allegory, melancholy, specific regional and historical detail, and concern with possibly irredeemable human sin and worldly evil. Lovecraft sees Poe as the paramount artist of modern horror, but his extensive treatment of Hawthorne evidences the latter’s influence on the weird. The seminal pulp magazine Weird Tales often reprinted nineteenth-century U.S. supernatural fiction and poetry before 1940, and they ran eight of Hawthorne’s tales, more than any writer except Poe.
Several Gothic Hawthorne tales stage ambivalent encounters for the reader with revolutionary violence. In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832) Robin undertakes a confused, surreal, nocturnal journey within eighteenth-century Boston to find the titular kinsman and the advancement he offers. Robin finds his corrupt kinsman tarred, feathered, and led by a mob with a satanic Janus-faced figure at its head, which presages philosopher Walter Benjamin’s Janus-like angel in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). The ghostly title figure of “The Gray Champion” (1835) manifests to spur on Puritans at key moments of political violence. The internal splits between Congress-men and King’s men and the latter’s doomed cause in the U.S. revolution are symbolized via a revel (which was influential on Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” [1842]), a satanic portrait, a pestilent piece of aristocratic dress, and a timely death in Hawthorne’s four-part “Legends of the Province House” (collected together 1842): “Howe’s Masquerade” (1838), “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (1838), “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle” (1838), and “Old Esther Dudley” (1839). “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844) speculates on humanity’s either past or future immolation of all tokens of political, sexual, militarist, penal, economic, literary, and religious authority.
Hawthorne’s short fictions’ major theme offers various haunting yet obscure epiphanies that vex characters’ relations with their intimates as well as their society and its values. “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) recounts the shattering effect on the seventeenth-century Puritan title character’s religious, social, and marital faiths (his wife is even named Faith) after a nocturnal forest experience or dream of a satanic encounter and a witches’ sabbath. The eighteenth-century Rev. Hooper veils himself in “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) for life and even burial against a never specified sin with seeming sexual overtones. His veil feminizes him, breaks his engagement, and makes him a social pariah. Originally intended for a longer romance, the title character of “Ethan Brand” (1850) returns home after a long, successful search for an unpardonable sin that he found within his own intellect.
One of Hawthorne’s most overt ventures into the didactic is “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), for the titular scientist’s sociological experiment hinges on the short-term Fountain of Youth. Perhaps Hawthorne’s most interesting film adaptation, Twice-Told Tales (1963), ironically adapts only that tale from the collection along with “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) and Hawthorne’s second major romance The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The Twice-Told Tales film participates in the 1960s–1970s U.S. and U.K. trend of horror anthology films and stars Vincent Price in the midst of his ten-film cycle of (loose) Poe adaptations (1960–1969). Consequently, the segment for “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” alters the tale into a romantic, Poe-esque rivalry between old friends over corpse preservation and resurrection occasioned by mysterious water.
Despite his central concern with sin, Hawthorne explored many variants of the Gothic. The frontier Gothic “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832) offers the failure of funerary rites for its title character in the Fourth Anglo-Abenaki War in what is now Maine. The riddle story “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe” (1834) centers upon a murder mystery. It and London’s simultaneous moral confusion and intimate surveillance in “Wakefield” (1835) anticipate Poe’s proto-detective tale “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) and subsequent detective fiction. “The White Old Maid” (1835) is near to a traditional ghost story, and its emphasis on unsettling feminine mourning anticipates Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930). “Feathertop” (1852) follows the Gothic tradition of asexual reproduction and synthetic life from Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man” (1817) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). A witch animates the title character, a scarecrow that thinks it is a man, to court a judge’s daughter for an unspecified revenge. “Feathertop” is one of the most adapted Hawthorne tales, both in its original form and as extended into Percy MacKaye’s stage melodrama The Scarecrow (1908), which adds sentiment and Satan. Hawthorne was an early U.S. speculative fiction writer with tales such as “The Birth-Mark” (1843), “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” but Feathertop’s smoking iconography influences the titular automaton of the first science fiction dime novel, Edward Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868).
Hawthorne’s first three years of the 1850s mark one of the most impressive productive periods of any U.S. writer; in addition to his final achievements in short fiction like “Ethan Brand” and “Feathertop,” he released his first three major romances: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance (1852). The Scarlet Letter presents itself, in the Gothic tradition of James Macpherson and Horace Walpole, as a found manuscript, incorporating historical figures of seventeenth-century Boston and the sinister forest surrounding it. The colony’s Puritan authorities impose the eponymous scarlet “A” upon Hester Prynne for her adultery and refusal to name the father of her infant daughter Pearl. But the ambivalent symbol also has enchanted and artistic overtones, and a few years later it provides a strange communion for Pearl, an impish and religiously irreverent child. The Scarlet Letter is one of the most striking treatments of crime and punishment in U.S. literature, with scenes of Hester’s social exclusion and her and later her secret lover’s suffering on the scaffold. Hester’s lover, Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, is mercilessly shadowed by her cuckold, the sinister scholar and physician Roger Chillingworth. The reverend’s and the doctor’s scenario follows the combination of demonic malignancy and homoerotic intimacy within Gothic romances like Frankenstein and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).
The Blithedale Romance (1852), a roman à clef, fictionalizes Hawthorne’s time at the 1840s Brook Farm commune, based upon Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism. The romance is Hawthorne’s brightest and least Gothic, but its narrator remains dissatisfied with rural idiocy and toil in its commune as well as alienated, modern Boston. Of the two major female characters during the romance’s climax, one is unveiled as the mysterious mesmerist referenced throughout, and the other, driven by a striking but unclear provocation, drowns herself. The recovery of the rigid, drowned corpse provides the most haunting scene. Hawthorne’s romance likely influenced George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil (1859) given their shared enervated, acute male protagonists; independent women seen as inscrutable and fatal; ingratiating, transgressive scientists; and twining of clairvoyance with modern media technology.
The House of the Seven Gables exerted a profound influence on New World Gothic and New England horror writers. But perhaps Hawthorne’s most underappreciated achievement is his final complete long work. The Marble Faun (1860) combines Gothic romance, a novel of artists, and an Italian travelogue from Hawthorne’s and his family’s tour abroad. The Marble Faun culminates tendencies toward urban Gothic in his prior major romances and tales like “Molineux” and “Wakefield.” Its descriptions of the Eternal City render Rome’s catacombs and carnival as a sprawling web for his characters, at once inspiration and ensnarement. Hawthorne’s intricate Roman cityscape anticipates Sigmund Freud’s extended metaphor in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), conjoining the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious to the city’s fragmentary and sometimes unexpected preservation of its long architectural history. The romance’s plot concerns three young U.S. fine artists and the Italian count of Monte Beni. Following the mold of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne contrasts his two female painters. Miriam, the archetypal Dark Lady, is speculated to be of Jewish-, German-, or Afro-American ancestry with a sinister past. Joyful Count Donatello, thought to be part human and part faun, falls in love with Miriam, who inadvertently suborns him into murdering a mysterious figure from her past. The painter-copyist Hilda, the Fair Maiden, is an innocent but dreadfully harsh in her judgment of Donatello and Miriam for this crime. She is loved by the sculptor Kenyon. This romance of secret sin and ambiguous enthrallment informs Louisa May Alcott’s late thrillers involving foreign liaisons and artists as well as Henry James’s narratives of artists, U.S. expatriates, and tourists in Italy, despite his critical reservations about this particular Hawthorne work. The complex overlays of different narratives and its vivid descriptions of place and art make The Marble Faun a sophisticated elevation of Hawthorne’s Gothic project.
Ill health in his last years limited Hawthorne’s writing, but he left several variant manuscripts for two different romance narratives, one inspired by his consular service in England and a superstition about an ancestral curse of bloody footprints as well as another concerning the Elixir of Life in revolutionary Concord. Some of these variants were posthumously published in the nineteenth century. He died in his sleep in 1864 and is buried at Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord, Massachusetts, near Louisa May Alcott and many other renowned U.S. writers. He was survived by his wife Sophia, née Amelia Peabody, a fine artist and diarist. They had three children: Una, who edited one of her father’s manuscripts but died young; Julian, a notable writer and editor of romances and mysteries; and Rose, a poet and later a nun.
Bob Hodges
See also: Alcott, Louisa May; Ancestral Curse; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Haunted House or Castle; The House of the Seven Gables; Lovecraft, H. P.; Mad Scientist; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Weird Tales; “Young Goodman Brown.”
Further Reading
Bidney, Martin. 2008. “Fire, Flutter, Fall, and Scatter: A Structure in the Epiphanies of Hawthorne’s Tales.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50, no. 1: 58–89.
Brodhead, Richard. 1990. Introduction to The Marble Faun, ix–xxix. NY: Penguin, 1990.
Elbert, Monika. 2008. “Dying to Be Heard: Morality and Aesthetics in Alcott’s and Hawthorne’s Tableaux Morts.” In Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Elizabeth Dill and Sheri Weinstein, 19–36. Newcastle: Cambridge.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Pearson, Leland. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Twice-Told Tales. 2005. DVD. Dir. Sidney Salkow. 1963. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM Midnite Movies.
Wineapple, Brenda. 2003. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Random House.
HEARN, LAFCADIO (1850–1904)
Best remembered today for his volume of Japanese ghost stories Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), Patrick Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn was in his day the chief interpreter of Japanese culture and literature for Western audiences. In Japan he is still well regarded, although considered old-fashioned. Like many Westerners of the era, he took a romantic view of the Orient, celebrating its ancient and traditional culture at precisely the time (particularly in Japan) when that culture was vanishing in the face of rapid modernization. His writings hover on the borderline between folklore and literature, a mixture of translation, retelling, and his own embellishments.
Hearn was born on the Greek isle of Lefkada to an Irish father and a Greek mother. The father soon abandoned the family. Hearn was raised in Dublin for a time, then sent to school in France and England. He lost sight in one eye during a schoolyard “accident” in England, which may have been an incident of bullying. He was essentially dumped in America, penniless, and left to make his way. After enduring great poverty and sleeping on the streets, he eventually became a journalist in Cincinnati, where he specialized in accounts of lurid crimes and other salacious stories. He married a black woman, Alethea Foley, which was illegal at the time. This “scandal” cost him his job and brought more poverty. The marriage was not a success. He continued as a journalist and moved to New Orleans, and also spent some time on the island of Martinique, where his extensive writings about these places brought him some measure of fame.
Hearn always had a taste for the bizarre and colorful, and he gathered much supernatural lore. A collection of writings from this period, Fantastics (1914), contains stories and prose sketches, some of them developed into full stories, all in a florid, poetic style. He published several highly regarded translations, including translations of Théophile Gautier’s One of Cleopatra’s Nights (1838) and Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874).
By this time he had already showed an interest in the Orient, retelling Chinese legends as Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), but when Harper & Brothers sent him to Japan in 1890 to write books and magazine articles, he fell in love with the country and stayed there, eventually becoming a Japanese citizen. His Japanese tales, found in such books as Kwaidan, Shadowings (1900), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Kotto (1902), The Romance of the Milky Way (1905), and others are of great interest to connoisseurs of the fantastic and horrifying. His wandering samurai, Buddhist priests, and ordinary peasants are constantly encountering malevolent ghosts, faceless demons, a lethal female snow demon, vampire-like creatures whose heads detach and fly around at night, a corpse-eating ghost that is the spirit of a greedy priest punished for his sins, and many more spooks and situations unfamiliar to Western readers, all told in beautiful prose, which becomes more spare and restrained in Hearn’s later period. Also of interest is his 1898 lecture “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction,” in which he argues that both tales of the supernatural and real-world beliefs in supernatural phenomena have their origin in dreams and nightmares.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Devils and Demons; Gautier, Théophile; Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things; Vampires.
Further Reading
Hakutani, Yoshinobu. 1898. “(Patricio) Lafcadio (Tessima Carlos) Hearn.” In American Short-Story Writers, 1880–1910, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel and William E. Grant. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 78. Detroit: Gale.
Hearn, Lafcadio. [1898] 2008. “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction.” In “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 267–278. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.
McWilliams, Vera, 1946. Lafcadio Hearn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
HELL HOUSE
Richard Matheson’s Hell House is a 1971 horror novel about four individuals—physicist/parapsychologist Professor Lionel Barrett, his wife, Edith; and two spirit mediums, Benjamin Fischer and Florence Tanner—employed by a wealthy, dying man named Rolf Rudolph Deutsch to investigate whether there really is life after death. As part of this enterprise, they must enter Maine’s notorious Belasco House, possibly the most haunted house on Earth, and live there for a week in order to divine whatever secrets of immortality it may contain, to be rewarded later with a sum of $100,000 as compensation for enduring its reputed horrors. As is related in the book, the place earned its reputation as “Hell House” due to the diabolical activities of the previous owner, Emeric Belasco.
As the inquiry proceeds—contrasting the scientific observations of the disturbing phenomena (via Barrett) with the otherworldly aspects of what might be happening (by way of the medium Tanner)—the characters are attacked by the evil dwelling in the house, as the malevolent forces attempt to prey on each individual’s personal fears and weaknesses. The author later adapted the novel into a film, The Legend of Hell House (1973).
Though arguably one of Matheson’s better known works—a fact that is at least partly due to the popularity of the film adaptation—it is also one of his weakest offerings (something Matheson acknowledged in later interviews). The characters seem dated in retrospect, and the story drags in the second half of the book. But the main weakness is the way Matheson chose to express the notion of evil via sex and gratuitous violence. There is a distracting preoccupation with “corrupt” sexual acts (mainly in the guise of lesbianism and orgies), along with scenes of overt (and grisly) violence, both of which are uncharacteristic of the author’s normal output, and which are unconvincingly rendered in places, probably due to his discomfort with such blatant demonstrations in his work. The end result is a mixed affair, and more than one reader has come away from the book disappointed and comparing the final reading experience unfavorably to author Shirley Jackson’s seminal work, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), which Matheson himself noted later as an influence, though he was not conscious of it at the time he wrote the novel. In the end, Jackson was better able to instill a feeling of dread and fear than Matheson achieves, effectively bridging the divide between a classic Gothic tradition (especially Poe) and the modern sensibilities of jaded audiences who, by the time of Hill House (the late 1950s), had been exposed to the brutal horrors of two World Wars and the blossoming of the mass media with its increasingly bold radio, cinematic, and television fare. Possibly only Peter Straub, author of 1979’s Ghost Story, would consistently approach Jackson’s work in this area, but not until the mid-1970s/1980s.
Hell House undoubtedly has its adherents. Dean Koontz praised it and predicted its endurance as a major novel of supernatural horror in an introduction written for one edition of the book and later reprinted in editors Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve’s The Twilight Zone and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. Laudatory blurbs from the likes of Straub and Stephen King were printed on some of the book’s various published editions, with the latter declaring that it “may be the scariest haunted house novel ever written.” Nevertheless, Hell House could be judged a rare miss for Matheson, if success is measured in terms of content and relevance.
Jason V Brock
See also: The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; Matheson, Richard.
Further Reading
Bradley, Matthew R. 2010. “Richard Matheson—Storyteller: Fresh Hell.” Tor.com, November 9. http://www.tor.com/2010/11/09/richard-matheson-storyteller-fresh-hell.
Koontz, Dean. 2009. “Introduction to Hell House.” In The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson, edited by Stanley Wiater, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, 100–107. New York: Citadel Press Books.
Pulliam, June M., and Fonseca, Anthony J. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
HERBERT, JAMES (1943–2013)
James John Herbert was an English writer of horror fiction who achieved fame with his first novel, The Rats, in 1974. Over a 40-year career he became Britain’s best-selling author of popular fiction, and his novels played a significant role in the horror publishing boom of the 1970s through the 1990s.
Herbert was born in London in 1943, the son of market stall traders, and grew up in the postwar bomb-damaged East End area of Whitechapel. Having studied graphic design and printing, he worked for an advertising agency in London, and it was there that he wrote The Rats, which was an instant best seller upon its publication. He went on to publish twenty-three more novels during his career, plus two nonfiction books and a graphic novel.
In his landmark survey of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, Stephen King describes Herbert as “probably the best writer of pulp horror fiction to come along since the death of Robert E. Howard” (King 1981, 336). King suggests that the way Herbert approaches horror is uncompromising: Herbert “seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces” (339), and this became evident early in his career. In books such as The Rats, The Fog (1975), and The Dark (1980), Herbert reveled in graphic depictions of violence, including a gym teacher stripped and beaten to death by his aroused students, a child eaten by rats, and an entire football stadium crowd descending into frenzied murder. King felt the need to defend Herbert, who he said was held in “remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre” (336). Arguably it was this tendency toward the explicit that branded Herbert the lesser, more “pulpy” writer, yet a lack of critical appreciation was compensated for by popularity. At the time of his death, Herbert had sold more than 50 million books.
Herbert shattered the British tradition of historically set, Gothic-inflected horror featuring middle-class intellectual heroes and aristocratic monsters. Instead, his stories are contemporary, urban, and working class. His main characters are mostly ordinary, professional men who are ill-equipped to deal with the forces against them, from bodyguard Liam Halloran facing ancient Sumerian evil in Sepulchre (1987) to the sleazy paparazzo Joe Creed beset by disenfranchised demons in Creed (1990).
Often these characters’ investigations lead them from their London flats to large country estates, blue-collar men drawn into the murky world of the wealthy country elite, and Herbert never shied away from political or social commentary. He earned the wrath of the British neo-Nazi movement with The Spear (1978), in which Nazi sympathizers worship a zombiefied Heinrich Himmler. In The Secret of Crickly Hall (2006) he wrote about child abuse in orphanages, while Others (1999) addressed the mistreatment of disabled children. In later years he critiqued big business, such as the Magma Corporation in Sepulchre and the powerful yet mysterious Illuminati-like The Inner Court in Ash (2013).
Such commentary stemmed from Herbert’s roots. Growing up in the East End, he saw successive governments fail to improve the living conditions of the poor, and his distrust of authority became the backdrop to his stories, with his heroes lifting the veil on the rich, powerful, and corrupt. Another key theme drew on his Catholicism, explored in detail in Shrine (1983), which tells the story of Alice, a deaf-mute girl who, after apparently seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary, can hear, speak, and perform miracles. Herbert’s story involves a Catholic church that exploits the miraculous Alice and the blind followers who idolize her, only to find that she is possessed by Elnor, a seventeenth-century nun who was a witch and a spirit of evil. Herbert’s critique here is aimed at all forms of blind faith and fanaticism. Alice is ultimately murdered by a lonely young man who is obsessed with Mark Chapman (John Lennon’s killer) and John Hinkley (would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan).
While graphic scenes of death and sex in his first novels gave Herbert a reputation as an enfant terrible of pulp horror, other early works demonstrated a softer side to his writing that would eventually come to the fore. The Survivor (1976) downplayed horror in favor of the supernatural in its tale of pilot David Keller, the single survivor of a plane crash that kills 300 people. The book is part mystery thriller, as Keller investigates the crash and a series of other bizarre deaths that occur around the crash site, but it also increasingly becomes a Catholic-inflected musing on the afterlife. Herbert expanded on this in his next book, Fluke (1977), a fable about a man who dies and is reborn as a dog, and who tries in his canine form to discover the circumstances of his death. Both Fluke and The Survivor were filmed, the former in Hollywood in 1995 and the latter in Australia in 1981. Fluke was sold as a children’s film, while The Survivor was a little seen and even less loved horror movie, as was Deadly Eyes (1982), a Canadian adaptation of The Rats. It was arguably the lack of success in transforming Herbert’s work into movies in the early 1980s that contributed to his becoming less of a cultural icon than King.
Although he returned to gore in novels such as The Spear, The Dark, and Sepulchre, increasingly Herbert focused on the supernatural, with later novels such as The Magic Cottage (1986) and Haunted (1988) becoming progressively elegiac in tone. Herbert’s softer side and huge achievement led to his eventual acceptance by the establishment. He was awarded the Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010, and the same year he received the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award from Stephen King. In the year before his death, after a checkered relationship with screen adaptations, Herbert saw his The Secret of Crickley Hall adapted by the BBC into a well-received three-part miniseries.
Herbert died at his home in West Sussex in March 2013. No cause of death was given. While the gentle Fluke was his personal favorite, his true legacy is found in the savage early works that revolutionized British horror writing and inspired a generation of young British readers to embrace the genre.
Simon Brown
See also: Psychological Horror; The Rats.
Further Reading
Cabell, James. 2013. James Herbert—The Authorised True Story 1943–2013. London. John Blake.
Jones. Stephen. 1992. James Herbert: By Horror Haunted. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
King, Stephen. 1981. Danse Macabre. New York. Everest House.
Spark, Alasdair. 1993. “Horrible Writing: The Early Fiction of James Herbert.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 147–160. London and Boulder: Pluto Press.
HICHENS, ROBERT (1864–1950)
Robert Smythe Hichens was a prolific English novelist and short-story writer. He did not originally claim credit for a successful roman à clef (a fictional story about real people) about Oscar Wilde, The Green Carnation (1894), but was deeply affected by a tour of the Nile made in the company of Lord Alfred Douglas, transfigured in his phantasmagoric novel An Imaginative Man (1895), and seems to have retained traumatic guilt feelings from it that also fueled his work.
Lord Frederick Hamilton, editor of the Pall Mall Magazine, was sufficiently impressed by Hichens’s account of a transmigration of souls in “A Reincarnation” (1895) to commission him to develop a plot of his own in “A Tribute of Souls,” featuring a diabolical bargain. But Hamilton subsequently found Hichens’s “The Cry of the Child” too nasty-minded to print. That harrowing tale of a man haunted by the ghostly cries of a child whom he allowed to die of neglect appeared in Hichens’s finest collection, Tongues of Conscience (1900), a book of five horror stories that also featured his masterpiece, “How Love Came to Professor Guildea.” The more sedate Bye-Ways (1897) had previously reprinted “A Tribute of Souls” alongside “The Charmer of Snakes,” in which a man loses his wife to the seductive music of a snake-charmer.
Flames (1897) is a remarkable novel in which an effortlessly moral socialite wants to feel the temptations that torment his imperfect friend, and so he proposes a magical exchange of souls that goes awry. The friend’s body is possessed by the soul of an evil occultist, whose influence threatens to corrupt him irredeemably. The Dweller on the Threshold (1911) revisits the theme of Flames, and Hichens wrote a third, more enigmatic version of the plot in “The Sin of Envy,” published in his The Gardenia and Other Stories (1934). In the title story of The Man in the Mirror (1950) a portraitist attempts to paint his doppelgänger, with disastrous consequences.
Hichens never quite made up his mind where he stood on the matter of the fashionable occultism that pervaded British and American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This uncertainty in the face of supernatural phenomena weakened many of his horror stories, but the strange psychology of his work remains a fascinating case study.
Brian Stableford
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Cooper, Frederic T. [1912] 2008. “Robert Hichens.” In A Hideous Bit of Morbidity: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 307–324. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Stableford, Brian. 1998. “Robert Smythe Hichens.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 268–270. Detroit: St. James Press.
HILL, JOE (1972–)
Joe Hill is the pen name for Joseph Hillstrom King, an American author. Born in 1972 to horror writer Stephen King and his wife Tabitha, also a writer, Hill chose a pseudonym to achieve success on his own, apart from his famous family name. He was able to write for nearly a decade, publishing a collection of short stories, while keeping his identity secret. He is best known for horror and science fiction novels and comic books.
His first book, a critically acclaimed short story collection titled 20th Century Ghosts (2005), garnered numerous awards, including a Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection and two British Fantasy Awards. Hill has said that his fiction, particularly his short fiction, is greatly influenced by Bernard Malamud, especially the idea that short stories can contain elements of fantasy and magic next to stark reality. Critics have described his writing style as “slipstream,” which crosses and combines genre elements of horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and literary fiction.
With the publication of his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box (2007), Hill won literary success, but he also found that he could no longer hide the connection to his famous father. Eventually, he gave in to the family connection and published several Kindle Singles with his father, including In the Tall Grass (2012) and Throttle (2012). Like Stephen King, Hill is probably best known for his horror novels: Heart-Shaped Box, Horns (2010), NOS4A2 (2013), and The Fireman (2016). In 2014, Horns was adapted into a feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple, directed by Alexandre Aja. NOS4A2 inspired a comic series called Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland (2013–2014). Wraith followed on the heels of Locke and Key (the first in the series debuted in 2008), another comic book series penned by Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez. In 2011, a television series adapted from Locke and Key was highly anticipated by fans, and a pilot was filmed, though the Fox network ultimately passed on the project. Hill has continued to work with various artists and IDW Publishing on several horror comic projects, including The Cape (2012) and Thumbprint (2013).
In 2016, a landmark year in Hill’s writing career, The Fireman hit #1 on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, the first work of his to reach the top spot. In interviews, Hill has said that he identifies more as a comic writer than anything else, though he continues to write across mediums. At the time of this writing, a new television adaptation of Locke and Key was rumored to be still in the works, with Hill saying that he did not want to give up on the project.
Lisa Kröger
See also: King, Stephen.
Further Reading
Dionne, Zach. 2013. “Owen King and Joe Hill on Their New Novels, Sibling Rivalry, and Stephen King’s Shadow.” Vulture, May 2. http://www.vulture.com/2013/04/joe-hill-owen-king-interview.html.
“Joe Hill.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
Joe Hill Fiction. 2016. Accessed June 15. http://www.joehillfiction.com.
Niehart, Ben. 2007. “Prince of Darkness.” New York Times Magazine, March 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/magazine/18hill.t.html?_r=0.
HILL, SUSAN (1942–)
British author Susan Hill, winner of the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham, and John Llewellyn Rhys awards and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is well known as an accomplished author of contemporary ghost stories: The Woman in Black (1983), The Mist in the Mirror (1992), The Man in the Picture (2007), several short stories, and also crime and other contemporary fictions. Both her tales of the strange living and of the dead impinging on the living depict individual feelings and the confusion of relationships and hidden family secrets. She creates social microcosms with delicacy, vulnerability, and a sense of threat.
Hill’s revival of the British ghost story in The Woman in Black (1983) engages readers with the power of Gothic horror to reveal horrible secrets of the past and their deadly legacy in the present, putting spectral flesh on hidden, repressed stories, versions, perspectives, and lives, and inviting readers to look again at social mores and understand them differently. The titular woman in black is the marginalized and maddened ghost of Jennet Humfrye, who wreaks fatal revenge on local children for the loss of her illegitimate child Nathaniel, who, after being adopted by Jennet’s wealthy sister, Mrs. Drablow, drowned in an accident crossing the marshy spit to her remote mansion. The novel is interpretable in light of Julia Briggs’s feminist exploration of women’s ghost stories, which recuperated and emphasized their importance for reading the hidden lives of women in periods when they had no property and little education, and were expected to be silent. Ghosts, says Briggs, lure readers into a space of tension “between certainty and doubt, between the familiar and the feared, between rational occurrence and the inexplicable” (Briggs 2012, 176).
In Hill’s The Mist in the Mirror, on a dark and rainy night Sir James Monmouth returns to England after a lifetime of traveling, intent on discovering more about himself and his obsession, explorer Conrad Vane. Sir James, warned against following Vane’s trail, experiences disturbing events leading to questions concerning a sad little boy, an old woman hidden behind the curtain, chilling screams, and desperate sobbing. Travel and entrapment reappear in The Man in the Picture, set in Cambridge, London, a remote country house, and Venice at Carnival time, a popular city for tales of ghosts, death, confusion, and loss (as in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, 1912; Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now,” 1971; and Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, 1981). Here people wear masks concealing secrets, which are revealed in a terrifying painting in which the man in the picture comes to life. Hill’s dark short stories also dramatize ghostly revenge. For example, in “The Small Hand” (2010) a murdered child leads a researcher close to death, reenacting his own drowning at the hand of the man’s brother, who, faced with his own guilt, commits suicide. Retribution, malice, and uncanny returns dominate Hill’s socially engaging horror.
Gina Wisker
See also: The Woman in Black.
Further Reading
Briggs, Julia. 2012. “The Ghost Story.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 176–185. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hill, Susan. 1983. The Woman in Black. London: Vintage.
Hill, Susan. 1992. The Mist in the Mirror. London: Sinclair Stevenson.
Hofer, Ernest H. 1993. “Enclosed Structures, Disclosed Lives: The Fictions of Susan Hill.” In Contemporary British Women Writers, Narrative Strategies, edited by Robert E. Hosmer Jr., 128–150. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Jackson, Rosemary. 1982. “Cold Enclosures: The Fiction of Susan Hill.” In Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, edited by Thomas F. Staley, 81–103. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books.
Quema, Anne. 2006. “Family and Symbolic Violence in The Mist in the Mirror.” Gothic Studies 8, no. 2: 114–135.
THE HISTORIAN
The Historian is the 2005 debut novel by Elizabeth Johnson Kostova (1964–). It involves characters in three different decades attempting to discover the truth behind the legends surrounding the ruthless fifteenth-century Romanian leader Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), the historical figure who may have served at least in part as an inspiration for Bram Stoker when he created the character of Dracula.
In the earliest of three interwoven threads, historian Professor Bartholomew Rossi searches for Dracula in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. In 1952, one of Rossi’s doctoral students, known only as Paul, tries to discover what happened to Rossi after he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Finally, in 1972, the student’s unnamed daughter searches for her father. As they travel the European continent, each scours libraries for hidden clues about where Tepes was buried. The three historians come to believe that Tepes really was a vampire and that he survives to this day. Except for the 1972 storyline, the novel is told through discovered letters, some many pages long, mirroring the epistolic style (i.e., told in the form of letters) of Dracula.
The unnamed narrator learns that she is a direct descendant of Dracula. When the vampire finally enters the story, he is unable to live up to the legend. He admires modern developments—the atomic bomb and the Cold War, for example—but he seems interested in little more than cataloging his vast library. He waxes poetic about the purity of evil, but is not very threatening and is apparently dispatched by a silver bullet to the heart.
Kostova was inspired by stories her father told her as a child while they lived in Slovenia and traveled throughout Europe. She researched and wrote the novel over a ten-year period, in part while teaching at various universities. In search of creative mentoring, she entered the MFA program at the University of Michigan, where the as-yet-incomplete manuscript won the Hopwood Award in 2004.
The book drew immediate interest from publishers and made headlines because of the $2 million advance paid for it at auction, as well as a similar payment from Sony for the film rights. Due to its reliance on solving puzzles and uncovering ancient conspiracies, Little, Brown and Company marketed the novel by comparing it to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, despite the fact that The Historian is much slower paced than the Brown thriller.
The Historian was the first debut novel to land at number one on the New York Times best-seller list during its first week and is still the fastest-selling debut novel in U.S. history. Reviews, however, were decidedly mixed, in part due to the lack of variation in voice among the various narrators. The movie adaptation has never been produced.
The Historian ends in a manner that invites a sequel—either Dracula is still alive or one of his minions has taken his place—but Kostova has stated that she has no intentions of continuing the story, preferring to leave it for her readers to speculate about what happens next.
Bev Vincent
See also: Dracula; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; Psychological Horror; Vampires.
Further Reading
“Elizabeth Kostova.” 2010. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
“Interview: Elizabeth Kostova Discusses Her First Novel, ‘The Historian.’” 2005. Weekend Edition Sunday. NPR, June 26.
Sanow, Anne. 2005. “Vivifying the Undead.” Publishers Weekly 11 (April): 32.
HODGSON, WILLIAM HOPE (1877–1918)
William Hope Hodgson was a British author known for his science fiction-based horror fiction. He was born in Essex in 1877, the second of twelve children of an Anglican priest. At fourteen he left school and joined the Merchant Marines, first as a cabin boy and later as a first mate, a deeply traumatic experience that was to inform his writing. While at sea he took up photography and also body-building. He died in 1918.
After quitting the sea, Hodgson wrote and sold articles about physical culture and life at sea. Self-taught, he soon began writing fiction. His short horror stories and novels do not feature standard supernatural elements such as ghosts or vampires, but monstrous life forms, sometimes evolved here on earth, and sometimes invading from other planes of existence.
Hodgson’s recurrent themes include horror at sea, most often the Sargasso Sea, and people besieged by monsters. His earliest published horror story, “A Tropical Horror” (1907), is typical, involving sailors barricading themselves against a huge, dangerous, but unknown sea creature. His two best short stories are “The Voice in the Night” (1907; adapted for the television series Suspicion in 1958) and “The Derelict” (1912). The former concerns a couple marooned on an island covered with a strange gray fungus, and the latter is about an abandoned ship that hosts a horrifying new form of life.
His first published novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907), is about shipwreck survivors who encounter trees that absorb people and a ship besieged by tentacled humanoid creatures. In The House on the Borderland (1908) a man experiences involuntary visionary trips beyond the solar system and into the remote future. The Ghost Pirates (1909) is set aboard a ship that is attacked and eventually overtaken by other-dimensional beings. The Night Land (1912) is a visionary tale of the remote future that is at once horror, science fiction, and romance. Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1910) is a collection about an occult detective who investigates hauntings caused by quasi-scientific phenomena.
Hodgson’s fiction anticipates that of H. P. Lovecraft, who independently created a similar approach to horror. But the Lovecraftian universe is harsh and apathetic, whereas Hodgson’s balances good and malign forces. Hodgson’s stories also often include overly sentimental romantic elements. He was notable for being able to create and sustain a mood of horror, even at novel length. He is primarily remembered for The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, “The Voice in the Night,” “The Derelict,” and the Carnacki stories, which are still being written today by other authors who expand on Hodgson’s original concept.
His writings were critically well received at the time but nearly forgotten until their rediscovery in the 1940s. He died in Ypres, Belgium, in 1918, a casualty of World War I.
Lee Weinstein
See also: The House on the Borderland; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Night Land; Occult Detectives.
Further Reading
Berruti, Massimo, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford, eds. 2014. William Hope Hodgson: Voices from the Borderland: Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1995. “William Hope Hodgson.” In Modern Horror Writers, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House.
Bruce, Samuel W. 1997. “William Hope Hodgson.” In British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I, edited by Darren Harris-Fain, 121–131. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 178. Detroit: Gale.
Gafford, Sam. 1992. “Writing Backward: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction 11 (Spring): 12–15.
Joshi, S. T. 2012. “William Hope Hodgson: Things in the Weeds.” In Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century, 445–451. Hornsea, England: PS Publishing.
The Night Land: The Weird Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://nightland.website.
Warren, Alan. 1992. “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 41–52. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.
Weinstein, Lee. 1980. “The First Literary Copernicus.” Nyctalops 15 (January). https://leestein2003.wordpress.com/the-first-literary-copernicus.
HOFFMANN, E. T. A. (1776–1822)
Ernest Theodore Wilhelm (Amadeus) Hoffmann was a German writer, artist, composer, lawyer, and theater manager. He was one of the most important figures in the cultural movement known as romanticism, and a highly influential writer in both European and American literature.
Hoffmann was born in the city of Königsberg, which at that time was in Germany; Königsberg is now part of Russia and has been renamed Kaliningrad. He trained initially for a career in the law and practiced as a lawyer. However, his interest in art was both deep and wide; he wrote novels, short stories, and poetry; he painted and created illustrations; and he also both performed and composed music. His passion for Mozart’s music was so great that he began replacing one of his middle names, “Wilhelm,” with “Amadeus,” which was also Mozart’s middle name. Hoffmann even composed an opera, “Undine,” which was based on a fantastic 1811 novella by his friend Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, who assisted him with the lyrics.
His first short story was published in 1809, and his first collection, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Stories in the Style of Callot), appeared in 1814. Much of this collection was devoted to writings about music; however, it also included an important early tale, “The Golden Pot: A Fairytale of Modern Times.” In this story, the somewhat awkward hero, Anselmus, falls in love with Serpentina, the daughter of a salamander escaped from Atlantis. The story presents a more light-hearted and bizarre side of Gothicism than many of his later tales, and resorts to the unusual tactic of bringing the narrator directly into the story in order to finish it. Crossing the boundaries between the real and the unreal would prove to be a constant theme running through Hoffmann’s work.
His first novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir) appeared in 1815 and proved to be a far darker story than “The Golden Pot.” The influence of The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, on The Devil’s Elixir is obvious. In this novel, the figure of the double, or “doppelgänger,” plays an important role, and Hoffmann’s subsequent writing was full of secondary characters who seemed to reflect the main characters.
In 1817, what is today arguably Hoffmann’s most famous work, “The Sand-man,” was published in his collection Nachtstücke (Night Pieces). It is the story of a young man named Nathanael who, as a boy, may have witnessed the death of his father during an alchemical experiment. His father was not alone at the time, but in the company of the mysterious and terrifying Coppelius, a man the young Nathanael suspects might be the actual Sand-man. In German folklore, the Sand-man is an evil spirit who steals the eyes of children. As a young man, Nathanael encounters an Italian eyeglass-maker named Coppola, who seems to be Coppelius in disguise, and falls in love with his beautiful, shy daughter Olimpia. When Nathanael realizes that Olimpia is actually an “automaton,” a machine built by Coppola, he goes mad. The theme of reality and unreality runs through “The Sand-man,” which is a sustained meditation on the reliability of vision, of experience, as a way of understanding reality. Sigmund Freud, the most important figure in modern psychotherapy, wrote extensively on “The Sand-man” in his 1919 psychological treatise, The Uncanny.
Hoffmann’s next collection, Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren), published in 1819, included the now-classic tale “Nutcracker and Mouse-King,” which inspired Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker.” Other well-known stories from this collection include “The Mines of Falun,” “Councillor Krespel,” and “Mademoiselle de Scuderi,” which is considered by many to be the first story of the detective genre. While much of Hoffmann’s fiction would not appear in English until the 1850s, it is generally believed that Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by “Mademoiselle de Scuderi” to write his own important early detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
In general, Hoffmann’s style is important for the way he combines the psychological and the supernatural. While he recycles certain Gothic images, settings, and situations, drawing from Gothic sources such as Matthew Lewis and, particularly, the short fiction of Horace Walpole, Hoffmann is original in the way he handles Gothic material. By reexamining the Gothic from a fresh point of view, which was formed by the developments in German philosophical thinking about the nature of the mind and its relationship to experience, Hoffmann was able to bring a new dimension into Gothic fiction. His delirium and grotesqueness are not just exciting Gothic effects; they give him a way to question humanity’s grasp on reality itself. Time and again, Hoffmann’s characters are swept up in the tumult of their own desires and become unable to tell what is dream and what is not; but they are not fools—their problem is only a more acute form of a problem faced by all human beings. Hoffmann deliberately withholds whatever information would be necessary to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the experiences of his narrators are not supernatural. Understanding this tendency helps to explain the importance of delusional personas, figures like Coppelius, who act as a focus for the delusion of the main character. These personas are often depicted as malevolent beings who are aware of the role they play and seek to carry it out as if it were a mission.
Hoffmann’s influence is extensive. Major authors both in and out of the horror genre reflect the results of reading Hoffmann, including not only Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the United States, but Russian authors such Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens and George MacDonald in England, and Charles Baudelaire in France. H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann” has a decidedly Hoffmann-like quality, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s character, Dr. Hesselius—a scholar of supernatural events and a forerunner of Bram Stoker’s Dr. Van Helsing—bears a resemblance to some of Hoffmann’s characters as well. The composer Jacques Offenbach wrote an opera entitled Tales of Hoffmann, which was adapted for film in 1951. In later days, animators such as the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer seem to have derived some inspiration from Hoffmann, who was fond of depicting inanimate objects coming to life and moving of their own accord.
Michael Cisco
See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Gogol, Nikolai; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; “The Music of Erich Zann”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; “The Sand-man”; The Uncanny; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Duroche, Leonard L. 1988. “Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1776–1822.” In Writers for Children: Critical Studies of Major Authors Since the Seventeenth Century, edited by Jane M. Bingham, 283–288. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 2003. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, 121–162. New York: Penguin.
Willis, Martin T. 1994. “Scientific Portraits in Magical Frames: The Construction of Preternatural Narrative in the Work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Arthur Machen.” Extrapolation 35, no. 3: 186–200.
“THE HORLA”
The influential short story “Le Horla” (The Horla) by the French writer Guy de Maupassant is a salient example of French weird fiction, praised by H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927). A stark tale about the metaphysics of invisibility that takes the form of a confession to a physician, it was published under the title “Lettre d’un fou” (Letter from a Madman) in Gil Blas, a popular Parisian magazine, in February 1885 under the pen name of “Maufrigneuse.” Maupassant then published (also in Gil Blas) the first version of “Le Horla” in October 1886, with the tale now featuring a framing device legitimating the narrator’s sanity—and thereby inviting the reader into a macabre world that casts light on the limitations of the natural sciences when confronting the impossible. The final version of the story was published as “Le Horla” (1887) in Le Horla, a collection of Maupassant’s short stories edited by Paul Ollendorff.
In the final version, Maupassant cuts out the frame narrative, instead organizing the story as a chronological series of journal entries told entirely from a first-person perspective and expressed in a lucid prose style. The narrator’s protracted reflections on nonhumans and the strange occurrences to which he bears witness, however, veer uncontrollably into metaphysical abstraction and Schopenhauerian (in the style of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer) pessimism, thereby engendering affective dread and despair. The story describes the arrival on earth of an invisible entity from beyond the veil of human knowledge, an arrival that implies for its narrator the obliteration of the human species by extradimensional beings. The narrator’s commitments to reason and faith collapse when confronting the titular “Horla,” thus opening onto a vision of an incomprehensible cosmos. The tale illustrates weird fiction’s penchant for speculating on realities that horrify readers before returning them to mundane reality with a more complex understanding of their embeddedness in cosmic immensities.
The narrator’s inability to rationalize the manifestations of the invisible creature leads him to concoct a plan to trap it in his house with iron shutters in order to burn it alive. Yet, in his frantic efforts to rid himself of Le Horla, he forgets to inform his servants of his plan, and they are killed in the process. The story concludes grimly with the narrator, who is trapped in an existential nightmare in which he believes the horrid being is still alive, choosing to commit suicide.
In 1892, only five years after the publication of “Le Horla,” Maupassant would himself attempt suicide, thereby paving the way for critics to speculate on the relationship between the story and the author’s life. Regardless of biographical relevance, “Le Horla” remains a striking monument to the weird’s capacity to unsettle and horrify both philosophically and psychologically, and it has had a profound influence on subsequent horror literature, including Lovecraft’s classic story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” (1893). It has been adapted as, and/or has exerted an influence on, multiple movies and radio and television program, including a loose adaptation as the 1963 American horror film Diary of a Madman, starring Vincent Price.
Sean Matharoo
See also: “The Call of Cthulhu”; Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; Frame Story; Maupassant, Guy de; Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Fitz, Brewster E. 1972. “The Use of Mirrors and Mirror Analogues in Maupassant’s Le Horla.” The French Review 45 (5): 954–963.
Goulet, Andrea. 2013. “Neurosyphilitcs and Madmen: The French Fin-de-siècle Fictions of Huysmans, Lermina, and Maupassant.” In Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders, edited by Stanley Finger, François Boller, and Anne Stiles, 73–91. Amsterdam and Oxford: Elsevier.
Showers, Brian J. 2010. “The Horla.” In Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture, edited by S. T. Joshi, 146–148. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of four novels by Arthur Conan Doyle that feature fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his loyal friend Dr. John Watson. Serialized in The Strand magazine from 1901 to 1902, it was the first Sherlock Holmes story to be published since 1893, when Doyle memorably killed off his hero in The Final Problem. However, due to immense public pressure to write more Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle produced The Hound of the Baskervilles, set sometime before Holmes’s fateful battle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.
Like the majority of Sherlock Holmes stories, the story is told by Dr. Watson’s narrative, but also in the epistolary format using letters and old manuscripts. Regarded as a little old-fashioned by the advent of the twentieth century, when modernism was on the rise, this format is nevertheless used to great effect by Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles as the mystery is gradually explained. Though typically classed as a detective story, the novel features many tropes common to Gothic literature, for example, the Gothic mansion of Baskerville Hall and the windswept moors. But unlike many Gothic and horror stories, there is a rational explanation for all of the strange events that occur.
The mystery in The Hound of the Baskervilles is a complex one, with a multitude of characters, multiple plot strands, and many false clues. Due to its length, Doyle was able to develop a much more intricate story than in the short fiction he had published previously. The mystery focuses on the ill-fated Baskerville family, who are apparently haunted by a demonic hellhound. Holmes does not believe in hellhounds, of course, and he and Watson set out to solve a puzzle with a very human (and canine) evil at its center.
Like the contradictory character of Holmes himself, The Hound of the Baskervilles combines the outrageous with the reassuringly rational. Doyle uses many sensational elements in his novel, such as diabolical criminals, ghostly seeming hounds, and manhunts across the moors, but always reduces the apparently uncanny to something explicable.
The Hound of the Baskervilles was a huge success, and it led to Doyle’s reviving Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Empty House, with the detective dramatically revealing he had faked his own death. The novel has been adapted for both the cinema and the television screen on numerous occasions. It has even lent its name to a statistical observation known as “the Baskerville effect,” the effect being that mortality due to heart attacks is increased by psychological stress. It continues to be one of the best-known and most popular Sherlock Holmes stories. It has also earned a place in the horror canon, a fact demonstrated by Christopher Frayling’s choice to include it along with three other iconic works of horror literature—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—in his 1996 BBC series Nightmare: The Birth of Horror and its accompanying book, in which he details the background, origin, and impact of each work.
Carys Crossen
See also: Ancestral Curse.
Further Reading
Frank, Lawrence. 2003. Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frayling, Christopher. 1996. “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” In Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, 162–214. London: BBC Books.
Kestner, Joseph A. 2010. Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. Farnham: Ashgate.
Priestman, Martin, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
The House Next Door is a 1978 novel by Anne Rivers Siddons. While at its core The House Next Door is a haunted house story, it could also be considered the anti–haunted house story. After all, the haunted house in question is not even built when the novel opens, and no ghosts actually come into the storyline, even though horrific things happen to anyone who moves into the home.
The novel is told from the perspective of Colquitt Kennedy, a Caucasian housewife living an ideal life in suburban Atlanta with her husband, Walter. Their domestic bliss is interrupted, however, when architect Kim Dougherty (whose orphan status and red hair makes him a prime candidate to be the source of the novel’s evil) builds his masterpiece next door. The novel is told in three parts, each detailing the three families who move in. Drawing heavily on haunted houses such as Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, the titular house next door to the Kennedys appears to have been created with horror inside its bones; the structure itself houses some kind of evil that brings about the downfall of its inhabitants. Unlike her predecessors, Siddons forgoes the traditional Gothic mansion in favor of a contemporary home, with a sleek and modern design. The home itself isn’t menacing; rather, the true horror comes from witnessing the effects of the new structure on the families who live there—and, by proximity, the Kennedys, who stand as witness. By removing the traditional elements of a horror story, Siddons is able to highlight the real horror that plagues humanity: war, loss, broken relationships, damaged trust.
In his book on the nature of horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King devotes an extended section to The House Next Door, comparing it both to the haunted house tradition of Shirley Jackson and to the Southern Gothic tradition of William Faulkner. Even though Siddons strips away the traditional architecture of the haunted house, King claims that she still holds on to the heart of the horrific, in that carefully constructed social norms have been broken down to the point that they are irreparable. The Kennedys are forever changed; in the end, they cannot return to their former suburban lives.
In 2006, Siddons’s novel was adapted into a made-for-television movie for Lifetime, with Lara Flynn Boyle playing the character of Col Kennedy, Colin Ferguson as her husband (named Walker for the film), and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as the architect Kim. The film did not receive good reviews.
Lisa Kröger
See also: Burnt Offerings; Faulkner, William; The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House, Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.
Further Reading
Bailey, Dale. 1999. “Middle-Class Nightmares: Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door.” In American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Eggener, Keith. 2013. “When Buildings Kill: Sentient Houses in Fiction and Film.” Places Journal, October. https://placesjournal.org/article/when-buildings-kill.
King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.
HOUSE OF LEAVES
House of Leaves is an experimental horror novel by American author Mark Z. Danielewski. It was originally published on Danielewski’s website and circulated in the early years of Internet “viral” culture. Since its publication in print form in 2000, it has become a touchstone of postmodern writing and a referent for almost all subsequent experimental horror fiction.
House of Leaves is a difficult text to synopsize. It is comprised of a series of concentric but interlinked narratives. At the center of the novel, both structurally and thematically, is the house on Ash Tree Lane belonging to photographer Will Navidson and his young family. Navidson discovers a profound spatial paradox when a hallway appears in his home, leading down into a labyrinth that vastly exceeds the dimensions of the house. He puts his visual skills to good use in a recorded exploration of the impossible space and its malign influence on his family. The novel’s textual appearance mirrors the physical labyrinth at the heart of the story. Danielewski uses color, typography, layout, and elaborate citation to present a textual composition that is dizzying and difficult to navigate.
Navidson’s video is the subject of House of Leaves’ bifurcated, competing narratives. The majority of the text is devoted to a pseudo-academic analysis of Navidson’s film, written by the reclusive, blind Zampanò. His analysis, “The Navidson Report,” is an in-depth deconstruction that parodies academic discourse while illustrating the uncanny, frightening properties of Navidson’s home. It is full of footnotes and citations, some of which reference authentic sources, while others are entirely fictitious.
Just as Zampanò reflects upon Navidson’s film, his analysis is in turn the subject of the next layer of the text: a stream-of-consciousness account by Los Angeles drop-out Johnny Truant. Johnny is the involuntary recipient of Zampanò’s study after he finds it in the dead man’s apartment. He appoints himself an unofficial editor of “The Navidson Report” and relates his own experience in the marginalia and footnotes to that text. As well as a commentary on the report, however, his narrative reveals the sinister consequence of reading Zampanò’s work. He becomes increasingly paranoid, convinced that he is being pursued by an entity that may or may not reside in Navidson’s labyrinth. The implication, of course, is that the same fate may befall the reader in turn. As Johnny explains: “focus on these words and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you” (26).
The horrors in House of Leaves are many and varied and exist at every level of the text: Johnny’s paranoia, Zampanò’s lonely death, the destruction of the Navidsons’ domestic space, and the death of their friends in the labyrinth. At the heart of the novel, however, is the notion of fallible truth: the idea that reality itself is unstable. This is foregrounded in various ways. The most shocking occurs late in the novel when Navidson finds himself alone and lost in the labyrinth reading a book by the light of a burning page. The book, of course, is revealed to be House of Leaves. Thus the text becomes as impossible a space as the labyrinth itself, and any perspective on what is “real” (within the context of the fiction) is entirely lost.
Danielewski’s novel has been influential in the development of a critically aware, self-reflexive, media-savvy breed of horror fiction. Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (2013) and Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) both follow in House of Leaves’ wake as horror fictions focused on the uncanny properties of media and mediation, and both have been termed successors to Danielewski’s novel. Its influence may also be discerned in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Bram Stoker Award–winning novel The Drowning Girl (2012). Danielewski has himself returned to the elaborate experimental form in the first two volumes of an intended twenty-seven-volume novel, The Familiar. It remains to be seen, however, whether any novel will equal the marriage of self-conscious commentary, innovative technique, and existential horror presented in House of Leaves.
Neil McRobert
See also: The Drowning Girl; Frame Story; The Haunted House or Castle; New Weird; The Uncanny; Unreliable Narrator; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Horror Criticism; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror.
Further Reading
Belletto, Steven. 2009. “Rescuing Interpretation with Mark Danielewski: The Genre of Scholarship in House of Leaves.” Genre Forms of Discourse and Culture 42, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter): 99–117.
Danielewski, Mark Z. 2015. The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. New York: Pantheon.
McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. 2003. “Haunted House: An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski.” Critique 44/2: 99–135.
Pessl, Marisha. 2013. Night Film. New York: Random House.
Pressman, Jessica. 2006. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 34, no. 1: 107–28.
Tremblay, Paul. 2015. A Head Full of Ghosts. New York: William Morrow.
Watkiss, Joanne. 2012. Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES
Published in 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second major romance, The House of the Seven Gables, competes with his first, The Scarlet Letter (1850), for pride of place amidst his oeuvre. Its influence as both a Gothic romance and a work of literature in general has been immense.
The titular gabled House, modeled after one in Salem, is set in a nameless New England town and built on land seized by one Col. Pyncheon via a false accusation of warlockery against Matthew Maule, who, as he was being hanged for witchcraft, laid a bloody curse on the Pyncheons. The primary action occurs in the mid-nineteenth century as Hepzibah Pyncheon, a destitute aristocrat, opens a shop and takes a boarder in the gabled house. The boarder, Holgrave, is a daguerreotypist (early photographer) and mesmerist (hypnotist), smitten with Hepzibah’s newly arrived cousin, Phoebe. Hepzibah’s paroled brother Clifford returns unhinged by prison after another cousin, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, probably framed Clifford for Jaffrey’s uncle’s death from Maule’s curse or a hereditary Pyncheon condition. The “curse” kills Jaffrey, which allows the Pyncheon siblings to inherit his estate and escape the house, and permits Holgrave, a Maule descendant, to become engaged to Phoebe.
The romance has had four cinematic adaptations. The two most interesting star Vincent Price. Twice-Told Tales (1963) adapts “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), and House in three segments. Made while Price was in the midst of his ten-film cycle of (loose) Poe adaptations (1960–1969), the segment highlights the influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s less subtle “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) on House as well as other sensational elements of Poe’s and Hawthorne’s supernatural fiction as walls and Col. Pyncheon’s portrait bleed, Phoebe cum Alice is buried alive, Hannah cum Hepzibah is a witch, Price as Gerald cum Jaffrey is a maniacal killer, and the house collapses. Universal’s The House of the Seven Gables (1940) hews closer to the romance but rearranges Pyncheon family structure and assigns a lengthy murder trial to Price as Clifford. Ironically, given Hawthorne’s racism and lack of support for abolition, Holgrave becomes an abolitionist jailed alongside Clifford, and Jaffrey swindles a gullible deacon into embezzling abolitionist funds into the slave trade.
H. P. Lovecraft admired House the most among Hawthorne’s works but frankly assessed that Hawthorne’s singular style, unlike Poe’s, had inspired few inheritors. That assessment has its truth, but subsequent history allows nuance. A vicious, variegated New England horror tradition succeeded without imitating Hawthorne, including occasional works by Edith Wharton, Lovecraft himself, and Shirley Jackson. Moreover, the cursed aristocratic inheritance exerts tremendous influence on high achievements of twentieth-century New World Gothic: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
Bob Hodges
See also: Ancestral Curse; Beloved; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; The Haunted House or Castle; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Jackson, Shirley; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Wharton, Edith; Witches and Witchcraft; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Gender, Sexuality, and the Monsters of Literary Horror; The Gothic Literary Tradition.
Further Reading
Bailey, Dale. 1999. “The Sentient House and the Ghostly Tradition: The Legacy of Poe and Hawthorne.” In American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, 15–24. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
The House of the Seven Gables. 2010. DVD. Dir. Joe May. 1940. Universal City: Universal.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Martin, Terence. 1983. “The House of the Seven Gables.” In Nathaniel Hawthorne, revised edition. Twayne’s United Authors Series 75. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Siebers, Tobin. 1983. “Hawthorne’s Appeal and Romanticism.” In The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, edited by Harry R. Garvin and Peter C. Carafiol, 100–117. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses.
Twice-Told Tales. 2005. DVD. Dir. Sidney Salkow. 1963. Beverly Hills: MGM Midnite Movies.
THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND
The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1908, is a portmanteau novel (one consisting of multiple different parts) in which four narrative episodes and two brief connecting passages, allegedly contained in a manuscript, are presented within a frame narrative, prefaced by an introduction and a poem. Two of the episodes describe the haunting of a house in Ireland by creatures from a nearby pit; one of the others is a vision in which a replica of the house is surrounded by a fabulous landscape inhabited by loathsome monsters, and the last a cosmic vision in which the dreaming narrator witnesses the end of the world and visits the binary star at the center of the universe, which is also an allegory of human life and death.
Although it represented a decisive break from the sea stories that were Hodgson’s principal stock in trade as he tried to make a living as a professional writer, the novel transports the metaphysical schema outlined in several of those stories, with its attendant psychological fascinations, into a broader visionary area in order to display them more elaborately. The enigmatic house is symbolic of the troubled mind of its inhabitant; the pit on whose brink it is precariously situated is the well of his unconscious. The main visionary sequence is both an attempt to place human existence in the frame of space and time established as true by contemporary science and an attempt to develop a metaphysical framework that might make that placement meaningful, subjectively if not objectively.
The idea of a marginal region incompletely separating our world from another plays a significant role in almost all of Hodgson’s fiction, where breaches in the barrier and irruptions from the world beyond are invariably seen as baleful; significantly, they are usually characterized as animalistic even when frankly supernatural; his “phantoms” always have a carnal repulsiveness about them, often porcine, as in this instance. That aspect of Hodgson’s work is distinctive, at least in the intensity of his preoccupation with it.
The fact that the novel is a patchwork of pieces that were presumably written separately makes its narrative flow awkward and detracts from its overall coherency, but the resulting disorder is by no means inappropriate to the nature of the exercise, and is amply compensated in terms of its imaginative ambition and graphic imagery. As in Hodgson’s The Night Land, to which it is closely related in terms of its underlying endeavor, its clumsiness is part and parcel of its ambition, a consequence of its reach exceeding its grasp. For that reason, The House of the Borderland has exerted a long-lasting fascination over many devoted admirers and remains a key work in the history of imaginative fiction that defies easy classification. Its influence on subsequent writers of horror and fantasy fiction, including major figures such as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, has been profound. In 2001 a graphic novel adaptation of the novel was published by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics.
Brian Stableford
See also: Dreams and Nightmares; The Haunted House or Castle; Hodgson, William Hope; The Night Land; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.
Further Reading
Berruti, Massimo, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford, eds. 2014. William Hope Hodgson: Voices from the Borderland: Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1995. “William Hope Hodgson.” In Modern Horror Writers, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House.
Gafford, Sam. 1992. “Writing Backward: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction 11 (Spring): 12–15.
Joshi, S. T. 2012. “William Hope Hodgson: Things in the Weeds.” In Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Vol. 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century, 445–451. Hornsea, England: PS Publishing.
Warren, Alan. 1992. “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 41–52. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.
HOWARD, ROBERT E. (1906–1936)
Robert E. Howard, who was born and lived most of his life in rural Texas, was a prolific American writer for pulp fiction magazines. Although he wrote for a wide variety of fiction markets, including adventure and sports publications, he is best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian and the fantasy subgenre of sword-and-sorcery. He was a titan of the pulp era in American popular fiction, and his work crossed over in many significant ways with dark fantasy and horror.
Howard made his first professional fiction sale in 1925 to Weird Tales, the magazine that would become his best market. The April, 1926 issue carried his “Wolfshead,” a werewolf tale whose muscular style and historical setting anticipated his approach in much of his heroic fantasy fiction. Other sales to Weird Tales included the witchcraft tale “Sea Curse” (1928), the ghost story “Man on the Ground” (1933), and the Native American–themed “Old Garfield’s Heart” (1933). Several of Howard’s most highly regarded works of horror were published posthumously, among them “Black Canaan” (1936) and “Pigeons from Hell” (May, 1938). Both of these stories are Southern Gothic tales steeped in the folklore of Howard’s native American South: they bristle dramatically with racial tensions between blacks and whites, and they are memorable for horrors rendered in Howard’s trademark visceral style. “The Dead Remember,” a tale of vengeance from beyond the grave published in the August 15, 1936 issue of Argosy, is another notable regional horror tale.
Howard began corresponding with fellow Weird Tales contributor H. P. Lovecraft in 1930, and he contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared world of cosmic horror fiction inspired by Lovecraft’s stories. As Marc Cerasini and Charles Hoffman have noted, most of Howard’s mythos tales—including “The Children of the Night” (1931), “The Thing on the Roof” (1932), “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (1936), and “Dig Me No Grave” (1937)—do not represent his best work, since his attempts to evoke the futility of human endeavor that distinguishes Lovecraft’s fiction forced him to suppress the heroics characteristic of his best fiction. An exception is “The Black Stone” (1931), an effective Lovecraftian horror story about a contemporary traveler in Hungary who is privy to a vivid dream vision of an ancient rite of sacrifice to a monstrous entity. This story introduced the mad poet Justin Geoffrey and the book of occult lore, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults), both referenced afterward in stories by Lovecraft and other contributors to the mythos.
Many tales featuring Howard’s serial heroes are punctuated with incidents of horror and the supernatural. “Worms of the Earth” (1932), featuring Pict warrior Bran Mak Morn, is one of several stories in which Howard developed the theme of a bestial prehistoric race, driven underground, that later gave rise to folk legends of the little people. In “Red Shadows” (1928), “The Moon of Skulls” (1930), “The Walking Dead” (1930), and “Wings in the Night” (1932), Howard’s puritan swordsman Solomon Kane becomes enmeshed in sorcerous intrigues in Africa. In many of Howard’s tales of Conan, incidents of physical horror and the supernatural provide challenges to the masculine prowess of the hero.
Howard committed suicide in June 1936 as his dying mother lay in a coma. The 1996 film The Whole Wide World depicts the romantic and intellectual relationship between Howard (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) and Novalyne Price (played by Renée Zellweger), as based on Price’s memoirs of her time with Howard.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950.
Further Reading
Bleiler, Everett F. 1985. “Robert E. Howard: 1906–1936.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by Everett F. Bleiler. New York: Scribner’s.
Cerasini, Marc A., and Charles Hoffman. 1987. Robert E. Howard: Starmont Reader’s Guide 35. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
HUBBARD, L. RON (1911–1986)
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard is best known as the founder of Scientology, a controversial religious system advocating the acquisition of knowledge and spiritual fulfillment through a course of study and training. Hubbard is also known as a prolific author of science fiction, having produced more than 250 short stories and novels. Nineteen of his books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. He began his authorial career writing science fiction, fantasy, and adventure stories for such pulp magazines as Thrilling Adventures and Astounding Science Fiction in the 1930s, and he continued to publish in those genres through the 1950s, a period that has been called the “Golden Age” of pulp fiction, during which time he achieved a considerable reputation, especially as a science fiction writer. Some of his work also touched on themes of horror, especially of the psychological variety.
Return to the Stars (1954) and Battlefield Earth (1982), both traditional science fiction narratives, are Hubbard’s best-known novels. Two other works, Typewriter in the Sky (1940) and Fear (1940), explore questions of identity and perception within the framework of the horror narrative.
Typewriter in the Sky, first published as a two-part serial, uses the conventions of a time-travel narrative to explore the growing fear of the loss of identity and self-awareness. The hero, Mike de Wolf, receives an electric shock and is thrown back to the sixteenth century, where he has high adventures in the Caribbean. He becomes aware that during his adventures he can hear the keys of a typewriter, and he begins to question his existence, wondering whether he is human or simply a character in someone else’s novel.
Even more disquieting is Fear. Ethnologist James Lowrey returns from an expedition to Central America to discover that he is being fired from his college for denying the existence of a spiritual world. During the course of the novel, Lowrey, suffering from the effects of malaria, blacks out for four hours and then begins to experience visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations. As he searches for his lost hours, demons and devils speak to him, offering godlike powers of perception and/or horrible death. He slowly loses his connections to reality, and in the end of the novel Lowrey discovers or imagines that he has killed his wife and best friend with an axe. Fear is widely considered a masterful description of a descent into madness and is recognized as a significant example of psychological horror.
In much of his fiction Hubbard develops themes related to Scientology, depicting establishment systems and beliefs, such as the banking system, the law, and especially psychiatry and psychology, as oppressive structures blocking the development of self-awareness and the acquisition of the means to develop human potential. In The Typewriter in the Sky and especially Fear, he dramatizes the internal horror of psychological deterioration and the inability of rational systems to provide help. Although the prominence of Scientology in popular consciousness has mostly eclipsed the memory of Hubbard’s career as a novelist, several of his novels, including these two, still stand as significant works of speculative fiction with connections to the literary horror tradition.
Jim Holte
See also: Devils and Demons; Fear; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Adrian, Jack. 1996. “L. Ron Hubbard: Overview.” St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle. New York: St. James Press.
Hubbard, L. Ron. 1950. Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. New York: Hermitage House.
Hubbard, L. Ron. 1977. Fear & Typewriter in the Sky. New York: Popular Library.
Miller, Russell. 1988. Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard. New York: Holt.
Stableford, Brian. 1979. “Fear and Typewriter in the Sky.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, vol. 2, edited by Frank N. Magill, 761–65. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.
HUGO, VICTOR (1802–1885)
Victor-Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and playwright who is regarded as one of France’s greatest writers. He became the effective figurehead of the French Romantic movement (which dominated French literature in the first half of the nineteenth century) following the premiere of his play Hernani in February 1830. The French consider him one of their greatest poets, but internationally his fame rests more on his novels, especially Les Misérables (1862) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), the latter of which is better known to English-speaking readers as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Hugo’s authorial career was divided into several phases by the fallout from mid-nineteenth-century French political events. His Republican sympathies led to his taking an active part in the 1848 Revolution against the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and he accepted a post in the new government. However, when the elected president, Louis-Napoléon, staged the coup d’état in 1851 that transformed the Republic into the Second Empire, Hugo was exiled; he refused to accept the offer of amnesty made some years later, and he did not return to France until the emperor was forced to abdicate in 1870. Hugo completed the second major phase of his literary work while residing on the Isle of Jersey; the third, begun after his return to France, was ended by a disabling stroke that he suffered in 1878.
Hugo was sixteen years old when he initially wrote his novel Bug-Jargal, about the friendship between a French military officer and the eponymous African prince during the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that led to Haitian Revolution, but he revised the text before publishing it in 1826. It features a dwarfish obi (a sorcerer or witch-doctor) and includes a fanciful account of the syncretic process that created the religion later known as voodoo. Much of Hugo’s subsequent prose fiction, including Han d’Islande (1823; translated as Hans of Iceland), features a similar mixture of melodrama and political polemic, embodying an odd fascination with human deformity that would now be considered politically incorrect. The supernatural plays no explicit role in Hugo’s fiction, where the horrors are always naturalistic. Le Dernier jour d’un condamé à mort (1829; translated as The Last Day of a Condemned Man) obtained him a reputation as a pillar of what Charles Nodier dubbed the “frenetic school” of French horror fiction (Hughes 2013, 107), while emphasizing the seriousness of his crusading purpose.
Hugo’s most famous novels, Notre-Dame de Paris—1482 and Les Misérables, retain an element of the frenetic but operate on a larger scale with far greater artistry. The former, especially in its characterization of the lustful cleric Claude Frollo and his remarkable protégé Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer, provided a significant archetype for the writers of popular newspaper serials who laid the foundations of modern popular fiction in the 1840s and 1850s; its imagery is prolifically echoed in the works of Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, and Paul Féval. The novel likewise influenced popular film, with The Hunchback of Notre Dame receiving several memorable cinematic treatments, including, especially, the silent 1923 version starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo and the lavish 1939 Hollywood production starring Charles Laughton.
Hugo’s superbly flamboyant melodrama L’Homme qui rit (1869; translated as The Man Who Laughs) recounts the bizarre adventures of Gwynplaine, the last victim of a child-mutilating comprachicos (or “child-buyer,” a term coined by Hugo to refer to those who, according to folkloric accounts, mutilated children in order to make them sellable as exotic specimens) before and after he comes into his legitimate inheritance as an English peer, having been saved from an early death by the vagabond philosopher Ursus and his pet wolf Homo. Gwynplaine’s particular mutilation—the cutting of his mouth into a perpetual grin—has been memorably portrayed in a number of films, most notably the 1928 American silent film The Man Who Laughs, directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni and starring Conrad Veidt. Hugo’s reach into the fantastic and speculative realms of international popular culture was further extended when Veidt’s portrayal of Gwynplaine later contributed to the inspiration behind Batman’s arch-nemesis, The Joker, “another mutilated, grinning character who defies the established order and demonstrates its weakness” (Heldenfels 2015, 98).
Brian Stableford
See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Féval, Paul; The Grotesque; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.
Further Reading
Brombert, Victor. 1984. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Heldenfels, Richard D. 2015. “More Than the Hood Was Red.” In The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime, edited by Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner, 94–108. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Houston, John Porter. 1974. Victor Hugo. Boston: Twayne.
Hughes, William. 2013. Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Lanham, MD; Toronto, Canada; and Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press.
HUYSMANS, J. K. (1848–1907)
Charles Marie Georges Huysmans was a nineteenth-century French author who wrote under the name Joris-Karl (J. K.) Huysmans, and whose Decadent and Symbolist writings were an important influence on horror fiction. His fierce blend of the antihuman, the antisocial, and the antirational, coupled with a hypnotic prose style that combines realist precision with strange flights of fancy, inspired not merely H. P. Lovecraft and his followers, but also Clark Ashton Smith, Thomas Ligotti, Poppy Z. Brite, and others. Huysmans’s fiction contains little supernaturalism, but is punctuated by compelling intervals of the horrible.
Huysmans’s career had three phases. In the first phase (1874–1884), he worked as a naturalist under the influence of Émile Zola. This effort enabled Huysmans to develop an astonishing mastery of description that he put to use subsequently when describing the bizarre, the repulsive, and the ineffable. In the second phase (1884–1891), which is of most relevance here, his novels embodied the concept of “supernatural realism,” where narrative precision is occasionally pushed into the realm of the eccentric when something hideous is described. In the final phase (1895–1907), Huysmans recounted his religious conversion.
Huysmans influenced horror fiction, first, with his sensibility. He seems to find something of the sublime in things that would normally evoke disgust. Second, Huysmans discarded linear plot development for a series of loosely connected set-pieces or tableaux. Instead of incidents, he made language itself—that is, the mood or atmosphere of the narrative—the central feature of his work.
The influential À Rebours (variously translated as Against the Grain or Against Nature, 1884) is the primary example of Decadent literature, in which the artificial is seen as superior to the natural world. The jaded des Esseintes secludes himself in the countryside and attempts to amuse himself with, among other things, grotesque flowers and plants, strange literature and art, and a “mouth organ” that dispenses “inner symphonies” of liqueurs. Some of the narrator’s flights of fancy, such as his wild imaginings regarding Gustave Moreau’s painting L’Apparition (1874), shade into the realm of horror.
In En Rade (variously translated as Becalmed, A Haven, or Stranded, 1887), Jacques Marles takes refuge from his Parisian creditors in a remote, run-down château. He finds the countryside disturbing, the local peasants offensive, and the house potentially haunted. Interspersed with the narrative are three dream sequences that include some of the most excitingly weird prose Huysmans wrote.
In Là-Bas (Down There or The Damned, 1891), the novelist Durtal undertakes biographical research on fourteenth-century satanist and child-murderer Gilles de Rais, and discovers that occult rites are still being practiced in Paris. Huysmans’s vivid description of a Black Mass is as hideous as anything in modern horror fiction.
Steven J. Mariconda
See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Brite, Poppy Z.; The Haunted House or Castle; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Smith, Clark Ashton; The Sublime; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition.
Further Reading
Antosh, Ruth B. 1986. Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J.-K. Huysmans. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Baldick, Robert. 1955. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cevasco, George A. 1980. J.-K. Huysmans: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Ridge, George Ross. 1968. Joris-Karl Huysmans. New York: Twayne.