MACHEN, ARTHUR (1863–1947)
Arthur Machen was a Welsh author whose work has exerted a dramatic influence on the horror and fantasy genres. Often referred to as a “lost” writer, he nevertheless wrote works such as “The Great God Pan” and The Three Impostors that have resonated through ensuing horror fiction, and Machen’s influence in that respect is evident throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He was regularly cited as an important benchmark by the coterie of writers associated with Weird Tales, particularly by H. P. Lovecraft. More recently, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, T. E. D. Klein, Mark Samuels, and numerous other horror writers have acknowledged Machen as having a profound impact on their writing and understanding of the genre. King, Klein, and Samuels have all written explicit homages to Machen. In the wider literary world, Machen has received plaudits from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry Miller, among many others. Film directors John Carpenter—who named a character Machen in The Fog (1980)—and Guillermo del Toro have also cited Machen as an important influence on their work, as especially evident in the latter’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Del Toro also provided the foreword for a Penguin Classics edition of Machen’s work, The White People and Other Weird Stories (2012).
Machen was born in Caerleon, a small town in south Wales on the river Usk. The isolated, wild countryside in which he grew up was to remain a persistent influence on his writing, and the fact that Caerleon was formerly a major Roman settlement shaped his childhood imagination. He was the son of a Church of England vicar, who at the time of Machen’s birth was in the process of impoverishing his family through his construction of an extravagant new rectory, which became the home in which Machen was raised. Not having the finances necessary to attend university, Machen instead made an unenthusiastic attempt to enroll in medical school, before deciding to relocate permanently to London with the intention of becoming a “man of letters.” He initially experienced only grinding poverty. After various engagements as a tutor, cataloguer, and translator, and the publication of a medieval pastiche, The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), Machen’s short stories began appearing in periodicals (then a burgeoning market), bringing him to the notice of Oscar Wilde, among others.
One of Machen’s “society” stories, “A Double Return” (1890), angered the readership of the St James’s Gazette to the extent that its editor declined to accept any more submissions from Machen. “The Lost Club” (1890), with its clear debt to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club (1878), marked the beginning of an influence that became one of the prevailing features of Machen’s output for the first half of the 1890s. Machen gained wide and fleeting attention from the reading public with his two books published for John Lane, an imprint very much associated with the controversial new “Decadent” movement: The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894) and The Three Impostors (1895). These exercises in weird horror were to be his most commercially successful achievements as an author, and they remain his most widely read works. Critical reaction to Machen’s uniquely potent blend of Stevenson, Poe, scientific horror, and pagan mystery was mixed and often negative. While H. G. Wells complained that Machen had “determined to be weird [and] horrible” (Wells 1896, 48), the art critic Harry Quilter less soberly accused Machen of being an agent of dangerous moral corruption. Machen was disparaged for being at once too graphic in his descriptions of hideous bodily degeneration and horrific tortures, and remiss in keeping the central mysteries of his stories nebulous and unresolved. However, this latter aspect of his writing has become increasingly valorized over the years, to the point where it is now regarded as one of his definitive stylistic achievements.
The scandal surrounding the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 resulted in “unhealthy” literature such as Machen’s becoming too controversial for publishers and readers alike. While the immediate effect of the trial on Machen’s career can be gauged by the fact that Machen referred to it henceforth as “the disaster,” a series of legacies from a Scottish branch of his family meant Machen felt no financial pressure to calibrate his writing to the new public mood. It was during this period (the second half of the 1890s) that he wrote what was to become one of his most celebrated contributions to the horror genre, “The White People,” although it was not published until 1904. Intent on changing course from Stevensonian horror, a seam he considered by then exhausted, he also produced what are regarded as his most unambiguously Decadent texts: The Hill of Dreams, a novel, and Ornaments in Jade, an anthology of prose poems. At odds with the post-Wilde trial reticence of the closing years of the 1890s, both works did not see print until years after they were written, The Hill of Dreams in 1907 and Ornaments in Jade in 1924.
After the death of his first wife, Amy Hogg, a distraught Machen temporarily abandoned writing fiction altogether. He also had a brief dalliance with the occult society the Order of the Golden Dawn, which attracted a variety of notable fin-de-siècle personalities including W. B. Yeats and the notorious Aleister Crowley. Machen’s temporary embroilment in the fractious internal politics of the group, characterized by claims of supernatural persecutions, resulted in or was contemporaneous with an episode that some have characterized as a nervous breakdown of sorts: the still-grieving Machen felt as though various extraordinary scenes from The Three Impostors were now being played out before him, with, for example, Yeats assuming the role of the novel’s “Young Man with Spectacles,” psychically threatened by Crowley’s “Dr. Lipsius.”
During a happier subsequent period as a “strolling player,” or rather a repertory actor in the Benson Company, often playing various Shakespearean supporting characters, he met Dorothy Purefoy Hudleston, who became his second wife. Settled back in London with a young family, Machen found work as a journalist, an occupation that offered him financial stability, but that he bitterly resented. With his signature Inverness cape and pipe he became something of a Fleet Street character, regaling younger colleagues with an apparently endless repertoire of anecdotes in his sonorous Welsh accent. He was frequently assigned to more outré stories commensurate with his interests. It was during this period that he saw his second period of fleeting notoriety and success. Throughout the First World War, he produced morale-boosting pieces for the Evening News, including in September 1914 one with the simple title of “The Bowmen.” It is presented as an account of a supernatural episode experienced by a retreating army unit, saved from extermination at the hands of the Germans by the appearance of ghostly Agincourt bowmen. The tale was taken by some readers at face value, and exaggerated and distorted versions of it spread across the country until it was popularly regarded as fact. Appalled, Machen made every effort to correct the misunderstanding, but the (by then) “Angels of Mons” legend clearly resonated intensely with the national mood, and gained such traction that it is still occasionally discussed as a genuine mystery to this day.
Most of Machen’s output during the Great War could be fairly classed as propaganda, and his nonfiction War and the Christian Faith (1918) is explicitly so. A notable exception is perhaps the wartime serial The Terror (1916), the story of a revolt of the animal kingdom in response to the imbalance to the natural order of things created by the unprecedented scale of the human conflict. Rarely singled out for critical praise, it is nevertheless a well-executed and exciting shocker, and the horrific set-pieces suggest that Machen could have become a very capable thriller writer should he have been so inclined. The Terror is also noteworthy as an antecedent to, and possible inspiration for, Daphne du Maurier’s story “The Birds,” the source material for Hitchcock’s celebrated film.
During the 1920s, and while he was still working as a journalist, Machen’s work experienced something of a renaissance in America. A number of American writers and critics, most notably Vincent Starrett, were recovering Machen’s earlier fiction from obscurity and positioning him as a great forgotten writer of the fin-de-siècle. Machen saw some immediate material benefit from their enthusiasm through revenue generated from U.S. reprints of his work. He was also at this time being enthusiastically discussed in the pages of Weird Tales—which reprinted “The Bowmen” in 1928—as a master of the form. Although it does not appear that Machen directly engaged with or was much aware of this pulp milieu, there is evidence that he read and thought highly of Lovecraft’s discussion of his work in Lovecraft’s influential survey Supernatural Horror in Literature. In 1916, Machen had, coincidentally, favorably reviewed Clark Ashton Smith’s poetry anthology The Star-Treader and Other Poems.
Although Machen’s output between the wars was prodigious in terms of his journalism, nonfiction, and memoirs, he only occasionally turned his hand to supernatural fiction. Much of his work in the genre at this time was the result of commissions from Lady Cynthia Asquith for the various highly regarded anthologies she edited and contributed to in that period. Collections such as The Ghost Book (1926) and Shudders (1929) saw Machen rubbing shoulders with the likes of D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, and L. P. Hartley, as well as fellow supernatural fiction specialists such as Algernon Blackwood. Some of this work was later anthologized in The Cosy Room and Other Stories (1936).
Two more substantial late efforts are The Green Round (1933) and The Children of the Pool (1936). The latter is a collection of original short stories that includes “The Bright Boy,” noteworthy for its use of the trope of a malevolent, aged dwarf masquerading as a child. Once again, Machen anticipates du Maurier, this time her similar conceit in Don’t Look Now (1971), and also the 2009 horror film Orphan. Associated with his interest in fairy lore (evident in his “The Novel of the Black Seal”), the association of child-like figures with malignant supernatural forces became increasingly oblique in his later writing. Examples include the cruel children in “Out of the Earth” (1915) who have wizened, repulsive faces, and the strange childlike entity persecuting the protagonist of The Green Round. M. John Harrison’s short story “The Incalling” (1983) and also his novel The Course of the Heart (1992) offer clear debts to Machen in this respect, acknowledged by the author.
Machen’s final—arguably underrated—novel The Green Round is usually dismissed as demonstrative of an aging writer’s failing powers. It is composed in the same journalistic, anecdotal style that distinguishes much of his later fiction and is off-putting to some commentators. The story ostensibly relates the convalescence of Hillyer, a reclusive scholar who at the age of fifty-five has developed a nervous condition, in the picturesque Welsh seaside town of Porth. He is baffled when the other residents at the hotel at which he resides turn against him, and rumors spread of his complicity in a local murder, based on his alleged association with a small, evil-looking dwarf. Hillyer returns to London plagued by poltergeist-like disruptions, and the novel’s potent atmosphere of disorienting paranoia intensifies. Although this is an accurate enough sketch in terms of plot fundamentals, it is perhaps misleading since in its execution Machen often interrupts the narrative with essayistic digressions on a range of matters including alchemy, religion, the nature of reality, and sanity and insanity.
Written, like The Green Round, when Machen was in his seventies, “N” was the only original contribution to The Cosy Room and Other Stories. This short story is a distillation of many ideas he had previously explored, but they are perhaps more perfectly expressed in this tale than in any other. Once again, the narrative is presented indirectly, anecdotally; it is an assembly of first-, second- and third-hand testimony regarding a recurring vision experienced by disparate visitors to a certain region of Stoke Newington in London. It is left up to the reader to piece together these strange fragments, tantalizing pieces of an unsolvable puzzle.
Apart from the works of specific horror interest mentioned above, Machen left a considerable wider legacy of both fiction and nonfiction, and three volumes of memoirs. Throughout the six- or seven-decade span of his writing career, Machen revisited certain tropes with something approaching monomania, although he steadily refined his treatment of the same material, moving generally away from horror toward something far more ambiguous and oblique. Ultimately, his central preoccupation was with what he considered to be the eternal mystery at the heart of all things. Despite his brief flirtation with the fin-de-siècle occult scene, and contrary to an erroneous assertion in his Times obituary of a deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, Machen remained a lifelong high church Anglican. Machen’s profound religiosity informed much of his fiction, especially its visionary aspects and his insistence on the existence of a numinous “reality” inaccessible to human consciousness, but indistinctly refracted through symbol and ritual. He regretted that in his early horror fiction of the 1890s he only managed to render this mystery as something evil, rather than awe-inspiring.
Although much of his later life was marked by periods of impoverishment and financial uncertainty, his dotage was eased considerably by the securement of a civil list pension, petitioned for by a number of other writers including George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Walter de la Mare. His eightieth birthday celebration was attended by, among other notables, W. W. Jacobs and Algernon Blackwood.
James Machin
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; The Ceremonies; du Maurier, Daphne; “The Great God Pan”; Lovecraft, H. P.; “The Novel of the Black Seal”; The Numinous; Samuels, Mark; “The White People.”
Further Reading
Arizuno, Lee. 2012. “Leave the Capitol: The Weird Tales of Arthur Machen.” The Quietus, October 31. http://thequietus.com/articles/08758-leave-the-capitol-the-weird-tales-of-arthur-machen.
Gawsworth, John. 2013. The Life of Arthur Machen. Leyburn: Tartarus.
Goldstone, Adrian, and Wesley Sweetser. 1965. A Bibliography of Arthur Machen. Austin: University of Texas.
Joshi, S. T. 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Reynolds, Aidan, and William Charlton. 1988. Arthur Machen. Oxford: Caermaen.
Valentine, Mark. 1995. Arthur Machen: A Short Account of His Life and Works. Bridgend: Seren.
Wells, H. G. 1896. Review of “The Three Impostors” by Arthur Machen. Saturday Review 81, no. 2098 (January 11): 48–49. In The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, vol. LXXXI. London.
“MACKINTOSH WILLY”
Written in 1977, British author Ramsey Campbell’s short story “Mackintosh Willy” first appeared in Charles L. Grant’s anthology Shadows 2 in 1979, before publication in the collections Dark Companions (1982), Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell (1987), and Alone with the Horrors (1993). It won a World Fantasy Award in 1980, has been translated into multiple languages, and is one of the author’s most anthologized works.
The shambling, mumbling drunk dubbed Mackintosh Willy presents a vague threat to the neighborhood children, but most simply shun him when not teasing each other about the local bogeyman—most, if not all, because someone hated the tramp enough to destroy his eyes as he lay dead in a park shelter. As the years go by, something with a metallic glint to its eyes forms in the shadows of that shelter, increasing in strength and malevolence as it draws its prey to a reckoning.
If the trash-strewn park shelter beside a pool was far from welcoming, its walls not only defaced by graffiti but offering little protection from the rain, its occupancy by a belligerent drunkard made it a place shunned by children and subject to dares by adolescents, even after the derelict’s death. Years afterward, the same fear that drove someone to screw bottle caps into the corpse’s eyes continued to lend its aura to his former residence, imbuing it with sonic, visual, and tactile evidence of his vengeful, waiting presence.
Throughout the story, a fluid and constant tension blurs the lines between innocence and guilt, reality and imagination, which Campbell deftly channels through the eyes of a narrator suffering through the petty rituals that circumscribe how those growing through childhood into adolescence allow themselves to deal with fear, friendship, loyalty, responsibility, and the attractions of the opposite sex. He builds the narrow “loophole for a natural explanation” recommended by M. R. James (James 2001, 486) directly into the uncertainty and wariness of ridicule natural to children interacting with each other and adults. Thus, the words of strange import overheard in and around the shelter might be fragments of sounds from the radio, the fair, or other outside forces; that heavy sodden body might have been rubbish after all; and it could have been the wind that drove those glittering bottle caps forward like glaring eyes. Meanwhile, the doomed friend has no choice but to face his nemesis, driven not only by misdirection from the ghost, but the goading and embarrassment visited upon him by his friends.
Imagination and guilt play out simultaneously during a necking scene within the shelter, when the narrator takes delight in his girlfriend’s sudden fear of the place by indulging his own dread, leading to a statement—“I was eager to let my imagination flourish, for it was better than reading a ghost story”—which casts light on a passage at the beginning: “One has to call one’s fears something, if only to gain the illusion of control. Still, sometimes I wonder how much of his monstrousness we created. Wondering helps me not to ponder my responsibility for what happened” (Campbell 1982, 233, 224). The protagonist certainly did not create the ghost, as the graphically violent graffiti and the increasingly shallow, limping tracks in the drying concrete leading from the shelter had appeared prior to this scene; but it is possible he believes himself responsible for assisting in its further incarnation, given his girlfriend’s escalating terror within and the widening of Willy’s activity outside the shelter afterward.
Some of the elements in the story reveal Campbell to be cognizant of the tradition in which he was working, while reshaping it to fit his own concerns. The pair of gleaming bottle caps illuminating Willy’s eyes are reminiscent of the “two small circular reflections, as it seemed to me of a reddish light” that signal the first appearance of the demonic monkey in Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” ([1869] 2002, 77). Similarly, the blurred voice that sounds as if it is emerging through interference on the radio is not dissimilar to “those soft husky mutterings one hears between items on the radio” in H. R. Wakefield’s “Old Man’s Beard” ([1929] 1996, 14), and the final image of the protagonist fearing to cover his eyes for fear of straying into the pool echoes the peril of the child running toward the river in terror of the ghosts in Wakefield’s “The Red Lodge” (1928). In Campbell these occur in a recognizable location in his native Liverpool and are surrounded by a network of finely graded premonitions and disclosures, which strengthens the reality of the gritty urban setting and characters while infusing the whole with a creeping sense of unease. Campbell manages this through dialogue that is precise, yet natural and prose that, to quote from his story “The Trick” (1976), shows him “relishing each separate word” (1982, 153) while never calling attention away from the tale itself.
Jim Rockhill
See also: Campbell, Ramsey; James, M. R.; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Wakefield, H. R.; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Campbell, Ramsey. 1982. Dark Companions. Glasgow: Fontana.
Campbell, Ramsey, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and S. T. Joshi. 1995. The Core of Ramsey Campbell: A Bibliography and Reader’s Guide. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.
James, M. R. [1924] 2001. “Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. In A Pleasing Terror, 486–490. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2001. Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. [1869] 2002. “Green Tea.” In The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861–70, 65–88. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.
Sullivan, Jack. 1982. “No Light Ahead.” Whispers 4, no. 3/4: 34–41.
Wakefield, H. R. [1929] 1996. “Old Man’s Beard.” In Old Man’s Beard, 3–20. Ashcroft: Ash-Tree Press.
MAD SCIENTIST
The figure of the “mad scientist” is one of the most recognizable archetypes in horror literature and film, highlighting a connection between specialized knowledge and sinister acts of godlike creation and Promethean arrogance. While the legendary Faust and other medieval alchemists are the likely historical sources of this icon, its modern incarnation owes everything to the figure of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s celebrated 1818 Gothic novel. Frankenstein established the basic lineaments of the mad scientist, which subsequent texts would deploy and develop: a Promethean artificer whose intellectual ambitions scorn traditional morality and challenge the prerogatives of God himself. In mad scientist narratives, science fiction shades into horror: Victor’s bold commitment to unfettered experimentation makes him capable of both wondrous accomplishment—the creation of an artificial person endowed with superhuman strength and intelligence—and blinkered amorality.
During the nineteenth century, most major writers of fantastic literature essayed some version of this myth. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), a secretive botanist turns his own child into a kind of poisonous plant; in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a mild-mannered chemist invents a potion that unleashes his demonic id (the monstrous, rapacious underside of the psyche as characterized in Freudian psychology); in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), the eponymous vivisector (that is, someone who performs surgical experiments on living animals) creates a race of twisted human-animal hybrids. Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, Wells’s novel points up the ethical limitations of experimental science: Moreau’s brilliance can mold a beast into a human semblance, but it cannot endow the result with virtue or a functioning conscience—thus suggesting a fundamental ambivalence regarding the processes and products of scientific inquiry.
During the twentieth century, the figure of the mad scientist flourished in the pulp magazines, in stories such as H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” (1922), an overt echo of Frankenstein in which the title character revivifies a corpse, and Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931), wherein a crazed inventor accelerates evolution with catastrophic results. The archetype found its most enduring representation, however, in the cinema, especially in the many adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein that followed in the wake of James Whale’s 1931 classic. These stories bequeathed to contemporary popular culture an enduring myth of science as an epochal threat to humanity and a source of moral corruption. In Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), mad science even leads to the extermination of the human race in a global spasm of thermonuclear violence.
The mad scientist has now become something of a cliché in the genre, parodied and pastiched in scores of stories, films, comic books, and video games. The most culturally visible mad scientist of recent years is probably Sir John Hammond, creator of the out-of-control dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park film series (1993–2015), yet another avatar of Frankenstein.
Rob Latham
See also: Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Invisible Man; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Shelley, Mary; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Wells, H. G.
Further Reading
Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Haynes, Roslynn D. 1994. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kirby, David A. 2011. Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Skal, David J. 1998. Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. New York: Norton.
MALPERTUIS
Malpertuis is a novel by Belgian writer Jean Ray (1887–1964), first published in French in 1943. The first English translation appeared in 1998. Malpertuis is an example of a latter-day Gothic romance, employing frame narratives (i.e., stories within stories), set in and around a sinister old house filled with dark secrets, and centered on a doomed love affair. These story elements are employed without any regard for conventional realism, creating a dreamlike narrative that resembles the works of Hoffmann or Horace Walpole’s short stories.
Jean-Jacques Grandsire is the young protagonist of the main story. According to the terms of a will left behind by a mysterious ancestor, Quentin Cassave, it is necessary for Grandsire to take up residence in Cassave’s ancient mansion, named Malpertuis, in order to claim his inheritance. The mansion is home to a number of other beneficiaries and retainers as well, including a beautiful woman named Euryale. The house has an otherworldly atmosphere, and the others who live there are, for the most part, highly eccentric or even mad. One man, Lampernisse, is preoccupied with ensuring that the lights never go out. There are three sisters, a servant who can spit fire, and a beautiful young man with an enchanting singing voice, among others.
In time, Grandsire will determine the truth—that Quentin Cassave retrieved what remained of the gods and mythological figures of ancient Greece and brought them back to Belgium with him. They live cooped up in Malptertuis, disguised as more or less ordinary people. Lampernisse is Prometheus. The three sisters, including one with whom Grandsire has a brief affair, are the Furies. The old man named Eisengott is Zeus himself, and hence able to retain a greater degree of independence from Malpertuis. Grandsire’s unknown mother may have been a supernatural being as well. Euryale is the only character to appear under her true name; a sister of Medusa, one of the Gorgons, she never looks directly at Grandsire.
The other dimensions of the story recount Cassave’s discovery and capture of the gods on an island in the Mediterranean. In general, characters are able to tell only part of their stories before the novel switches to a new narrator or writer, so that the reader seems to piece together the overall story from fragmentary evidence.
The novel touches on many of Ray’s favorite themes, including the reenchantment of urban settings and the subversion of bourgeois ideas of reality, the operation in human life of impersonal destiny, secret identities, and the parallels between hermetic magic and art. Like much of Ray’s other work, Malpertuis favors the grotesque over the terrible. Ray’s preference for the bizarre reflects an ambiguity in desire, which is at once frightened by and attracted to what is out of the ordinary. The figure of the Gorgon, altered here in that it is being seen by her, rather than seeing her, that turns one to stone, might be taken to reflect Ray’s idea of the supernatural best.
Belgian director Harry Kuemel created a Flemish-language film adaptation of the novel, also called Malpertuis, in 1971. The film stars Orson Welles as Cassave, called “Cassavius” in the film. The novel was adapted for film by Jean Ferry, a French screenwriter who worked with internationally respected directors including Henri-Georges Clouzot and Louis Malle.
Michael Cisco
See also: Frame Story; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Ray, Jean; Walpole; Horace.
Further Reading
Monteiro, António. 2011. “Ghosts, Fear, and Parallel Worlds: The Supernatural Fiction of Jean Ray.” Weird Fiction Review, November 21. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/ghosts-fear-and-parallel-worlds-the-supernatural-fiction-of-jean-ray.
Thompson, David. 2002. “Auteur of Darkness.” Sight & Sound 12, no. 8: 16–18.
THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA
Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815), a Polish nobleman, lived an itinerant life combining adventure and scholarship before he committed suicide by (according to some accounts) shooting himself in the head with a silver bullet. The publication history of his one surviving novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, is a complex one. The original French manuscript is incomplete and some of the text has only survived in its translation into Potocki’s native Polish. It is possible that Potocki began work on it in the 1790s and only completed it in the year of his death, although various extracts had already been published in Russia and France before then. After the first complete Polish translation was made in 1847, the novel eventually saw print in French in 1989, before Penguin published Ian Maclean’s English translation in 1995.
Potocki claimed that The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was principally inspired by Ann Radcliffe’s seminal works in the Gothic genre. However, Potocki’s mind seems to have been too mercurial to follow Radcliffe’s template in any ordinary or straightforward fashion. Instead, he presents the reader with a dizzyingly complicated arrangement of tales within tales, all themselves bookended with an overriding frame story. The resulting Russian-doll structure results in characters being introduced within a story, who then relate a further story, in which yet another character begins relating his or her own story, and so on. The reader quickly becomes hopelessly yet joyously lost in the maze-like palimpsest of narratives.
At the outset of the novel, the ostensible romantic hero, Alphonse Van Worden, a soldier lost in the wild Andalusian countryside, is apparently seduced by two Muslim sisters before waking to find himself lying beside the gyrating corpses of two executed bandits. Realizing he has been tricked by their malevolent spirits, he flees, but then finds himself similarly ensnared in another of their illusions. Potocki reboots the narrative several times in this manner, disorienting not only Van Worden, but also the reader, who struggles to keep up with the constant elision of reality and fantasy. This destabilizing effect is maintained throughout the novel, which is by turns ludic and terrifying, erotic and grotesque, but usually maintains a distinctly sardonic undercurrent. Populating the novel are demons, bandits, knights, kabbalists, princesses, scholars, soldiers, and inquisitors. The Wandering Jew stalks its pages, appearing in several stories as well as relating his own.
The tortured (and often torturous) hazing and repeated disorientation of Van Worden, and some of the other protagonists, in the face of horrors and wonders of consistently unresolved ontological status (including hallucinations, dreams, antagonistic human manipulation and misdirection, and the genuinely supernatural) goes somewhat beyond Radcliffe’s rather more straightforward “explained supernatural.” Thematically The Manuscript Found in Saragossa explicitly engages with the Occidental encounter with the Orient, where Spain, with its imbrication of Christian and Islamic cultures, represents a sort of liminal imaginative space between these two mutually fascinated and suspicious cultures. It has been suggested that the novel’s complexity is the result of it being arranged according to an occult schema, possibly relating to the tarot deck. However, Potocki’s frequent articulation of rationalist, enlightenment discourse within the novel and the often satirical tone of his treatment of, for example, the Spanish inquisition and kabbalism, at least complicates the notion of the author as a committed occultist.
Admirers of the novel include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, and Italo Calvino, the latter of whom regarded Potocki’s work as an anticipation of Poe and used an excerpt to open his posthumously published 1998 anthology of nineteenth-century Fantastic Tales. The 1965 Polish film adaptation The Saragossa Manuscript, directed by Wojciech Has, is much admired by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. It successfully captures the quicksilver, expansive spirit of this unique novel, albeit in a necessarily truncated form.
James Machin
See also: Frame Story; Radcliffe, Ann; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Calvino, Italo. 2001. Fantastic Tales. London: Penguin.
Lachman, Gary. 2000. “The Mystical Count.” Fortean Times 140 (November). http://web.archive.org/web/20020811153132/http://forteantimes.com/articles/140_potocki.shtml.
Maclean, Ian. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki. London: Penguin.
MARTIN, GEORGE R. R. (1948–)
George R. R. Martin is best known to contemporary audiences as the author of the ongoing fantasy series of novels Song of Ice and Fire and the massively popular television show Game of Thrones based on the same. He began his professional career in 1971 as a writer of science fiction short stories, but he quickly established himself as an author of great flexibility, moving seemingly without effort between science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and with great understanding of how these genres differ from, overlap with, and complement each other. Aside from the five novels in his Song of Ice and Fire series (with more projected at the time of this writing), Martin has authored or co-authored six novels and edited or co-edited nearly three dozen science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies. His work has won him both critical acclaim and (mostly) commercial success, including four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Fevre Dream (1982) is Martin’s sole pure horror novel. An intensely readable and marvelously realized story of vampires and their human pawns and partners traversing the Mississippi River on ornate steamboats, the novel owes as much to its horror trappings as it does to the American historical novel. The Armageddon Rag, a thriller with supernatural underpinnings that seem forced at best, was published the following year. In his introduction to Martin’s short story retrospective Dreamsongs Volume I, Gardner Dozois points to the commercial failure of The Armageddon Rag as the reason Martin abandoned the horror genre to focus on scripting and producing for television, including the relaunch of a new Twilight Zone (1985–1987) series and the more successful Beauty and the Beast (1987–1990). To that point Martin’s published horror in short form included “Meathouse Man” (1976), Sandkings (1979), and “Nightflyers” (1980/1981). But Martin never completely left the horror field, and he continued to produce stories of high quality, such as “The Monkey Treatment” (1983), “The Pear-Shaped Man” (1987), and Skin Trade (1988).
Martin’s horror fiction is distinguished by his ability to effectively blend genres together to achieve a maximum of narrative effect. “Meathouse Man,” for example, relates through a mix of pre-cyberpunk imagery and body horror the story of a disaffected young male who is both sexually and socially frustrated, while “Nightflyers” reconceives the traditional haunted house story aboard a spaceship. Sandkings, too, belongs to this category of story. More traditional, yet no less powerful, stories like “The Pear-Shaped Man, wherein a female artist becomes obsessed with the odd loner who lives in the basement of her apartment complex, and “The Monkey Treatment,” in which an obese man seeks a new treatment for his eating disorder and discovers that the cure is far worse than the ailment, demonstrate Martin’s mastery of genre convention. The graphic novella Skin Trade shows the influence of splatterpunk, but remains distinctly Martin-ish in its telling of urban werewolves who are hunted by something far worse, and whose lead character, a middle-aged and out-of-shape reporter cum werewolf, undermines popular genre clichés.
As of this writing, George R. R. Martin’s energies seem focused on completing Song of Ice and Fire and on further developing the Game of Thrones franchise, and one can hardly fault him given its enormous commercial success. While elements of horror can be found throughout the cycle—the Night King and his White Walkers, for example—it seems readers will have to wait for a more focused example of the horror fiction that Martin has proven so capable of producing.
Javier A. Martinez
See also: Body Horror; Sandkings; Vampires.
Further Reading
“Author George R. R. Martin ‘Playing for Keeps.’” 2011. Weekend All Things Considered. NPR, July 17. http://info.nhpr.org/author-george-rr-martin-playing-keeps.
“George R. R. Martin.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.
Levy, Michael. 1996. “George R. R. Martin: Dreamer of Fantastic Worlds.” Publishers Weekly, 243: 70–71.
McMullen, E. C., Jr. 2003. “George R. R. Martin.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 667–672. New York: Thomson/Gale.
“THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH”
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” was first published in the May 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine under the title “The Masque of the Red Death: A Fantasy.” Allegorical in nature, the story is at once a deft rendering in Gothic horror fiction and a specimen of Poe’s comic art in the short story. Fearing what they view as a contagion, Prince Prospero and his followers seclude themselves in his palace, imagining that they can thus escape blood and time, twin strongholds in life. The tale dramatizes their folly, concluding with death’s overtaking the group in the form of a masked reveler who turns out not to be masked at all, but the actual personification of the plague they had feared. Poe’s use of the term “masque” derives in part from an early form of English drama in which each performer represented a psychological or moral state, and although the characters in Poe’s tale are revelers, they periodically register unease, betraying an awareness that they sense a futility in trying to control human realities of the body and of time, symbolized by the “Red Death,” designating blood, and a striking clock, designating time’s not standing still.
The chambers in Prospero’s weird palace are decorated with colors that some readers think represent the stages in life from youth to old age. The red and black chamber, with its dual colors representing life and death, reveals that no delusion of the revelers will allow escape from reality. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), from which in part Poe’s tale derives, the Prospero character must return to real life from his paradise island, and even there an unsettling reality intrudes in the person of Caliban. In “Masque” no such reprieve is offered: all the would-be escapees from life’s realities die, showing the futility of their endeavor.
Reading “Masque” is in part analogous to viewing the inside of a human head, with the characters in the tale representing the delusions of those who try to evade blood, time, and death—life’s absolutes. Some also perceive comic undercurrents in the tale, particularly with “Masque” being viewed as a comic takeoff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837 and 1842), which Poe reviewed, there implying that Hawthorne had plagiarized from him.
The story was adapted, rather loosely, by screenwriters Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell for an installment in director Roger Corman’s popular series of Edgar Allan Poe movies starring Vincent Price. Although the movie takes great liberties with Poe’s story and also incorporates aspects of another Poe story, “Hop-Frog” (1849), it is an enjoyable production that remains somewhat true to the spirit of “The Masque of the Red Death.” It was remade in 1989, with Corman producing and Larry Brand directing.
Benjamin F. Fisher
See also: Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Poe, Edgar Allan; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Shakespearean Horrors.
Further Reading
Fisher, Benjamin F. 2002. “Poe and the Gothic Tradition.” In The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, 72–91. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Regan, Robert. 1983. “Hawthorne’s ‘Plagiary’; Poe’s Duplicity.” In The Naiad Voice: Essays on Poe’s Satiric Hoaxing, edited by Dennis W. Eddings, 73–87. Port Washington, NY: Associated Faculty Press. Originally published in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1970, 25: 281–298.
Roppolo, Joseph. 1963. “Meaning and ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’” Tulane Studies in English 13: 59–69.
MATHESON, RICHARD (1926–2013)
Richard Burton Matheson was an American author of horror and science fiction whose work helped to shape the speculative fiction genres in the twentieth century. In the view of many critics and readers, Matheson captured the postmodern angst and existential predicaments that came to dominate the common person in the mid-to-late twentieth century better than his peers. Much of this was due to his anxieties and execution, where the hallmarks of his oeuvre included the intrusion of the extraordinary into daily life, a strong feeling (especially in his earlier output) of mistrust, and an all-inclusive desire to recognize the spiritual side of humankind (mostly in later works). Couple these characteristics with his footprint in mass media by way of an impressive career in film and television—in addition to his output in short fiction, novels, and song lyrics—and his import becomes clear upon even a cursory examination of his output.
He was born February 20, 1926, in Allendale, New Jersey, and was of Norwegian descent. Early on he found comfort in writing as a way to deal with the harsh realities of his alcoholic family life. After an honorable discharge from the Army during World War II, he obtained a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. He wrote his first novels while submitting to short story and pulp markets; a breakthrough happened with the publication of his dystopian vampire work, I Am Legend (1954).
Matheson’s follow-up book was another masterwork—The Shrinking Man (1956). In this novel, bleak notions about science, spiritualism, and humanity’s place in the universe—themes that Matheson would revisit in later works—bubbled up, with astonishing results. Making his way to Los Angeles, he was given the chance (at his insistence as a gambit to establish himself in film) to adapt the book into script format (The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957), thus demonstrating an additional ability: working in another medium. He was ahead of his peers in this respect, with the notable exception of his remarkable friend Charles Beaumont (The Intruder, 1959), and it was then that he and Beaumont were tapped by Rod Serling, by way of The Martian Chronicles (1950) author Ray Bradbury’s intervention, to write for The Twilight Zone. During this time, he was part of a collective of creators and friends—known later as “The Southern California Writer’s Group,” but internally simply referred to as “The Group”—which included not only Matheson and Beaumont, but also William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run, 1967), George Clayton Johnson (Ocean’s 11, 1959), John Tomerlin (Challenge the Wind, 1967), and by extension Bradbury, Robert Bloch (Psycho, 1959), and many others. By now, Matheson—in addition to being a successful novelist and writer for the screen—had also become a devoted husband and father.
Later, director Roger Corman would demonstrate similar vision as Serling by employing both Beaumont and Matheson to write his Poe series of films—House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and others. To this end, Matheson’s personal demons—paranoia, fear of insanity, dread of unintended scientific repercussions, the dangers of modernity—began to be addressed directly in his output. As his career accelerated, he turned away from short fiction to write more for film and television. Though working frequently for the likes of directors such as Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows, 1966–1971) and a young Steven Spielberg (Duel, 1971), he continued to produce novels. Several of his standout books center on the ideas and thematic possibilities of the importance of the magical and the transcendent power of love. His output began to touch on themes and concepts that his friends’ work did not.
Stylistically, a general lack of nostalgia (at least in his short work; a few of his novels have touched upon this emotion at length), yet cautious optimism and hope that there is more to the plight of humans, is another one of the things that separates Matheson’s writing from his contemporaries in the genres he explored: Western, horror, science fiction, mainstream literary, and forays into nonfiction. In spite of Matheson’s relatively modest literary output—he was never a consistent “best seller” or excessively prolific—he was nonetheless unusually important, even in his peer cohort. The reason for this most likely stems from Matheson’s treatment of his personal concerns, which, at their core, strike at the root of human failing, technophobia, and anomie in ways that none of his colleagues ever managed, including his eminent, aforementioned equals, such as Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, and even the esteemed Ray Bradbury. Surrounded by family, Matheson passed away peacefully in his home on June 23, 2013.
Jason V Brock
See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Nolan, William F.; Vampires.
Further Reading
Brock, Jason V. 2014. Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2002. “The Matheson Zone.” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 24 (June 17): 31–35. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20020617/28779-the-matheson-zone.html.
Pulliam, June M., and Anthony J. Fonseca. 2016. Richard Matheson’s Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
Wiater, Stanley, Matthew R. Bradley, and Paul Stuve, eds. 2009. The Twilight and Other Zones: The Dark Worlds of Richard Matheson. New York: Citadel Press Books.
MATURIN, CHARLES ROBERT (1782–1824)
Charles Robert Maturin was a writer of Gothic novels and plays, most famously Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). A Protestant clergyman, he was born and lived most of his life in Dublin. He was an eccentric, a dandy, and a charismatic preacher.
Maturin was born in Dublin on September 25, 1782, into a line of Protestant clergymen, descendants of Huguenots who fled France to escape Catholic persecution. As a young man Maturin attended Trinity College. He then took religious orders and, following his ordination, became a curate in Dublin. He lived with his parents, and in 1803 married singer and society beauty Henrietta Kingsbury.
Maturin began to write out of his own interest and self-published his first books. Not wishing to harm his chances of advancement in the priesthood, Maturin wrote his first three novels under a pseudonym. They were not well received, but they attracted the notice of Sir Walter Scott, and Maturin and he struck up a correspondence. Scott was very supportive of Maturin’s career and recommended his work to Lord Byron, who admired it.
A combination of factors—his Calvinism, the fact that he had offended a bishop, concern over the impiety of his fiction—meant Maturin was barred from clerical advancement. As he had to support his parents as well as his family, and his wages as a curate were small, he was forced to take on other jobs.
Then, in 1816, Maturin’s tragic play, Bertram, was an unexpected success on the London stage. Maturin was suddenly famous, and the play earned him about £1,000, a sum that enabled him to give up the teaching he was doing on top of his priestly duties and devote more time to writing. Despite its popularity, Bertram was critically decried in Britain, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge blasting it in his Biographia Literaria (1817), describing the opening of its fourth act “as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind” (Coleridge 2014, 398). However—and seemingly unsuspected by Maturin—internationally the play was not just popularly successful but critically acclaimed. It was performed in America, translated into French, used as the basis for operas in both France and Italy, and praised by the likes of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Further plays failed, however, so Maturin turned back to novel writing and, in 1820, published the work for which he is best known, Melmoth the Wanderer. Two other novels followed, but none of the three (Melmoth included) sold well or received many positive notices at the time.
Scott often, in his letters to Maturin, advised the Irishman to tone down his productions and introduce greater realism. Much about Maturin’s aesthetic sense can be deduced from looking at the differences between his and Scott’s approaches to writing as a career. Scott was developing a new tradition, a sober, plausible, and modern “historical romance,” a mode designed to appeal to contemporary readers. Maturin’s aim, by contrast, was to radicalize, to make more lurid and disturbing, the Gothic romance. Maturin was the archetype of the contrary horror writer who, out of step with public taste and frustrated by critical responses to his or her work, pushes more and more against the boundaries of decency. He aimed in his work at the intense, the sublime, the violent, the grotesque, and the comic, interweaving these moods to disconcerting effect.
Maturin died in penury and obscurity on October 20, 1824. In the 1890s, his literary reputation in Britain was revived, and Melmoth, which was translated into French in 1821, had a major influence on the Decadent and Surrealist movements.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: Byron, Lord; Frame Story; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. [1817] 2014. Biographia Literaria. Edited by Adam Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sage, Victor. 2000. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin, vii–xxix. London: Penguin.
MAUPASSANT, GUY DE (1850–1893)
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a French naturalist writer known for his virtuosic short stories, written between 1875 and 1891, including the remarkable “Le Horla” (1887), an early example of weird fiction that H. P. Lovecraft, in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), claims is “perhaps without a peer in its particular department” (Lovecraft 2012, 52). Indeed, Maupassant’s horror tales, which often consist of hallucinatory encounters with the numinous that decenter the self as a privileged site for differentiating between the real and the unreal, have had an immeasurable impact on writers of weird fiction and cosmic horror similarly interested in subverting the rational.
A student of Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant is perhaps best known for the rollicking “Boule de suif” (Ball of Fat, 1880), published in Emile Zola’s Soirées de Médan (Evenings at Médan), which brought him success as an author, and for the conte cruel (cynical tale of cruelty) “La Parure” (The Necklace, 1884), whose “twist” ending plays a cautionary role. Both stories explore French life in the nineteenth century with a spirit of playful mischievousness. Yet, as indicated by Arnold Kellett in the introduction to The Dark Side: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1989), there exists a “dark side” to the author’s oeuvre, including some thirty tales that investigate the sometimes quiet, sometimes cosmic horrors of the weird and the unknown. Most of these stories are collected in Kellett’s volume, which is the best introduction to Maupassant’s horror fiction, where the reader can observe the ways in which Maupassant was inspired by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism, the nineteenth-century French pioneer of neurology Jean-Martin Charcot’s lectures on hypnotism, the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Gothic stories, and the French writer Charles Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre works.
Maupassant’s horror tales, such as “Lui?” (tr. as The Terror; 1883), “La Nuit” (tr. as The Nightmare, 1887), and “Qui sait?” (Who Knows? 1890), straddle the line between the supernatural and realism, thereby allowing horror and terror to coexist in an atmosphere of uneasiness, often culminating in the narrator experiencing hallucinations, obsessions, and madness. Maupassant was fond of the frame story, frequently characterizing his narrators as persons of credible sanity whose encounters with the outré (the strange and unusual)—including doppelgängers, animate objects, and the undead—and whose subsequent devolutions into states of frenzy are rendered both believable and disturbing. Maupassant, who fought in the Franco-Prussian War, was equally interested in the notion of inhumanity, and he explored the horrors of war with a somber lucidity in stories such as “La Folle” (The Mad Woman, 1882), “Deux amis” (Two Friends, 1883), and “Le Père Milon” (Father Milon, 1883).
Maupassant lived a life of debauchery and, in his twenties, contracted syphilis, leading to the gradual dissolution of his physical and mental health. In 1892 he made a botched attempt at suicide and spent the remaining year of his life in an asylum, where he died at the young age of forty-two.
Sean Matharoo
See also: Doubles, Dopplegängers, and Split Selves; Dreams and Nightmares; Frame Story; The Haunted House or Castle; “The Horla”; The Numinous; Psychological Horror; Terror versus Horror.
Further Reading
Álvaro, L. C. 2005. “Hallucinations and Pathological Visual Perceptions in Maupassant’s Fantastical Short Stories—a Neurological Approach.” Journal of the History of Neurosciences 14 (2): 100–115.
Lerner, Michael G. 1975. Maupassant. New York: George Braziller.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Marvin, Frederic R. 1915. “Maupassant and Poe.” In ‘A Hideous Bit of Morbidity’: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 148–152. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
MCCAMMON, ROBERT R. (1952–)
Robert Rick McCammon is an American writer of horror and historical crime fiction who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s as a writer of best-selling paperback original novels. His work is distinguished by its optimistic portrayals of characters who draw on their greatest virtues as human beings to triumph over challenges, both supernatural and otherwise.
McCammon took a degree in journalism from the University of Alabama and was writing advertising copy for newspapers in Birmingham when his first novel, Baal, was published in 1978. The story of a child born of a rape committed by a demonic being who eventually grows into an antichrist-like figure with powers that threaten the world, it was the first of several novels in which McCammon tackled themes common in the then burgeoning horror market. Bethany’s Sin (1980), which garnered comparisons to Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1973), is a small-town horror novel in which a family discovers that the Connecticut town they have recently moved to is home to a fertility cult possessed by the spirits of bloodthirsty Amazons unleashed during an archaeological excavation. The Night Boat (1980) was somewhat ahead of the horror genre’s early twenty-first-century zombie craze with its account of a Nazi U-boat crew cursed by a voodoo priest to immortal existence as flesh-eating zombies. They Thirst (1981) proved to be McCammon’s breakout novel: set in Los Angeles where an apocalyptic vampire invasion is gradually unfolding, its large cast of characters and epic scale showed him attempting more ambitious plots.
McCammon’s next two novels were published as hardcovers. In Mystery Walk (1983), the struggle between human good and supernatural evil that serves as the foundation for many of his stories plays out in the relationship between two young men gifted with supernatural powers, one of whom uses his to heal the afflicted while the other uses his to further the campaign of his father, an evangelical Christian zealot. The premise of McCammon’s Southern Gothic novel Usher’s Passing (1984) is that the doomed family in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a historically real American family that has made its fortune as arms merchants. Rix Usher, a contemporary descendant, repudiates his family’s legacy, but finds that family obligations and his personal destiny as inheritor of a family business founded on a legacy of horrors are nearly impossible to escape.
Swan Song (1987) was another paperback original and the first of McCammon’s novels to make the New York Times best-seller list. It is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has devastated the planet and left the survivors, some of whom are endowed with supernatural powers, to reestablish civilization and resist the ironically named “Friend,” a shape-shifting monster trying to divide humanity against itself. McCammon’s next novel, Stinger (1988), has been likened to a science fiction B-movie with its account of a small Texas town whose feuding residents pull together to assist a benign extraterrestrial who is fleeing the titular intergalactic bounty hunter. Stinger anticipates McCammon’s The Border (2015), in which people from different, and often diametrically opposed, walks of life band together to assist a young man with an otherworldly pedigree who is the only possible salvation for an earth being decimated by opposing extraterrestrial armies that use it as their battleground. McCammon followed Stinger with The Wolf’s Hour (1989), which gives a novel twist to the traditional werewolf theme: Michael Gallatin, the novel’s werewolf, is a hero who fights for the Allied forces against the Nazis in World War II. Gallatin also serves as the protagonist in a handful of stories collected as The Hunter from the Woods (2015) and can be viewed as a prototype for Trevor Lawson, the benevolent vampire gunslinger in McCammon’s period novels I Travel By Night (2013) and Last Train from Perdition (2016), both set in the American South in the aftermath of the Civil War.
McCammon shifted to writing nonsupernatural suspense fiction with Mine (1990), a novel about the dark side of America’s counterculture in the 1960s, in which a former member of a radical underground front kidnaps the child of a privileged upper middle-class mother, setting off a cross-country chase that virtually radicalizes the mother in her determination to retrieve her child. Boy’s Life (1991) is a Bradburyesque evocation of its main character’s childhood in a small Southern town, one in which youthful imagination colors recollections of even the most dramatic events, infusing them with a fantastical quality. Like Swan Song and Mine, the novel won the Bram Stoker Award given by the Horror Writers Association for best novel. Gone South (1992) is yet another nonsupernatural novel concerning a fugitive on the run from bounty hunters whose pursuit through the Louisiana bayous bring him into contact with grotesques redolent of the fiction of Flannery O’Connor.
Ten years separate the publication of Gone South and Speaks the Nightbird (2002), during which McCammon, who was in disagreement with editors on the new direction he was taking in his work, unofficially retired from writing. Speaks the Nightbird is the first novel in a series that now includes The Queen of Bedlam (2007), Mister Slaughter (2010), The Providence Rider (2012), The River of Souls (2014), and Freedom of the Mask (2016), featuring Matthew Corbett, a “problem solver” (i.e., private detective) in prerevolutionary America whose adventures often verge on the macabre and occasionally suggest the supernatural through the superstitions and folk beliefs of their period characters. In this second act of his career, McCammon has alternated novels in his nonsupernatural series with supernatural fiction, including The Five (2011), in which a rock band’s stalking by an assassin proves to be supernaturally motivated. McCammon is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Blue World (1989), several of whose stories have been adapted for television, including “Nightcrawlers,” about a Vietnam veteran who brings the war home with him in the form of horrors that manifest from his dreams.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Bram Stoker Award; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Splatterpunk; Vampires; Werewolves; Zombies.
Further Reading
Bleiler, Richard, and Hunter Goatley. 2003. “Robert R. McCammon.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, vol. 2, edited by Richard Bleiler, 705–712. New York: Scribner’s.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1998. “Robert R(ick) McCammon.” In The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 398–399. Detroit. MI: St. James Press.
Staggs, Sam. 1991. “PW Interviews: Robert R. McCammon.” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 34 (August 2): 54–55.
Wiater, Stanley. 1990. “Robert R. McCammon.” In Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror, 145–153. New York: Avon.
MCDOWELL, MICHAEL (1950–1999)
Michael McEachern McDowell was an American screenwriter and novelist from Enterprise, Alabama. He is best known as the author of Blackwater, a six-part Southern Gothic serial novel, and for his work as a screenwriter, including two original scripts for Tim Burton and a Stephen King adaptation. King himself, in a much-quoted comment, once described McDowell as “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today” (Winter 1985, 177).
McDowell held degrees from Harvard (summa cum laude) and a PhD in English and American Literature from Brandeis, where his 1978 dissertation was titled American Attitudes toward Death, 1825–1865. While attempting six novels that failed to sell, he supported himself by working as a teacher, a theater critic, and a secretary at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
After seeing a trailer for The Omen while attending a showing of Barry Lyndon, he was inspired to work on a horror script of his own. He novelized his script as an exercise, resulting in his debut, The Amulet, published in 1979. He continued in the Southern Gothic vein for several subsequent novels, including Cold Moon over Babylon (1980), The Elementals (1981), and Blackwater (1983), which was published in six monthly installments. Michael E. Stamm has noted that in his Southern Gothic novels, McDowell was “noticeably influenced” by Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Southern novelist (Stamm 1988, 51).
Roughly half of McDowell’s approximately thirty novels, most published as paperback originals, appeared under his own name, while others were credited to various pseudonyms, including Mike McCray, Preston Macadam, and a pair of pen names used for his collaborations with Dennis Schuetz: Nathan Aldyne (four gay detective novels) and Axel Young. In addition to his horror novels, he wrote several historical novels, a trilogy of crime books, and a novelization for the movie Clue.
In the mid-1980s, McDowell received a phone call from the producers of the American anthology horror television series Tales from the Darkside inquiring after the rights to a story that was actually written by Michael P-Kube McDowell. He used the opportunity to send them a script and started writing for anthology television series, including Amazing Stories, Monsters, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as for two television specials. His feature film script of Beetlejuice (1988; based on a story co-written with Larry Wilson) followed, as well as scripts for High Spirits (1988), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), The Nightmare before Christmas (1993), and Thinner (1996), based on the Stephen King novel of the same name.
Following his discovery that he was HIV-positive in 1994, McDowell spent the last years of his life teaching classes on screenwriting at Boston and Tufts University. At the time of his death, he was working on treatments of a Beetlejuice sequel and a new version of The Nutcracker. After his death in 1999 from AIDS-related illness in Boston, Tabitha King, a personal friend, agreed to complete his final novel, Candles Burning, which was published in 2006.
McDowell’s “Death Collection” of bizarre curios, some of which date to the sixteenth century, including pictures of women modeling burial gowns, spirit photographs, funeral cards, hair wreaths, morticians’ supplies, crime scene photos, hanging and accident photos, and an infant-sized casket, is archived at Northwestern University.
Bev Vincent
See also: Dark Fantasy; King, Stephen; Welty, Eudora.
Further Reading
Cagle, Ryan. 2016. Cold Moon over McDowell: The Life and Works of Michael McDowell. Accessed August 11, 2016. http://coldmoonovermcdowell.blogspot.com.
Stamm, Michael E. 1988. “Michael McDowell and the Haunted South.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 51–62. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Wiater, Stanley. 1988. “Horror in Print: Michael McDowell.” Fangoria 40: 54–56.
Winter, Douglas E. 1982. “From Harvard to Horror” (interview with Michael McDowell). Fantasy Newsletter 5, no. 11 (December): 23–28.
Winter, Douglas E. 1985. Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror. New York: Berkley Books.
Now predominantly residing in New York, the British novelist Patrick McGrath is a writer of some standing in the field of Anglo-American letters and Gothic literature. Since his debut novel The Grotesque (1989), he has penned several critically acclaimed fictions that stage and interrogate the complexities of madness, obsession, psychiatry, and familial relationships. A number of McGrath’s novels have been read through critical lenses that are associated with Gothic studies, yet perhaps only a handful of his works—such as Spider (1990), his short story “The Smell” (1991), and his 2000 novel Martha Peake—are consistently Gothicized in their imagery, iconography, or narration. One of McGrath’s most exquisite skills as a writer lies in the tendency of his crafted prose to transform sustained and slow-burning terror into moments of devastating horror or revelation. His greatest influences are from the Gothic tradition, Edgar Allan Poe in particular, but he is also an avid reader of the haunting tales of Joseph Conrad, the passionate love affairs of D. H. Lawrence, and the aesthetically intense prose of John Hawkes.
A landmark critical study, Sue Zlosnik’s monograph Patrick McGrath (2011), makes the standout scholarly case for considering him as primarily a writer of modern Gothic fiction. For instance, Zlosnik suggests that even McGrath’s Asylum (1996), the narrative style of which is influenced by Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 modernist novel The Good Soldier, explores fundamentally Gothic concerns and themes; the book’s “narrative voice resists a Gothic tone,” but its “concerns are undeniably Gothic” as its thematics are “shaped around a powerful symbolic structure relating to boundaries” (Zlosnik 2011, 75). Indeed, Asylum is concerned thematically with the causes, limits, and contours of madness, betrayal, institutionalism, and sexual possession. Its setting in 1959 is particularly telling. The institutional practices critiqued in Asylum draw from Victorian principles of psychiatry that were soon to be revolutionized through the transformative legislation of the Mental Health Act in the United Kingdom. Of keen interest to those academics and scholars who work on the intersections between medical practices and literature, McGrath’s father—Dr. Pat McGrath Sr.—was the last medical superintendent of Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum (as it was then known), and McGrath the writer spent a good portion of his youth growing-up in a house just outside of the asylum’s grounds. The influence that these years have upon his writing is pronounced, and his fiction has been described as neuro-Gothic because of its fusion of Gothic atmosphere with medical matters.
McGrath’s modern novels continue to impress critics, and posterity may judge his collection of three stories, Ghost Town (2005), as one of the most nuanced and moving meditations upon post-9/11 New York. The work of this millennial McGrath is more recognizably American, and in recent years he has continued to gain a global, transnational readership. For instance, his Gothic novel Martha Peake won Italy’s Premio Flaiano Prize. Both Trauma (2008) and Constance (2013), his two most recent novels as of late 2016, produce devastating conclusions and revelations. McGrath’s intensity as a writer is undiminished.
Reflecting a renewed interest in his writing, McGrath, in collaboration with the University of Stirling in Scotland, has created an archive of his professional materials, one that includes books of automatic writing, several drafts of his novels, early promotional materials, adapted screenplays—including for David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002)—and a complete set of first editions of his works. The archive’s opening in January 2016 was marked by an international symposium that both celebrated McGrath’s work and was a testament to scholars’ continuing fascination with his neuro-Gothic writings.
Matt Foley
See also: The Grotesque.
Further Reading
McGrath, Patrick. 1997. “John Hawkes’ An Irish Eye.” BOMB Magazine 61 (Fall). http://bombmagazine.org/article/5188/john-hawkes-an-irish-eye.
McGrath, Patrick. 2012. “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor.” The Economist, September/October. https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/a-boys-own-broadmoor.
McRobert, Neil. 2011. “Patrick McGrath Interviewed by Neil McRobert.” The Gothic Imagination at University of Stirling, July 13. http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/patrick-mcgrath-interviewed-by-neil-mcrobert.
Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
MELMOTH THE WANDERER
In works of literary history, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale (1820) is often said to mark the end of the high Gothic as a genre. Its author, Charles Robert Maturin, was a Protestant clergyman from Dublin and a writer of novels and plays. Melmoth is one of the most macabre and bizarre of all Gothic novels from the period, with frequent grotesque scenes and a very complex narrative structure.
Maturin struggled for money and, in his preface to Melmoth, claims to have resorted regretfully to the Gothic romance in an attempt to find popularity with the public at a time when the Gothic was seeing a late resurgence. But given the exuberance and relish with which Melmoth is written, it seems likely Maturin was being disingenuous. In truth, he had an affinity for the Gothic and had been writing in the vein for some years. Impoverished though he was, it is doubtful that he would ever have considered compromising his vision to meet the public taste; he wished to outdo in extremity the Gothic tales of earlier writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.
Melmoth has a complex structure consisting of nested narratives. Through manuscript and eyewitness accounts that are tortuous and labyrinthine, the novel unfolds the story of the eponymous Wanderer’s Satanic bargain. Melmoth has pledged his soul to Satan in return for unnatural longevity, and he can only save himself if he is able to find someone willing to take his place. He attempts to corrupt those in great mortal suffering, but ultimately fails to do so. As allegory the novel is opaque and confused, but this only increases its imaginative power.
In Melmoth, Maturin brings together the poetics of Gothic extremity and the comic and skeptical tradition of Enlightenment satire. The effect of this is to make of the Gothic a critical mode. Melmoth is not a novel that, as most works of the high Gothic period do, confirms the status quo, but is instead one that mockingly and perversely questions it.
In light of this, it is ironic that most contemporary reviews of the novel were critical of Maturin’s use of what they viewed as a worn-out Gothic mode. They also criticized the novel’s perceived excesses, particularly as these were felt inappropriate given Maturin’s role as a clergyman. One reviewer, John Wilson Crocker, in the Quarterly Review of January 1821, even went so far as to accuse Maturin of nonsense, lack of veracity, blasphemy, brutality, and “dark, cold-blooded, pedantic obscenity” (Crocker 1821, 311). At the same time, many critics were led to acknowledge, however grudgingly, Maturin’s eloquence and skill. The reviewer in Blackwood’s Magazine of November 1820, after rebuking Maturin for “copying the worst faults of his predecessors and contemporaries, in the commonest works of fictitious writing,” claimed that “Maturin is gifted with a genius as fervently powerful as it is distinctly original” and called him “one of the most genuine masters of the dark romance” (Anonymous 1820, 161, 168).
In England Melmoth fell into obscurity after Maturin’s death in poverty in 1824. There were some attempts to revive his reputation in Ireland during the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1890s that the novel was reprinted, along with a memoir of Maturin for which Oscar Wilde and his mother, who was Maturin’s niece by marriage, provided some biographical insights. Later, when Wilde left Reading Gaol to head to Paris to die, he took on the name “Sebastian Melmoth” in melancholy tribute to his great-uncle’s creation.
But in France, where Maturin’s play Bertram (1816) had been a popular success in translation, Melmoth had a much more sympathetic reception. The novel was translated into French in 1821 and was hailed as a classic of the Romantic sublime. Honoré de Balzac praised it as one of the most important works of the Romantic Gothic, and even wrote a satire based on its central conceit. The poet Charles Baudelaire saw Maturin not as a Romantic, but as a modern whose work demonstrated the demonic perversity of modernity. The strange poetic novel The Songs of Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, contains clear allusions to Melmoth. And André Breton, founder of Surrealism, thought it the greatest of all Gothic novels. The reputation of this odd and initially overlooked novel has only continued to rise since.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Gothic Hero/Villain; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror); Surrealism.
Further Reading
Anon. 1820. “Review of Melmoth the Wanderer.” Blackwood’s Magazine VIII: 160–168. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030603925;view=1up;seq=9.
Crocker, John Wilson. 1821. “Melmoth, the Wanderer, by the Author of Bertram.” Quarterly Review XXIV: 303–311.
Sage, Victor. 2000. Introduction to Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin, vii–xxix. London: Penguin.
METCALFE, JOHN (1891–1965)
William John Metcalfe was an English writer who is best known for his macabre and supernatural horror stories. His best stories often present puzzles whose only solutions lead to additional puzzles accompanied by greater narrative unease.
His father, William Charles Metcalfe, was a successful writer of sea stories who imbued his son with a love of the sea. John Metcalfe matriculated at the University of London and received a degree in philosophy, taught in Paris, worked as a schoolmaster in London, and moved to the United States in 1928 to work as a barge captain in New York while writing. His early one-act play T’Strike (1921) uses English regional dialect to good effect to discuss the sociopolitical issues of his day, but although several stories in his first collection, The Smoking Leg, and Other Stories (1925) likewise use dialect, explicit discussions of politics are largely eschewed as Metcalfe concentrates on the horrors that can erupt from bizarre situations as well as exploring potentially horrific issues involving confusions of space and time. The titular story, first published in 1925, involves a cursed ruby implanted in a sailor’s leg; it smokes and emits flames and causes ships to sink, but removing it is not an easy affair. “The Bad Lands” (1920) details two men’s conviction that a remote house in the dunes and the surrounding countryside are the epitome of concentrated evil, though others see it as merely an old farmhouse; and “The Double Admiral,” generally considered one of Metcalfe’s best tales, takes another two men, one an admiral, on a journey to see a puzzling island in the distance, but they ultimately encounter themselves, and one of the admirals dies, to be replaced by the other, his doppelgänger.
Poorly chosen relationships and personality issues that resolve themselves horrifically are the subject of Arm’s-Length (1930), which contains no overt supernaturalism, but Judas, and Other Stories (1931) again offers superior supernatural horrors: “Mortmain,” set in the same areas as “The Double Admiral,” concerns a haunting, with ghostly ships and horrible carrion moths. Religion plays a role in “Mr. Meldrum’s Mania,” in which Mr. Meldrum gradually and inexplicably becomes the Egyptian deity Thoth, and religious faith is depicted in “Time-Fuse,” in which an elderly believer in spiritualism handles hot coals until her faith is destroyed, at which point she perishes horribly. “Funeral March of a Marionette” has grown dated and contains no supernatural horrors, but the central conceit—boys substitute a body for the effigy of Guy Fawkes—remains grotesquely effective. The titular boy in Brenner’s Boy (1932) may not have been a guest in Winter’s house, for his father insists that the boy is sick and never left home, but Winter’s wife and friends saw something, even if he does not appear in photographs.
Following the Second World War, Metcalfe was unable to find an English publisher for his third collection of horrific stories, and he submitted them to August Derleth’s Arkham House, but Derleth chose to publish only the longest, The Feasting Dead (1954). It is the story of a haunting, in which Colonel Hapgood’s son Denis, for a while a guest in France, becomes oddly connected with Raoul Privache, perhaps a gardener or a servant, who follows him upon his return to England. The development, which involves psychic vampirism, possession, and utterly reprehensible human behavior, is horrible and disturbing. Additional horrific stories by Metcalfe exist in collections, but there is no comprehensive collection of Metcalfe’s work readily available.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Arkham House; Derleth, August.
Dalby, Richard. 1985. “John Metcalfe.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 597–602. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2005. “Metcalfe, [William] John.” In Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, edited by S. T. Joshi, 802–803. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Metcalfe, John. 1998. Nightmare Jack and Other Stories, edited by Richard Dalby. Ashcroft, Canada: Ash-Tree Press.
Wilson, Neil. 2000. Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820–1950. Boston Spa and London: British Library.
MEYRINK, GUSTAV (1868–1932)
Born Gustav Meyer, the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink is best known for his supernatural fiction, most especially his novel The Golem (1914; first published in German as Der Golem). Other noteworthy works include Das gruene Gesicht (The Green Face) 1916), Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night) (1917), and Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (The Angel of the West Window) (1927).
Meyrink’s supernatural fiction is permeated by philosophical uncertainty about religious faith. According to Meyrink, when he was twenty-four his suicide attempt was interrupted by the sudden appearance beneath his door of a pamphlet about the afterlife. He attributed to this incident the beginning of his intense interest in the occult; from that age on, he was an avid student of Western hermetic traditions and Eastern religions. He co-founded a financial company in 1889, and in 1902 he was arrested on charges that he was committing fraud by spiritualistic means. Thereafter, Meyrink was compelled to publish fiction and translations in order to make ends meet.
In general, Meyrink’s fiction is characterized by a strong sense of place. Ordinary events are treated as only superficial indications of a more profound spiritual reality that is incomprehensible to unenlightened human beings. Very often, the narrator’s experiences form not so much a coherent narrative with a clear plotline as a gathering of seemingly unrelated events that, when scanned for occult significance, reveal telling coincidences and similarities. So the reader of Meyrink’s fiction undergoes a vicarious initiation into deeper mysteries, whose reality lies beyond the confines of the story or novel. In 2012 a high-profile collection of esoteric and spiritual literature, the Ritman Library in Amsterdam, also known as the Bibliotecha Philosophica Hermetica, held an exhibition devoted to Meyrink and his works.
Michael Cisco
See also: The Golem; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Occult Fiction.
Further Reading
Irwin, Robert. 1995. “Gustav Meyrink and His Golem.” In The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, translated by Mike Mitchell, 15–20. Monroe, OR: Dedalus.
Mitchell, Mike. 2008. Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink. UK: Dedalus.
van den Berg, Erik. 2012. “Profile: Gustav Meyrink.” Ritman Library/Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, December 17. http://www.ritmanlibrary.com/2012/12/chotverdori-aschubliv.
MIÉVILLE, CHINA (1972–)
China Miéville is an award-winning British writer whose work combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, and horror. Miéville studied social anthropology at Cambridge and earned a PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics. A Marxist, Miéville brings a critique of contemporary capitalism into most of his work. A prolific as well as successful writer, Miéville has produced ten novels, two novellas, three short story collections, three comic books, one illustrated children’s book, and three works of nonfiction.
Miéville sets his work in imaginary and often bleak or dystopic places. Three novels, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004), form the Bas-Lag Series and explore the imagined city of New Crobuzon, where magic and technology mix in a futuristic steampunk universe (steampunk being the popular science fiction subgenre that imagines an alternate history and/or future and/or postapocalyptic world where technological evolution has been centered in nineteenth-century industrial steam-powered technology instead of electrical and digital technology). Un Lun Dun (2008) is a young adult novel. Embassytown (2011) is a science fiction novel set on a different planet, and describes the interactions of human colonists and intelligent aliens. Miéville continued to explore imagined places in The City & The City (2009), where two cities share the same physical space, but citizens of each city are not permitted to acknowledge the existence of the other. Miéville sets a crime narrative in this world of denial and rejection that serves as a metaphor of contemporary urban life. He continued to mix narrative styles and genres in his later novels: Kraken (2010) is a mystery novel in which a preserved body of a giant squid disappears from the London Museum of Natural History, and members of the Church of Kraken Almighty, who believe that the giant squid is God, are suspected. In Railsea (2012), a young adult novel based, very loosely, on Moby Dick, the captain and crew of an undersea train hunt a gigantic mole.
Miéville calls his writing “weird fiction,” a genre of the fantastic that deliberately juxtaposes itself with the traditional high fantasy of such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis by focusing on disruptions of reality and a sense of strangeness and surrealism. He is also associated with the “new weird” movement, in which the boundaries of fantasy, science fiction, and horror are blurred in stories characterized by urban settings, body horror, subversive social criticism, and a metaphysical and/or existential sense of strangeness and unease. His manipulation of genres and creation of dark futures make him one of the most significant writers working in genre fiction today.
Miéville has received numerous awards for his work. Perdido Street Station won the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy awards. The Scar won the 2003 British Fantasy and Locus awards. Iron Council won the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke and Locus awards. Un Lun Dun won the 2008 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. The City & The City won the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. Miéville has been a guest of honor at numerous conventions and conferences, including Eastercon (the annual convention of the British Science Fiction Association) and the Society for the Fantastic in the Arts conference. In 2015 he became a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature.
Jim Holte
See also: New Weird; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Gordon, Joan. 2003. “Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville.” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 3: 355–373. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm.
“Gothic Politics: A Discussion with China Miéville.” 2008. Gothic Studies 10, no. 1: 61–70.
Williams, Mark. 2010. “Weird of Globalization: Esemplastic Power in the Short Fiction of China Miéville.” Irish Journal of Gothic Studies 8 (June 14). https://irishgothichorror.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/ijghsissue8.pdf.
THE MIND PARASITES
Often discussed as a work of science fiction, Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967) strays from a stereotypical understanding of vampires as haematophagic (blood eating), but is very much a vampire story of stolen human autonomy, of psycho-emotive parasitism. Part of the vanguard of modern American vampire fiction, it sits alongside generic dominants such as the suburban mass infection in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) and the solipsistic self-reflection in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976).
The central protagonist, archaeologist Professor Gilbert Austin, discovers that, in parallel with the growth of modern industrialism since the late eighteenth century, humans have been cultivated as food for Mind Parasites, “alien intelligences, whose aim is either to destroy the human race or enslave it” (Wilson 2005, 113). These intelligences are variously referred to as “energy vampires” (52), “vampire bats of the soul” (71), “Great Old Ones” (36), and “Tsathogguans” (8) (these last two overtly influenced by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos). The Mind Parasites has a horror pedigree born from a challenge to write a Lovecraftian tale issued by August Derleth, publisher and anthologist of Lovecraft’s works.
Prior to The Mind Parasites, Wilson wrote about the effects of social dislocation through discussion of literary, artistic, and cultural figures ranging from Dostoyevsky to Van Gogh and Albert Camus in The Outsider (1956), first in a series of seven nonfiction texts that, over the subsequent decade, demonstrated a New Existentialist philosophical curiosity that fed into his fiction. This reflection upon disarticulation is, in The Mind Parasites, intensified by an exploitation of contemporary pre–moon landing unknowns surrounding space travel and alien antagonists, which caught popular imagination in the 1950s and 1960s.
The manipulation of humanity by unknown aliens positions horror in The Mind Parasites as holistic: what affects mind affects body, and what affects one affects all, within a narrative informed by the ideas of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl (who established the field of phenomenology, focused on investigating the first-person viewpoint of conscious experience), and also the idea of the collective unconscious as elaborated by the twentieth-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Wilson thematically ranges across philosophy, psychology, academia, politics, and drug use, and yet his use of the human mind as a tangible space wherein terrible beasts dwell follows a straightforward overcoming-the-monster plot arc. These vampires channel humans toward a state of malleable pessimism: those who lack “the mental discipline to resist” (54) are a source of energy; those who challenge are destroyed. Unwilling to relinquish parasitic control, these aliens mount increasingly vicious attacks on the inner space of Austin and his fellow intellectual fighters, until their ultimate defeat. Wilson enhances this generic pastiche with Lovecraftian prose in which Austin apologizes for lacking erudition and resorting to conventional linguistic tropes employed in horror fiction, such as mental instability, slavery, grotesquerie, and glimpsed shadowy figures, in a bid to impress upon readers the concept that horror comes from a lack of foundation or meaning.
Jillian Wingfield
See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Derleth, August; I Am Legend; Interview with the Vampire; Vampires.
Further Reading
Lachman, Gary. 2016. Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. New York: Tarcher.
Tredell, Nicolas. 1982. “Arrows to the Farther Shore: The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone.” The Novels of Colin Wilson, 97–116. London and Totowa, NJ: Vision and Barnes & Noble.
Wilson, Colin. [1967] 2005. The Mind Parasites. Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish.
MISERY
Misery is a horror/thriller novel by the American novelist Stephen King. Published in 1987, it was the first winner of the Bram Stoker Award for best novel. Often considered King’s most autobiographical work, the novel centers on issues of authorship and the struggle for creative autonomy.
Misery is focused on two characters: the best-selling author Paul Sheldon and his obsessive fan Annie Wilkes. At the novel’s opening, Paul has recently completed the final volume in a series of Gothic romances that has made his name, but that he regards as a barrier to creative fulfillment. Having killed off his heroine, Misery Chastaine, Paul sets off on a celebratory cross-country drive in inclement weather. He is carrying the only extant copy of his manuscript. Along the way he crashes his car and is rescued by Annie, who, upon his waking, professes herself his “number-one fan.” Her ministrations, which initially seem benign, if odd, soon turn sinister once Annie reads Paul’s manuscript. She is enraged at Misery’s death and embarks on a regime of physical and psychological torture in order to coerce Paul into resurrecting her beloved character. The bulk of the novel concerns Paul’s attempts to survive Annie’s brutality while struggling with his own authorial anxieties.
Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her portrayal of Annie in Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of the novel. The film has become famous for the “hobbling” scene, in which Annie breaks Paul’s ankles with a sledgehammer. Despite the scene’s notoriety, it is actually toned down from the original, in which Annie amputates Paul’s foot with an axe. In recent years Misery has been adapted for the theater by William Goldman (who also wrote the screenplay for the film). In 2012 the play moved to Broadway, where the role of Paul was played by Bruce Willis.
Paul and Annie’s conflict is a microcosmic representation of the writing industry, where success breeds creative constraint and demanding fans reject deviation from type. Numerous critics have, therefore, associated the character of Paul with his creator. In the 1980s King was at the peak of his popularity as a horror writer. But in 1984 he had published The Eyes of the Dragon, a whimsical fantasy that stepped well outside of his usual fictional range. His fans’ hostile response to this novel is seen by some as the genesis for Misery, in which the physical entrapment within Annie’s cabin is a literal enactment of the confinement within genre boundaries that both Paul Sheldon and Stephen King experienced.
Together with The Dark Half (1989) and “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (1990), Misery forms a metafictional “trilogy” focusing on “writers and writing and that strange no-man’s land between what’s real and what’s make believe” (King 1990, 237). Despite his returning repeatedly to the figure of the writer in more recent years, Misery remains King’s most potent and sophisticated reflection on the craft.
Neil McRobert
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Frame Story; King, Stephen.
Further Reading
Berkenkamp, Lauri. 1992. “Reading, Writing and Interpreting: Stephen King’s Misery.” In The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape, edited by Tony Magistrale, 203–211. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
King, Stephen. 1990. Four Past Midnight. New York: Viking.
Magistrale, Anthony. 1989. “Art versus Madness in Stephen King’s Misery.” In The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn, and Csilla Bertha, 271–278. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
McRobert, Neil. 2013. “Figuring the Author in Modern Gothic Writing.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 297–308. New York: Routledge.
THE MONK
The Monk: A Romance largely shaped the course of the Gothic tradition in both the 1790s and subsequent decades, entering into conversation with its contemporaries and initiating new literary conversations. It is still considered to be one of the most shocking and graphic Gothic works. Written by the nineteen-year-old Matthew Gregory Lewis (known throughout his life as “Monk” Lewis), who claimed to have written it in ten weeks, it was published in five editions during his life, the first published anonymously in 1796. The second, published later in the same year, proudly bore his name and position as a member of Parliament (MP). Despite its popularity, it caused scandal for its graphic violence and sexual content, as well as its commentary on religion. Subsequent editions attempted to address these controversies, the fourth featuring the most evidence of self-censorship and, as a result, being the least interesting to scholars. All critical editions are based on the first edition.
The novel revolves around the young monk, Ambrosio, whose life of seclusion and asceticism fails to protect him from his own desires, incited when his faithful novice reveals him/herself to be a woman in disguise, Matilda. When she saves his life, he not only allows her to stay but to seduce him and guide him into a satanic pact to gain access to a more pure and innocent woman, Antonia. This constitutes the main plot but, like most Gothic novels of the period, it features several side plots. The second, and almost equally prominent, introduces Agnes, the sister of Antonia’s suitor, Lorenzo, and a nun within Ambrosio’s sister convent, who has been promised to religion by her family. When Ambrosio catches her with a note from her lover, Raymond (Lorenzo’s best friend), he discovers that she is pregnant and hands her over to the prioress, Mother St. Ursula, who punishes her by faking her death and entombing her alive within the catacombs.
It is easy to see how religion, sexuality, and gender stand out as prominent themes throughout the novel. Set in seventeenth-century Spain, Lewis’s text is safely distanced from his own time and place, but it was clearly influenced by the violence of the French Revolution, discussions of the slave trade, and attitudes toward homosexuality at the time. Further, it demonstrates the evils of Catholicism characteristic of the Gothic and features a series of both tyrannical and pure women, culminating in the shape-shifting Matilda. Ambrosio, embracing his pact with the devil, murders Antonia’s mother and fakes Antonia’s death in order to fully possess and rape her, an act that culminates in her death and his arrest by the Inquisition. When word of what Mother St. Ursula has done reaches the people of Madrid, the crowd riots and tramples her in one of the most graphic scenes in Romantic literature: an act of the people against oppression. Agnes is found clutching the corpse of her baby, and Ambrosio, facing death, allows Matilda to entice him once more to sell his soul, an act that initiates his death and ends the novel. A short list of further side plots includes folkloric figures like the wandering Jew and the bleeding nun, encounters with bandits, family tyrannies, and incest.
The Monk was both inspired by and inspired other forms of literature. Lewis drew heavily on shorter texts, many of which he translated and stitched together with his own graphic twist. He admitted to being strongly influenced by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the last of which is often discussed in opposition to Lewis’s novel as examples of female and male Gothic. Whereas Radcliffe’s novels feature scenes of terror and the explained supernatural, Lewis’s supernatural is real, and it leads to the graphic scenes of horror for which he is known. Radcliffe answered Lewis’s novel with another of her own, The Italian (1797). The Monk incited a series of adaptations in the form of dramas, pantomimes, poems, and chapbooks. But growing interest in Gothic literature by women has drawn attention to the prominent rewriting of The Monk: Zofloya (1806), by Charlotte Dacre, referred to by some scholars as the “female monk” for her open idealization of the author. Zofloya features the same level of graphic gender and sexual engagement, with the added shock of its female authorship. Despite harsh criticism from reviewers such as Coleridge, Lewis’s novel also inspired canonical writers, such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. It was, unsurprisingly, praised by the Marquis de Sade, who much preferred it over Radcliffe’s work.
Twenty-first-century readers and scholars hail The Monk for its establishment of bold transgressions within institutions and identities, offering critiques of justice, religion, family, and tyranny as well as extensive explorations of morality and desire that would become trademarks of the Gothic tradition. Its use of underground and closed-off spaces creates a rich multilayered and recognizable comment on the dangers of repression and the power of the return of the repressed. It thus offers a keen illustration of claustrophobia in terms of both space and social structures. A novel preoccupied with excess, it presents a villain who is himself victimized by not only the devil and his temptations but the unrealistic expectations of the institutions that hold him in multiple layers of incarceration, making him an unsettlingly easy character with whom to sympathize. The extent to which the social structures within the text have its villains, victims, and monsters allows the Gothic to juxtapose them with the supernatural, exposing pervasive and, as such, invisible sociopolitical injustices. Unnatural repression of desire creates a master/slave relationship that causes rather than prevents damaging perversity. That Lewis offers readers the same enjoyment of excess through his prose creates a tense and uneasy bond between the reader and the novel’s characters that would be replicated in subsequent Gothic works.
A renewed consideration of Gothic texts produced during the 1790s and their influences has brought The Monk into the twenty-first-century classroom, where its intertextuality has revealed its prominent place within the Romantic literary scene. The 2013 edition of the novel through Valancourt Press includes an introduction by Stephen King, which outlines the extent to which current writers are also indebted to the vociferously transgressive moves of Lewis’s first novel and its championship of horror.
Laura R. Kremmel
See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Terror versus Horror.
Further Reading
Brewer, William D. 2004. “Transgendering in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.” Gothic Studies 6, no. 2: 192–207.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory. [1796] 2004. The Monk: A Romance. Edited by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Ontario: Broadview Press.
Macdonald, D. L. 2000. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Miles, Robert. 2000. “Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.” In A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 41–57. Oxford: Blackwell.
“THE MONKEY’S PAW”
“The Monkey’s Paw” is a short story by W. W. Jacobs (William Wymark Jacobs, 1863–1943), first published in the September 1902 issue of Harper’s magazine and included in his collection Our Lady of the Barge that same year. Inspired by the tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp from The Arabian Nights, the story is about how people who interfere with fate do so to their sorrow. The theme is summed up in the epigram: Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it.
Sergeant-Major Morris, recently returned from India, visits the White family bearing the eponymous talisman, which he claims is cursed. It can grant three wishes, but greed clouds the holder’s head. Its previous owner used his third wish to ask for death. Mr. White rescues the mummified paw from the fire after Morris attempts to destroy it. The wish for £200 to clear their debts is satisfied when their son Herbert is mangled by a machine the next day. Their second wish is for Herbert to be alive again. Herbert returns that night and, although his appearance is not described, his mother’s actions in barricading the door against him indicate what a monster he must be. Mr. White’s third wish is for Herbert to be dead again.
Although “The Monkey’s Paw” is often cited as an example of great American literature, the author was born and lived in England all his life. The story is something of a departure for Jacobs, who wrote primarily humorous and satirical stories or seafaring tales. His early works were praised by the likes of Henry James, G. K. Chesterton, and Christopher Morley.
The story has had a pervasive influence on twentieth-century fiction and film, and it has been widely anthologized, including in literature textbooks widely used in American public schools. It was performed as a one-act play in 1907, has been filmed numerous times (as early as 1933), was adapted for an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965, and provided the inspiration for works as diverse as operas, rock music lyrics, Pet Sematary by Stephen King, and episodes of the TV programs The Monkees and The Simpsons.
Bev Vincent
See also: Dark Fantasy; Forbidden Knowledge or Power.
Further Reading
Chesterton, G. K. 1953. “W. W. Jacobs.” In A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers, edited by Dorothy Collins, 28–35. New York: Sheed and Ward.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1997. “An Overview of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’” In Short Stories for Students, vol. 2, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 146–159. Detroit, MI: Gale.
MONSTERS
Horror literature and film have a long and productive history of engaging with and using monsters. Much of the early horror narratives drew from mythologies, folklore, and theological tradition, though they were limited by the moral standards of the day, so explicit detail is often vague rather than concrete. Early examples include the appearance of Satan as in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806). The monster narrative as it would be recognized today draws from these mythic, religious, and folkloric influences, and synthesizes these with more modern cultural concerns. Some of the most influential and notable texts in this tradition emerged from British romanticism and, particularly, the summer at the Villa Diodati in 1816 that served as the point of origin for two highly influential monster texts. One is John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” which was published in 1819 and became one of the founding texts of modern vampire fiction, presenting the central monster as a romantic and aristocratic figure. The more famous text from 1818, and perhaps the most influential “monster” text in horror, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Shelley mixes theological and mythic narratives around the creation of humanity with new technological advances in science to create an extremely compelling new monster text. Both of these texts became extremely successful upon publication, spawning a host of theatrical adaptations throughout the 1800s.
The figure of the vampire with its mix of aristocratic hauteur, violence, and simmering eroticism became exceptionally popular throughout the nineteenth century. Key texts include James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s 1847 serial Varney the Vampire as well as Sheridan La Fanu’s Carmilla of 1871–1872. These texts solidified the tropes and expectations of the vampire monster, which would reach its high point with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.
As products of the cultural anxieties of their time, monsters have been subject to much critical attention as scholars trace their various contexts and analyze how this impacts the monsters of a particular era. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culturally shocked in the aftermath of Darwin’s research on human nature and experiencing cultural change and instability at home and abroad, show a deep preoccupation with degeneration and devolution. This finds expression in a wide range of texts, including Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1890), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). To become monstrous was to lose one’s humanity. In a world where Darwinian evolution had replaced the religious as the source of human subjectivity, a person could become animal or abhuman with terrifying ease. The cultural and social upheaval of the early twentieth century further exacerbated this tendency as exemplified through the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and his so-called Cthulhu Mythos, famously first presented in Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1928.
As the twentieth century developed, historical changes forced change upon the presentation of the monster. The Universal Studios horror films of the 1930s made pop-culture icons out of both Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula, with Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931) and Dracula (dir. Tod Browning, 1931) becoming wildly popular. The performances of both Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi in Dracula created an enduring image of what these monsters were supposed to be, a conception that endures to the present day. The decades that followed featured new monsters as horror responded to new cultural stimuli. The age of the atomic bomb gave rise to new expressions of fear in science fiction–influenced horrors such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Seigel, 1956; based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers), Gojira (dir. Ishirô Honda, 1954; known in the West as Godzilla), and The Blob (dir. Irvin Yeaworth, 1958).
As the Cold War ended and youth culture became increasingly important to cinema audiences, a new kind of monster was made: the slasher. Beginning with controversial films such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), the new monsters were murderous figures that preyed upon the young and the reckless. Notable examples in this genre include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Last House on the Left (dir. Wes Craven, 1972), and the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The slasher genre drew inspiration from director Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, often identified as the first slasher film, which was adapted from Robert Bloch’s 1960 novel of the same title. Both the novel and the film are centered on the character of Norman Bates, whose twisted psyche makes him a true human monster. Meanwhile, even as this new trend developed, the more traditional monster narratives that drew on religious or spiritual themes became increasingly derivative after the successes of both Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973), the former based on Ira Levin’s 1967 novel and the latter adapted by William Peter Blatty from his best-selling 1971 novel.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the horror monster as killer was increasingly replaced with the horror of the zombie. Thanks to the success of films such as George A. Romero’s Living Dead series (1968–2009) and novels such as Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006), the figure of the zombie has increasingly been seen as a metaphor for the state of subjectivity under late capitalism, articulating a range of fears around race, the spread of disease, and the rise of consumerism. Zombies have become part of modern pop-culture, with Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic books spawning a franchise that includes video games and a high-profile television show. Despite the notion that such monster texts may be considered “lowbrow,” the zombie has become ubiquitous, suggesting that now, more than ever, there is a desire to experience new monster narratives.
Jon Greenaway
See also: Bloch, Robert; Carmilla; Cthulhu Mythos; Dracula; The Exorcist; “The Great God Pan”; The Monk; Mummies; Psychological Horror; Rosemary’s Baby; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Vathek; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft; Zombies.
Further Reading
Asma, Stephen T. 2009. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hogle, Jerrold E. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skal, David J. 1994. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. London: Penguin Books.
While he has produced short stories, novels, poetry and other, more difficult to classify literary and performance pieces, English writer, occultist, and magician Alan Moore is best known for his work in comic books and graphic novels. Moore is among the most important comics writers of the last half-century, having exerted an incalculable influence not only over that medium, but also over Anglo-American popular culture broadly since the 1980s. Moore often works in, around, and through the horror genre, and his work was crucial to the turn toward darker themes and Gothic aesthetics that spread through the world of British and American comics in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of Moore’s fictions, both sequential art and literary, contain elements of supernatural horror.
Moore’s darkly toned work with British independent comics magazines Warrior and 2000 AD led to his assignment to work on DC’s then fairly formulaic monster-focused series, Saga of the Swamp Thing. Moore scripted it from 1983 to 1987 to tremendous acclaim, contributing to a renewed popular interest in horror comics that would lead DC to create their new mature-readers imprint, Vertigo, which would publish some of the most important horror and fantasy titles of the late 1980s and 1990s, including Swamp Thing spin-off Hellblazer and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Moore’s work on Swamp Thing drew on his interest in American Gothic literature and folklore, flirting with a “monster of the month” approach while creating more complex narrative arcs. It fused classical horror tropes and monsters including werewolves and vampires with psychedelic science fictional concepts reminiscent of some of Philip K. Dick’s darker moments and anticipatory of the approach taken by the 1990s TV series The X-Files. Moore would push his interest in complexly structured and maddeningly paranoid plots far further in the Victorian Gothic series From Hell (serialized 1989–1996, collected 1999), illustrated by Eddie Campbell. Combining horror and historical metafiction, this reimagining of the Jack the Ripper murders remains among the most ambitious graphic novels ever created, and was instrumental in the surge of popular interest in neo-Victorian Gothic fiction that continues to this day. It was adapted to film by the Hughes brothers in 2001.
Among Moore’s many influences, none has been more important to his horror-focused work than H. P. Lovecraft, and Moore has contributed much to the resurgence of interest that Lovecraft’s work experienced in the twenty-first century. Moore wrote many overtly Lovecraftian stories in the 1990s, some of which are now lost, but some of which are assembled in the collection Yuggoth Cultures (2003). He contributed a story titled “The Courtyard” to D. M. Mitchell’s collection The Starry Wisdom (1994), subsequently using it as the basis for his horror comic limited series Neonomicon (2010–2011, illustrated by Jacen Burrows). Most recently, Moore has continued to draw extensively on Lovecraft’s life and writings for the limited series Providence (2015–2016, also with Burrows).
Sean Moreland
See also: Dick, Philip K.; Gaiman, Neil; Lovecraft, H. P.
Further Reading
Di Liddo, Annalisa. 2009. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Green, Matthew J. A. 2013. Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Parkin, Lance. 2013. Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore. London: Arum Press.
MORRELL, DAVID (1943–)
David Morrell is an American novelist who is perhaps best known for creating the character of John Rambo in his 1972 novel First Blood. He has also made contributions to the horror genre. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, Morrell immigrated to the United States in 1966 to attend Penn State University. While there, he was mentored by the science fiction writer Philip Klass, a.k.a. William Tenn. Under Klass’s tutelage, Morrell followed the author’s advice to exploit his own fears. Inspired by what he labeled “a waking nightmare,” in which he was pursued through a forest by an unseen stalker, Morrell crafted his famous debut, First Blood, a seminal novel in the action/adventure/thriller genre.
Since 1972, Morrell has published numerous other novels and novelizations, among them Last Reveille (1977), Testament (1975), Blood Oath (1982), and the best-selling suspense novels The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), The Fraternity of the Stone (1985), The League of Night and Fog (1987), The Fifth Profession (1990), and The Covenant of the Flame (1991). Other works include the fantasy The Hundred Year Christmas (1983) and thrillers Assumed Identity (1993), Desperate Measures (1994), Extreme Denial (1996), Double Image (1998), Burnt Sienna (2000), The Protector (2003), Creepers (2005), Scavenger (2009), The Spy Who Came for Christmas (2008), The Shimmer (2009), The Naked Edge (2010), Murder as a Fine Art (2013), and Inspector of the Dead (2015). Fireflies, a touching fictional memoir of the death from cancer of his fifteen-year-old son Matthew, was published in 1988. Since 2007, Morrell has also scripted several stories for Marvel Comics, featuring such classic heroes as Captain America, Spider-Man, and Wolverine.
Although he often explores the horrific in his novels (set pieces and themes in many of his books, especially First Blood, Testament, and Creepers, provide telling examples), only The Totem (1979) and Long Lost (2002) can be counted as pure works of horror. Inspired by Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, The Totem had two incarnations, both effective explorations of the zombie/werewolf/vampire and small town horror themes. Published in 1979, the first, slighter version earned a glowing entry in Horror: 100 Best Books (1988); a “complete and unaltered” version was published by Donald M. Grant in 1994. Long Lost is a horror novel/ghost story that was never really recognized as such. Although Morrell leads with classic revenge and chase motifs, his narrative also includes metaphorical monsters, tombs, and even a haunted house.
Morrell has written some of the most effective short horror of the last several decades. His shorter work has appeared in many major horror anthologies, including the Whispers, Shadows, Night Visions, and Masters of Darkness series. A number of these shorter works are showcased in Black Evening (1994) and Nightscape (2004). Black Evening contains stories written from 1972 through 1992, featuring the Bram Stoker Award–winning novellas “The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves” and “Orange Is for Anguish, Blue Is for Insanity.” Nightscape includes many of Morrell’s stories written since 1992. The major difference between the two collections is that the majority of the stories in Black Evening deal with the supernatural, whereas those appearing in Nightscape tend to be more realistic, treating themes of obsession, determination, and individual identity.
Hank Wagner
See also: King, Stephen; Vampires; Werewolves.
Further Reading
“David Morrell.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.
Holt, Erika. 2014. “Author Spotlight: David Morrell.” Nightmare 26 (November). http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-david-morrell.
MORRISON, TONI (1931–)
Toni Morrison is one of the most recognized and influential American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and in her work, her concern with presenting the African American experience coexists with elements of the supernatural. In interviews, she has emphasized the importance of the relationship between the language of haunting and her explorations of race, gender, memory, and the past.
She was born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents, George and Ramah, were migrants from Southern states. She studied the classics and humanities at Howard University (BA) and Cornell (MA). Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She has since published ten additional novels. A shortened list of her numerous awards and accolades includes the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, the 1993 Nobel Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), and the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
Morrison has influenced numerous writers, students, and readers. While she was writing her first novel, she worked at Random House, where she edited manuscripts by African American writers such as Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, and Toni Cade Bambara. She taught at Howard University, Texas Southern, Yale, and is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.
Many critics note the influence of William Faulkner’s Southern Gothic on Morrison’s fiction and have suggested possible influences from magical realist writers. While Morrison has acknowledged these precursors, she emphasizes that her work is grounded in African American culture, history, and literary tradition. In her turn, she has influenced writers such as, to name a few, Gloria Naylor, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich to use fiction (often with a supernatural component) to bring attention to elided histories of women and ethnic groups.
She is best known for her masterwork, Beloved (1987), an unflinching gaze at the horrors of slavery through a ghost story. In her collection of lectures Playing in the Dark (1992), she describes the marginalized and ghostly position of African American characters in American literature by white writers. In her fiction, characters, and sometimes narrators, speak from beyond the grave; living characters who are oppressed and marginalized become liminal presences; and specters appear in the return of the repressed to haunt individuals who have forgotten or are avoiding a traumatic past. Several of Morrison’s novels include ghosts of the past, in particular Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), and Home (2012). Her play Desdemona (2011) gives Shakespeare’s character a voice from the space between life and death as she tries to understand the trajectory of her life and her relationships by engaging issues of race and gender not present in Othello.
Morrison remains active in the literary and academic communities. Her papers are archived at Princeton University Library.
Melanie R. Anderson
See also: Beloved; Faulkner, William.
Further Reading
Denard, Carolyn C., ed. 2008. Toni Morrison: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Taylor-Guthrie, Danille K., ed. 1994. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
MORROW, W. C. (1854–1932)
William Chambers Morrow was an American writer who wrote horror and science fiction that was popular in its day and has been compared at times to that of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and other classic American horror writers. In 2009 the Library of America chose to include Morrow’s 1889 story “His Unconquerable Enemy” in its two-volume retrospective anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, effectively canonizing it.
Born in 1854 (although his birthdate was variously given), and raised and educated in Alabama, Morrow moved to California in 1879 and began writing for the San Francisco Argonaut, attracting favorable attention from Ambrose Bierce, among others, before joining the staff of William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. His reputation as a horror writer exists largely because of The Ape, the Idiot & Other People (1897), a collection of fourteen stories including “His Unconquerable Enemy.” Other notable stories include “The Monster Maker” (first published as “The Surgeon’s Experiment” in 1887), “Over an Absinthe Bottle” (first published as “The Pale Dice-Thrower” in 1893), and “An Original Revenge.” The first, a work of proto–science fiction, describes a young man, determined to conclude his life, who pays a surgeon $5,000 to kill him; the surgeon has other plans, and these culminate in the discovery of a brainless apelike monster: money can make monsters out of men. The latter two are fantastic: the first is heavily ironic, involving the chance meeting of a starving man and a bank robber, and a game of dice that seems to go well for the former but has a conclusion that owes much to Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” while the latter involves a haunting carried out as revenge.
In his later books, Morrow largely abandoned overtly horrific narratives, but A Man: His Mark (1900), though ostensibly a romance, contains scenes of accident and medical situations that will make a modern reader cringe and shudder. Morrow was a clever writer, unafraid to experiment and explore the ideas inherent in certain situations, and it is to be regretted that he ultimately found the writing of romances to be more lucrative than the writing of horrors.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Mad Scientist; Monsters.
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 2004. “W. C. Morrow: Horror in San Francisco.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 13–17. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2005. “Morrow, W[illiam] C[hambers].” In Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, edited by S. T. Joshi. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Morrow, W. C. 2000. The Monster Maker and Other Stories, edited by S. T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz. Seattle, WA: Midnight House.
Moskowitz, Sam. 1992. “W. C. Morrow: Forgotten Master of Horror—First Phase.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 127–173. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.
“MR. ARCULARIS”
“Mr. Arcularis” is a short story by the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet, novelist, and short story writer Conrad Aiken. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1931 and later collected in The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken in 1960. It was also chosen by the Library of America to appear in its two-volume retrospective anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny (2009), a semi-official mark of canonization that recognizes the story as a significant work of American literature in the vein of the fantastic.
Mr. Arcularis—his last name references an arc, and his first name is never given—is sent on a voyage to England following a serious operation, the ship leaving from Boston. It is June, but the weather is unseasonably cold, and he simply cannot get warm. One of his regular dinner companions is Miss Clarice Dean, a lovely young woman with whom he begins a gentle flirtation. He is disturbed to learn that the ship is also transporting a coffin containing a corpse, for such is a bad omen for a voyage, but more disturbing is his recently developed habit of sleepwalking. He shares this news with Miss Dean, along with the disturbing dream that accompanied it, and after another episode sees the ship’s doctor for a bromide. The sleepwalking episodes begin to culminate with him awakening near the coffin with his memories slipping, and though he becomes more intimate with Miss Dean, he is perpetually cold. The operation has failed, and Mr. Arcularis has died on the operating table.
In his introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, Mark Schorer states that Aiken “moves from the mundane into the mysterious, into hysteria, horror, hallucination, phobia, compulsion, dream, death, and, more often than not, back again into the mundane” (Aiken 1960, viii). Such is a reasonable assessment of the moods of “Mr. Arcularis,” for the story is an unsettling combination of explicit detail and dreamlike development. At the same time, despite Aiken’s literary skills, “Mr. Arcularis” cannot escape being pigeonholed: it is one of the works akin to Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which a dying mind attempts to create a narrative that provides an explanation for its passing. Once the conclusion is reached and the surprise revealed, everything falls into place. Its elements become clearer, but it does not transcend its literary inspiration.
Aiken later adapted “Mr. Arcularis” as a play that was first produced in 1949. It was published in 1957 by Harvard University Press as Mr. Arcularis: A Play. The play proved popular as material for mid-twentieth-century television: it was produced as an episode of the CBS television drama anthology series Studio One in Hollywood in 1956. Other American television productions followed in 1959 (for ITV Play of the Week) and 1961 (for Great Ghost Tales). A made-for-television movie adaptation of the story aired in West Germany in 1967.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Dreams and Nightmares; “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.”
Further Reading
Aiken, Conrad. 1960. The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing.
Pope, John A. 1957. “Conrad Aiken Revivifies ‘Mr. Arcularis.” Harvard Crimson. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1957/3/1/conrad-aiken-revivifies-mr-arcularis-pin. Originally published in The Harvard Crimson, March 1, 1957.
Spivey, Ted R. 1997. “Fictional Descent into Hell.” In Time’s Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey, 91–105. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
Tabachnick, Stephen E. 1974. “The Great Circle Voyage of Conrad Aiken’s Mr. Arcularis.” American Literature (January): 590–607.
MUMMIES
A mummy is a corpse of an animal or human preserved either intentionally or unintentionally by exposure to chemicals or extreme temperature and/or humidity. In its role as a character in horror literature, the mummy, like the vampire or zombie, is a revenant, a human being who returns from the dead. All revenants inspire fear as they represent a rupture of the natural and supernatural orders. Like the vampire and the zombie, the mummy also represents an assault on the normal rational world by an unexplained force that must be believed in, studied, and then destroyed before it destroys the modern rational world, usually represented by archaeologists, handsome young men, and beautiful women. The mummy is both ancient and foreign, and its appearance raises concerns about the power of the past, the power of the other, and the fear of incursion of the other.
Although mummification has occurred in China, Europe, and Central and South America, mummies in both fact and fiction are most often associated with Egypt, where mummification was practiced as early as 3400 BCE. Contrary to popular belief, mummification was not a process for royalty only; rather, it was used by most classes of society. Animals, especially pets, were also mummified in ancient Egypt.
Interest in mummies can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. In Europe during the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500 CE), popular belief held that mummified bodies had healing properties, and a brisk trade in medicinal mummified ashes developed. Modern interest in mummies followed Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. He included a large number of scientists and scholars with his forces, and they in turn studied and made popular throughout Europe ancient Egyptian art and artifacts. The result has been termed “Egyptomania,” an enthusiasm for all things Egyptian that swept Europe and the United States throughout the nineteenth century.
Two aspects of Egyptomania are important to the development of the mummy as a figure of horror. The first was the craze for mummy unwrapping, which led to the second, the development of mummy fiction. In Europe and the United States, a popular upper-class diversion was an “unwrapping party,” in which a host who had purchased a mummy would invite friends for the “unwrapping.” Writers soon turned this pastime into fiction.
One of the earliest mummy stories is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), in which an unwrapped mummy is brought back to life through galvanism (electricity). Although Poe’s story is comic, horror would follow. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote two mummy short stories, “The Ring of Thoth” (1890) and “Lot No. 249” (1894). In the former Conan Doyle introduces a magician/priest character into the narrative, thus establishing a figure that would become standard in later mummy horror stories. In the latter he creates the first monstrous mummy. Conan Doyle’s friend Bram Stoker, best known as the creator of Dracula, published an influential mummy novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), in which Margaret, who is both the daughter of an Egyptologist and a reincarnated Egyptian princess, must reattach her lost mummified hand to the mummy of her former self in order to ensure immortality. In the original novel she fails, but in the 1912 edition she succeeds and marries the narrator, after which the mummy disappears.
Fact merged with fiction in 1922 when archaeologist John Carter opened the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, popularly known as King Tut. The publicity surrounding this event, along with a now discredited story of a mummy’s curse, reignited worldwide Egyptomania. Hollywood did not wait long before cashing in on the excitement. Universal Studios released The Mummy in 1932, and the success of that film established the mummy as one of horror’s essential characters.
Universal Pictures producer Carl Laemmle, who also produced Universal’s Dracula, commissioned screenwriter John Balderston, who in a former career as a journalist had reported on the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, to create a screenplay for the film. The resulting narrative combines elements of “The Ring of Thoth,” The Jewel of Seven Stars, and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. It proved both a financial and critical success, and it also established the conventions adopted by most mummy films and novels that followed its release: the discovery of a mummy’s tomb, the use of ancient scrolls to bring it to life, a curse on the tomb’s discoverers, the mummy’s revenge, the mummy’s discovery of a lost reincarnated love, the invocation of ancient wisdom to combat the mummy, and the eventual destruction of the mummy and the reimposition of Western rationality and order.
Mummy movies rapidly became a thriving subgenre in the burgeoning world of horror and monster cinema. Between 1940 and 1955 Universal released a slew of additional mummy movies: The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). In England, Hammer Films, which, like Universal, focused on the creation of horror films, released The Mummy (1959), The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), The Mummy’s Shroud (1966), and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971). In 1999, after a hiatus of nearly half a century, Universal retuned to making mummy movies with The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, which adapted the basic elements of the 1932 film for a modern audience, and which was followed by the sequels The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), as well as the spin-off The Scorpion King (2008), which is not a horror film but rather an adventure comedy employing the conventions of the earlier films.
The mummy has also reappeared in contemporary fiction, most notably in Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989). Rice employed many of the conventions established by the mummy film tradition, but she also made major changes. Her protagonist is not the priest Imhotep, but rather the pharaoh Ramses II, who discovered the secret elixir of eternal life from a Hittite priest and passed that secret on to Cleopatra, who chose death after the suicide of Mark Antony. Ramses falls in love with an Egyptologist’s daughter, but when he discovers the mummy of Cleopatra, he attempts to bring her back to life. He succeeds, but Cleopatra is missing parts of her hands and face. The novel ends with her swearing eternal revenge on Ramses. In many ways the character of Ramses is closer to Rice’s vampire Lestat from The Vampire Chronicles (1976–) than he is to earlier fictive or film vampires, as both creatures are larger than life and caught in immortality.
Jim Holte
See also: Ancestral Curse; The Jewel of Seven Stars; Lansdale, Joe R.; “Lot No. 249”; Monsters; Quinn, Seabury; Rice, Anne; Rohmer, Sax; She; Vampires; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Curl, James Stevens. 1994. Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival: A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press.
Freeman, Richard. 2009. “The Mummy in Context.” European Journal of American Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring). https://ejas.revues.org/7566.
Frost, Brian J. 2008. The Essential Guide to Mummy Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN”
In his letters, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) wrote that of all his tales, his two favorites remained “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and “The Music of Erich Zann.” Written in late 1921 and first published in National Amateur in March 1922, “The Music of Erich Zann” was an early favorite for others as well. It quickly became one of Lovecraft’s most popular works, republished twice in Weird Tales (May 1925; November 1934), anthologized in Dashiell Hammett’s Creeps by Night (1931), and becoming the first Lovecraft tale printed in a literature textbook for use in schools: The Short Story (1956). More significant than its popularity is that “Zann” represents the seeds of Lovecraft’s most enduring themes. It introduces the dream narrative, the forbidden knowledge narrative, and the narrative of cosmic horror—all major themes that would establish Lovecraft’s unique contribution to horror literature in later works.
“Zann’s” narrator, a once “impoverished student of metaphysics,” provides a frame for the story by describing an experience that happened in his past, in an apartment and on a street that he can no longer find: the “Rue d’Auseil” (the name is a poor French construction loosely translatable as “street at the threshold”). The narrator emphasizes that, after an extensive search, he “cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality” (Lovecraft 2005, 15). Dislodging the setting from any verifiable external reality prefigures several of Lovecraft’s dream narratives, including the early “Celephaïs” (1922), “The Silver Key” (1926), and “The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath” (1926), in which settings become removed from physical reality and are difficult to reach or regain.
Elusive, forbidden knowledge plays an equally important role in the narrative. Curious about the “haunting” music of Erich Zann—an elderly viol player living in another apartment at the boardinghouse—the narrator slowly befriends Zann, finally convincing him to explain his unique music and his fear of allowing others to hear it. Unwilling to speak of it, Zann frantically scribbles his story in his native German, but as he is committing it to paper, the source of his horror returns. The narrator reports, “suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard,” and moments later, “A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window” (Lovecraft 2005, 20). The papers are swallowed up by the horror outside the window, all explanation (and proof) lost forever. This theme of lost documents and forbidden and obscure knowledge would become a major theme of Lovecraft’s work, most notably in the many stories referencing the dreaded Necronomicon.
The most powerful theme concerns the source of the horror itself, glimpsed by the narrator as he looks out the open window in Zann’s apartment. He relates: “I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth” (Lovecraft 2005, 22). Confronting this dark and alien infinite, the narrator bolts from the apartment. While no physical embodiment of an alien other presents itself (as in later Lovecraft tales), the horror of the cosmic void—Lovecraft’s most profound contribution to the genre—is presented starkly and memorably here.
Mark Wegley
See also: “The Colour out of Space”; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Frame Story; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Airaksinen, Timo. 1999. “Fighting Nothingness: ‘The Music of Erich Zann.’” In The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror, 7–15. New York: Peter Lang.
Burleson, Donald R. 1983. “Early Years: Beginnings and Foreshadowings (1920–1923).” In H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study: 39–96. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Burleson, D. R. 1990. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Cannon, P. 1989. H. P. Lovecraft. Boston: Twayne.
Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2001. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ligotti, Thomas. 2003. “The Dark Beauty of Unheard of Horrors.” In The Thomas Ligotti Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 78–84. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. 2005. “The Music of Erich Zann.” In H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, 15–23. New York: Library of America.
THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO
Published in 1794 by Ann Radcliffe in four volumes, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance is considered by many scholars to be the greatest Gothic novel of the eighteenth century. Already an established writer at the time of The Mysteries of Udolpho’s publication, Radcliffe was paid £500 to write The Mysteries of Udolpho, making her the most well-paid novelist at the time. The Mysteries of Udolpho proved an immediate success—it had a direct influence on the Gothic novels of the 1790s and subsequent decades, and is directly referenced in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. A lengthy text that is filled with intellectual themes and a melodramatic plot, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the progenitor of female Gothic fiction (sometimes called Radcliffean Gothic) and has been an influential text on horror writers for more than two hundred years.
Set in France, The Mysteries of Udolpho focuses on the long plight of Emily St. Aubert. Emily is an only child and resides with her parents at their country estate. While the family is trying to cope with difficult economic times, Emily’s mother suddenly passes away. This event results in father and daughter deciding to travel the countryside to reflect on the natural beauty of Europe, studying the sublime landscape of the mountains and forests in order to expand their appreciation of the natural world. The two meet a young man named Valancourt, who falls in love with Emily, before returning to their estate in France. Emily’s father becomes sick and eventually dies. His sister, the superficial Madame Cheron, takes control of his estates and Emily, forcing the young girl to relocate to Italy, where Cheron marries a sinister Italian named Montoni. An authoritarian tyrant who only weds Cheron because he desires to take control of her estates, Montoni moves himself, his wife, and Emily to the castle Udolpho. There he abuses and threatens his wife and Emily until he gets what he wants: Cheron eventually passes away, yet Emily is subjected to various horrors at Udolpho until she eventually escapes Montoni with the help of friends. Emily later finds herself in the company of a French count and his family. She and her friends have an adventure at a nearby chateau that is believed to be haunted. She is soon after reunited with Valancourt, who had fallen on hard times, but marries Emily at the conclusion of the narrative.
At the center of Radcliffe’s text is a conservative concern of balance between human emotions and eighteenth-century rational thought. Very much a young woman who has been taught to engage and explore her emotions, Emily is nonetheless prone to too much sentimentality, something her father openly discusses with his daughter on his deathbed. Emily’s singular flaw, which is persistent throughout the majority of the text, is that she never develops the rational self-control embodied by her father. She thus lacks a balance between her emotional side and her rational mind, which manifests in an unrestrained imagination that terrifies her more than it should. To be certain, Emily’s experiences throughout the text are terrifying, but her unrestrained imagination exacerbates it all, making her prone to superstitious sightings of ghosts that are not there and believing the worst even when the situation might not be as grave as she perceives. It is not until the text nears its conclusion, in the last hundred or so pages, that Emily finally develops controllable rationality when she subdues the powerful feelings that she has for Valancourt, whom she has come to believe has engaged in questionable moral behavior. By the text’s conclusion, Emily is a woman mentally balanced by the emotional aspects of sentimentality and eighteenth-century rational thought.
One unintended consequence of The Mysteries of Udolpho was the publication of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk in 1796. Although the only novel ever published by Lewis, The Monk was a direct challenge to the form of Gothic fiction envisioned by Radcliffe. Where Radcliffe made constant use of the explained supernatural throughout her novel, in accordance with her eighteenth-century beliefs against superstition, Lewis made his supernatural occurrences unquestionably real, with the use of sorcery, ghosts, and demons all present throughout. He likewise put more emphasis on his Gothic villain, the monk Ambrosio, over his pursued protagonist, a reversal of Radcliffe’s focus on Emily over Montoni. More horrifying than terrifying, The Monk likewise utilizes different effects than The Mysteries of Udolpho in order to produce fear in its reader. Within two years of the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Gothic fiction was divided into two subtypes, one represented by Radcliffe, the other by Lewis, showing the genre was open to experimentation and innovation that previously had not really been present.
The Mysteries of Udolpho stands as one of the greatest Gothic novels ever written. While it is not free from flaws within its narrative (many find the explained supernatural incredibly forced, and others have noted problems with the fourth volume involving the haunted chateau), Radcliffe’s novel has nonetheless had a lasting impact upon the horror genre. Its publication marks a high point in the history of Gothic fiction, and it continues to hold strong cultural relevancy as evident in the many works that have come to reference it in some way. While the explained supernatural has not exactly fared well in the horror genre, Radcliffe’s ability to create atmosphere, suspense, and terror set a standard that very few have been able to surpass.
Joel T. Terranova
See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; Radcliffe, Ann; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Albright, Richard S. 2005. “No Time Like the Present: The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5, no. 1: 49–75.
Russett, Margaret. 1998. “Narrative Enchantment in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” ELH 65, no. 1: 159–186.
Schillace, Brandy Lain. “‘Temporary Failure of Mind’: Déjà vu and Epilepsy in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 2: 273–287.
Whiting, Patrica. 1996. “Literal and Literary Representations of the Family in The Mysteries of Udolpho.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 4: 485–501.