RADCLIFFE, ANN (1764–1823)
The best paid novelist of the eighteenth century, Ann Radcliffe was a literary celebrity during her lifetime whose Gothic novels were incredibly popular with the British reading public. Born in 1764, the year the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, was published, Radcliffe was a reclusive middle-class writer who published a series of Gothic novels at the end of the eighteenth century during the height of the genre’s popularity. Within an eight-year period, Radcliffe produced five Gothic novels, the last three of which proved incredibly successful in terms of commercial and aesthetic value; her works are The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). A historical romance, Gaston de Blondeville (1826), was published posthumously. Since her death in 1823, Radcliffe has continued to influence writers in the horror genre with many of them referencing her works within their own.
Radcliffe’s biography has long been a challenge for literary historians. Much of her early life is unknown and she lived a private life during her years as a respected writer. Unlike other popular authors of the period, like Horace Walpole, only a single letter of correspondence, discovered in 2014, to her mother-in-law survives. The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti even attempted to write a book-length biography of Radcliffe but was forced to abandon her plans when it became evident that the historical sources simply do not exist. Radcliffe’s place in the history of horror fiction, however, is an accepted fact despite the lack of biographical details. After Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic novel slowly but surely took hold on the British reading public’s imagination. By 1777, the second Gothic novel, The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve, was published, each following year seeing the publication of more Gothic novels until the trend finally began to slow down in the early years of the nineteenth century. Radcliffe was among the many literate middle- and working-class individuals who saw fit to write in the form presented by Gothic fiction with her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne appearing in 1789 and A Sicilian Romance a year later. Neither novel is an outstanding work on its own, both owing much to the earlier works by Walpole and Reeve as they are more imitative than anything else. It was the publication of her third novel in 1791, The Romance of the Forest, that not only demonstrated her complex growth as a writer but her mastery of Gothic fiction and subsequently earned her the adoration of the reading public.
Following the success of The Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe was advanced £500, an unheard-of sum for a novelist at the time, for her next novel, which would subsequently become her magnum opus, The Mysteries of Udolpho. The immediate success of The Mysteries of Udolpho established Radcliffe as a household name among middle- and upper-class families, making her perhaps the most influential figure in Gothic fiction for decades. Two years after the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho, a young member of Parliament named Matthew Lewis published his own Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), a work that seemingly countered many of the themes and motifs presented by Radcliffe’s brand of Gothic fiction. Radcliffe’s response to Lewis was her final novel published during her lifetime, The Italian, a work she was paid £800 for, that took issue with the more masculine style of Gothic fiction found in The Monk. After The Italian, Radcliffe quietly disappeared from public life and died in 1823 at the age of 58. In 1826, an essay by Radcliffe, entitled “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” was posthumously published, in which she states her ideas on the function of terror and horror in Gothic fiction, a distinction that has continued to be relevant ever since.
Radcliffe’s contributions to Gothic fiction are immense. Many of her works, especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, utilize major eighteenth-century philosophical ideas such as the sublime and sensibility that illustrate a strong intellectual complexity that is lacking in other Gothic texts of the period. Her focus on the picturesque and description add depth to a genre already dependent on aesthetics and the imagination. Her own brand of Gothic fiction, sometimes called female Gothic (in direct opposition to the male Gothic best represented by Lewis) or Radcliffean Gothic, tends to focus on a young female protagonist who is normally pursued by a man of power, the use of terror over horror, the explained supernatural (true supernatural occurrences do not exist in Radcliffean Gothic—what is perceived to be supernatural is always logically explained by the conclusion of the text), and an integration of the aforementioned eighteenth-century concepts like sensibility and the sublime.
Radcliffe had an immediate influence on Gothic fiction during her literary career, influencing many of her contemporaries, like Eliza Parsons, Francis Lathom, and Regina Maria Roche, to fashion Radcliffean Gothic novels of their own. Later writers of the horror genre have been greatly influenced by her as well. For example, Edgar Allan Poe references Radcliffe and her work in several works of his own, most notably his “The Oval Portrait” (1842). Charlotte and Emily Brontë are among other nineteenth-century writers who are clearly inspired by Radcliffe, and the aforementioned Christina Rossetti found Radcliffe’s biography a topic worthy of study. Strong parallels with Radcliffe and modern writers like Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and Susan Hill can also be found, once again demonstrating Radcliffe’s lasting legacy on the horror genre.
Joel T. Terranova
See also: The Brontë Sisters; The Castle of Otranto; Hill, Susan; Jackson, Shirley; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Poe, Edgar Allan; Rice, Anne; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Durant, David. 1982. “Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22, no. 3: 519–530.
Michasiw, Kim Ian. 1994. “Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6, no. 4: 327–346.
Norton, Rictor. 1999. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.
Rogers, Deborah D. 1996. Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Townshend, Dale. 2014. Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism, and the Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
THE RATS
The Rats was the first novel by British horror writer James Herbert. It was published in the United Kingdom in 1974 by New English Library a few months before they also published Stephen King’s first book, Carrie. The novel tells the story of a horde of large, savage, mutant rats invading London’s docklands and killing people, an incursion investigated by a secondary school teacher named Harris. Herbert was inspired by a passage in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in which Dracula’s servant Renfield dreams of thousands of rats with red eyes. He was also inspired by his own impoverished upbringing in rat-infested slums in East London.
The Rats established the signature style and themes that would form the hallmark of Herbert’s future works: sparse and direct prose, explicit depictions of sex and violence, the vision of an empty metropolis, and a heavily political subtext. The book opens with the rats eating a former salesman who was drummed out of his job due to his homosexuality and is now drinking himself to death in abandoned buildings. As London is overrun, the disenfranchised—the homeless, the addicted, the poor, and the young—suffer at the rats’ hands (or paws) while the government does nothing. Herbert has both main political parties, Labour and Conservative, blaming each other for the living conditions of the poor that allowed the mutant rats to breed, and it is not Foskins, the pompous and ineffective undersecretary of state, who saves the day, but the ordinary, working-class Harris.
Through this working-class focus, Herbert’s novel democratized British horror by depicting characters who were not aristocrats or intellectuals as they were in other British horror staples such as the novels of Dennis Wheatley and the films produced by Hammer Studios. His protagonists were ordinary working people with the courage to act. Moreover, his emphasis on the explicit depiction of violence, while it alienated many people—famously, high-street book chain WH Smith initially refused to sell the book—effectively opened horror up to a new proletarian readership and ushered in a new era of British horror literature.
The Rats was loosely adapted as the 1982 Canadian horror movie Deadly Eyes, which was poorly received, and which Herbert himself repudiated.
Simon Brown
See also: Herbert, James.
Further Reading
Cabell, James. 2013. James Herbert—The Authorised True Story 1943–2013. London: John Blake.
Jones, Stephen. 1992. James Herbert: By Horror Haunted. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Spark, Alasdair. 1993. “Horrible Writing: The Early Fiction of James Herbert.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 147–160. London and Boulder, CO: Pluto Press.
“THE RATS IN THE WALLS”
Written in August or September of 1923 and published in Weird Tales for March 1924, “The Rats in the Walls” by H. P. Lovecraft must have seemed, given the rather poor content of the early Weird Tales, an absolute miracle, probably the strongest American horror story since Poe. It was one of Lovecraft’s early triumphs, and it remains one of his most widely read and anthologized works.
The story in fact bears a visible relationship to Poe: like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Rats in the Walls” concerns the dissolution of the “house”—in both an architectural and a genealogical sense—of an ancient and now extinct family, whose final representative comes to a bad end. In this case, the last of the de la Poers, whose only son has died from injuries suffered during World War I, restores and moves into Exham Priory in England, the family seat from which an ancestor fled centuries before under very mysterious circumstances. He finds himself haunted by spectral rats, which seem to be streaming by the thousands inside the walls, downward, into depths below the lowest cellars.
This is not merely a job for the exterminator, because apparently only he and his pet cats can hear the rats; but it is not a case of delusion, either, because further investigations, in the company of scientific men and Captain Norrys, his late son’s war comrade, reveal hidden grottos and caves filled with thousands of human and animal bones, plus blasphemous altars and ultimately, it is implied, a pathway to the Earth’s center where Nyarlathotep, “the mad, faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute players.” Generations of de la Poers had indulged in unspeakable cultic practices, including human (and subhuman) sacrifice and cannibalism. As the last de la Poer penetrates the abyss, he reverts to atavistic type, his mind sliding back through the centuries, gibbering first in Elizabethan English, then older languages all the way back to a bestial gurgle. Even then he does not make it all the way to the throne of Nyarlathotep, because he is overtaken in the dark by his colleagues, having apparently killed and partially devoured Captain Norrys, although he insists that he is innocent and the rats did it.
This is a story of a man overwhelmed by accursed hereditary “influences.” His attempt to live as a modern, moral person fails precisely because of who he actually is and what his ancestors have done. His reversion to the monstrous is brought on by uncovering what was best left hidden. A parallel to “The Fall of the House of Usher” recurs. In the Poe story the fissure in the wall that the narrator observes clearly symbolizes the unsoundness of Roderick Usher’s mind, so that when the house literally falls to pieces, so does he, psychologically. Lovecraft’s character, too, as he descends lower and lower through caves and tunnels, is delving into his own mind, the contents of which predate not only his own individual existence, but humanity itself. Barton Levi St. Armand’s The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft contains a cogent analysis of this story in terms of dream imagery and Jungian archetypes.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Ancestral Curse; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Lovecraft, H. P.; Poe, Edgar Allan.
Further Reading
Lévy, Maurice. 1988. “The Depths of Horror.” In Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, translated by S. T. Joshi, 63–72. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. 1999. “The Rats in the Walls.” In The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 89–108. Annotations by S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin Books.
Monteleone, Paul. 1995. “‘The Rats in the Walls’: A Study in Pessimism.” Lovecraft Studies 32 (Spring): 18–26.
St. Armand, Barton Levi. 1977. The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press.
RAY, JEAN (1887–1964)
Jean Ray is the best-known pseudonym of Belgian writer Raymundus Joannes de Kremer. His fiction combines elements of the Gothic and modernist fiction; his stories involve both sensational and philosophical elements, laid out with a self-awareness in the story itself that bridges the gap between the more straightforward textual qualities of Gothic fiction—the reliance on frame narratives, the use of letters and other documentation alongside or instead of direct narration—and the formal experimentation of surrealist and modernist writers. His stories are characterized by a rapid switching between wonder and horror; they are often whimsical even as they are terrible. Destiny, Faustian bargains, and demonic presences, who are associated with madness as much as they are with malice or temptation, are his preferred themes.
Ray was born in the Belgian town of Ghent, also known as Gand; his father was an official in maritime affairs and his mother ran a girls’ school. Ray did not complete college, worked in low-level city clerical jobs, got involved in writing, and worked for a time as an editor on local periodicals. He married in 1912.
Ray’s first book was a collection of grotesque and fantastic short stories called Les Contes du Whisky, or “Whisky Stories,” published in 1925. These tales reflected Ray’s lasting interest in England and America, his penchant for wildly unusual ideas, and his love of Hoffmann-esque experts, mad scientists, and other ominous officials.
Charged with participation in a scheme of embezzlement in 1926, Ray was found guilty, and in 1927 he was sent to prison. It was as a prisoner that he wrote two of his best known works, “The Shadowy Street” and “The Mainz Psalter.” Although he had been sentenced to a six-year term, Ray was released in 1929. From this point forward, the exact details of his life are hard to pin down. Since Ray deliberately obscured or even falsified many of the facts of his life, it is not certain whether he really did engage in smuggling, rum running, or piracy, as he sometimes claimed. It is clear that he earned his living as a sailor for a time.
Financial troubles and a lack of opportunities made him a very prolific writer. Jean Ray was only one of many pen names, John Flanders being the one he preferred when writing in Flemish, which is one of the two languages commonly spoken in Belgium. Ray had been asked to translate a series of German-language stories about a fictional detective named Harry Dickson, the “American Sherlock Holmes.” Ray didn’t think the stories were that good, and he began writing his own, expanding the adventures of Harry Dickson by hundreds of new tales.
It is not clear what Ray did during World War II, but after the war’s end he published six books in rapid succession: Le Grand Nocturne (1942), La Cité de l’Inidicible Peur (1943), Malpertuis (1943), Les Cercles de l’Epouvante (1943), Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (1944), and Le Livre des Fantomes (1947). The first English edition of his work was Ghouls in My Grave, published in 1965.
In 1955, French author Raymond Queneau helped to bring Malpertuis back into print in France; this helped Ray avoid disappearing from public view. In 1959, he met with Alain Resnais, the French filmmaker known for Hiroshima Mon Amour and L’Année Derniere á Marienbad. Resnais was interested in building a film around Harry Dickson. While the film never happened, it is likely that this encounter was responsible for the involvement of Resnais’s screenwriter, Jean Ferry, in creating the screenplay for Harry Kuemel’s 1971 film adaptation of Malpertuis. There was also a film adaptation of La Cité de l’Inidicible Peur by Jean-Pierre Mocky in 1964.
Michael Cisco
See also: Dreams and Nightmares; Malpertuis; Surrealism.
Monteiro, António. 2011. “Ghosts, Fear, and Parallel Worlds: The Supernatural Fiction of Jean Ray.” Weird Fiction Review, November 21. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/ghosts-fear-and-parallel-worlds-the-supernatural-fiction-of-jean-ray.
Van Calenbergh, Hubert. 1999. “Jean Ray and the Belgian School of the Weird.” Studies in Weird Fiction 24 (Winter): 14–17.
“THE REACH”
“The Reach” is a story by Stephen King that was published under the title “Do the Dead Sing?” in the November 1981 issue of Yankee magazine and later collected in Skeleton Crew (1985). It is one of King’s most evocative depictions of life in small-town Maine, and thus can be considered a sidebar to his tales of horror set in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock.
Although its narrative point of view is omniscient, the story is essentially a glimpse into the mind of Stella Flanders, a woman who lives on Goat Island off the coast of Maine. In her ninety-five years, Stella has never once crossed the reach, the name given to the stretch of water that separates the island from the mainland. Suffering from cancer, Stella has begun to see ghosts, notably that of her dead husband Bill, who invites her to cross the reach to join him. Stella’s thoughts about Bill and the life and family she had with him leads her to reflect on her many years on the island and the people she has known. Her random memories conjure the image of a self-sufficient, close-knit community who have looked out for one another and lived their lives largely independent of the world beyond their island. At the height of a severe snowstorm, Stella bundles up and sets out to cross the frozen-over reach to the mainland. En route, she finds herself helped out by Bill and friends who passed away over the years. The next day she is found frozen to death on the mainland—and the discovery that she’s wearing a hat that Bill handed to her during her crossing dispels any doubt that the friends who accompanied her were only in her imagination. Her fate also confirms that crossing the reach was not just a physical journey, it was metaphoric for passing from life into the afterlife.
Auspiciously, “The Reach” was published one year before Different Season, a collection of four short novels in which King applied the techniques and approaches he had honed in his macabre fiction to stories with mainstream literary appeal. The tale is one of his most successful demonstrations of the potential for fantastic and supernatural fiction to address concerns universal to fiction irrespective of genre pigeonholing—an appraisal that has gained considerable traction in the twenty-first century with King’s embrace by the literary mainstream. The title “Do the Dead Sing?” alludes to a passage in the story—“Do the dead sing? Do they love?” (King 1986, 566)—made in reference to the souls of the dead singing over the dying into the warm embrace of their community in the afterlife. It casts in a reassuring light the proximity of the dead to the living that is more often depicted as menacing in tales of the supernatural.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
Further Reading
Collings, Michael, and Engbretson, David. 1985. The Shorter Works of Stephen King. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
King, Stephen. 1986. Skeleton Crew. New York: Signet.
Reino, Joseph. 1988. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary. Boston: Twayne.
Winter, Douglas. 1986. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: Signet.
“THE RECRUDESCENE OF IMRAY”/
“THE RETURN OF IMRAY”
“The Recrudescence of Imray” by Rudyard Kipling was published in America, in 1891, in Kipling’s fiction collection Mine Own People, the same year that it was published in England in Life’s Handicap, Being Stories of Mine Own People under the title “The Return of Imray.” The story is a loose sequel to Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast,” and like that story it features the character of Strickland, a British police investigator living in India who has a deep knowledge of the Indian people and their ways. Also like “The Mark of the Beast,” “The Recrudescence of Imray” touches on the “imperial Gothic,” the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary subgenre in which traditional Gothic motifs were drawn upon and transformed to show the dominant Western values of the British Empire being threatened by contamination from the “other” represented by colonial subjects, particularly in India and other Eastern locales.
“The Recrudescence of Imray” is in fact set in India, and it begins with the disappearance of Imray, apparently a very genial man-about-town. After Imray has been missing some months, Strickland of the police and his dog Tietjens move into Imray’s bungalow, though Tietjens refuses to enter and sleeps on the veranda. When the narrator visits, he feels and shares Tietjens’s unease, and when he and Strickland investigate some snakes that are living between the ceiling cloth and the bungalow roof, they discover the corpse of Imray. Strickland realizes the murderer could only be Imray’s servant, Bahadur Khan, and he confronts Khan, who confesses: he believed that Imray’s patting the head of his child was the casting of an evil eye, for the child died soon thereafter. But though Strickland wants to hang Bahadur Khan, the man escapes European justice.
Although the two titles of the story hint at humor, “The Recrudescence of Imray” is grim. A benevolent gesture is misinterpreted, for the different cultures have failed to communicate, and the conclusion offers no real hope for better relations: the narrator realizes only that his servant has been with him just as long as Bahadur Khan was with Imray. It can be debated whether the story is a primitive detective story, for Strickland does very little detecting, but in its borderline supernaturalism and in its denouement—the revelation of the rotting corpse of a murdered man hidden in the ceiling of his bungalow—it is remarkably horrific. The only one to escape unscathed is Tietjens, whose entrance into the bungalow at the conclusion reveals that everything has been satisfactorily resolved.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Phantom ’Rickshaw”; “They.”
Further Reading
Morey, Peter. 2000. “Gothic and Supernatural: Allegories at Work and Play in Kipling’s Indian Fiction.” In Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, 201–217. New York: Palgrave.
Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. “Imperial Gothic.” In The Gothic, 44–49. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
THE RETURN
The Return is the second of three novels written by prolific British writer Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and the second of his two longer works (the first being Henry Brocken, 1904) to deal with themes of supernaturalism, for which his short stories and poems such as “The Listeners” are more famous.
Published in 1910 and revised in both 1922 and 1945, The Return tells the story of Arthur Lawford, who, having fallen asleep on a grave on unconsecrated ground, is possessed by the spirit of the grave’s occupant, and who begins to take on the physical (though not entirely the psychological) characteristics of the dead man. Unrecognized by his family and loved ones, Lawford’s condition is the premise for de la Mare’s mournful meditation on death, self-enforced isolation, and the fragility of personal identity and social bonds.
With echoes of Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), de la Mare’s story engages early modernist, twentieth-century anxieties concerning Freudian psychology and the (at the time) growing awareness of the tenuous nature of individual personality.
Lawford’s physical transmogrification is really a foil for de la Mare’s subtler psychological probing into the fundamentals of self and the spiritual and emotional horrors that people would experience were family and loved ones suddenly unable to recognize them. In this way, Lawford’s experience is very much an inversion of the traditional Capgras syndrome frequently found in alien invasion narratives (such as Jack Finney’s 1955 science fiction novel The Body Snatchers), in which the protagonist’s loved ones physically resemble themselves but have otherwise been psychologically taken over by invaders. In this particular instance, it is Lawford’s wife, Sheila, who struggles with the belief that he is, in fact, still her husband.
De la Mare raises questions as to the validity of personal (and religious) faith in the face of logic and reason, and part of the narrative’s horror for the reader derives from the supernatural impossibilities of Lawford’s metamorphosis, as something very much against nature. Moreover, The Return illustrates the notion that body and mind are nondualistic, that they are in fact separate, and that the individual is at all times inherently a stranger to him/herself.
Beyond supernatural horror, The Return is also a painfully human tale about the disintegration of love between a husband and wife, and the psychologically destructive effects of domestic trauma. While Lawford, at first, fears the loss of his family’s love due to his physical change (his wife believes that he is an impostor), his self-imposed retreat from her, and the acceptance he finds from another woman, makes it clear that the emotional horror underpinning this story is the unfathomable power of love and the tragedy that ensues when love between two people fades. Indeed, Lawford’s internalized self-loathing, manifested in the story as a literal transformation into another person, is echoed somewhat in de la Mare’s own personal history; for after his wife became an invalid from Parkinson’s disease, de la Mare himself was cared for by a sick-nurse, whom he in turn loved deeply.
Ian Kinane
See also: de la Mare, Walter; Irving, Washington; “The Listeners”; “Out of the Deep”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychological Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Further Reading
Clute, John. 1985. “Walter de la Mare.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror Vol. 1, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 497–504. New York: Scribner Sons.
de la Mare, Walter. [1910] 2012. The Return. London: John Murray.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
McCrosson, Doris Ross. 1966. Walter de la Mare. New York: Twayne.
RICE, ANNE (1941–)
Anne Rice is a leading American horror and Gothic writer who made her mark with her debut novel Interview with the Vampire (1976). She was born to a New Orleans Catholic family, and her work as a writer has been indelibly influenced by these surroundings and religious upbringing, as well as her years living with her poet-husband Stan Rice in Haight-Ashbury and the Castro district in San Francisco, before settling once again in New Orleans. San Francisco and New Orleans are the home of many of her most iconic characters, offering an ideal backdrop for many of her literary explorations of religious belief, Catholic doctrine, sensuality, sexuality, morality, mortality, and the nature of good and evil. These themes and atmospheres underpin her writing. Since the success of her first novel, her writing career has been diverse, following Interview with the Vampire with historical period dramas such as Feast of All Saints (1978) and Cry to Heaven (1982), alongside two series of erotic novels written under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling (Exit to Eden, 1985; Belinda, 1986) and A. N. Roquelaure (The Sleeping Beauty Series, 1983–1985/2015). In the 2000s, in a period in which she reembraced her religious upbringing, she turned to Christian fiction, telling stories about Jesus Christ (The Life of Christ series, 2005/2008) and angels (Songs of the Seraphim series, 2009/2010). While these genres of literature appear on the surface to be contrasting, they share a preoccupation with negotiating identity—of the author as well as her characters.
Despite her taste for generic experimentation, Rice’s most substantial literary contribution has been within horror, returning repeatedly to familiar monsters such as the vampire, the mummy, witches, spirits, and werewolves, and reimagining them in distinct and provocative ways. Her storytelling is both personal and epic, with storylines that often privilege the first-person perspective, inviting introspection, but also positioning her characters within broader cultural and social histories that extend beyond individual books and into long-running series. The most significant of these is her Vampire Chronicles (1976–2015), totaling eleven novels so far as well as a spin-off series, New Tales of the Vampires (1998–1999), which includes a further two books. This is followed by three books within The Lives of the Mayfair Witches series (1990–1994) and The Wolf Gift Chronicles (2012–2013), which to date is comprised of two books. While these books are largely self-contained narratives, with the exception of the Mayfair Witches, which is structured in a more serialized form, they are interconnected pieces within a broad supernatural matrix, creating a fully realized and complex universe in which to position her characters and immerse her reader. The worlds of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches are also interlinked and go so far as to directly intersect when one of the witches is turned into a vampire in Merrick (2000). The historical background of her stories often spans centuries, and even millennia in the case of The Mummy (1989), harking back to the time of Cleopatra, and The Queen of the Damned (1988), which reveals the origins of vampirism as emerging from ancient Egypt. These extensive timespans can reflect the personal immortal existence of her vampires or the many generations of the Mayfair Witches, interweaving real historical moments within her fictional universe. In her work, these supernatural characters clearly exist within or on the periphery of the real world, haunting the shadows, and that is part of their allure and horror.
As a horror writer, Rice undermines expectations about monsters, inviting the reader to love them while acknowledging the horrific things that they do and thus implicating the reader in complex moral dilemmas. Interview with the Vampire set the tone for her approach to the genre through its first-person narrative, told by the vampire Louis to a journalist, while its sequel, The Vampire Lestat (1985), is written as an autobiography of the vampire who “turned” Louis. Many of the later novels in the series continue to focus on Lestat, Rice’s brat prince of the vampire world—a character who flaunts his evilness and revels in vampirism—but others open up the storytelling world to recurring characters within Lestat and Louis’s universe, such as Marius, Armand, and Pandora. Together these novels encourage the reader to see the world from the vampires’ perspective, emphasizing the sensuality and romanticism of the vampires alongside their brutality. In this manner, Rice’s work stands as a pivotal moment within the evolution of the sympathetic vampire, a trajectory that runs from the Byronic heroes of Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori to the twenty-first-century vampire works of Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer, as well as the proliferation of sympathetic vampires in television series such as Angel (1999–2004), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), and Being Human (2008–2013) and films such as Byzantium (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
Notably, her first vampire novel emerged in the 1970s when horror was undergoing a transition in which audiences no longer feared the monstrous outsider but rather identified with it, highlighting the destabilizing nature of horror in which the status quo is overturned. In Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, the reader comes to understand vampires’ experience of the world by seeing it through their eyes and hearing about it via their voices as they take control of the storytelling, dramatically explaining their appreciation of beauty, art, music, literature, the wonders of nature, and their near-orgasmic pleasure in the kill. While wallowing in the allure of vampirism, Rice’s novels embrace the inherent moral ambiguity of their characters and confront readers with tough questions that challenge their understanding of evil. These include the questions of whether the characters are evil because they kill to survive; how readers rationalize their sympathy for characters with such passion for killing; and whether such characters, while they celebrate death, may not also offer a model of living to the fullest, as they revel in life and love as well as death.
While Rice does not always take a direct first-person point of view in each of her stories, her work is always informed by the perspective of the “other,” extending this approach to the other monsters in her creative universes, such as Ramses in The Mummy and the werewolf Reuben in the Wolf Gift Chronicles, two monsters that have generally been rendered the least knowable within horror fiction. The mummy is the regenerated dead driven by a curse and a desire for revenge and therefore often lacking in consciousness, while the werewolf is typically presented as too primal to understand, devoid of human identity when in animal form and therefore impenetrable to the reader. Ramses and Reuben, however, remain highly articulate and thought-provoking creations, offering an alternative to mainstream conceptions of life and living and raising questions about morality. For instance, rather than feeling cursed by his lycanthropy, Reuben is empowered physically and morally, savoring his newfound strength and choosing to hurt those who hurt others; his first killing saves a woman from a rapist and murderer.
Rice’s work explores existential questions about the meaning of good and evil and invites the reader to question the existence and nature of God within a world that allows such monsters to exist. This is particularly prevalent in Interview with the Vampire, but as a theme it recurs across much of her work. The very existence of her characters, whether they are vampires, immortals, regenerated dead, or spirits, challenges traditional conceptions of an afterlife that promises heaven. Her characters provide no such spiritual comfort but rather question the existence of heaven. Vampires, mummies, and spirits, after all, represent a pragmatic perception of an afterlife that is earthbound. More significantly, these monsters are also bound within their bodies, defined by their physicality rather than spiritual transcendence. For instance, the Mayfair Witches achieve their power through the support of a spirit known as Lasher that covets physical form, seeking rebirth through the pregnancy of one of the witches by entering her womb and joining with the fetus. Once born, it develops into a full-grown man and once again seduces and impregnates her and other witches within the family in order to spread its new species, all of which leads to miscarriage and death for the mothers. Through such tales, Rice explores the sensuality and horror of monstrosity, inviting readers to indulge their fascination with monsters while forcing them to question the implications of their sympathies.
Stacey Abbott
See also: Devils and Demons; Mummies; Vampires; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Auerbach, Nina. 1997. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carter, Margaret L. 1997. “The Vampire as Alien in Contemporary Fiction.” In Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, 27–44. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. 1996. The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. 1999. “Interviewing the Author of Interview with the Vampire.” Gothic Studies 1, no. 2: 169–181.
Smith, Jennifer. 1996. Anne Rice: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.
“RINGING THE CHANGES”
“Ringing the Changes” is the best known of all of Robert Aickman’s “strange stories.” It was first published in his fiction collection in Dark Entries (1964), then reprinted in Painted Devils (1979), which contains revised versions of earlier stories. It also appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1971. It was a very significant story for Aickman’s career; Herbert Van Thal, a well-known literary agent, read it and was impressed, and this led to the publication of Dark Entries as well as Aickman’s first novel, The Late Breakfasters (1964).
“Ringing the Changes” is one of only a small number of Aickman’s tales to feature a customary horror trope, here the dead raised to a kind of life. But it is far from a conventional zombie story. Gerald and Phrynne have married after a very short courtship and go away on a belated honeymoon to Holihaven, a faded resort. There is a significant age gap between them; Gerald is twenty-four years Phrynne’s senior. As they arrive, all the churches in town begin ringing their bells to—as another character, Commander Shotcroft later explains—“wake the dead.” And the dead do wake, and dance with the living—an ecstatic revel in which Phrynne is caught up.
The story, as many of Aickman’s works do, explores the Freudian linking of sex and death, of eros (the sexual force) and thanatos (the death drive). When the dead awake, Gerald and Phrynne are making love. The morning after their terrifying experience, as they are walking back to the train station and pass a graveyard where many men are digging, Phrynne flushes with excitement.
Aickman had a sensitivity to the atavistic, to the way ancient and dark rites lie just beneath the surface of civilized modern life. “Ringing the Changes,” along with other Aickman stories such as “Bind Your Hair,” bear similarities to the films of the folk horror movement in British cinema of the era, which expressed similar thematic concerns. The plot of “Ringing the Changes” also illustrates a common Aickman technique: the literalization of a figure of speech or metaphor—in this case, “ringing to wake the dead”—to strange and uncanny effect.
In 1968 a television adaptation of the story under the title “The Bells of Hell” appeared as part of the BBC 2 series Late Night Horror. There have also been two radio play versions, one in 1980 on the CBC series Nightfall, and another in 2000 as a BBC Radio Four production that was adapted by Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss from the League of Gentlemen. “Ringing the Changes” is one of Aickman’s most accessible stories, but it is still characteristically ambiguous and profoundly unsettling.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: Aickman, Robert; The Uncanny; Zombies.
Further Reading
Challinor, Philip. 2012. “Till Death Do Us Part: Some Notes on ‘Ringing the Changes.’” In Insufficient Answers: Essays on Robert Aickman, edited by Gary William Crawford, 8–21. Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press.
Crawford, Gary William. 2011. Robert Aickman: An Introduction. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash Tree Press. Kindle edition.
“THE ROCKING-HORSE WINNER”
D. H. Lawrence’s weird tale “The Rocking-Horse Winner” renders an early twentieth-century version of the haunted child trope that would later become prevalent in modern and contemporary horror fictions. Written in February 1926, the story was published in several places: the July 1926 edition of Harper’s Bazaar Magazine; Cynthia Asquith’s edited collection The Ghost Book of the same year; and the 1928 Secker edition of Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. The story might never have come to fruition if Asquith had not rejected Lawrence’s initial contribution to her Ghost Book, “Glad Ghosts” (1925), a tale in which a Lawrentian artist is visited in his guest chamber by a ghostly, sexualized figure that Asquith took to be a distasteful version of herself.
In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” an aristocratic mother, Hester, is a proxy for the Asquith whom Lawrence saw as rejecting him. Hester is cold-hearted, stoic, and recognizes her coldness toward her children, something that they too experience as unspoken but distinct. Rosemary Reeve Davies has argued that the genesis of the tale was suggested “by the tragic illness of Lady Cynthia’s oldest son John and by the Asquith marriage itself” (Davies 1983, 121). At times, Lawrence acted as a pseudo-analyst for the Asquith family, particularly for John, who may have been autistic.
It is revealed that Hester’s son Paul, who can thus be read as an extraordinary incarnation of John Asquith, has an uncanny and portentous ability to predict winning racehorses. As his powers heighten, so, too, does a disturbing refrain that echoes throughout his playroom, one that demands that he make more and more money. At the climax of this cautionary but speculative allegory—which warns against the monomaniacal pursuit of wealth—Paul dies after correctly predicting the success of the horse Malabar. While these winnings may clear debts, the family’s betrayal of Lawrentian ideals leads, ultimately, to spiritual and emotional ruin.
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” has been widely anthologized. In 1949 it was adapted as a British feature film.
Matt Foley
See also: Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary.
Further Reading
Davies, Rosemary. 1983. “Lawrence, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and ‘The Rocking Horse Winner.’” Studies in Short Fiction 20, 2/3: 121–126.
Hollington, Michael. 2011. “Lawrentian Gothic and ‘The Uncanny.’” Anglophonia 15 (2004): 172–184. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic, Vol. 149. Detroit, MI: Gale.
ROHMER, SAX (1883–1959)
Sax Rohmer is the pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward, creator of Dr. Fu Manchu, a sinister supercriminal genius and dispenser of innumerable scientific and biological horrors. A former Fleet Street journalist, Rohmer debuted with a short story, “The Mysterious Mummy” (1903). Despite the author’s frequent forays into horror, he belonged to the British thriller school of mystery fiction. Consequently, Fu Manchu was in the tradition of Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty, but was a distinct distillation of the Yellow Peril theme that traced back to the eighteenth century.
His creator memorably described Fu Manchu as a seemingly supernatural figure of horror: “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. . . . one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present. . . . Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man” (Rohmer 1970, 17). Introduced in The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (later retitled The Insidious Fu Manchu) in 1913, the devil doctor most often battled British police official Nayland Smith and his cohorts. Contrary to accepted fictional portrayals of Asian malefactors, the character was portrayed with a strange mixture of subtle horror and sympathy. A Chinese physician and scientist, Dr. Fu Manchu was brilliant, bound by a strict code of honor, yet utterly diabolical in pursuit of his lofty goals, which typically centered around world domination by China through the Si-Fan, a secret society he controlled.
Although depicted as a coldly intellectual embodiment of evil, Fu Manchu was neither supernatural nor employed occult means to pursue his objectives, even though, as a consequence of imbibing the elixir of life, he was preternaturally ancient and inexplicably possessed the transparent inner eyelid of a feline. The horrors inflicted on his adversaries were most often venomous reptiles and insects, exotic poisons and fungi, and sinister agents of death such as Dacoits or Thuggees. The author was skilled in weaving an atmosphere of horror about the proceedings, and so indelible was Rohmer’s portrayal of Fu Manchu that numerous imitations of Fu Manchu followed. Thirteen novels and a handful of short stories featuring the devil doctor were produced over a thirty-five-year period. By the time the series had run its course in 1959, cultural sensitivities made the iconic but stereotypical figure undesirable, if not entirely passé.
A student of the occult, Rohmer wrote a handful of short stories and novels exploring overtly supernatural themes, chief of which was his acknowledged masterpiece—praised by H. P. Lovecraft, among others—the mummy-themed Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), followed by The Green Eyes of Bast (1920), a short story collection revolving around an occult detective, The Dream Detective (1920), and others. The author was also instrumental in introducing a strain of Egyptian-themed horror into the popular consciousness of his era, and in 1914 he produced a well-researched nonfiction survey of the occult, The Romance of Sorcery. Two lesser novels, The Orchard of Tears (1918) and Wulfheim (1950), were inspired by the author’s Theosophical leanings. Sax Rohmer died in London on June 1, 1959, ironically succumbing to the Asian flu.
Will Murray
See also: Mummies; Occult Detectives; Pulp Horror.
Further Reading
Briney, R. E. 1998. “Rohmer, Sax (1883–1959).” Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, vol. 2, edited by Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan, 791–804. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Rohmer, Sax. [1913] 1970. The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. New York: Pyramid Books.
Van Ash, Cay, and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. 1972. Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press.
ROMANTICISM AND DARK ROMANTICISM
During the eighteenth century in Europe, a major cultural movement took place, now known as “the Enlightenment,” and those who participated in this movement celebrated reason above tradition. In politics, religion, and art, they tried to break with tradition and with historical trends, with the idea that a new, much better society could be formed along strictly rationalistic lines. The Enlightenment period gave rise to some of the most sophisticated literature, philosophy, and political thought in European history. In France in 1789, a revolution put people in power who were determined to rebuild the government, and indeed all of France, along lines spelled out by important theoretical works of Enlightenment thinkers, many of whom were also important for the leaders of the American Revolution. Despite many accomplishments, the French Revolution finally produced what became known as “the Terror.” More than 16,000 people were executed for being antirevolutionary in a period of not much more than a single year. For many, both in France and throughout the Western world, this was taken as a sign that the Enlightenment was a failure.
The cultural movement known as romanticism was, if anything, even more widely influential than the Enlightenment thinkers were. For some, romanticism was the rejection of Enlightenment ideals. While they did not dismiss reason as unimportant, they saw it as being soulless; the full human being is more than just a rational mind, being also an often tumultuous or chaotic emotional soul. What reason was to the Enlightenment, the will was to romanticism. However, there were many who participated in the Romantic movement who saw in it an extension of the best aspects of the Enlightenment, building on the best ideas of the previous generation while avoiding their errors.
It is important to distinguish between romanticism and dark romanticism, because a conflict existed between these two artistic directions within romanticism overall. While those who tended to write darker, more Gothic material simply went their own way, other writers who publicly identified themselves as leaders of a Romantic movement, including William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, took issue with the more fantastic and grotesque writing being published as “Romantic literature.” These leaders came to represent the more utopian or uplifting side of romanticism, although even they went on to write a few “dark” pieces themselves.
Important Romantic authors include, in Germany, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Schelling, and Ludwig Tieck; in England, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. In the United States, many canonical authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, are considered either Romantics or to have been strongly influenced by romanticism.
Romantic literature often presents the reader with isolated characters whose psychological states are described in great detail. The concept of the unconscious mind becomes extremely important in Romantic writing and usually appears in some combination with nature; that is, nature is understood as the image or mirror of the unconscious mind. Very often the emotional or mental state of a character will be reflected in the weather or in landscape features; Wuthering Heights is a late example of this, providing in its stormy, remote setting a psychologically appropriate background for a novel about passionate, isolated characters.
This close association of the unconscious mind with nature is often described in terms of the supernatural. Coleridge, for example, believed that the imagination could produce knowledge, just as reason can. The inspired artistic genius was, for him, a seer. From the Romantic point of view, the artist of the Enlightenment was trying to create art by using a sort of recipe; true art, however, was supposed to have a mysterious origin. The artist did not create ideas consciously, but was receptive to the appearance of ideas that originated somewhere beyond the mind.
Modern Western horror fiction has its roots in dark romanticism, which is the more Gothic aspect of the Romantic movement. For some, the unconscious mind was seen as a gateway to higher, loftier thinking, but for others, the unconscious mind was a terrifying presence, an evil twin. Vampires, doubles, specters, all manner of beings meant to represent the guilt or the evil impulses of the main character abound in Dark Romantic writing. Frankenstein’s monster is at times described as an evil double of Frankenstein himself, relentlessly pursuing him, refusing to allow him to forget or abandon his responsibilities. James Hogg’s influential 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner has a similar plot; in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “William Wilson,” the roles are reversed, and the pursuing twin is the main character’s better side, rather than his evil side.
As the nineteenth century continued, aspects of dark romanticism cropped up in the fiction of later generations. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde embodies both halves of one character in two distinct persons, while Arthur Machen’s novella “The Great God Pan” revolves around a malevolent woman who represents something like the collective unconscious of all humanity, rather than of a single individual. Many ghost stories of this later era involve considerable uncertainty about the existence of the ghost. It is impossible to say with any certainty that the ghostly woman or double of the main character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is an objectively other entity, or only some other part of her own mind.
Dark romanticism also became mingled with the literary movement known as decadence, which developed around the year 1890. The “Decadents” were writers and artists who also turned away from official rationalism and embraced the unconscious, treating it as a form of cultural exhaustion. Oscar Wilde was often included among the Decadents, as was French author J. K. Huysmans, whose novel about black magic, entitled La-Bas (literally translated as “Down There,” although it has also been published in English under the title The Damned), was influential on H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and other horror writers. The Decadents were as concerned with society as the Romantics were, but had none of the optimistic utopianism of the Romantics; for the Decadents, society was like one huge work of art, and the decay of both society and individuals was regarded as beautiful.
Dark romanticism has since become associated with the aesthetics of a renewed Gothic cultural movement, while many of the aesthetic discoveries and ideas of the Romantics, especially with regard to the unconscious, remain in circulation today. The term is also sometimes used to describe a hybridization of the modern “romance novel,” or love story, and horror fiction.
Michael Cisco
See also: The Brontë Sisters; Byron, Lord; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; “The Great God Pan”; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Shelley, Mary; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”
Further Reading
Fiedler, Leslie. 1966. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day.
Thompson, G. R., ed. 1974. “Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition.” Introduction to The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press.
ROSEMARY’S BABY
Rosemary’s Baby is an American horror novel written by Ira Levin, first published in 1967. Levin’s novel, a story of a woman who becomes the center of a plot by a coven of witches to bring about the Antichrist in New York City, was the beginning of a trend of devil and demon-possession horror novels in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a bestseller for Levin, and the subsequent film adaptation cemented its status as a horror classic.
Ira Levin was already an established writer when he wrote Rosemary’s Baby, his second novel. His first novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1953), won Levin an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Rosemary’s Baby tells the story of Rosemary Woodhouse, a naïve young woman who has just moved to a New York City apartment with her actor husband. Experiencing a difficult pregnancy, she grows suspicious of her neighbors, who she believes are witches, and eventually comes to the conclusion that she is impregnated with the spawn of Satan. The plot is firmly rooted in the Gothic tradition, as a helpless young heroine is isolated in a Gothic-style building with people who want to do her harm. Levin, however, adds depth to his novel by highlighting the powerlessness of Rosemary, who is repeatedly ignored when she seeks help. Her doctor, recommended by her neighbors, dismisses her early concerns when she expresses the painful symptoms of her pregnancy. Later, when her friends, frightened by the mother-to-be’s gaunt and sickly appearance, push Rosemary to get help, Rosemary’s husband, Guy, convinces her that her friends are meddling, hysterical women. When Rosemary finally escapes to a hospital and a doctor who is not under the coven’s control, that doctor promptly calls her husband to pick her up, dismissing Rosemary’s claims as the cries of a paranoid and anxious mother. The true horror, perhaps, lies in Rosemary’s lack of agency as she tries to navigate a patriarchal society that dismisses her as a weak woman rather than one controlled by the satanic threat.
Levin would later return to this premise of women meeting horror at the hands of the men in their life in his next novel, The Stepford Wives (1972). Rosemary’s Baby was met with enormous critical acclaim and commercial success. Levin wrote a sequel titled Son of Rosemary in 1997, but it did not earn the same praise as its predecessor.
Horror film director William Castle bought the rights to Rosemary’s Baby before the novel was even published, eager to bring Levin’s tale to the silver screen. The adaptation was a passion project for Castle, who was known more for his promotion gimmicks than his craft. He hoped that Rosemary’s Baby would make him a respected director; however, the studio refused to make the film if Castle was directing. Instead, Castle took the role of producer, and Roman Polanski wrote and directed. Rosemary’s Baby, the film, debuted in 1968 to enormous critical and popular praise. The movie, starring Mia Farrow as Rosemary, was nominated for several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and several Golden Globes, earning nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Original Score. Ruth Gordon, who played Minnie Castavet, won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. Mia Farrow also earned a nomination at the Golden Globes for Best Actress. Polanski’s film is considered to be a classic horror film, often earning spots on best film lists. It was selected for preservation in the United States’ National Film Registry.
Like the novel, the film adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby spawned sequels and remakes. In 1976, a television film was made titled Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, which was intended to be a sequel. Ruth Gordon reprised her role as Minnie Castavet, but Rosemary was played this time by Patty Duke. The film was universally disliked. In January 2014, NBC released a four-hour television miniseries of the original novel. Zoe Saldana was cast as Rosemary, and the setting was changed to Paris. This television adaptation received lukewarm reviews.
Lisa Kröger
See also: Devils and Demons; Incubi and Succubi; Witches and Witchcraft.
Adler, Renata. 1968. “Movie Review: Rosemary’s Baby.” New York Times, June 13. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1738E271BC4B52DFB0668383679EDE.
Fisher, Lucy. 1992. “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’” Cinema Journal 31, no. 3: 3–18.
Langan, John. 2008. “A Devil for the Day: William Peter Blatty, Ira Levin, and the Revision of the Satanic.” In American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty, edited by Benjamin Szumskyj, 45–70. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Levin, Ira. 2012. “‘Stuck with Satan’: Ira Levin on the Origins of Rosemary’s Baby.” Criterion.com, November 5. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2541-stuck-with-satan-ira-levin-on-the-origins-of-rosemary-s-baby.
Lima, Robert. 1974. “The Satanic Rape of Catholicism in Rosemary’s Baby.” Studies in American Fiction (Autumn): 211–220.
Valerius, Karyn. 2005. “Rosemary’s Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects.” College Literature 32, no. 2: 116–135.
RUSSELL, RAY (1924–1999)
Ray Russell was an American writer and editor. He was known for his work as fiction editor for Playboy magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, during which time he was responsible for making the magazine a prime market for short fiction, especially horror and science fiction. He was also an accomplished horror writer in his own right, publishing several novels and short stories until his death in 1999.
As fiction editor for Playboy, Russell was responsible for publishing science fiction and horror writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Matheson, and Ray Bradbury, to name only a few. It was during his time at Playboy that he discovered Charles Beaumont, a writer with whom he would later work. More than fifty of Russell’s own works appeared in Hugh Hefner’s magazine, including the short story “Sardonicus” (1961), which was later published as part of a trio of stories and adapted into film as Mr. Sardonicus (1961), for which Russell wrote the screenplay. He also penned the script for Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), as well as several other film projects, including The Horror of It All (1964) and Chamber of Horrors (1966). X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes won Russell, along with his fellow screenwriter Robert Dillon, an award at the Trieste International Film Festival in 1963. He continued his work with Charles Beaumont when the two worked together on a screen adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Premature Burial” (1962). The film was directed by Roger Corman.
Russell’s other works include the 1962 novel The Case Against Satan, which tells the story of two priests who come to the aid of a young demon-possessed girl. The novel is remarkable in that it came before William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist. Russell’s 1976 novel Incubus combined the shock of sex and the gore of horror as a demon tries to impregnate human women, mostly with horrific results. A movie based on Incubus was made in 1982, starring John Cassavetes. In the 1970s, Russell continued to work with Playboy, editing several story anthologies (sometimes anonymously) including The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural (1967). In 1985, a collection of his short stories was released, titled Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Tales of Ray Russell. Penguin released a new edition in 2013.
Russell’s work earned him two Bram Stoker awards (in 1991 and 1992), as well as the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. Penguin released a new edition of The Case Against Satan in 2015.
Lisa Kröger
See also: Beaumont, Charles; Bradbury, Ray; Bram Stoker Award; The Exorcist; Incubi and Succubi; Matheson, Richard; “Sardonicus”; World Fantasy Award.
Adrian, Jack. 1999. “Obituary: Ray Russell.” The Independent, March 26. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-ray-russell-1083246.html.
Errickson, Will. 2014. “The Summer of Sleaze: Ray Russell’s Incubus.” Tor.com. September 19. http://www.tor.com/2014/09/19/summer-of-sleaze-ray-russell-incubus.
Morgan, Chris. 1998. “Ray Russell.” In St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle, 494–496. Detroit, MI: St. James Press/Gale.
Staggs, Matt. 2016. “Sardonicus Rising: Horror Master Ray Russsell’s Unexpected Revival.” Unbound Worlds, September 30. http://www.unboundworlds.com/2016/09/sardonicus-rising-horror-master-ray-russells-unexpected-revival.