NEW WEIRD
In 2003, speculative-fiction author M. John Harrison posted a question on his “Third Alternative” message board: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything? Is it even New?” (quoted in VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2008, 317). This prompted a formative discussion about the genre that some have come to refer to as the “New Weird.” Editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The New Weird (2008) provides the best entry point into this contested field, and includes such stories as K. J. Bishop’s “The Art of Dying” (1997), Brian Evenson’s “Watson’s Boy” (2000), China Miéville’s “Jack” (2005), Steph Swainston’s “The Ride of the Gabbleratchet” (2007), and Alistair Rennie’s “The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines” (2008).
In the introduction to The New Weird, Jeff VanderMeer points to the mainstream success of Miéville’s genre-bending masterpiece Perdido Street Station (2000) as the event that most clearly defined the emergence of the movement. Using the novel as a springboard, VanderMeer offers one definition of the New Weird, emphasizing gritty urban settings that distort genre conventions, an intellectual sensibility influenced by New Wave science fiction writers such as J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, a visceral corporeality (a focus on bodily reality) stemming from Clive Barker’s horror fiction from the 1980s, and an embrace of the weird that often refers to the existential politics of modern life in a subversive or transgressive mode.
The New Weird, then, may be positioned in a genealogy of weird fiction that reaches back to Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic horror, the French Surrealists’ attacks on consensus reality, the cosmic dread of the Lovecraft school, and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast saga (1946–1959), and then moves through Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series (1950–1984), Harrison’s Viriconium books (1971–1985), the splatterpunk of Barker and Poppy Z. Brite, and the metaphysical horror of Thomas Ligotti and Kathe Koja. In the 1990s, magazines such as Andy Cox’s The Third Alternative and Ann VanderMeer’s The Silver Web played a significant role in publishing New Weird fiction. Other examples of the New Weird include Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen (1995), Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2001), Bishop’s The Etched City (2003), and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008). More recently and in the context of visual media, the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective (2014) television series, David Robert Mitchell’s pastiche film It Follows (2014), and Robert Eggers’s supernatural film The Witch (2015) have brought New Weird sensibilities into the cultural mainstream.
However, like slipstream fiction and interstitial writing (writing that falls on or between the boundaries of genres and forms), works associated with the New Weird embrace multiplicity in both form and content, and therefore challenge taxonomic categorization, leading many authors and critics, aware of the pressures of marketability, to question the validity of the term. Art-horror writer Laird Barron, for instance, instead affirms the persistence of the weird itself as a speculative mode that cuts across genres by disrupting natural laws, thereby giving rise to an atmospherics of unease.
Sean Matharoo
See also: Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Brite, Poppy Z.; Kafka, Franz; Koja, Kathe; Ligotti, Thomas; Link, Kelly; Lovecraftian Horror; Miéville, China; Surrealism; VanderMeer, Jeff.
Further Reading
Miéville, China. 2003. “Long Live the New Weird.” The Third Alternative 35: 3.
Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, eds. 2016. The Age of Lovecraft. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2008. The New Weird. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications.
Walter, Damien G. 2008. “The New World of New Weird.” The Guardian, January 22. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jan/22/thenewworldofnewweird.
NEWMAN, KIM (1959–)
Kim James Newman is one of the most ingenious and media-literate authors of horror fiction to emerge during the 1980s. His earliest works were film novelizations and “sharecropper” novels set in the secondary worlds of gaming franchises, published under the pseudonym “Jack Yeovil,” along with critical studies such as the excellent survey of horror cinema, Nightmare Movies (1988; rev. ed. 2011). Newman’s knowledge of genre film, both classic and obscure, is nothing short of magisterial, and he continues to review movies for numerous venues, such as Video Watchdog.
Newman’s wide-ranging erudition in twentieth-century popular culture deeply informed his first serious works of fiction. His debut novel under his own name, The Night Mayor (1989), is a potent fusion of noir, science fiction, and horror, in which characters are trapped in virtual-reality scenarios borrowed from Hollywood movies. Newman’s second novel, Bad Dreams (1990), is a delirious dark fantasy in which a demonic vampire attempts to ensnare a young woman in his self-made dreamscape, only to be foiled by her willful, ingenious resistance. Anno Dracula (1992), Newman’s first real breakthrough, is an alternate history in which the attempted undead invasion of England chronicled in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel was actually a success, with the count marrying Queen Victoria and their vampiric progeny coming to dominate the twentieth century. The novel spawned a number of sequels, all prolific with allusions to vampire literature and film: The Bloody Red Baron (1995), Dracula Cha Cha Cha (1998), and Johnny Alucard (2013). Newman’s short fiction—gathered in such collections as The Original Dr. Shade, and Other Stories (1994) and Famous Monsters (1995)—has also engaged cleverly with the literary and cinematic history of horror.
Newman’s favored form is the pastiche, involving the ironic recycling of familiar motifs and materials: his tales offer both the pleasure of recognition, as the densely textured layers of allusion register on the reader, and a sense of estrangement from the familiar genre patterns these allusions summon up. Newman’s basic impulse is not merely to borrow but to subvert: his allusions always bear a critical edge. Yet at the same time, they suggest a bond of complicity linking author and reader in an ironic nostalgia for the icons and plot structures he has so ruthlessly plundered and satirically redeployed. The joy of reading Anno Dracula, for example, lies not only in its shrewd exposure of the patriarchal and imperialist power dynamics of classic nineteenth-century vampire stories, but also in the sheer profusion of loving detail with which Newman evokes them, the sense he conveys that this popular material, while ideologically suspect, is irrepressibly imprinted on our memories and appetites. Perhaps due to his restless genre-switching and his uncanny talent for mimicry, Newman’s remarkable originality as an author has not been as widely recognized as it should be.
Rob Latham
See also: Dark Fantasy; New Weird; Vampires.
Further Reading
Hills, Matt. 2003. “Counterfictions in the Work of Kim Newman: Rewriting Gothic SF as ‘Alternate-Story Stories.’” Science Fiction Studies 30 (30): 436–455.
Latham, Rob. 2001. “VR Noir: Kim Newman’s The Night Mayor.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 16: 95–122.
Wilkinson, Gary. 2000. “Stepping through the Silver Screen: The Fiction of Kim Newman.” Vector 210 (March/April): 15–18.
THE NIGHT LAND
The Night Land is a visionary fantasy by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. It constitutes a kind of allegorical summation of Hodgson’s metaphysical and moral ideas. Critical opinion of the work has always been sharply divided; its admirers regard it as an unparalleled masterpiece by virtue of its imaginative reach and the phantasmagorical elaboration of its imagery, while its detractors consider it to be almost unreadable because of its mock-archaic style.
In the novel’s frame narrative—set in a past sufficiently remote to justify the use of an ornate narrative style—the death of the narrator’s beloved Mirdath stimulates visions of the remote future in his grief-stricken mind. In the world of those visions, the sun’s radiation is fading away, leaving the Earth unfit for human habitation. The people who believe themselves to be the last representatives of humankind live in a huge metal pyramid, the Last Redoubt, which is supplied with power by an Electric Circle that draws energy from the dwindling Earth-Current. As well as life support, the power in question supplies the necessary defense against various monsters and enigmatic observers, seemingly waiting to inherit the Earth.
When a message is unexpectedly received from another precarious abode, whose sole surviving inhabitant, Naani, is a reincarnation of Mirdath, the narrator’s dream-self embarks upon an arduous odyssey across the phantasmagorical landscape of the dying Earth, hoping to rescue her. He reaches her, but their return journey is even more dangerous. Eventually, Naani is killed by emanations from the mysterious House of Silence, the dwelling of the giant Silent Ones, but she is miraculously resurrected by the Earth-Current in order to secure the narrator a more fortunate end in his dream than he can possibly attain in life.
Hodgson’s vision of the world’s end is derived from Lord William Thomson Kelvin’s theory that the sun’s radiation was produced by gravitational collapse and could not last for more than a few million years. Other fictional extrapolations of the theory had been produced, most notably H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, but none had complicated the tragedy of the Earth’s demise with such a dramatic metamorphosis of life on its surface, explained in terms of the breakdown of dimensional barriers. No previous work had contrived to communicate such an acute sense of the utter insignificance of one species inhabiting one world in a vast, bleak, intrinsically malign and essentially incomprehensible cosmos—the sensibility that H. P. Lovecraft called “cosmic horror.” The artificiality of the novel’s prose attempts to support the cultivation of that aesthetic reaction by provoking a sense of alienation in the reader; the many descriptive terms rendered with an initial capital letter do not refer in a simple sense to aspects of the imaginary landscape, but emphasize its status as a metaphorical model of the human mind under the stress of grief and angst. The allegory is only partly decipherable, by necessity, deliberately leaving a dark margin of mystery.
Brian Stableford
See also: Frame Story; Hodgson, William Hope; The House on the Borderland.
Further Reading
Bell, Ian. 1986. “A Dream of Darkness: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land.” Studies in Weird Fiction 1 (Summer): 13–17.
Bloom, Harold. 1995. “William Hope Hodgson.” In Modern Horror Writers, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House.
Bruce, Samuel W. 1997. “William Hope Hodgson.” In British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I, edited by Darren Harris-Fain, 121–131. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 178. Detroit, MI: Gale.
Gafford, Sam. 1992. “Writing Backward: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson.” Studies in Weird Fiction 11 (Spring): 12–15.
Hodgens, Richard. 1981. “The Deep World of Hodgson’s Nightland.” Trumpet 12 (Summer): 14–18, 44.
The Night Land: The Weird Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://nightland.website.
Warren, Alan. 1992. “Full Fathom Five: The Supernatural Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 41–52. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.
NIGHT SHIFT
Night Shift is a collection of twenty stories by Stephen King, with an introduction by John D. Macdonald (who was one of King’s writer idols) published in 1978. It was King’s first short-fiction collection, and most of its contents had first been published in Cavalier and other men’s magazines. The book showcases the many different types of fiction King attempted up to that point: Lovecraftian horror in “Jerusalem’s Lot,” an epistolary narrative about an ancient evil that overruns a small Maine town in the nineteenth century; science fiction in “I Am the Doorway,” in which an astronaut returned from space discovers that his body is turning into a conduit to an alien dimension; suspense in “The Ledge,” about a man blackmailed into undertaking a death-defying act by the husband whose wife is the man’s lover; and even mainstream fiction in “The Woman in the Room,” in which a man secretly facilitates the death of his mother, a cancer victim.
The majority of the book’s stories are examples of King’s trademark approach to horror, turning the ordinary and commonplace into objects of menace: laundry machinery is endowed with malevolent life in “The Mangler”; toy soldiers are magically animated as aggressive combatants in “Battleground”; rats infesting a decrepit mill grow to monstrous size in “Graveyard Shift”; a can of spoiled beer causes a grotesque transformation in the man who drinks it in “Gray Matter”; and childish fear of the boogeyman proves to be horrifyingly warranted in “The Boogeyman.” The stories are set for the most part in recognizable American towns, cast with everyday people who are products of their environments and peppered with recognizable references to contemporary popular culture and consumer culture that help to situate their horrors in the familiar. The vampire story “One for the Road” is a sidebar to King’s novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975). Most of the book’s stories were later adapted as movies, notably “Trucks” as Maximum Overdrive (1986), which King himself directed; “Graveyard Shift” (film version 1990), and “Children of the Corn” (1984), the latter concerned with a cult of children in rural Nebraska who waylay unsuspecting travelers to sacrifice them to a monstrous entity that lives in the cornfields. The film version of Children of the Corn spawned a horror franchise that continues to this day.
In his lengthy foreword to the book, King relates his “marketable obsession” (King 2011, xix) to write horror to the reader’s taste for horror fiction, noting that “great horror is almost always allegorical” in its depictions of death, and that “the horror tales live most naturally at that connection point between the conscious and the subconscious” (King 2011, xxxviii). In his opinion, the tale of horror fiction speaks to that commingling of interest and revulsion that compels us to contemplate what King refers to “the body under the sheet,” that is, the reality of death, especially one’s own. His observations anticipate those that would shape his book-length study of horror in popular culture, Danse Macabre (1981).
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: King, Stephen; Lovecraftian Horror; Vampires.
Further Reading
Collings, Michael, and David Engbretson. 1985. The Shorter Works of Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
Herron, Don. 1982. “Horror Springs in the Fiction of Stephen King.” In Fear Itself, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 57–82. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller.
King, Stephen. 2011. Night Shift. New York: Anchor Books.
Reino, Joseph. 1988. “Night Shift: Harbinger of Bad News.” In Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary, 100–116. Boston: Twayne.
NOLAN, WILLIAM F. (1928–)
William Francis Nolan is an American science fiction, horror, and fantasy author. He is the creator, by his own estimation, of more than 2,000 pieces of fiction and nonfiction, and he has edited or co-edited roughly 26 anthologies in his nearly 60-year career. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and originally worked as an artist for Hallmark Cards and in the comic book industry before becoming a writer. Though married since 1970, he has been estranged from his wife for more than ten years. He is continually working on new projects and is a frequent guest of honor at industry conventions and festivals, including the World Horror Convention, the World Fantasy Convention, and smaller regional events.
In the 1950s, Nolan was an integral part of the writing ensemble known as “The Group,” which included many well-known genre writers such as Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, John Tomerlin, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson (with whom he co-wrote Logan’s Run in 1967), and others. Tomerlin, Beaumont, and Nolan were also avid auto racing fans and participated in local races themselves throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Nolan is considered a leading expert on Dashiell Hammett and pulps such as Black Mask and Western Story, and he is the world authority on the works of prolific scribe Max Brand, the creator of Dr. Kildare. In addition to writing biographies of both men, he has also written books on director John Huston, actor Steve McQueen, and racing legend Barney Oldfield. Also adept at poetry and screenwriting—with more than twenty produced scripts to his credit—he was co-writer, with Dan Curtis (of Dark Shadows fame), of the screenplay for the classic 1976 horror film Burnt Offerings (based on the 1973 novel of the same name by Robert Marasco), as well as co-writer, with his friend Richard Matheson, of the classic American television movie Trilogy of Terror (1975), directed by Curtis. Curtis and Nolan teamed up on several other productions as well, including The Kansas City Massacre (1975), Turn of the Screw (1974), and The Norliss Tapes (1973).
Though he has written in a variety of genres, Nolan’s main output is in horror and science fiction. His style has changed over the years, and what began as a tendency toward the lush flourishes of his mentor Ray Bradbury has evolved into a leaner approach more influenced by noir, hardboiled fiction, and Ernest Hemingway. Many of his works are populated by loners, or, conversely, young female (and even alien/nonhuman) protagonists and are frequently narrated in the first person. With respect to themes, Nolan often utilizes plot-driven narratives with sparse characterizations and descriptions; many of his works focus on the juxtaposition of the uncanny and the commonplace, life given to inanimate objects, or the violent reaction of everyday people to unexpected circumstances.
Jason V Brock
See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bradbury, Ray; Matheson, Richard.
Further Reading
Brock, Jason V. 2014. Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
Morton, Lisa. 2015. “Interview: William F. Nolan.” Nightmare 32 (May). http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-william-f-nolan.
Nolan, William F. 2013. Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Zicree, Marc Scott. 1992. The Twilight Zone Companion, 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press.
NORTHANGER ABBEY
Although it was the first of her novels completed for publication, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey was not published until 1818, a year after her death. Northanger Abbey is a parody of both a novel of manners and the Gothic novel, an eighteenth-century literary form made popular by such works as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). These and similar novels combined ruined medieval castles or abbeys as settings, supernatural or paranormal occurrences, dark and threatening men who were often aristocrats or religious figures, a threatened young woman, and overwrought emotions often accompanied by overwrought prose. Although formulaic, Gothic novels were wildly successful and established many of the conventions of later horror fiction and film.
In Northanger Abbey Austen employs the conventions of the Gothic novel to subvert the genre. It begins with young Catherine Morland, an English teenager who is inordinately fond of reading Gothic novels, traveling to the city of Bath for a season of balls, tea in the Pump Room, and meeting eligible young gentlemen. There she is befriended by Isabella Thorpe, who shares her enthusiasm for Gothic fiction; Isabella’s brother John; Henry Tilney, the son of a general; and his sister Eleanor. At Bath she is attracted to Henry Tilney but isolated by the Thorpes, who think she is wealthier than she is and who plan for her to marry John, for whom she has little affection. Invited by the Tilneys to visit their estate at Northanger Abbey, Catherine is delighted by the anticipation of staying at a Gothic abbey, where she imagines all kinds of excitingly dreadful experiences await her. While at the Abbey she imagines it to be haunted, believes it contains secret rooms with ominous histories, and convinces herself that the general has murdered his wife. Mysteriously, General Tilney cuts short her visit and orders her to leave. All turns out well, however. Catherine learns of the Thorpes’ intentions, Henry Tilney proposes to her, and the general eventually consents to the marriage. Catherine, now older and wiser at age eighteen, realizes that life is not like a work of Gothic fiction as she prepares for her upcoming marriage.
Northanger Abbey is both a parody of the Gothic novel and a commentary on its readers. Catherine Morland is naïve and gullible. She believes everyone she meets has her best interests at heart, and more significantly, because she has immersed herself in reading Gothic novels, she believes that real life is a delightfully dreadful adventure full of danger and the supernatural. She interprets every event at the Abbey in light of her reading, and of course she is always wrong. In Northanger Abbey Austen is also satirizing the novel of manners, a form focused on matters of social class and convention, for while Catherine is in Bath in the first half of the novel, she has no clue whatsoever what is going on around her and simply follows the advice of others. Successful marriage in Northanger Abbey is the consequence of pure chance.
The novel has been adapted for stage and screen multiple times, including for PBS, the BBC, and the A&E Network. In 2014 a new version of the novel, written by best-selling crime writer Val McDermid and transforming it into a modern-day teen thriller (with the protagonist now called Cat Morland), was published as part of HarperCollins’s Austen Project, in which popular and critically respected modern-day writers were hired to rework Jane Austen’s six complete novels for modern audiences.
Jim Holte
See also: The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Radcliffe, Ann; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Ford, Susan Allen. 2012. “A Sweet Creature’s Horrid Novels: Gothic Reading in Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions: The Jane Austin Journal On-Line 3, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol33no1/ford.html.
Gill, Linda. 2013. “Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” Pennsylvania Literary Journal 5, no. 3: 36–57.
Levine, George. 1975. “Translating the Monstrous: Northanger Abbey.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 3: 335–350.
Skinner, Karalyn. 2013. “‘Horrid’ Gothicism: Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” Explicator 71, no. 3: 229–232.
“THE NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL”
Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal” was originally published as one of the constituent tales of The Three Impostors (1895), a portmanteau work (that is, a work composed of multiple parts) consisting of several short stories connected by a frame story. In its title Machen invokes the (even then) antiquated French meaning of “novel,” implying “novelty” rather than a book-length text.
The tale is presented as the alleged testimony of Miss Lally, an educated young woman fallen into poverty, who is rescued from starvation by employment as a governess to the children of Professor Gregg, an ethnologist. Relocating from London to Professor Gregg’s home on the edges of the remote Grey Hills in Wales, Lally is puzzled and terrified by a series of anomalous incidents. Discovering Gregg’s journal, she reads of his work investigating the “reality” behind Celtic fairy lore: the persistence of prehuman hominids lurking in the isolated countryside.
The story is partly informed by the Euhemerist theories of David MacRitchie (1851–1925), who argued that, through analysis of folk traditions, one could gain information about premodern peoples, including (he speculated) a race of “Turanian” pygmies. Machen used this central idea in two other magazine stories also published in 1895, “The Shining Pyramid” and “The Red Hand.” It was a theme he would return to repeatedly throughout his ensuing career, albeit in increasingly oblique ways, for example “Out of the Earth” (1915) and The Green Round (1933).
“The Novel of the Black Seal” should also be seen in the wider context of the late-Victorian preoccupation with biological and cultural atavism (a focus on the supposed barbarity and awfulness of earlier and “lower” stages of evolution), an anxiety in part precipitated by the wider acceptance of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and concerns about biological and cultural degeneration. Comparable stories from the era include Grant Allen’s “Pallinghurst Barrow” (1892) and John Buchan’s “No-Man’s Land” (1899), in which Buchan resituates Machen’s malevolent little people within his native Scotland. However, the peculiar potency of Machen’s use of this theme lies in his decision to keep his malignant prehuman entities “off screen,” their ensuing ambiguity provoking in the reader a sense of queasy uncertainty and dread.
“The Novel of the Black Seal” is notable for the influence it had on Robert E. Howard and, particularly, H. P. Lovecraft. It is unlikely that many of Lovecraft’s most celebrated stories would exist in any recognizable form divested of the influence of “The Novel of the Black Seal,” specifically the notions of modern survival of ancient cults and prehuman intelligences, the dizzying contemplation of deep history, and the transient contingency of modernity (the idea that human civilization is not an inevitable or invulnerable phenomenon). Several stories by Howard, including “Worms of the Earth” and “The Little People,” are essentially reworkings of Machen’s central conceit, the latter story explicitly so.
James Machin
See also: “The Great God Pan”; Howard, Robert E.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; “The White People.”
Further Reading
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.
Trotter, David. 1995. “Introduction.” In The Three Imposters, by Arthur Machen, xvii–xxxi. London: Everyman.
Novels and short fiction are the two major literary forms in which Gothic literature and horror fiction can be found (although horror comics and Gothic and horror poetry form two important subgenres in their own right). Both allow fear, horror, and unease to be conveyed to the reader through the use of dramatic plot twists, supernatural elements, eerie landscapes, and uncanny atmospheres. The novel, in being a longer narrative form, makes for the development of complex narrative structures and in-depth explorations of psychological mechanisms, whereas the short story, in being a condensed form, plays on dramatic plot twists, drastic ellipsis, and elisions in order to shock or surprise the reader.
Gothic literature consists mainly of novels and short stories, even though some instances of Gothic theater and poetry can be found in the works of Lord Byron (Manfred, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) or the graveyard poets (“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “Night-Piece on Death”). In spite of the Gothic movement being born from the poetic tradition of dark romanticism, narrative prose was what made the genre highly popular in the late eighteenth century, as it allowed reaching out to a broader, more mainstream, and mostly feminine audience. Hundreds of Gothic novels were published over the period 1764–1820, fashioning what was known at the time as the “great Gothic craze” (Hansen 2010, 238).
Early Gothic fictions were short novels or romances, a mass-market literary form that focuses on relationships and love interests. Authors such as Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), and Matthew Lewis (The Monk, 1796) adopted this narrative format, as it was popular at the end of the eighteenth century. The publication of sentimental novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie; or the New Héloïse (1761) had seen a rise in the popularity of romances and had given credibility to a literature that had otherwise been held in contempt.
Gothic novels combined elements of sentimental novels with that of medieval folklore and dark romanticism: a complex love intrigue, mysterious threatening events, dilapidated castles, dark forests, supernatural creatures, and so on. The length of the novel allowed for many plot twists, and also movements and travels within the narrative, thus heightening its tension. As the genre picked up, short romances became full-fledged novels that focused on the development of characters and psychological drama. Examples of lengthy Gothic novels include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, 1860–1861; Bleak House, 1852–1853) Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891; Jude the Obscure, 1894–1895) or George Eliot (Middlemarch (1871–1872) also incorporated Gothic elements in their novels in spite of their more naturalist style.
While Gothic novels thrived in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century, the short form started gaining popularity, mostly in America, where the genre would see a revival in the mid-nineteenth century. Being strongly influenced by folklore and popular tales, Gothic fiction already had the quality of short fiction, and authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne would immediately exploit this feature of the genre. Influenced by German folk tales (such as those passed along by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm) as well as early American Gothic short novels (such as Wieland and Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown), both would bring the art of Gothic tales to its pinnacle with short stories such as Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), and “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832), and Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), and “Berenice” (1835). In the literary essay “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), Poe praises the value of short fiction over lengthy writing, claiming that short fiction is better than novels in conveying shock, surprise, and fear to the reader since it can be enjoyed in “the limit of one single sitting” (Poe 2006, 525).
Short fiction would then become a widely popular form for Gothic and horror fiction in America, especially in the subgenre of Southern Gothic fiction. Major figures of Southern Gothic literature, including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and Joyce Carol Oates, not only wrote many short stories but also defended their literary choice in claiming, much like Poe, that the writing of short stories is highly demanding creative art, particularly effective in creating uncanny, eerie narratives. As of today, collections of horror stories are published regularly in America and still manage to find the broad audience they were designed for in the first place.
At the same time, horror fiction in novel-length form continues to be popular, with one of the legacies of the horror publishing “boom” of the 1970s and 1980s being the creation of a unique subtype of horror novel that, in the words of horror and science fiction anthologist David Hartwell, “constitutes an avant-garde and experimental literary form which attempts to translate the horrific effects previously thought to be the nearly exclusive domain of the short forms into newly conceived long forms that maintain the proper atmosphere and effects” (Hartwell 1987, 3). The interesting relationship and significant distinctions between short works and novel-length works of horror continue to play a significant role in the evolution of horror literature as a whole.
Elsa Charléty
See also: The Brontë Sisters; Faulkner, William; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Hoffmann, E. T. A; Oates, Joyce Carol; O’Connor, Flannery; Poe, Edgar Allan; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary.
Further Reading
Hansen, Christopher, ed. 2010. Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.
Hartwell, David. 1987. The Dark Descent. New York: Tor.
O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Robert Fitzgerald and Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Macmillan.
Poe, Edgar Allan. 2006. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Penguin.
Potter, Franz. 2005. The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
THE NUMINOUS
The numinous is not a genre, but an aspect of some horror fiction. The term “numinous,” which was coined by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto, generally refers to the more spiritual or existential side of the supernatural encounter. While a supernatural entity may frighten a character by threatening him or her, the reason for this terror is clear. However, even when a supernatural entity is not threatening a character personally, the very existence of a supernatural being threatens a character’s idea of what reality is. This may be owing to an intolerantly rationalistic attitude, but, in horror fiction, the numinous does not depend exclusively on a clash with any materialistic prejudice to make itself felt. The numinous experience is disturbing simply because it shows the characters there is another form of existence, and that reality as it is commonly known is only a smaller part of a much larger, invisible whole.
The numinous can be mystical. Noteworthy examples of the mystical numinous can be found in the writings of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. The numinous can also be more in keeping with scientific speculation, as was more often the case in H. P. Lovecraft’s stories of “cosmic horror.” Where Machen and Blackwood give the reader the impression that ancient spiritual mysteries continue to manifest themselves in modern reality, Lovecraft draws more on the boundlessness of relativistic space and time and on the limitations of human knowledge to create his numinous effects.
In formulating the concept of the numinous, Otto was greatly influenced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in whose philosophy the linguistically distinct but thematically related idea of the noumenal plays an important role. Kant identified as noumenal those things that seem to lie just beyond the limits of possible human experience, things as they are “in themselves,” as distinct from human perception and knowledge of them. The noumenal, Kant argued, cannot be experienced, but it is possible to experience the limits of human experience. With this as a deep background to Otto’s concept, the numinous experience would then be the sense of almost experiencing what is just beyond the human, and so it is very close to the aesthetic idea of the sublime.
Horror fiction that dwells more on physical threats and direct emotional consequences would not be considered numinous. Numinous horror fiction may involve physical or direct threats and pay considerable attention to character, but in general the numinous horror tale is philosophical and will often downplay physical or personal aspects of a supernatural menace in order to emphasize the danger posed to an idea of the world itself. Such stories depend less on sympathy with characters in jeopardy and more on encouragement of the reader to question his or her reality. For this reason, a numinous story will often be unsensational, set in familiar places, and involve ordinary people; the supernatural intrusion will be subtle and uncertain, and the points of view of the various characters will become correspondingly more important. However, a story like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw would not likely be considered numinous, for the considerable doubt thrown on the sanity of the governess in that story undermines the supernatural reality of the ghosts in that tale.
One significant example of a numinous story is “Cecilia de Noel,” published by English writer Mary Elizabeth Hawker in 1891. This story is composed of a number of different narratives from different narrators, who all relate tales touching on a haunting. Numinous uncertainty, more than terror, is the overall effect of the story. Another, later example is the 1959 Twilight Zone episode “And When the Sky Was Opened,” in which the main characters, a group of test pilots who have by chance stumbled across some mysterious threshold during an experimental flight in a new kind of aircraft, are edited out of existence; apparently, the cosmos wishes to preserve its secrets. This episode was based on a 1953 short story by Richard Matheson titled “Disappearing Act.”
Michael Cisco
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; Samuels, Mark; The Sublime; “The Willows.”
Further Reading
Geary, Robert F. 1992. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edward Mellon Press.
Varnado, S. L. 1987. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.