JACKSON, SHIRLEY (1916–1965)
Best known for the 1948 short story “The Lottery” and the 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson was a prominent, albeit controversial writer during the 1950s and 1960s. Her legacy is largely as an author of horror and supernatural fiction, but Jackson’s oeuvre crossed genres, from the campus novel to children’s fiction to the domestic novel. She is considered to be the queen of Gothic literature in the twentieth century. With her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson raised four children, and the couple moved several times, most notably to North Bennington, Vermont, a town that offered inspiration for her writing. Though she died in 1965 at the relatively young age of forty-eight, she was prolific.
After briefly attending the University of Rochester, Jackson withdrew to take a year to write, before enrolling in Syracuse University, where she published her first short story, “Janice” (1938), and met Hyman, a relationship that proved to be instrumental in her career. Together, Hyman and Jackson founded a university literary magazine, Spectre. By the time her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in 1948, Jackson had long been immersed in the literary world and had published several stories; her first national story was the humorous “My Life with R. H. Macy” in a 1941 issue of the New Republic. The Road Through the Wall introduced readers to a theme that would become common in Jackson’s work: an isolated community that is hostile toward or unwilling to interact with outsiders. The novel tells the story of the citizens of Pepper Street, who are all fine, upstanding citizens in their own minds, but who refuse to socialize with those who do not fit their narrow view of the world.
The same year her first novel was published, Jackson’s most infamous story, “The Lottery,” was printed in The New Yorker. Like The Road Through the Wall, the story introduces a seemingly moral community, but one that annually engages in murder to appease a long-standing tradition. The story immediately struck a chord with readers, many of whom hated the violence of the story’s climax and wrote letters to the magazine, resulting in the largest amount of mail the publisher had ever received. Though “The Lottery” was widely criticized, the story also gave Jackson literary fame, and the story was first adapted to television in 1952. It would later inspire film adaptations. Though none of her other stories received as much attention as “The Lottery,” a few did garner critical attention, including “The Summer People” (1951) and “One Ordinary Day with Peanuts” (1956), both of which appeared in Best American Short Stories in the years they were published. Her 1961 short story “Louisa, Please Come Home,” a mystery involving the disappearance of a young woman the day before her sister’s wedding, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America.
“The Lottery” established Jackson as a writer of “weird fiction,” placing her in a long line of writers of the fantasy and horror genre. Jackson, though, defied categorization, as she was just as comfortable writing about her life at home as she was a grisly tale of murder. As a mother of four children and a homemaker, Jackson had a fountain of material, which she collected into essays for Good Housekeeping and a litany of other magazines, including Woman’s Day and Woman’s Home Companion, plus two domestic novels filled with sketches of her life as a wife and mother, often with a humorous tone: Life Among the Savages was published in 1952, and Raising Demons followed in 1957. Jackson’s musings are unflinchingly honest at times, which sets them apart from the stylized and overly optimistic domestic writings of the time.
As is fitting for a Gothic writer, Jackson was greatly interested in studying witchcraft and the occult, a subject she wrote about in 1956’s The Witchcraft of Salem Village, an account of the events surrounding the Salem witch trials written for children. Jackson would go on to pen more children’s stories, including a one-act play called The Bad Children (1959), which retold the fable of Hansel and Gretel, and two more books, 9 Magic Wishes (1963) and Famous Sally (1966).
It was Jackson’s novel Hangsaman, published in 1951, that established her career as a Gothic writer. On its surface it is a campus novel, telling the story of Natalie Waite as she attends her first year at a small liberal arts college that shares more than a passing resemblance to Bennington College, where Jackson’s husband had taught. But as the novel progresses, the plot becomes darker as Natalie, a Gothic heroine, is sexually assaulted by a family friend and eventually unravels. The novels that followed all contain elements of Gothic horror. The Bird’s Nest (1954) contains a heroine who, like Natalie in Hangsaman, has a tenuous grip on reality. The book tells the story of Elizabeth, who struggles with schizophrenia and multiple personalities after being molested by her mother’s lover. The novel is a prime example of Jackson’s interest in the field of psychology, which forms a recurring motif in her works. It was adapted into the 1957 film Lizzie, directed by Hugo Haas and starring Eleanor Parker. In The Sundial (1958), Jackson explored the idea of a Gothic mansion, this one run by the Halloran family, all of whom seem to be so removed from the outside world that they cannot be trusted to understand what is reality and what is fantasy.
The character of the outsider shunning the world in a Gothic castle is one that would become a favorite of Jackson’s. In 1959, Jackson published her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House. In telling the story of Hill House, a mansion that Jackson describes as having been “born bad” (Jackson 1984, 70), Jackson enters into a long tradition of haunted house tales, following in the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James. The novel inspired two films, 1963’s The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and considered a masterpiece in its own right, and the lesser 1999 film of the same title, directed by Jan de Bont. Hill House, a haunted house with its writing on the wall (in blood) and mysterious noises, is most likely the prototype for many haunted houses to come, from the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining to the Navidson family’s new home in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).
Though not a haunted house novel, Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which was named one of the “Ten Best Novels” of the year by Time magazine, continued her development of the Gothic. Like many of Jackson’s other novels, this one tells the story of a heroine who has become an outsider to society. Unlike a weaker or more innocent character such as Hangsaman’s Natalie or The Haunting of Hill House’s Eleanor, Merricat Blackwood maintains more control over her isolation in Blackwood Manor, and also, more significantly, over her older sister Constance. Merricat is protective of her sister, defending her against the antagonistic townspeople and a greedy relative, and making a home for the two of them, even as their family home is crumbling around them. The novel spawned several adaptations for the stage, the first in 1966 and another in 2010, as a musical for the Yale Repertory Theatre. Film adaptations have been rumored, though as of 2016, none have come to fruition.
The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle garnered more critical praise for Jackson than any of her other novels. Despite failing health, she continued to be a prolific writer, participating in conferences and lecturing at universities until her death on August 8, 1965, of heart failure.
Given Jackson’s quite varied authorial career, many critics find it difficult to categorize her as merely a “horror” writer, out of concern that the title does not accurately represent the breadth of her canon. Jackson does manage to instill a sense of horror in her readers, particularly as she shows them the violence that can lie just beneath the surface of everyday life. Her characters are often on the verge of a mental collapse, and her stories have a profound psychological depth for readers to plumb. Her landscapes tend to be Gothic in nature (i.e., large mansions with murderous pasts), and her heroines are almost always escaping a hostile outside world. Perhaps due to her success in the Gothic and horror fiction, Jackson’s legacy has been relegated to that genre, though late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century critics began to show a renewed interest in her work.
In 1988, Judy Oppenheimer published the first biography of Jackson, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. Many readers and critics questioned some of its claims that Jackson suffered from mental disease and possible childhood sexual abuse. Oppenheimer also makes the claim that Jackson’s study into the supernatural and occult went beyond a scholar’s interest, and that she believed in the existence of the supernatural. Many critics, however, take issue with this stance, asserting that Jackson probably held no such notion and citing the fact the characters in Jackson’s works who experience the supernatural are often struggling with differentiating the real world from the inner world of imagination. Some have argued that the question of whether or not Jackson herself believed in the supernatural overshadows her authorial legacy, though this is beginning to change. Jackson’s literary achievements continue into the twenty-first century, with her estate releasing previously unpublished works, including “Paranoia” (2013) and “The Man in the Woods” (2014), both of which appeared in The New Yorker. These stories, along with more of Jackson’s previously unseen works, were collected and published in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (2015), edited by two of Jackson’s adult children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt.
In some ways, the memory of Jackson herself has nearly eclipsed her writing, as readers are just as intrigued by Shirley Jackson the person as they are by Shirley Jackson the author. On June 27 (the same day the events of “The Lottery” take place), the town of North Bennington celebrates Shirley Jackson as one of their most illustrious citizens. Novelist Susan Scott Merrell wrote Jackson as a character in her 2015 psychological thriller Shirley: A Novel, which tells the tale of the disappearance of a young college student who attends the same university where Jackson’s husband teaches. The novel takes true events from Jackson’s life and the real disappearance of Paula Weldon (which also inspired Jackson’s Hangsaman and “The Missing Girl”) and interweaves them with a fictional mystery. In 2016, a new biography of Shirley Jackson, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, written by Ruth Franklin, was published, demonstrating that Jackson still captivates audiences even half a century after her death. In a further example of her enduring influence, the Shirley Jackson Award was established in 2007 to be given annually in recognition of superior achievement in long and short fiction in the genres of thriller (particularly psychological thrillers, as Jackson herself would have preferred), horror, and dark fantasy. The first Shirley Jackson Awards were presented at the 2007 Readercon conference in Burlington, Massachusetts.
Lisa Kröger
See also: The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; Shirley Jackson Awards; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Anderson, Melanie R., and Lisa Kröger, eds. 2016. Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences. New York: Routledge.
Franklin, Ruth. 2016. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: Liveright.
Friedman, Lenemaja. 1975. Shirley Jackson: A Biography. Boston: Twayne.
Hall, Joan Wylie. 1993. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. 2003. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Jackson, Shirley. [1959] 1984. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Penguin Books.
Jackson, Shirley. 2015. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. New York: Random House.
Miller, Laura. 2006. Introduction to The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, ix–xxii. New York: Penguin. http://lauramiller.typepad.com/lauramiller/shirley-jacksons-the-haunting-of-hill-house-an-introduction.html.
Murphy, Bernice M., ed. 2005. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Oppenheimer, Judy. 1988. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam.
JAMES, HENRY (1843–1916)
Henry James was an expatriate American writer who spent most of his adult life living in England and on the European continent. He was a prolific author of novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and travel writing, and was best known in his fiction writing for his sharp and incisive portraits of the psychological lives of his characters. James’s vast output includes eighteen stories, most written before the turn of the twentieth century, which his biographer, Leon Edel, collected as The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (1948). Charles L. Elkins, writing in Supernatural Fiction Writers, speculates that James may have been drawn to the tale of the supernatural because ghost stories were a very popular type of fiction in the Victorian era and James wanted to be successful financially as well as critically. His most famous ghost story is an undisputed classic of the form, the short novel The Turn of the Screw (1898).
Although James’s ghost stories are not traditional by most genre standards, some feature genuine ghostly presences. In “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), a woman who is set on marrying the widower of her dead sister rummages through a trunk of clothes that her sister forbade anyone but her daughter to have, and is found dead beside it, her face and brow bearing “the marks of ten hideous wounds from two vengeful ghostly hands.” “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891) literalizes the idea of the sins of the parents being visited upon the children when a mother is dismayed to see the ghost of a lover she once jilted pursuing her daughter, presumably to inflict misery upon her. In “The Real Right Thing” (1899), a journalist intent on writing the biography of a deceased writer with the cooperation of his widow changes his mind when the writer’s ghost appears to them both to dissuade them.
In a number of James’s stories, the ghosts and hauntings are more ambiguous. “The Ghostly Rental” (1876) concerns an elderly man, Captain Diamond, who is convinced that he sees the ghost of his dead daughter in the house where he disowned her for a past indiscretion. When his daughter later reveals to the narrator that she is alive and has been maintaining the charade of her death to punish her father, she is convinced that she sees his ghost in the house after he dies, although this may just be an expression of her own guilty feelings. In “Owen Wingrave” (1892), a young man who refuses to follow his family’s tradition of entering military service agrees to sleep in a room supposedly haunted by the ghost of a colonel ancestor who killed his own son in it in a fit of rage. When the room is entered the next day the young man is found dead. The protagonist of “The Jolly Corner” (1908) returns to his boyhood home in New York as part of his quest to discover how his life might have turned out had he not left thirty years before, and encounters what appears to be the alternate identity that he might have had. The Turn of the Screw has long been regarded a masterpiece of ambiguous supernaturalism. Its heroine, a newly hired governess at a country estate, is convinced that the two children she is supervising have fallen under the malignant influence of the ghosts of her employer’s ex-valet and her predecessor, although it is never clear whether the spectral figures she sees are real or projections of her own emotionally overwrought mind. The story was adapted memorably for the screen in 1961 as The Innocents.
Like the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, with whom James was friends, his ghost stories differ little from his more mainstream writing as regards the development of their characters and the insights provided for their motivations and behaviors. They are important examples of how the tale of the supernatural is just one of many possible approaches to fiction in a literary writer’s repertoire.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; The Turn of the Screw; Unreliable Narrator; Wharton, Edith; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.
Edel, Leon. 1970. “Introduction.” In Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, v–xiv. New York: Taplinger.
Elkins, Charles. 1982. “Henry James.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, Volume I: Fantasy and Horror, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 337–344. New York: Scribners.
James, Henry. 1996. “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” In American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, 103–120. New York: Penguin.
Lustig, T. J. 1994. Henry James and the Ghostly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tuttle, Lisa. 1988. “Henry James.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by Richard Bleiler, 298–301. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.
JAMES, M. R. (1862–1936)
Montague Rhodes “Monty” James was the youngest son of an evangelical Anglican divine (clergy). As indicated by his memoir’s title, Eton and King’s (1926), he attended Eton College, then King’s College at Cambridge University, and worked at those two institutions for most of his life as a medievalist, biblical scholar, translator, museum director, and administrator. However, James’s contemporary reputation rests not on a prolific academic output but on his occasional pastime as writer of about three dozen ghost stories, which some critics see as the apogee of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English ghost story tradition. He published relatively few of these stories in periodicals, and some, such as “After Dark in the Playing Fields” (1924) and “Rats” (1929), appeared in small Eton magazines.
James’s stories were often honed as oral tales to rapt fireside academic audiences on Christmas Eve nights or read at meetings of various literary societies. They often maintain informal, laconic, and understated tones appropriate to their original telling, glaze over plot details, and exhibit a flair for the minutiae of Edwardian academics’ lives. For example, “The Mezzotint” (1904) includes a side gag about academics golfing.
Many of James’s stories made their first print appearances in four thin collections of five to eight stories: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). A darkly humorous tale to scare Boy Scouts, Wailing Well (1928) first appeared as a chapbook. The nearly comprehensive The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931) appeared in his lifetime. S. T. Joshi’s two-volume The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (2005–2006) rounds up remaining early and fugitive stories as well as James’s limited but provocative theoretical writings on the form of the ghost story, mostly from prefaces to his own work or others’ collections.
James is best remembered for his first two collections, especially Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The enthusiasm of James’s illustrator friend James McBryde spurred James to assemble the collection. However, McBryde’s untimely death came after he produced only two illustrations each for “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” (1895) and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904). James refused to let any other illustrator finish the work. McBryde’s detailed rendering from a photograph of the interior of Saint Bertrand de Comminges Cathedral, the location of Canon Alberic’s haunted scrapbook, became the frontispiece for the collection’s first edition. McBryde models his drawing of the story’s academic protagonist on James himself, and that character, Dennistoun, is mentioned again by the narrator of “The Mezzotint” and establishes the type for subsequent James protagonists. Another of McBryde’s illustrations, the sheet-wrapped specter attacking in “Oh, Whistle,” is iconic and graces many subsequent covers of James’s work. As a tribute to his friend, James also oversaw the publication of The Story of a Troll-Hunt (1904), a fantasy story written and drawn by McBryde and based on his and James’s trip with a third friend to Jutland. Another James editorial project was the recovery and publication of often anonymous ghost stories from his favorite writer of the genre, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, in Madame Cowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923).
James appeared to hold some contempt for the occult detective fiction of contemporaries William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, but his work has overlays of detective fiction. He admired Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, referenced The Strand in “A School Story” (1911), and wrote an introduction (1926) to Le Fanu’s sensation novel Uncle Silas (1864). One might connect the Holmes cases’ emphases on clues and physical objects and use of them for titles to James’s practice. The vast majority of James’s stories are titled after objects and places, the sources of the haunting. The haunted art of “The Mezzotint” is the most self-reflexive example, a motif James returns to in “The Haunted Dolls’ House” (1923). Scholars dispute the interpretation of James’s title “The Malice of Inanimate Objects” (1933), but it aptly summarizes his oeuvre. More direct influences from detective fiction are present. Despite his contempt for Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838), James’s “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1904) owes much to the cryptography of Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843). Other stories like “The Rose Garden” (1911) and “Two Doctors” (1919) are highly elliptical and rely on the reader to make inferences from their sparse details.
Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2017) contrasts two categories of horror that many James stories straddle. James’s playful, understated ghost stories might seem inimical to the cosmic bombast often associated with Weird Tales writing. As Joshi points out, James slyly criticizes weird writers in print, and in letters rails against H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and others. But Lovecraft admires James, and not just for their shared disinterest in plots (Joshi 1990, 141–42). Lovecraft singles out the grotesque, bestial, and tactile qualities of James’s ghosts, which can suggest weird writers’ fascination with viscera, sinister evolutions, and the nonhuman. One might think of the burned giant spiders and the witch’s black-haired skeleton revealed in the immolation of “The Ash-Tree” (1904) or the dried, cobwebbed baldness of the apparition in “The Tractate Middoth” (1911). As Joshi points out, many of James’s tales operate on a strident binary between the academic, reserved, bourgeois qualities of his English male protagonists and the bestial violence of his sometimes feminine specters. In “Count Magnus” (1904), an overinquisitive English academic foolishly thrice wishes to gaze upon a dead Satanist Swedish nobleman and finds himself pursued back to England and to a grisly end by two mysterious cloaked figures, the revenant count and his nonhuman familiar. For Lovecraft and China Miéville, this story is the apotheosis of James’s synthesis of the ghost story’s typical religious and folkloric overtones, as well as indirect style, with the weird tale’s characteristic madness and inexplicable otherness.
Robert Macfarlane intimately associates the mode of the eerie with James, both as a technique of slow-mounting dread and as a fascination with landscapes and what lies beneath: brutal histories of struggles for property and more overt supernatural intrusions. Macfarlane’s central example is James’s “A View from a Hill” (1925) as haunted binoculars reveal the ghosts of people and architecture of an English landscape. James’s post–World War I stories largely surrendered his occasional prior interest in French and Scandinavian settings, and James’s fiction turned to an English setting eerie with hidden landscapes and threatening yet never fully apprehensible history, such as “A Warning to the Curious” (1925). As Macfarlane traces it, this mode of James’s inflects contemporary trends in music, poetry, and painting. Most notably, one can see its role in the filmic subgenre of folk horror, which had a heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–1975), an annual television film series of James adaptations. This tradition has lately been revived in the films of Ben Wheatley, especially A Field in England (2013), and revivals of A Ghost Story for Christmas.
The most comprehensive collection of television film adaptations of James is the British Film Institute’s Ghost Stories for Christmas (2013), which includes twenty-one different adaptations of James’s stories along with adaptations of a few other ghost story writers, including Dickens and occasional James-imitator Ramsey Campbell. Many were broadcast on the BBC at Christmas. These adaptations range from eleven to fifty-two minutes in length and were made from 1968 to 2010. About half dramatize James’s narratives; the other half are single actors performing partially dramatized readings, including three done by Christopher Lee playing M. R. James himself. Both visual and audio adaptations of James proliferate far beyond that single British Film Institute (BFI) collection. One volunteer-based, public domain source of audio adaptations of James is the website LibriVox, which hosts recordings of James’s first three story collections as well as his only novel, the surreal children’s fantasy The Five Jars (1922).
Bob Hodges
See also: Campbell, Ramsey; “Casting the Runes”; The Haunted House or Castle; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Occult Detectives; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Occult Fiction; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction.
Further Reading
Briggs, Julia. 1977. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber.
Ghost Stories for Christmas: Expanded 6 Disc Collection. 2013. DVD. London: BFI.
Joshi, S. T. 2005–2006. Introductions to The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James. 2 vols. New York: Penguin.
Joshi, S. T. [1990] 2003. The Weird Tale. Maryland: Wildside Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2015. “The Eeriness of the English Countryside.” The Guardian, April 10. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane.
Miéville, China. 2011. “M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?” Weird Fiction Review, November 29. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/m-r-james-and-the-quantum-vampire-by-china-mieville. Originally published in Collapse IV (May 2008): 105–126.
Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press.
The Jewel of Seven Stars is Bram Stoker’s best-known novel after Dracula, and the only other of his works to have been adapted for the cinema. It was released in two very different versions in 1903 and 1912, the latter being significantly shorter, with a conventional romantic ending and a central, introspective chapter excised.
The novel opens in Edwardian London, where Abel Trelawny, a British Egyptologist, lies unconscious after having been mysteriously attacked during the night. The narrator, Malcolm Ross, is enamored of Margaret, Trelawny’s daughter, and joins the beleaguered household in their nightly vigils. Ross learns through Corbeck, another Egyptologist, that Trelawny has plundered the grave goods of the female pharaoh Tera, transporting her mummy, its detached seven-fingered hand, a mysterious ruby—the jewel of the title—a sealed coffer, and some ritually significant lamps to London. The attacks appear to have been perpetrated supernaturally by Tera’s mummified polydactyl cat, who acts as a sort of guardian both to the severed hand and the jewel. Having transported the whole assemblage to a cave in Cornwall, Trelawny attempts to revive the remarkably preserved mummy of Tera. In the first edition, a violent storm breaks into the chamber, disrupting what appears to be a successful revival of the body, and Ross, the sole survivor, is left to describe the horror that characterizes the fixed faces of his dead companions who have, clearly, witnessed something unspeakable. In the second edition, the mummy is destroyed without having been revived, nobody dies, and Ross and Margaret marry, the bride wearing Tera’s robe and jewelry.
The Jewel of Seven Stars is, in many ways, a quite conventional Gothic work. It has an ambivalent supernatural content, and there is a suggestion of the promethean overreacher in the characterization of Trelawny. The novel is, further, saturated with doppelgängers—Margaret resembles Tera; her polydactyl cat may be confused with its mummified counterpart; the dead are at times mistaken for the living. As in Dracula, there is a central group of professional, educated gentlemen, accompanied by an appendant and resourceful woman, to balance the supernatural revenant—though here they appear to be easing, rather than opposing, the undead’s access to British soil. The settings, both in urban London and rural Cornwall, are claustrophobic and sublime in their literally shadowed obscurity.
While The Jewel of Seven Stars superficially resembles Egyptological romances such as Conan Doyle’s “Lot no. 249” (1892), or Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), it is nonetheless an unusually thoughtful work. Tera’s resurrection is rendered through the language of science rather than occultism, and science is implicitly tested by the uncanny. “Powers—Old and New,” the cancelled chapter, likewise contemplates the existence of rival gods, thereby engendering a cosmological debate that the stridently Protestant author might well have deemed inappropriate for a second, popular edition. The Egyptological content of the novel is, incidentally, systematic and relatively accurate, being derived largely from the writings of the British Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge. Notable film adaptations include Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), which was the last entry in the Hammer Films mummy series, and The Awakening (1980), a big-budget (and slow, and ponderous, and critically reviled) production starring Charlton Heston.
William Hughes
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Mummies; Stoker, Bram; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950.
Further Reading
Bridges, Meilee D. 2008. “Tales from the Crypt: Bram Stoker and the Curse of the Egyptian Mummy.” Victorians Institute Journal 36, 137–165.
Hughes, William. 2000. Beyond Dracula: Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context. New York: Palgrave.
Stoker, Bram. [1903] 1996. The Jewel of Seven Stars. Annotated and edited by Clive Leatherdale. Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, UK: Desert Island Books.
JOHN SILENCE: PHYSICIAN EXTRAORDINARY
John Silence: Physician Extraordinary by Algernon Blackwood was one of the earliest and most influential books in the development of the occult detective genre. It was published in 1908 as a collection of five original stories. The character of Silence followed in the footsteps of Bram Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Martin Hesselius, and Heskith Pritchard’s Flaxman Low.
The stories were originally intended by Blackwood to be independent examinations of different occult topics, but the publisher, Eveleigh Nash, requested him to tie them together with a single character. Because Silence was added secondarily, he sometimes has only a nominal role. The publisher excluded a sixth story, “A Victim of Higher Space,” from the collection because he felt it was weaker than the others, but it was published in The Occult Review for December 1914 and has been added to recent reprints of the collection. It is far shorter than the others and lacks their mood and atmosphere.
Silence is an independently wealthy physician who only takes on cases that personally interest him, such as a haunting that causes a writer to lose his sense of humor in “A Psychical Invasion.” As in “Green Tea” by Le Fanu, it involves a patient made vulnerable to a haunting by ingesting a drug. It was inspired by a haunted house Blackwood knew of in Putney. Other cases involve a fire elemental from ancient Egypt in “Nemesis of Fire,” inspired by the home of an Egyptologist he knew, and a case of lycanthropy in “Camp of the Dog,” set on a Swedish island where he had once camped with a group. Silence makes only nominal appearances in “Ancient Sorceries,” in which he passively listens to a patient’s tale of witchcraft and cats in a remote French village, and in “Secret Worship,” in which he appears at the end to save someone from the spectral replay of a devil-worshipping cult in a southern German village.
The individual stories reflect Blackwood’s interests both as an occultist and as an outdoorsman. A member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an important occult and metaphysical organization at the turn of the twentieth century that numbered several prominent authors among its members, he believed in the supernatural and understood and treated his subject matter seriously. He also had a lifelong love of nature, which shows in his writings. The first five Silence stories were all set in locations Blackwood had visited, and they display his strength at creating atmosphere, a strength that also informed other, later works such as “The Wendigo” and “The Willows.”
The book was heavily promoted on its release, and its popularity established Blackwood’s name and reputation as a writer. It also paved the way for such later characters and series as William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, and on television, Kolchak the Night Stalker and The X-Files.
Lee Weinstein
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Carmilla; The Devil Rides Out; Dracula; “Green Tea”; Hodgson, William Hope; Occult Detectives; Quinn, Seabury; “The Willows.”
Further Reading
Ashley, Mike. 2001. Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Carroll & Graf.
Blackwood, Algernon. 1997. The Complete John Silence Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Fonseca, Tony. 2007. “The Psychic.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 409–439. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Joshi, S. T. 1990. “Algernon Blackwood: The Expansion of Consciousness.” In The Weird Tale, 87–132. Austin: University of Texas Press.
JOSHI, S. T. (1958–)
Sunand Tryambak Joshi is a leading American scholar, critic, and editor of horror fiction, in particular of the work of H. P. Lovecraft. Joshi was born in India and immigrated to the United States in 1963. Considered to be the greatest living authority on the genre, Joshi has written multiple critical surveys, published many collections of horror fiction both classic and contemporary, and edited multiple academic journals.
The first phase of Joshi’s career was devoted to researching and explicating Lovecraft’s work: he made comprehensive and landmark contributions in textual editing, literary criticism, biography, and bibliography. The capstone of this work was the authoritative two-volume biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), for which he won the World Fantasy Award, and the publication of three volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction under the prestigious Penguin imprint beginning in 1999.
Joshi’s work is characterized not merely by critical acumen but also by diligence and thoroughness. He seems not merely to study but to envelop an author—researching and consulting all primary and secondary sources, reading the entire body of the author’s work, and understanding the author’s intellectual milieu. He often seeks to apprehend how an author’s worldview is reflected in his or her fiction.
After writing several collections of comprehensive essay-reviews on the main writers in the genre, Joshi produced the only truly comprehensive survey of horror fiction yet published. In Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), Joshi evaluates both the famous and the obscure, from antiquity to the present, in 800 pages over two volumes. He concludes that the vast majority of horror fiction, like the vast majority of any genre fiction, is junk. Along the way Joshi does find a few gems amid the dross, and boosts such lesser lights as L. P. Hartley and Charles Beaumont. He also singles out a more thoughtful stream of contemporary authors—Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Thomas Ligotti—as contributors of effective work with significant depth and artistic finish. Some reviews of the book contended Joshi, who is an expert polemicist like his favorite, H. L. Mencken, was overly harsh in his criticisms, particularly of modern authors.
Joshi has edited numerous collections of horror fiction, many as editor of Dover Publications’ supernatural fiction line. He has been the editor of many literary journals devoted to horror, most recently The Lovecraft Annual: New Scholarship on H. P. Lovecraft (2007–present) and Studies in the Fantastic (2008–present). He continues to resurrect neglected horror tales and elevate individual authors and the genre as a whole.
Steven J. Mariconda
See also: Aickman, Robert; Beaumont, Charles; Campbell, Ramsey; Hartley, L. P.; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Klein, T. E. D.; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; World Fantasy Award; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Criticism; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror.
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 2014. 200 Books by S. T. Joshi: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2012. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2016. S. T. Joshi’s Web Site. Accessed July 4, 2016. http://stjoshi.org.
Graham William Joyce was a British author of speculative fiction that combined elements of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His novels and short stories relied upon an ambiguous perspective in which he allowed readers to decide for themselves whether something truly supernatural was taking place or the seemingly supernatural events were just manifestations of a character’s mental breakdown, angst, delusion, hysteria, or alcohol- or drug-induced hallucination. Joyce was of the opinion that there was little difference between what his characters believed and what was real.
The son of a coal miner, Joyce grew up in Keresley, an English coal-mining town near Coventry that was destroyed during the Blitz in World War II. His grandmother—the seventh child of a seventh child, fictionalized in Joyce’s The Facts of Life (2002), and the inspiration for Old Liz in his novel Dark Sister (1992)—had visions and uttered accurate prophecies laden with classic or modernized symbols. Joyce claimed that he also had uncanny experiences that inspired him when writing his novels.
After working at an odd assemblage of jobs during his twenties and early thirties, he turned from poetry (for which he won awards) to fiction. His first novel attracted some attention but was never published. In 1988, he married, quit his job with the National Association of Youth Clubs, and moved to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Crete, an experience that he fictionalized in The House of Lost Dreams (1993). During this year abroad, he completed Dreamside, which was published in England in 1991.
He believed stories require a strong sense of place because environment demands a certain response from readers. His novels alternated between being set in the English midlands, a region he felt was not represented in fiction very often, and exotic locales such as Jerusalem, Rome, Greece, and the south of France. Smoking Poppy (2001), about an electrician who travels to Thailand to rescue his daughter, is written with a thick regional accent.
His books were critically acclaimed in the United Kingdom, where he won four British Fantasy Awards and a World Fantasy Award for best novel between 1993 and 2003, but his work was initially deemed too British for American audiences. Eventually he found a publisher in the United States, where Requiem, his fourth novel, was chosen as his American debut in 1996. His novels explored such varied topics as lucid dreaming, spiritualism, mysticism, witchcraft, guilt’s power to twist the psyche, coming of age, the corrupting power of secrets in families, the perception of reality, demons—both personal and literal—ghosts, and fairies.
He was awarded a PhD from Nottingham Trent University, where he taught creative writing from 1996 onward. He published fourteen novels, four books for young adults, a nonfiction football memoir, and more than two dozen short stories. His short fiction appears in three collections, the last of which, 25 Years in the Word Mines, brought together the best of his previously published stories and appeared around the time of his death from cancer in 2014.
Bev Vincent
See also: Dark Fantasy; Devils and Demons; Dreams and Nightmares; Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; Witches and Witchcraft; World Fantasy Award; Part One, Horror through History, Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural.
Further Reading
“Ghost Writing” (interview with Graham Joyce). 2009. Locus 62, no. 4 (April): 6–7, 60–61.
“Graham Joyce.” 2014. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale.
Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Joyce, Graham 1954–.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. 2nd ed. vol. 1. Edited by Richard Bleiler, 503–508. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003.