PALAHNIUK, CHUCK (1962–)
Charles Michael “Chuck” Palahniuk is an American novelist and journalist. As of 2016, he has published fourteen novels, a short story collection, and several pieces of non-fiction. Though only a small portion of his work can categorically be considered “horror,” his transgressive style and bleak worldview have made him a central figure in the contemporary macabre.
Palahniuk is best known for his first novel, Fight Club (1996). The novel met with lukewarm attention upon release, but after being adapted for film by director David Fincher it has gathered a cult following. Fight Club’s cynical and at times nihilistic indictment of contemporary corporate life has cemented its status as a key text of the Generation-X literary zeitgeist. All of Palahniuk’s fiction is marked by an inclination toward the grotesque, the transgressive, and the nihilistic. Yet his contribution to the horror genre is largely concentrated within a sequence of three novels that Palahniuk has himself termed his “horror trilogy.”
Lullaby (2001) concerns the search for a poem that, when read aloud, has the power to kill. At the beginning of the novel this “culling song” has resulted in the accidental death of the protagonist’s family. The plot concerns his attempt to track down and eradicate the threat. In addition to this basic plot, which is clearly influenced by the success of urban-legend horror in films such as Ringu (1998), Lullaby also features a necrophiliac paramedic and an estate agent who specializes in haunted houses.
Diary (2002) is a more conventional piece of American Gothic. Its depiction of the sinister recesses of small-town America is clearly influenced by the work of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Diary is the story of Misty Wilmot, an aspiring artist who relocates to her husband’s isolated island community. Once there she discovers that she is part of a sinister conspiracy in which her art, and her life, are to be sacrificed for the good of the town. Though there is little of the body horror that typifies Palahniuk’s other work, Diary achieves a quiet eeriness that stands alone in his writing so far.
Of all Palahniuk’s novels, Haunted (2005) is most clearly situated in the horror genre. It has an unusual structure, comprising nearly two dozen short narratives, framed within a wider story of confinement and abuse. The protagonists have each volunteered to be part of a writing retreat under the control of the elderly Mr. Whittier. They are taken to an abandoned theater and locked inside, under the proviso that they will be released once their writing is complete. Soon, however, the group descends to barbarity, eschewing literary creation in favor of a horror story that they can make (and sell) out of their own experience. They each tell their own tales, while brutalizing themselves and each other. Cannibalism and bodily dismemberment ensues. Nothing in the violence of the framing narrative can compete with the opening tale, “Guts.” This story is infamous for making audience members faint during live readings.
A possible inspiration for this turn to outright horror is the real-life murder of Palahniuk’s father in 1999. Palahniuk was asked to contribute to the legal discussion regarding whether the murderer should receive the death sentence. Critics have seen his horror trilogy as an attempt to deal with his responsibility in deciding the fate of another human being.
Though Palahniuk has gone on to write prolifically, releasing a novel per year since 2007, he has yet to match the potency of his horror trilogy. The first two installments of another trilogy, Damned (2011) and Doomed (2013), are horror-inflected, but they prioritize satire over any darker intent. However, a return to the world of Fight Club in a graphic novel sequel (2015–2016), does suggest that Palahniuk’s violent, nihilistic sensibility may make a startling reappearance in future work.
Neil McRobert
See also: Body Horror; Frame Story; King, Stephen; Jackson, Shirley.
Further Reading
Kuhn, Cynthia, and Lance Rubin, eds. 2009. Reading Chuck Palahniuk: American Monsters and Literary Mayhem. New York: Routledge.
Palahniuk, Chuck. 2004. Non Fiction. London: Vintage.
Sartain, Jeffrey, ed. 2009. Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.
PENNY DREADFUL
Penny dreadful is a name that was bestowed on penny newspapers filled with tales of adventure and horror that were published in England in the 1830s and 1840s. They were also referred to as “penny bloods” in reference to their blood-and-thunder style of storytelling. In the decades since, the term penny dreadful has become a catch-all phrase denoting publications with sensational or exploitative content.
Penny dreadfuls were made possible through the new machine manufacture of paper in the early nineteenth century and the invention of the rotary steam printing press, both of which allowed publishers to mass-produce printed publications relatively inexpensively. They were printed as pamphlets with dense, multicolumn text, usually adorned with a lurid cover engraving, and sold primarily to working-class readers as cheap entertainment. Penny dreadfuls were the successors to the Gothic bluebooks, or “shilling shockers,” themselves the successors to the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their contents were often redolent of both. Some featured self-contained stories, but most offered serial installments of longer works meant to entice readers to buy succeeding weekly or bi-weekly installments. By their nature the serial stories were written to run as long as they were popular with readers, meaning that their plots were often very loosely constructed, and they were often padded with chapters of history not essential to the story, unresolved subplots, and repetitive short lines of dialogue.
The best-known penny dreadfuls include James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampire (serialized in 220 chapters between 1845 and 1847), G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846–1847), and Rymer’s The String of Pearls (possibly written in collaboration with Thomas Peckett Prest), which is the best-known version of the story of Sweeney Todd, “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” who murdered his patrons and gave their remains to his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, to be baked into meat pies for public consumption. A number of penny dreadfuls were the work of serial writers, hence their slapdash execution: The Mysteries of London was a four-series story about the seedy underbelly of street life in London begun in 1844 by G. W. M. Reynolds and finished several years later by Thomas Miller and Edward L. Blanchard.
Not all penny dreadfuls featured horror themes. The Newgate Calendar—a monthly account of imprisonments and executions in England’s Newgate Prison, first published in book form in 1774—provided fodder for the penny papers, as did The Terrific Register (1825), an anthology of exotic atrocities and gruesome crimes from around the world. Dick Turpin, the infamous highwayman executed in 1739, was the hero of a number of penny dreadfuls, among them Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road, which ran for 254 installments between 1867 and 1868. Spring-Heeled Jack, a leaping bandit reputed to have preyed upon women in London in the 1830s (and whose exploits were later conflated with those of Jack the Ripper), was the main character in several penny dreadfuls. Pirates, outlaws, freebooters, revolutionaries, robbers, and cowboys all put in appearances in the penny dreadfuls, as did folk heroes such as Robin Hood and celebrities from real life, including Buffalo Bill. Some of the more popular penny dreadfuls were plagiarized from the work of Charles Dickens and other celebrity writers of the era.
W. M. Clarke, Edward Lloyd, and others founded their publishing empires on the strength of their penny dreadful sales. By the 1850s, public disapproval of the content of penny dreadfuls and its impact on the sensibilities of young readers contributed to the conversion of penny papers to more genteel publications for young boys, among them The Boy’s Own Paper, Boys of England, and The Young Gentleman’s Journal. These papers were forerunners of the nickel weeklies and dime novels published at the end of the nineteenth century, which in turn paved the way for the pulp fiction magazines of the first half of the twentieth century.
In May 2014 the Showtime cable television channel premiered Penny Dreadful, a horror series set in Victorian England with a mash-up plot featuring characters from classic nineteenth-century horror fiction, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Dracula; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Pulp Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Angelo, Michael. 1977. Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors. London: Jupiter Books.
Haining, Peter, ed. 1976. The Penny Dreadful. London: Gollancz.
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
The Phantom of the Opera began as a French Gothic novel published in 1910 by the prolific journalist and mystery-adventure novelist Gaston Leroux (1868–1927). Building on Leroux’s knowledge of the real Paris Opera, begun in the 1860s under architect Charles Garnier, and fictionalizing several of that era’s headlines to provide a news-like authenticity (including the actual fall of a chandelier into the Opera audience in 1896), the novel focuses on a musician-composer-architect-builder calling himself “Erik,” supposedly one of the Opera’s original designers.
Erik sequesters himself deep in the lower cellars underneath the Opera—indeed, on the shores of the underground lake (which actually exists because swampland had to be drained before the Opera could be built)—and hides himself there, while often trying to affect what happens in the world above. He is ashamed of the skull-face he bears from birth, over which has grown only thin and parchment-yellow skin, a visage suggested to Leroux by danse macabre paintings descended from medieval times and rarely used as the phantom’s real visage in most adaptations.
The action of the novel commences after Erik witnesses a girl from the country, Christine Daae, join the opera chorus. After hearing her sing, he becomes her unseen voice teacher (and Freudian father-figure) from behind her dressing-room’s walls and falls in love with her (regarding her at times as a replacement for his mother, since Freud’s concepts were taking hold by 1910). Soon, though, Christine’s improvement starts making her a rival for major roles with the Opera’s diva, Carlotta—whom the phantom chases off the stage by cutting down the chandelier—and she welcomes visits from her childhood sweetheart, the Vicomte Raoul de Chigny, a patron of the Opera delighted to find his former love after many years.
To get closer to Christine, Erik disguises himself—except that he uses his actual skull-face—as the figure of “Red Death” (from an 1845 story by Poe) at the Opera’s gala masked ball, a real annual event from the 1870s to the present. Alarmed by his pupil drifting from him, he captures her and takes her to his underground lair, where he woos her by rehearsing Verdi’s Otello with her while wearing a black mask—adding racial, even miscegenistic overtones not present in any later adaptation—until she abruptly unmasks him and recoils at beholding Death incarnate.
Meanwhile, Raoul joins forces with a Persian detective (who has chased Erik to Paris from the Middle East, where he used to do magic and construct torture chambers for a shah) and climbs down a labyrinth of dark passages toward the cellars to rescue Christine. There they face exotic Oriental obstacles that Erik now puts in their way, a symptom of the racist Orientalism that was quite common at the Paris Opera—and in Europe generally—at the time of the novel.
This story conflates many mythical, literary, and contemporary sources, starting with several Greek myths about Death and the Maiden, the best known of which is Pluto and Persephone (in which the god of the underworld kidnaps the daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest). It also carries forward several features from Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the notorious French scandal of the 1890s known as the Dreyfus Affair, on which Leroux reported and in which a Jewish officer in Paris was falsely charged with espionage and returned from imprisonment for a retrial as emaciated as a skeleton.
Leroux’s novel lost popularity after 1912 until the author himself negotiated the adaptation of it as a silent film released by Universal in 1925 and starring Lon Chaney, the premier star of silent horror pictures. That version, though it changed the novel significantly, set a standard for many that have come after it on the stage, film, and television. The most successful of these has been the stage-musical version by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and Richard Stilgoe, which debuted in London in 1986 and then on Broadway during the 1987–1988 season. Since then, it has become the longest-running play in Broadway history, augmented by many touring companies and a film version that have carried it around the world.
Jerrold E. Hogle
See also: Body Horror; Dracula; Gothic Hero/Villain; Hugo, Victor; “The Masque of the Red Death”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Stoker, Bram.
Further Reading
Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and Its Progeny. New York: Palgrave.
Perry, George, and Jane Rice 1987. The Complete Phantom of the Opera. New York: Henry Holt.
Wolf, Leonard, ed. and trans. 1996. The Essential Phantom of the Opera, Including the Complete Novel by Gaston Leroux. New York: Plume/Penguin.
“THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW”
Rudyard Kipling’s “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” was originally published in Quartette, the Christmas Annual of the Civil and Military Gazette for 1885, and later collected in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales (1888). It was Kipling’s first supernatural story, and on one level, it is a traditional ghost story, the tale of a wrongdoer haunted and done in by those he wronged. In the judgment of Kipling scholar Louis Cornell, “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” but more than that, the story is actual superior to those two because of its deployment of traditional Gothic elements in a recognizable contemporary setting.
The story is presented as the deathbed narrative of Theobald Jack Pansay, an Englishman resident in Simla, India. While en route from Gravesend to Bombay, Pansay had an affair with Agnes Keith-Wessington, the wife of an officer, destroying her marriage. Although Pansay attempted to break off his relations, she followed him to Simla, over the course of the next year repeatedly letting him know from her ’rickshaw that she was there for him. A thoroughgoing cad, Pansay disregarded her and pursued others, becoming engaged to Kitty Mannering. Mrs. Keith-Wessington dies, but to his horror, Pansay finds himself haunted by her as well as her four liveried servants and the ’rickshaw from which she used to speak to him, although there is incontrovertible evidence that all (including the servants) are dead and that the ’rickshaw has been destroyed. Nobody else can see the ghosts, but Pansay’s behavior attracts attention among the English colonials. The local doctor, Heathlegh, attempts to treat Pansay for hallucinations, but the ’rickshaw is present when the treatment concludes, and when the history of his treatment of Mrs. Keith-Wessington emerges, Pansay finds his engagement concluded. Pansay realizes that his days in India are numbered, and though he cannot understand why he must face punishment in this world rather than the next, he has conversations with Mrs. Wessington and accepts his fate before dying.
Certainly Pansay deserves what happens to him, for he is as unpleasant a character as Kipling ever created. Adding depth to the story is the depiction of the world of the English colonials residing in India: theirs is a closed society in which a transgression leads inevitably to ostracism. At the same time, Heathlegh’s solution offers readers a different perspective, one that is rational and rejects the supernatural: that Pansay merely suffered from a mental problem, in which the haunting is a manifestation of his conscience. Finally, there is the pathos of Mrs. Keith-Wessington: hers is not a vengeful ghost, merely one who wants the love that has been denied to her when she was alive, and in attempting to get her due, she emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic specter.
In his autobiography Something of Myself (1937), Kipling said “The Phantom ’Rickshaw” was one of the first things that he wrote under the clear influence of his “Personal Daemon,” a creative force that he experienced as being external to him, and that he described as guiding him in his authorial career.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”; “They.”
Further Reading
Cornell, Louis L. 1966. Kipling in India. New York: Macmillan.
Dillingham, William B. 2005. Kipling: Hell and Heroism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
PHANTOMS
The prolific American writer Dean Koontz has published numerous types of novels and has disputed being identified as a horror fiction writer. Though elements of horror do frequently appear in his stories, he is more correctly identified as a novelist of thrillers. He states in an afterword to a 2001 paperback reprint of his 1983 novel Phantoms, “Writing Phantoms was one of the ten biggest mistakes of my life,” because this novel (which has sold more than 60 million copies worldwide) “earned for me the label of ‘horror writer,’ which I never wanted, never embraced, and have ever since sought to shed” (Koontz 2001, 432).
Nevertheless, Phantoms is generally regarded as a first-rate horror story, perhaps one of the finest in the genre. It narrates the story of two sisters—Lisa and Jenny Paige—who travel to Jenny’s hometown of Snowfield, California, there to find the ski resort town to be entirely deserted. Jenny is a physician and Lisa is her fourteen-year-old sister. When they arrive at Jenny’s home, they discover the corpse of Jenny’s housekeeper lying on the floor, looking as if “she died in the middle of a scream” (15). Investigating the town, they discover more hideous corpses, some of them mutilated in sadistic fashion. They are able to contact the county authorities in Santa Mira, Sheriff Bryce Hammond and Lt. Talbert Whitman, who arrive in Snowfield to lead the investigation there. The most important clue they discover is the name “Timothy Flyte” written by one of the victims. Flyte, it appears, is a destitute British academic who once published a book entitled The Ancient Enemy, which recounts the mysterious mass disappearances of communities and populations through history.
Assisted by the Biological Investigations Unit of the American military, the group discovers that the “Ancient Enemy” is a massive creature able to shape parts of itself into any form or “phantom” that it desires. Growing in mass and size with each killing, this intelligent amoeba-like creature kills many of the investigators, including Flyte himself, who is brought to Snowfield at the creature’s insistence in order to write its biography. A scientific solution is eventually discovered that defeats the monster via a bacteria solution that consumes its amorphous petroleum-like cell structure. A thought-provoking subplot also appears in the story about Fletcher Kale, a sociopath, who becomes a type of apostle of the Ancient Enemy, which presents itself to him as the Devil. The novel concludes with the possibility of Kale being infected by the Ancient Enemy before its destruction, thus leaving a dark, open-ended resolution to the story.
In an essay comparing and contrasting the central evil in Phantoms with that in two of Koontz’s other novels, Whispers and Darkfall, Michael A. Morrison characterizes Phantoms as “the monster tale as police procedural” and notes that it focuses crucially on the mindset of the human protagonists as they confront something beyond their ken: “They are men and women of reason: systematic, scientific, rational. And much of Phantoms examines the responses of such people to the presence of an unknown” (Morrison 1998, 128–129). D. W. Taylor points out that the novel also engages not just its protagonists but its readers in a confrontation with this presence, and even turns this back upon the reader themselves: “[B]y the end of Phantoms, the hoary concept of a predestined evil from Hell has been turned upon the reader like a mirror, who suddenly finds himself staring rather uncomfortably into his own inexplicable, evil image” (Taylor 1998, 108).
Phantoms was released as a film in 1998, directed by Joe Chappelle and starring Peter O’Toole. Koontz wrote the screenplay based on his novel.
Gary Hoppenstand
See also: Koontz, Dean.
Further Reading
Koontz, Dean. [1983] 2001. Phantoms. New York: Berkley.
Lehti, Steven J. 1997. “Dean R. Koontz’s Phantoms.” Cinefantasique 29, no. 4/5 (October): 16–21.
Morrison, Michael A. 1998. “The Three Faces of Evil: The Monsters of Whispers, Phantoms, and Darkfall.” In Discovering Dean Koontz: Essays on America’s Bestselling Writer of Suspense and Horror Fiction, edited by Bill Munster, 120–143. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Taylor, D. W. 1998. “Mainstream Horror in Whispers and Phantoms.” In Discovering Dean Koontz: Essays on America’s Bestselling Writer of Suspense and Horror Fiction, edited by Bill Munster, 97–111. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
“PICKMAN’S MODEL”
“Pickman’s Model” is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft that was first published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. It is among Lovecraft’s most reprinted stories and it has been adapted numerous times for extraliterary media, notably by screenwriter Alvin Sapinsley for the December 1, 1971, episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
Set in Boston, the story is a narrated as a monologue in the first person by a man named Thurber to his friend Eliot. Thurber refuses to travel with his friend via the city’s subway system and by way of explanation he recounts his relationship with Richard Upton Pickman, a recently disappeared artist of the macabre who is shunned by the artistic establishment. It’s less the horrific subject matter of Pickman’s work—which frequently features dog-faced ghouls feeding—than its graphic realism that so distresses the art world.
Thurber relates how his admiration of Pickman’s work compelled him to accept the artist’s invitation one evening to visit his studio in Boston’s North End, where Pickman points out that many of the houses are connected by a network of subterranean tunnels that date to the earliest years of New England’s settling. Thurber is disturbed by several of Pickman’s recent canvases hanging in the studio, including the painting “Subway Accident,” which depicts the ghoul creatures emerging from train tunnels to attack a crowd on a platform, and “The Lesson,” which appears to feature elder ghouls teaching a young human changeling how to feed on a corpse. When sounds are heard in the nearby room where the house’s boarded-up tunnel entrance is located, Pickman investigates, fires several shots, and then returns to hastily conclude his meeting with Thurber. In his excitement, Thurber accidentally snatches a photo affixed to a corner of one of Pickman’s works in progress. When he looks at it later, expecting to see an image that Pickman is using for background detail, he discovers the truth about why Pickman’s painted monsters appear so realistic.
Although not regarded as one of Lovecraft’s tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, “Pickman’s Model” can be appreciated in the same context as one of his efforts to depict an otherworldly race of beings that exists parallel to the human race, and largely unseen. References in the story suggest that the race of ghouls dates back at least to the Salem witch trials and the earliest years of New England history. Lovecraft lards the story with historic and geographic details that depict the ghoul culture as inextricable from the culture of those on whom they feed: the blue-blood stock of New England. The story has inspired a number of homages by other writers, including Robert Barbour Johnson’s “Far Below” (1939) and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Daughter of Hounds (2006) and “Pickman’s Other Model (1929).”
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Arkham House; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Monsters; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Anderson, James. 2002. “Pickman’s Model: H. P. Lovecraft’s Model of Terror.” In A Century Less a Dream: Selected Criticism on H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Scott Connors, 195–205. Holicong, PA: Wildside.
Lovecraft, Howard P. [1927] 1999. “Pickman’s Model.” In More Annotated Lovecraft, edited by S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon. New York: Dell.
Sederholm, Carl. 2006. “What Screams Are Made of: Representing Cosmic Fear in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16, no. 4 (Winter): 335–349.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel, a supernatural tale of moral degeneration and hidden guilt. It began as a story told to his friends, but Philadelphia publisher J. M. Stoddart, on a visit to London, requested him to write it out for his magazine. It was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine for July 1890, where its thinly veiled homoeroticism stirred up controversy. Wilde extensively revised it before its book publication in 1891, toning down the homoeroticism and adding six chapters and a preface with the French Aestheticist argument that books are neither moral nor immoral but exist for their own sake.
Youthful Dorian Gray meets the hedonistic Lord Henry Wotton as he sits for a portrait. During the sitting Dorian wishes aloud to remain young while the portrait ages. He soon discovers his wish has been magically granted, but that it also reflects his evil deeds. Wotton gives him a yellow book, which helps to entice him into a corrupt, hedonistic lifestyle. The portrait, his symbolic conscience, gradually changes, reflecting his moral descent. Ashamed, he locks it in an unused upstairs room. Finally, he destroys the hated portrait with a knife, destroying himself in the process.
The book bears many similarities to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both involve moral decay, the separation of the good and evil aspects of human nature, and the self-destruction of the protagonist. Hyde’s activities and Dorian’s are largely left to the imagination.
Other major influences on it were Wilde’s mother’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress by J. W. Meinhold with its double portrait of the good and evil versions of Sidonia; and Melmoth the Wanderer by Wilde’s great-uncle, Charles Maturin, which has a hidden painting of a character who bargained with the devil to live 150 years. Other possible influences are Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and “William Wilson.” The name Dorian alludes to the ancient Greek Dorian tribe, noted for homosexuality in their military. Dorian’s character is partially based on Wilde himself and on his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The enticing yellow book is presumably the French Decadent novel A Rebours by J. K. Huysmans.
Critics attacked the magazine version, calling it immoral, unclean, and poisonous. It was used as evidence by the prosecution when Wilde was later tried for indecency. The book version received slightly less vehement criticism. An uncensored, annotated edition was published by Belknap Press in 2011.
The story has been adapted to ballet and opera and has been filmed many times between 1918 and 2009. Albert Lewin’s version (1945), the most notable, won Academy and Golden Globe awards, as well as a retro Hugo. To this day, it is often said of youthful-appearing people that they “must have a portrait hidden in the attic.”
Lee Weinstein
See also: Huysmans, J. K.; Melmoth the Wanderer; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Further Reading
Beckson, Karl E. 1998. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS Press.
Belford, Barbara. 2000. Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius. New York: Random House.
Gomel, Elana. 2004. “Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the Author.” Narrative 12, no. 1: 74–92.
Wilde, Oscar. [1890] 2011. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, edited by Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
POE, EDGAR ALLAN (1809–1849)
Edgar Allan Poe did not invent Gothic fiction, or supernatural fiction, or horror fiction, but he was certainly a significant heir of Gothic tradition, which he fashioned to his own purposes, thus refreshing literary Gothicism. Horror is indeed a signal feature in much of his work, but it is not horror for mere horror’s sake. Critics taxed him for creating too much “German” (for which, read “Gothic” or “horror”) substance, notably in his fiction. In the “Preface” to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), his first collection of his tales, most of which had been originally published in magazines or newspapers, he stated: “I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul,” adding that he composed those tales with that principle uppermost in mind (Poe 1984, 129). That this principle is evident in many of his poems, tales, and, certainly, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Poe’s only completed novel, is unmistakable.
Poe’s biography is often thought to be sensational. Actually, his life was not extraordinary. He was no legendary drunkard as malicious gossip portrayed him; no drug addict, contrary to another misconception; and no debaucher—of young women, black cats, or ravens. If author Poe was pursued by any demon, that demon was poverty. His literary income for twenty-plus years’ authorship was roughly ten thousand dollars, poverty level even in his day. Far too often, Poe’s personal life has been presented as the basis for his creative writings, but that interpretation is also inaccurate.
Born January 19, 1809, as Edgar Poe, to actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, he was the second of their three children. His siblings were William Henry Leonard Poe (1807–1831), usually known as Henry, and Rosalie Poe (1810–1874), adopted by the Mackenzies of Richmond, Virginia, so typically known as Rosalie Mackenzie Poe. David Poe Jr. deserted his family in 1811, and no documentary evidence has been discovered that details the rest of his life. Elizabeth died from tuberculosis later that year. Edgar became the foster child of John and Frances Allan, a childless couple of Richmond, so he came to sign his name as Edgar A. Poe, as if Allan were genuinely part of his name. John Allan, an immigrant from Scotland and a successful businessman, was a no-nonsense guardian. Frances Valentine Allan was far more sympathetic to their ward.
Edgar’s early life with the Allans was fairly pleasant. He received a good education in English and American schools. He then attended the University of Virginia (February–December 1826), but Allan’s scant financial support led to Poe’s accumulating high gambling debts and his withdrawal, despite his academic credibility. Poe quarreled with Allan, went to Boston, where he enlisted in the Army as “Edgar A. Perry,” and published his first book, Tamerlane and other Poems “by a Bostonian” (1827). Poe’s ambitions for authorship displeased the more practical-minded Allan.
Poe desired to be a poet akin to Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and other British Romantic poets. He published two more slim books of verse, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) and Poems (1831). He had also enrolled at West Point Military Academy, but tired of the regimen, got himself court martialed, and went to Baltimore, where he lived with his widowed, invalid grandmother, Elizabeth C. Poe, her daughter, Maria Poe Clemm, and Mrs. Clemm’s daughter, Virginia, and Henry Poe (who died in August 1831). Henry, too, had literary ambitions, but his endeavors in authorship have sometimes been confused with Edgar’s, given the practices of authorial anonymity then prevalent.
Poe’s poems reveal undeniable links to Gothicism, for example, in the fearful or emotionally unsettled speakers in Tamerlane, “The Lake. To—,” or “Spirits of the Dead,” among early pieces, where weird, claustrophobic settings increase psychological unease. More intense psychological fears enhance later poems, for example, “The Raven” (1845), “The Conqueror Worm” (1843), and “Ulalume” (1847). The speakers are prey to anxieties, which seem mysterious, but which in “The Raven” prove to be grief for Lenore, who, in delightful ambiguity, may be literally dead or representative of a feminism “dead,” that is, absent from the speaker’s life. Likewise, Ulalume is no longer part of the speaker’s normal life, but memories of her haunt him, much as a more literal ghost might torment its victim.
Poe’s poems reveal his abilities to achieve exquisite mingling of sound with sense. Implications of scene and emotion closing in to overwhelm the speaker with claustrophobic, destructive feelings in “The Lake. To—,” for example, are plausibly combined. The lyrical effects in “The Raven,” “The Conqueror Worm,” or “Ulalume” create a “music” that coalesces deftly with the decreasing rationality of the speaker, who ultimately succumbs to hypnotic effects of rhythms couching negative influences or what he imagines are negative influences.
Poe’s early years in Baltimore, 1831–1833, still remain shadowy. Realizing, perhaps, that he was unlikely to achieve financial security from publishing verse, he began to write short stories or, as he preferred, “tales,” emulating popular Gothic tales in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and like periodicals. Poe entered five tales in a contest sponsored in late 1831 by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier; none won the prize, but all were published, unsigned, during 1832. In another prize competition for the best poem and the best tale, sponsored in 1833 by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, Poe’s tale “MS. Found in a Bottle” and his poem “The Coliseum” were chosen first in each category. The judges, though, didn’t want to award both prizes to a single author, so the poetry prize went to John Hill Hewitt. He was connected with the Visiter, so Poe took umbrage.
Thanks to the kindness of John Pendleton Kennedy, an established Baltimore author who was a judge in the Visiter contest, Poe was hired by Thomas W. White, who established a new monthly magazine in Richmond, Virginia, the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe was managing editor for the magazine, though White had the final word on content. Although Poe published revised versions of some of his poems and tales, along with new pieces, in the Messenger during 1835–1836, he actually gained national fame for his reviews, which were accurate, if often stringent.
Poe rapidly perceived how much Gothic horror literature had become trite, featuring too many protagonists haunted by vague angst, in grim, often crumbling ancient castles as backdrops, and seemingly supernatural, too incredible horrors, multiplying to cause unease—all expressed in high-flown language. Alternatively, diabolic physical tortures and pain were inflicted on helpless victims of temperamental tyrants. Poe’s literary artistry repeatedly transformed such clichéd settings, characters, and language into artistic symbolic representations of troubled human psychology.
In the early 1830s Poe’s awareness of potential weaknesses in horror fiction also led him onto another path. Like many young people, he reacted against what he perceived as extremes and weaknesses—here, those in popular horror fiction—by confronting them with humor. He toyed with the idea of creating a book, “Tales of the Folio Club,” featuring a group of pretentious authors, all caricatures of well-known writers of the times, who would meet monthly, enjoy ample drink and food, then proceed to read to each other an original tale, which the group would then criticize. The tales debated and the critical methods, too, would be discussed within a comic framework. The person whose tale was designated the worst had to host the next gathering. After several successive such penalties occurred to the same club member, he would decide to expose the pretentiousness and weaknesses in the club members and their productions, fleeing to a publisher to make public such folderol.
Thus Poe composed tales that parodied and satirized the themes and techniques of some much admired contemporary authors. Unfortunately, since no publisher would accept Poe’s book because of financial uncertainties about its success with the reading public, Poe published the tales individually, thereby causing a confusion about his own aims and intentions that persists to the present.
Such tales as “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), or “The Black Cat” (1843), to cite but a few, exemplify Poe’s artistic, convincing portrayals of disintegrating minds. Although the surfaces in such tales may be horrific, they are the more terrifying because they are plausible. The narrators in the first two named tales and Prospero and his followers in the third represent destructive emotional forces that wreak horrors on the minds and perhaps the bodies of such characters.
Although he learned much about what would constitute best-selling horror fiction from models in Blackwood’s and others of a similar nature, which were popular reading in his day and, in the case of Blackwood’s in particular, which published horror fiction as a staple, Poe collected his stories, revised, into two volumes dated 1840 (actually published in late 1839). The book’s title, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, has continued to create confusion among critics, and clear distinctions between “grotesque” and “arabesque” have never been established.
Poe twice ventured beyond the tale as his venue. First, heeding the advice of James Kirke Paulding, an older, established author, Poe turned to writing a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which appeared in book form in 1838, though early chapters appeared in the Messenger in early 1837, during which time Poe left the magazine. Poe’s second experiment in novel writing, The Journal of Julius Rodman, was serialized and left uncompleted in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (January–June 1840). Poe had become editor of that magazine, though he also aspired to launch a literary magazine of his own, but those attempts failed. Poe and Burton ultimately clashed, so Poe accepted the offer of George R. Graham to edit Graham’s Magazine, there publishing some of his most notable work, which included “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).
After unsuccessfully enlisting Graham to join his magazine project, Poe in 1843 went to New York City, where he would eventually publish the extended version of Pym and where he engaged in journalistic work, ultimately to become editor, then editor and proprietor of the Broadway Journal, a weekly literary periodical, during 1845–1846. Again Poe published revised versions of his stories and poems, along with perceptive reviews.
After he abandoned the Broadway Journal, Poe no longer had means of responding to antagonists (such antipathies caused chiefly by his often caustic reviews of some publisher’s darling’s book), and he became targeted by those who disliked him. Virginia Poe, who had long been suffering from tuberculosis, died in January 1847. In the wake of his devastation, Poe apparently sought understanding and compassion from other women, which has also led to many prurient speculations about his nature. Homeward bound from a successful visit to his onetime home, Richmond, where he had gone to lecture on poetry and politics, Poe was discovered in very poor physical condition in Baltimore in early October 1849. He was hospitalized, remained incoherent, died on October 7, 1849, and was buried in Westminster Presbyterian graveyard. In 1876, a memorial service was held, during which Poe’s remains were moved to a new grave, replete with an imposing monument, in the front of the graveyard.
Because of a scurrilous, inaccurate biographical sketch of Poe by Rufus W. Griswold, then considered a prominent author and editor, Poe’s reputation has repeatedly been called into question. There are persisting notions that Poe was diabolic and that he modeled all his literary protagonists on his own emotionally disordered self. The real reason for Poe’s continuing fascination for readers is, however, that the weird, frightening characters and situations in his fiction and poems evince a “terror of the soul,” which, in the “Preface” to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he himself called the mainstay of his creative endeavors.
Benjamin F. Fisher
See also: “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “Ligeia”; “The Masque of the Red Death”; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Fisher, Benjamin F. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Poe, Edgar Allan. 1984. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America.
Poe, Edgar Allan. 2008. The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 vols. Edited by John Ward Ostrom. Revised, corrected, and expanded by Burton R. Pollin and Jeffrey A. Savoye. New York: Gordian Press.
Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. 1987. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Wagenknecht, Edward. 1963. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press.
POSSESSION AND EXORCISM
Exorcism is the religious or spiritual practice of casting out demons from those who are under a state of possession from demonic or satanic spiritual forces. While possession and exorcism appear in many cultures and religious traditions, in the popular imagination they are most commonly part of Christian religious traditions. They are also extremely popular subjects for horror fiction and film, where they are commonly represented as being generally Catholic phenomena.
Within the Catholic Church, a distinction is drawn between “prayers of deliverance,” which can be offered by anyone, and formal exorcism, which can only be performed by a priest during baptism or with the permission of a bishop. The Catholic rite for a “Major Exorcism” is given in Section Eleven of the Rituale Romanum. The exorcism is performed through the recitation of prayers listed in the rite, invoking the name of Jesus, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit; and it may, though not necessarily, involve the use of religious symbols and sacraments such as communion wafers, relics, crucifixes, and holy water. The authority and power of the exorcism comes from the invocation of the Trinity, and the efficacy of the exorcism is dependent upon the faith of the practitioner and the legitimacy of the authorizing body that allows it to take place.
The manifestation of demonic possession has been variable throughout history, but signs listed in the Roman Ritual include, but are not limited to, speaking foreign or ancient languages of which the possessed has no prior knowledge; supernatural strength; knowledge of hidden things that the possessed has no way of obtaining; an aversion to anything holy; and profuse blasphemous language. With clergy often criticized for mistaking undiagnosed mental illness for possession, recorded cases of episcopal approval for exorcism rites have become increasingly rare, although modern media attention (particularly in the aftermath of key horror texts such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist) has often led to spikes in requests for exorcisms among established churches. Those under possession are often not held accountable for their actions, and thus the exorcism rite is understood not as a punishment but as an act designed to restore their individual subjectivity.
Representations of possession and exorcism in Gothic and horror literature and film tend to focus upon the process by which an individual can fall under demonic influence, the manifestation of the various demonic powers, and, although not always, the final restoration of normality and the “saving” of the possessed individual. Beginning with the satanic encounters in early horror texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), as well as Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya the Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century (1806), possession has been a regular occurring theme throughout horror history. By the late nineteenth century, concerns around evolution and degeneration led to possession being represented as a loss of humanity, frequently shown in animalistic terms. Notable examples include Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1890). The ambiguity of possession in the era of increasing secularity is another repeated concern, reaching its high point with Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). The early twentieth century saw a decline in the possession narrative, although the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft was often concerned with the annihilation of the subject after an encounter with a powerful spiritual reality. The possession narrative reemerged in the 1960s with Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan (1962) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), the latter of which became a critical and commercial success.
Film has also been an extremely fruitful area for possession and exorcism narratives, several of which have become well-regarded horror classics. Key texts from horror cinema in this area include Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman Polanski, 1968) and the highly influential The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin 1973), as well as Sam Rami’s Evil Dead franchise (1981–2013). Postmillennial horror has featured a resurgence in possession and exorcism narratives—The Exorcism of Emily Rose (dir. Scott Derrickson, 2005) as well as The Last Exorcism (dir. Daniel Stamm, 2010) being high-profile examples. These films, which are relatively inexpensive to produce, generally generate high returns, despite an increasingly lukewarm critical response. This suggests that even in an era of ostensible secularity, the possession narrative and the fears that it taps into still continue to resonate with horror fans.
Jon Greenaway
See also: Devils and Demons; The Exorcist; “The Great God Pan”; The Monk; Rosemary’s Baby; Russell, Ray; “Thrawn Janet”; The Turn of the Screw; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Cardin, Matt. 2007. “The Angel and the Demon.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by S. T. Joshi, 31–64. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.
Mäyrä, Frans Ilkka. 1999. Demonic Texts and Textual Demons: The Demonic Tradition, the Self, and Popular Fiction. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press. http://people.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/Demon_2005/Demon.pdf.
Schober, Adrian. 2004. Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film. New York: Macmillan.
THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF
A JUSTIFIED SINNER
James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner can validly be considered a work ahead of its time. It is arguably the first psychological horror novel in literature, and certainly its ambiguities, which allow for either psychological or supernatural readings or both, is more to the taste of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than the nineteenth.
In the late seventeenth century, George Colwan, a Scottish laird, marries an appalling religious bigot. This new wife is so offended by the merrymaking at the wedding that she refuses to come to his bed, and, very likely, he rapes her. A son born of this union, also called George, grows up to be personable and fun-loving, like his father. A year later Mrs. Colwan gives birth to another son, Robert Wringhim, apparently fathered by her hypocritical religious mentor. Young Robert becomes a fanatical believer in extreme Calvinism, convinced that he is predestined to go to heaven, regardless of what acts he may perform on Earth. The logical extension of this is that anything he does is God’s work, including murder, starting with his half-brother, George. He attempts to push George to his death off Arthur’s Seat, a height above Edinburgh, but is deterred by an apparition, which can be explained as a mirage.
Later, George is murdered, but witnesses clearly see someone else leaving the scene of the crime. However, the novel is told as a frame narrative with different points of view, and the “Editor’s Narrative” now switches to Robert’s “Confession,” which presents the reader with a very different version of events. Robert has encountered a doppelgänger of himself called Gil-Martin, who urges him on to further crimes. While Robert believes that Gil-Martin is really the Russian czar Peter the Great traveling incognito, a better interpretation is that Gil-Martin is the Devil who leads him to destruction by telling him exactly what he wants to hear. It is clear that Robert’s mind is disintegrating, but the question remains as to whether he is truly in the company of the Devil. Gil-Martin can assume any identity, and it is possible, but not certain, that he killed George.
More crimes ensue. Robert has large gaps in his memory. Gil-Martin may be a projection of Robert’s, but this is never made clear, even after Robert comes to fear Gil-Martin, tries to flee, and ultimately commits suicide, at which point the “Editor’s Narrative” resumes. The text analyzes itself and fails to come to a conclusion. The editor even inquires of the novel’s author, Mr. Hogg, who, in an amusing in-joke, is too busy with a deal in sheep to show much interest.
The sheep joke fits because James Hogg was known as “The Ettrick Shepherd.” He really had been a shepherd before he became a poet, and as a rustic bard he was acceptable to the Scottish literary establishment. But when he moved on to books like Justified Sinner, he was rejected, and the work fell into obscurity before being rediscovered and appreciated in the twentieth century. Today it is recognized as a precursor of such classic double and doppelgänger tales as Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like these and other such tales, Hogg’s novel explores the question of human identity and possible duality, and it offers acute insight into the fears and anxieties surrounding Calvinism and predestination.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Frame Story; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Further Reading
Carey, John. 1959. Introduction to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ix–xvi. New York: Grove Press.
Jackson, Richard D. 2001. “The Devil, the Doppelgänger, and the Confessions of James Hogg and Thomas De Quincey.” Studies in Hogg and His World 12: 90–103.
Smith, Nelson C. 1985. “James Hogg.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, vol. 1, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 177–183. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror that focuses on the inner psychological states and experiences of characters to generate horror, fear, and dread. Horror in general, as an artistic genre or mode, consists of prose fiction (or poetry, drama, or film) that elicits emotions of intense fear, revulsion, and dread. Horror is a subgenre of the fantastic, and it may be almost infinitely subdivided, with the major subdivisions including what might be called killer horror (centering on violent and murderous people as villains), monster horror, paranormal/supernatural horror, extreme horror (emphasizing gore and bodily destruction), and psychological horror. Unlike killer and monster horror, psychological horror does not rely on a physical, external threat to produce fear. Unlike paranormal/supernatural horror, it does not posit, or at least does not focus solely upon, the existence of a paranormal or supernatural universe as the chief source of dread. Unlike extreme horror, psychological horror emphasizes inner rather than external conflicts and brutality to produce the central emotions of fear and dread. Significantly, the boundaries between such subgenres are fluid, and many horror narratives move between genres.
Although first recognized as a subgenre of horror in film studies in the mid-twentieth century, psychological horror has a long literary history. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), with its depiction of a nightmarish walk through the forest outside colonial Salem Village, Massachusetts, can be read as an early example, since it winds up to an ambiguous conclusion in which the title character may have witnessed an actual satanic gathering in the woods or may have simply had a dream or vision that left him forever suspicious of and alienated from his family and fellow villagers. Likewise, many of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, such as “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), generate and rely on psychological horror. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) are excellent examples of the genre with their depictions of progressive psychological deterioration narrated in the first person. More recent examples of psychological horror fiction include L. Ron Hubbard’s Fear (1940), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), and Stephen King’s Misery (1987) and The Shining (1977), all of which dramatize the terror of growing psychosis and attendant violence.
Film has provided a welcoming medium for horror, and psychological horror has played an essential part in film history. Sometimes this has been linked to literary sources; adaptations of Psycho (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), The Haunting of Hill House (filmed as The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, 1963), and The Shining (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1980) are considered film classics. Cinema began to explore psychological horror very early, especially in the case of German Expressionism (1919–1933), which created a striking visual style by exteriorizing characters’ often dark inner states by means of exaggerated and surreal lighting and set design. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which is set in an asylum, and Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which follows a murdering pedophile through Berlin, use composition and lighting to reflect inner disorientation and fear. Also often cited as early examples of cinematic psychological horror are The Black Cat (1934), Cat People (1942), and White Zombie (1932), the latter of which, despite its title, is more a psychological film than monster movie.
Given the fluid boundaries between horror subgenres, a number of horror narratives can be read or viewed from a variety of critical perspectives that unite psychological horror with something else. For example, both Jack Finney’s classic horror/science fiction novel The Body Snatchers (1955) and its several film adaptations as Invasion of the Body Snatchers—as in Dan Siegel’s 1956 version, Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version, and Abel Ferrara’s 1993 version—are as much psychological studies of disorientation in the face of an almost inconceivable and unbearable event—the sinister replacement of one’s friends, acquaintances, and loved ones by alien duplicates (“pod people,” as they are commonly referred to in popular culture)—as they are science fiction invasion narratives. Both Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs and its superlative 1991 film adaptation by director Jonathan Demme stand more as studies in madness, inhering in the almost transcendent and magisterial insanity of the genius, psychologist, and serial killer Hannibal Lecter, than they do as killer thrillers.
Jim Holte
See also: Bloch, Robert; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Fear; Harris, Thomas; The Haunting of Hill House; “Ligeia”; Misery; The Shining; The Turn of the Screw; “The Yellow Wall-Paper”; “Young Goodman Brown.”
Further Reading
Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Hoppenstand, Gary. 2001. “Horror Fiction.” In The Guide to United States Popular Culture, edited by Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne, 406–408. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Massé, Michelle A. 2015. “Psychoanalysis and the Gothic.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 307–320. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Spratford, Becky Siegel, and Tammy Hennigh Clausen. 2004. “Psychological Horror.” In Horror Readers’ Advisory: The Librarian’s Guide to Vampires, Killer Tomatoes, and Haunted Houses, 90–97. Chicago: American Library Association.
Wisker, Gina. 2005. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum.
PULP HORROR
The term “pulp horror” refers to a brand of horror fiction chiefly but not exclusively limited to twentieth-century popular magazines printed on cheap paper and catering to lower- and middle-class readers. Pulp horror is marked by an adherence to formula writing and stereotypical characters and themes at the expense of originality.
Horror fiction had been comparatively rare in the general-interest pulp magazines of the twentieth century until the advent of Weird Tales in 1923. Titles such as Argosy were formulated to appeal to a broad audience, and individual issues typically contained general fiction and the commonly accepted popular genres, such as mystery, Western, and romance. Horror was considered “off-trail,” an editorial term denoting a story out of the mainstream of acceptability, and only the most compelling horror stories by reputable authors found their way into print.
For its first decade, Weird Tales had the field virtually to itself, and its readers were largely content with the traditional subgenres of supernatural fiction—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and like monsters. It set the standard for magazine horror fiction in its day, and although it claimed to have no editorial taboos, in reality its contents hewed to common and comfortable horror conventions, with the contributions by H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and very few others representing notable exceptions.
The first wave of Hollywood horror talkies in 1931–1932 directly inspired a parallel trend in pulp detection fiction. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and other now-classic films demonstrated that the general public was open to horror stories. This led to a wave of “menace” tales appearing in pulp magazines such as Detective-Dragnet and Dime Mystery Magazine, in which detective protagonists battled ghoulish fiends, the classic Prohibition-era gangster antagonist having become passé.
In 1933, menace detective fiction evolved into the mystery-terror story, becoming a distinct subgenre unto itself. In the fall of that year, Popular Publications reformulated Dime Mystery Magazine as a vehicle for horror-themed suspense stories with a specific mystery—but not deductive—slant.
Publisher Harry Steeger cited the horrific Grand Guignol Theater in Paris as the inspiration for this unique new brand of pulp story, but Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade were equally influential. Editor Rogers Terrill described the rigid formula writers were required to follow slavishly: “Our stories usually concern a young man and a young woman in love, either married or sweethearts, and terror menaces both of them. The emotional effect of terror felt for someone else is far stronger than fear for oneself. Where a terrible menace threatens a man and woman in love, they will fight like hell for each other. . . . We want an eerie, uncanny type of menace, which may seem supernatural as the story progresses, but which can be logically explained at the end—or it may be definitely supernatural” (Lenninger 1935, 16).
Dime Mystery’s rising circulation proved Steeger correct. The title was followed by Terror Tales (1934) and Horror Stories (1935), in which the new mystery-terror formula was relentlessly codified by writers such as Norvell W. Page, Frederick C. Davis, Wyatt Blassingame, Hugh B. Cave, Arthur J. Burks, Paul Ernst, and John H. Knox. “Weird Menace” became the operative term for these super-specialized stories wherein lay protagonists—as distinct from official or semiofficial crime solvers—confront and defeat seemingly supernatural situations and survive, if not triumph. One conceit of the formula avoided admitting that any actual supernatural agency was at work. The ghouls, fiends, vampires, and other depraved monsters were usually revealed as diabolical frauds, giving the stories a climactic twist in the direction of normalcy triumphant. A sprinkling of supernatural denouements were offered to create an element of uncertainty. The editorial need to push the boundaries of taboo situations inevitably led to excesses in the areas of sex and sadism, as typical Weird Menace titles such as “Death’s Loving Arms,” “Girls for the Devil’s Abattoir,” and “Daughter of Dark Desire” suggest, resulting in censorship pressures that culminated with the banning of such magazines in 1940 and their extinction in 1941.
With variations, the Weird Menace formula has been periodically revived. The so-called “Men’s Sweat” magazines of the 1950s and 1960s flirted with it without success. Readers preferred Nazi torturers and naturalistic wildlife encounters instead of the faux-supernatural horror element. However, Weird Menace continues to thrive in Hollywood, as exemplified by the cycles of Scream, Saw, and Nightmare on Elm Street film franchises, in which hapless teenage protagonists endlessly reenact the grisly Ten Little Indians formula of classic mystery fiction, but with horrific trappings.
Will Murray
See also: Lovecraft, H. P.; Occult Detectives; Penny Dreadful; Smith, Clark Ashton; Splatterpunk; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Jones, Robert Kenneth. 1978. The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s. New York: New American Library.
Lenninger, August. 1935. “Six of a Chain.” Writer’s Digest, January. Cincinnati, Ohio.