SAKI (1870–1916)
Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, whose macabre stories frequently appear in horror anthologies, especially “The Open Window” (1914) and “Sredni Vashtar” (1911). Celebrated for his sly and witty portrayals of the English upper middle classes, Saki’s horror stories introduce bizarre incidents to an Edwardian England full of flappers, languid aristocrats, country homes, garden parties, and cynical young dandies or “feral ephebes” (Byrne 2007, 15).
Munro was born the youngest of three children to an imperial military family serving the British Raj in Akyab, northwest Burma (now Myanmar), on December 18, 1870. His mother died following a miscarriage, and at the tender age of two, young Hector was sent, with his siblings Charlie and Ethel, to his grandmother’s house in England, where the children were in constant fear of two strict aunts who appear as the monstrous female relatives in Saki stories such as “The Lumber-Room” (1914) or “Sredni Vashtar.”
Munro at first chose to follow his father into the Burmese military police, but illness drove him back to England, where he worked as a journalist for various newspapers and magazines. His first short story was published in 1899 and his first book, a historical study of the Russian Empire, in 1900. From 1902 to 1908, Munro worked abroad as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post, but then returned to London, where he wrote satires on the politics of the day as well as collections of short stories revolving around his ephebe characters Bassington, Reginald, and Clovis Sangrail.
Elements of the horrific fantastic crept into the latter fiction. Saki’s second collection of short stories, Reginald in Russia (1910), included “Gabriel-Ernest,” a chilling tale of a beautiful boyish werewolf with a taste for child-flesh. “Sredni Vashtar,” “Esmé,” “The Music on the Hill,” and “The Easter Egg” all appear in his subsequent collection, The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), and “The Open Window” in Beasts and Super-beasts (1914), while The Toys of Peace (1919) featured “The Interlopers,” “The Penance,” and “The Wolves of Cernograst.”
Munro enlisted for World War I in 1914, when he was in his forties, refusing an officer’s commission. He was shot and killed by a German sniper on November 14, 1916 near the village of Beaumont-Hamel on the river Somme. His last words were reported to have been, “Put that bloody cigarette out!” (Byrne 2007, 3).
Saki’s tales are extremely funny, mingling what A. A. Milne called his “careless cruelty” with graceful satires on upper-class society (Milne 2016, 6). For example, in “Louis” (1919), an irritated husband conspires with his sister to gas his wife Lena’s Pomeranian lapdog, only to discover that Lena has been cuddling a lifelike facsimile as an excuse to avoid accompanying him to social engagements. In “Esmé,” an escaped hyena devours a Roma (Gypsy) child in front of two horrified lady hunters, one of whom recounts this episode in a highly amused fashion years later, revealing that she pretended the hyena was her dog in order to obtain a valuable brooch as compensation from a gentleman who accidentally ran it over.
Saki pits the elegant, highly artificial manners of the Edwardian drawing room against the raw violence of the natural world, most often in the form of animals and children. In his homoerotic werewolf story, “Gabriel-Ernest” (1909), which combines the animal with the child, the hapless gentleman Van Cheele is powerless before both the predations of the werewolf and the overtures of another overbearing aunt, who tries to make the lycanthropic boy her protégè, allowing him to carry off one of the infants from her Sunday-school class. The alluring queerness of the feral boy, reflecting Munro’s own suppressed homosexuality, is mirrored by the god Pan, who appears as a beautiful, laughing boy in “The Music on the Hill” (1911), in which a domineering bride is gored to death by a stag as a punishment for taking an offering of grapes from his shrine.
While many of Saki’s women are similarly punished, leaving the impression that they won’t be missed, and his social comedies abound with disparaging references to the militant suffragettes of his time, he also has a soft spot for the younger, cheekier “flappers” of the early twentieth century. Another of his recurring characters is the precocious flapper Vera, who figures as the niece in “The Open Window.”
Saki’s adults occasionally live to regret their confrontations with the innocent ruthlessness of Nature. In “The Penance” (1919), three children (whose circumstances closely resemble those of Munro’s own childhood) remorselessly pursue their neighbor, who has killed their pet cat, mistakenly under the impression that it was raiding his chickens. Taking advantage of his efforts to placate them, they kidnap his two-year-old daughter and drop her into the muck of the pigsty, refusing to help retrieve her until the frantic father vows to do penance by standing by the cat’s grave holding a candle and declaring himself a “miserable Beast” (Saki 1976, 427). The “inexorable” cruelty of the children—“We shall be very sorry when we’ve killed Olivia,” said the girl, “but we can’t be sorry till we’ve done it” (426)—accentuates the coldness in what might otherwise be simply a cute story of childish revenge. But there is nothing cute about Saki’s youngsters; their hatred of adult injustices is seething, bitter, and heartfelt.
Saki was clearly influenced by Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling, both of whom have contributed major works of horror to world literature. His later contemporaries P. G. Wodehouse and M. R. James can be compared to him both in point of social satire and, in the case of the latter, the ability to introduce horrifying and shocking elements into scenes of utter normalcy. He has also been compared to the American writer of twist endings, O. Henry. Apart from his best known stories, Saki’s work remains rather obscure, and scholarship on him has occurred but rarely. However, his fiction has been highly praised as inspirational by other authors, including G. K. Chesterton, A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, Christopher Morley, H. P. Lovecraft, V. S. Pritchett, and Graham Greene.
Aalya Ahmad
See also: James, M. R.; Lovecraft, H. P.; “Sredni Vashtar.”
Further Reading
Birden, Lorene. 2004. “‘People Dined against Each Other’: Social Practices in Sakian Satire.” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2.2.
Birden, Lorene M. 2012. “Saki as Dauphin of the Wildean Witticism.” Anachronist 17: 117.
Byrne, Sandi. 2007. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frost, Adam. 1999. “A Hundred Years of Saki.” Contemporary Review 275, no. 1607, 302–304.
Gibson, Brian. 2014. Reading Saki: The Fiction of H. H. Munro. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Milne, A. A. [1911] 2016. Introduction to The Chronicles of Clovis. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. 5–6.
Saki (H. H. Munro). 1976. The Complete Works of Saki. Introduction by Noël Coward. New York: Doubleday.
Salemi, Joseph S. 1989. “An Asp Lurking in an Apple-charlotte: Animal Violence in Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 4: 423.
Spears, George James. 1963. The Satire of Saki: A Study of the Satiric Art of Hector Hugh Munro. New York: Exposition Press.
SAMUELS, MARK (1967–)
Mark Samuels is a British writer of weird horror, primarily known for his short fiction. He is also a former general secretary of the Friends of Arthur Machen, a society devoted to the works of the visionary late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writer.
Samuels was born in Clapham, South London. He began publishing short fiction in 1988. His debut collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, was published in 2003, and both it and its title story were nominated for British Fantasy Awards in 2004. He has, as of this writing, published four subsequent collections of fiction and one novel, The Face of Twilight (2005), which was also nominated for a British Fantasy Award. In addition, he has had numerous short stories included in horror and weird fiction anthologies.
Much of Samuels’s fiction is set in London. He is influenced in his approach to the city by that of Machen, who saw London as a place where atavistic and/or esoteric forces might at any time erupt. In Samuels’s The Face of Twilight, a recurring character of his, Alfred Muswell (whose initials are a nod to Machen), is quoted as having written, “there are London streets that lead to another world impinging on this one” (Samuels 2006, 20). In Samuels’s work there are two Londons, with a visionary city laid on top of the ordinary one.
Also like Machen, Samuels is intensely interested in the mystical side of Christianity. This can be seen in the tendency for his protagonists’ encounters with the weird to end not in madness and death, as such encounters generally do in much weird fiction, including Lovecraftian fiction (and Lovecraft is another of Samuels’s chief influences), but in ecstasy and transmutation, with the self animated by some primal animism or blinding numinous force.
In addition to Machen and Lovecraft, Samuels’s work also bears the particular mark of Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Ligotti, Bruno Schulz, Stefan Grabiński, and Ramsey Campbell. But his erudite and densely allusive fiction incorporates much more of the supernatural fiction tradition than just these writers. As in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, who is another key influence, evocations of weird tales; scholarly, occult, and spiritual works; and historical events, both real and fabricated, are braided together in Samuels’s stories into a bizarre yet convincing tissue of quotations.
His story “The Man Who Collected Machen,” the eponymous entry in his 2011 collection The Man Who Collected Machen, is a representative example of Samuels’s approach. A man who refuses to give up a rare edition of a work by Machen is therefore made a member of the Lost Club (a reference to a Machen story of that name) by a jealous collector and banished to a London transmuted by Machen’s vision. But for him it is not a dreadful exile but an ecstatic one, for he sees the wonder in that awful place.
Samuels’s writing has had an important influence on the modern weird fiction tradition. A tribute to his work, Marked to Die, featuring stories by a number of contemporary writers of weird horror, was published in June 2016.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: Borges, Jorge Luis; Campbell, Ramsey; Grabiński, Stefan; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Machen, Arthur; The Numinous; Poe, Edgar Allan; Schulz, Bruno.
Further Reading
Cardin, Matt. 2006. “Interview with Mark Samuels: A Sense of Charnel Glamour.” The Teeming Brain, August. http://www.teemingbrain.com/interview-with-mark-samuels.
Samuels, Mark. 2006. The Face of Twilight. With an introduction by Mark Morris. Hornsea, England: PS Publishing.
SANDKINGS
Sandkings is a novella written by George R. R. Martin that was first published in the August 1979 issue of Omni magazine; it has since been reprinted numerous times in various anthologies. Sandkings was awarded the Hugo Award by the World Science Fiction Society in 1979 and the Nebula Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1980. It was adapted into a graphic novel by DC Comics in 1987 and was filmed as the first episode of the relaunched The Outer Limits television series that premiered in 1995.
Sandkings opens with Simon Kress, a wealthy collector of exotic animals who lives on the planet Baldur, discovering a shop, Shade & Wo, he has never seen before in an otherwise familiar city. Inside he meets the shop’s proprietress, Jala Wo, who, in response to Kress’s request for an unusual animal, presents him with the insect-like Sandkings. There are four colonies of Sandkings, differentiated by their color scheme—red, orange, black, and white—that live in the four corners of a large terrarium buried in the sand; the queen, or Maw, remains unseen, buried deep below, but directs the Sandkings via telepathic signals. Wo promises Kress that so long as he keeps the Sandkings fed they will provide him countless hours of amusement with their warfare and strategic, purposeful maneuvering. She also informs him that the creatures will grow according to their environment, which heartens Kress, who had expressed reservations about their diminutive size.
Kress purchases the Sandkings and has them delivered to his home, where he keeps them in a terrarium much larger than the one used in the shop. A showman and braggart, Kress organizes viewing parties with fellow elites, calling attention especially to the reproduction of his likeness that the Sandkings sketch on the sides of their homes. While the partygoers are generally satisfied with the warring of the Sandkings, Kress eventually grows bored and begins withholding food from them, making them increasingly vicious. Kress’s abusive treatment escalates and soon he is engaging them in fights with other exotic alien species. Wo warns him against this behavior. When Kress notices that one of his visages has taken on a twisted appearance, he lashes out at the Sandkings queen, gouging a stick deep into her lair and most likely injuring her. The next day Kress is visited by his former lover Cath, who resents his treatment of the Sandkings. She smashes their tank but is injured in the resulting tumult. Kress flees, leaving Cath behind. When he returns much later he finds that the red, black, and white factions of Sandkings have taken over the grounds and consumed Cath. Kress takes steps to exterminate them, but is forced to enlist Wo’s aid. The Sandkings, she explains, have evolved to a point of sentience, but because of Kress’s mistreatment they are pathological and fixated on revenge. Wo and her partner Shade, who is revealed to be an evolved Sandking, assume responsibility for the escaped Sandkings, much to Kress’s relief. Fleeing the scene, Kress eventually stumbles upon a solitary home. Thinking he has found refuge, he discovers that the home is actually a large sandcastle built by the escaped orange Sandkings, which have adopted Kress’s size and likeness. Their captive now, Kress is dragged away screaming, presumably to be devoured by the Maw.
While Sandkings initially reads as pure science fiction, complete with extraterrestrial creatures and an alien world that serves as the story’s backdrop, it also functions as an example of psychological horror. As the story develops Kress experiences a gradual yet ever-increasing sense of dislocation from his environment. His sense of control over the Sandkings gradually erodes, leading to a break with his circle of acquaintances (one hesitates to call them his friends), expulsion from his home, and ultimately a complete separation from his role in Baldur’s culture of wealth and leisure. The closing scene—in which Kress is mobbed by Sandkings who have adopted his visage—effectively blends existential crisis and physical violence as Kress’s identity is symbolically and literally consumed.
Javier A. Martinez
See also: Martin, George R. R.; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Bischoff, David. 1995. “The New Outer Limits.” Omni 17, no. 7: 34.
Cotman, Elwin. 2013. “The Colonial Nightmares in ‘Sandkings.’” Weird Fiction Review, March 19. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/03/wfrs-101-weird-writers-22-george-r-r-martin.
“THE SAND-MAN”
“The Sand-man” (a.k.a. “Der Sand-mann”) is a short story by the nineteenth-century German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. Originally published in German in 1817, it first appeared in English in Tales from the German, Comprising Specimens from the Most Celebrated Authors in 1844. One of Hoffmann’s most complex stories, “The Sand-man” exists in several translations and has different versions of its characters’ names, but the story is at its core one of perceptions, with madness and identity and obsession being several of its themes.
The never-seen titular character is folkloric, a “wicked man, who comes to children, when they will not go to bed and throws handfuls of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads” (Oxenford and Feiling 1844, 141); he then takes the naughty children to his loved ones, where the children’s eyes are plucked out. The Sand-man is one of young Nathanael’s obsessions, and the story begins with his writing a letter to Lothair, brother of his fiancée Clara, in which he describes his childhood memories of the Sand-man and concludes with recounting a disastrous meeting with the domineering lawyer Coppelius. Coppelius is also an alchemist, and his fiery magical experiments almost lead to Nathanael’s death; they do later lead to the death of Nathanael’s father and the disappearance of Coppelius. But Nathanael believes Coppelius has reappeared as Coppola, a seller of barometers. Nathanael’s letter is sent to Clara, however, who offers Nathanael sympathy, then concludes by telling him that his fears are from his own mind and that he should stop obsessing about Coppelius/Coppola. Nathanael’s next letter reveals that he was wrong in his identification of Coppelius with Coppola, for the two are different people. He additionally reveals that his professor, Spalanzani, has vouched for Coppola and has a beautiful daughter, Olimpia. This letter is sent to Lothair and is correctly delivered.
The above motifs and situations being semi-established, there are more narrative complexities. There are issues of obsession, identity, and reality, for a person can be machine-like in behavior, and machines may have the appearance of people. Nathanael’s actions reveal that he has become thoroughly unhinged, ultimately dangerously so, though he fails to kill Clara, Coppola, and Coppelius, and concludes by committing suicide, throwing himself from a balcony and leaving Clara to find happiness with another, which she does.
According to the introduction by the story’s original English translators, “the story of the Sand-man had its origin in a discussion which actually took place between La Motte Fouqué and some friends, at which Hoffmann was present. Some of the people found fault with the cold, mechanical deportment of a young lady of their acquaintance, while La Motte Fouqué defended her. Here Hoffmann caught the notion of the automaton Olympia [sic], and the arguments used by Nathaniel [sic] are those that were really employed by La Motte Fouqué” (Oxenford and Feiling 1844, xii–xiii). At the same time, the story is much more than a simple assessment of behavior, and it remains one of Hoffmann’s most complex and idea-driven tales. Significantly, it was used by Sigmund Freud as a chief focus in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” where he dwells on the living doll Olimpia, the significance of the Sand-man’s violence to eyes, and the theme of the double or doppelgänger, and avers that “E. T. A. Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (Freud 2003, 141).
Richard Bleiler
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; Psychological Horror; The Uncanny.
Further Reading
Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 2003. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, 121–162. New York: Penguin.
Mahlendorf, Ursula. 1975. “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sand-man: The Fictional Psycho-Biography of a Romantic Poet.” American Imago 32, no. 3: 217–239.
Oxenford, John, and C. A. Feiling, trans. 1844. Tales from the German, Comprising Specimens from the Most Celebrated Authors. London: Chapman and Hall.
Willis, Martin T. 1994. “Scientific Portraits in Magical Frames: The Construction of Preternatural Narrative in the Work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Arthur Machen.” Extrapolation 35, no. 3: 186–200.
SARBAN (1910–1989)
“Sarban” was the pseudonym under which John William Wall, a British career diplomat, published three books of weird fiction between 1951 and 1953. Sarban’s work is considered a bridge between the work of writers in the classic supernatural tradition, such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, and contemporary weird fiction. His stories are especially memorable for their evocative descriptions of foreign lands and exotic cultures for whom mythic survivals are not uncommon.
Sarban’s first book, Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (1951), collects five previously unpublished short stories. The title tale tells of a young woman, Daphne, who cares for three children in a manor house in the Northumbrian moorlands built near an ancient stone circle. The eldest, Nuaman, expresses a vibrant sexuality seemingly beyond his years. The evidence mounts by the story’s end that Nuaman is the avatar of an ancient god in league with the fairy race who built the ringstones, and that Daphne has submitted to his primitive sexual dominance in dreams, if not in waking life. As Peter Nicholls has noted, dramatic tension in the story derives from the juxtaposition of the forbidden primitive sexuality that Nuaman represents to the repressions of modern life that govern Daphne. Survivals from the past infused with primitive sexuality are also elements in “The Khan” (1951), in which an Englishwoman traveling with her stodgy husband in the Persian desert strays into a mystical forest glade where she is groomed to become the sexual partner of a woodland spirit who assumes the form of a massive bear, and “Capra” (1951), in which a satyr from antiquity becomes the victim of a party of sexually uninhibited modern couples in contemporary Greece.
Sarban’s best-known work, the short novel The Sound of His Horn (1952), is an alternate history tale (with none of the traditional science fiction underpinnings) whose protagonist, a prisoner escaped from a POW camp during World War II, slips into a future in which Germany has won the war. That future is not a futuristic extrapolation of the Third Reich, but rather a throwback to the legendary past in which a master forester, Count von Hackleberg, plays the role of the legendary Wild Huntsman, organizing hunts of members of subjugated races for the benefit of senior members of the Reich. The count’s “harriers”—biologically altered females outfitted as naked catlike huntresses—gives the book’s treatment of the themes of dominance and submission a patina of perverse sexuality.
Dominance and submission recur again in The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny (1953), which collects three stories, including the title tale, in which a teenage girl discovers that the handsome young man who lives on the estate next door to her boarding school, and who encourages her romantic inclinations toward him, intends to capture her soul magically in a doll to serve as his plaything. In one of the book’s other stories, “The Trespassers,” a reclusive girl in a country estate uses her sexual allure to persuade two schoolboys who have strayed onto its premises to help her capture a unicorn.
The posthumous collection The Sacrifice and Other Stories (2002) collects four stories, of which two capture the same sense of sexual menace that imbues Sarban’s other fiction: “The King of the Lake,” an Arabian Nights–style fable in which two women lost in a sandstorm are taken to an underground lake by a mysterious stranger whose mythic destiny is bound up with his unsavory designs on them; and “Number Fourteen,” about a religious cult’s obsession with a dancer in (then) contemporary London. Discovery of Heretics: Unseen Writings (2010) collects a number of fragmentary and previously unpublished works, including the novella “The Gynarchs,” about a postapocalyptic matriarchal utopia.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Machen, Arthur.
Further Reading
Nicholls, Peter. 1986. “Sarban.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, Volume II, edited by Everett F. Bleiler, 667–673. New York: Scribners.
Valentine, Mark. 2010. Time, A Falconer: A Study of Sarban. North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press.
“SARDONICUS”
“Sardonicus” is a short story written by Ray Russell, originally published in the January 1961 issue of Playboy magazine. It is an example of a Gothic story in both its Bohemian castle setting and damsel-in-distress plot, prompting Stephen King to call it “perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written” (del Toro 2013, xii). The story was later collected in Unholy Trilogy (1967) with two other tales, “Sagittarius,” which takes place in part in Paris at the infamous Grand Guignol (a theater specializing in horror plays, presented with copious gore), and “Sanguinarius,” a fictional account of the murderous Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
“Sardonicus” tells the story of Robert Cargrave, a doctor, who is called to an ancient estate to help a former love interest, Maude, who is now married to Sardonicus, the owner of the impressive manor. Sardonicus is suffering from a rare medical condition that makes it impossible for him to move his face, which has been frozen in a horrific grin ever since he looked upon the corpse of his father in its grave. He is a prime example of a man who has turned into a monster, specifically, a ghoul. Sardonicus proves to be both an unkind host and an abusive husband, and after he psychologically tortures Robert, the doctor finally retaliates, determined to save Maude. Robert uses his own knowledge of psychology to convince Sardonicus that his mouth will no longer open or close, leaving him to die from starvation.
The same year of its publication, Russell’s story was adapted to film by director William Castle under the title Mr. Sardonicus. The film was released by Columbia in October 1961, with Guy Rolfe playing the titular character. Castle, a master at creating gimmicks to fill theater seats, advertised two endings and let the audience participate in a “punishment poll” to vote on whether Mr. Sardonicus should live or die. The reviews were mixed at best, but even so, Mr. Sardonicus is considered by many to be the best of Castle’s career, due in large part to the makeup effects used to create the horrific smile on Rolfe’s face.
In 2013 Penguin included Russell’s story in Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories, an anthology for Penguin Classics edited by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. In his foreword, del Toro effectively highlighted the significance of “Sardonicus” as both a backward-looking and forward-looking tale when he described it as “a tale of enormous originality that remains, at the same time, a grand homage and a reinvention of the Gothic” (del Toro 2013, xiii).
Lisa Kröger
See also: Monsters; Psychological Horror; Russell, Ray.
Further Reading
Brottman, Mikita. 2004. “Afterword: Risus Sardonicus.” In Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor, 141–153. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Conners, Scott. 2007. “The Ghoul.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 243–266. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Del Toro, Guillermo. 2013. “Foreword.” In Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories by Ray Russell, xi–xix. New York: Penguin.
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.
“SCHALKEN THE PAINTER”
Although Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s (1814–1873) most celebrated work remains the vampire novella Carmilla (1871–1872), and to a lesser extent the supernatural short story “Green Tea” (1869), “Schalken the Painter,” one of his earliest supernatural tales, is considered by connoisseurs of the uncanny to be one of his finest offerings. The story has long been a favorite among anthologists, including Montague Summers, Peter Haining, and E. F. Bleiler. M. R. James, who generally held Le Fanu’s writing in high regard, singled out this story in his introduction to Ghosts & Marvels (1924) as being “one of the best of Le Fanu’s good things” (James 2001, 488).
“Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter,” to give the tale its full title, was first published in the Dublin University Magazine in the May 1839 issue. The story originally bore the subtitle “Being a Seventh Extract from the Legacy of the Late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh,” and was part of a loosely linked series of tales and poems, collected posthumously under the title The Purcell Papers (1880). “Schalken,” which is set in Holland, is further notable as being Le Fanu’s first story to be set outside of Dublin.
The titular protagonist Godfrey Schalken is based on the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706), whose chiaroscuro style (an art style that highlights the contrast between light and shadow) informs Le Fanu’s narrative technique, especially the way in which descriptive details are carefully revealed to great uncanny effect. The tale concerns the inspiration for a painting by Schalken depicting a white-robed female figure whose arch smile is illuminated solely by the lamp she bears; in the background is a man with his hand on the hilt of his sword, in the act of drawing it. Whether or not this painting is based on one that Le Fanu had actually seen is a frequent topic of debate among scholars.
Schalken, apprenticed to Gerard Douw (Gerrit Dou, 1613–1675), falls in love with his master’s ward, Rose Velderkaust, who is “possessed of all the dimpling charms of the fair, light-hearted Flemish maidens” (Le Fanu 2014, 78). One evening a sinister stranger appears in the studio—Mynher Vanderhausen, from Rotterdam—whose bluish leaden face is described as “malignant, even satanic” (89). Vanderhausen offers Douw a box of golden ingots in exchange for Rose’s hand in marriage. Despite Schalken’s affection, Douw accepts, and Vanderhausen leaves for Rotterdam with his bride. Some time later, Rose returns to Douw’s house “wild and haggard, and pale with exhaustion and terror” (92). With the aid of an old clergyman, Schalken and Douw attempt to shelter her, but she is taken one night by some unseen hand. Schalken encounters Rose once more in a church in Rotterdam. With an arch smile she leads him to the crypt, where he witnesses a charnel bed and the livid and demoniac form of Vanderhausen.
“Schalken” shares with Carmilla horrific sexual undertones, especially in its climax, in which sexual congress between the living and the dead is strongly implied. This theme of innocence ruined by the otherworldly can also be found in two of Le Fanu’s later stories, “The Child That Went with the Faeries” (1870) and “Laura Silver Bell” (1872). However, “Schalken” remains Le Fanu’s cruelest and most chilling variation on the demon lover theme.
Le Fanu often reworked his stories throughout his career. For his first collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), he included a rewritten version of “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter,” with the truncated title “Schalken the Painter,” and accompanied it with an illustration by frequent Dickens collaborator “Phiz” (Hablot K. Browne, 1815–1882). While neither version of the story is considered better than the other—each has its own merits and flourishes of supernatural subtlety—they do have their differences, notably in the rewritten opening paragraphs and the addition of a Bible quote (Job 9:32–34).
In 1979 the BBC adapted Le Fanu’s story for television. Schalcken the Painter was written and directed by Leslie Meaghy and first aired on December 23. Though a drama, Schalcken was filmed for the arts documentary program Omnibus. It is now considered part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas series along with adaptations of M. R. James and Dickens. Meaghy’s faithful adaptation, with its slow build toward the final horrific scene, is also notable for its lush cinematography, reproducing as it does the styles, tones, and compositions of the Dutch masters.
Brian J. Showers
See also: Bleiler, E. F.; Carmilla; “Green Tea”; Haining, Peter; In a Glass Darkly; James, M. R.; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Summers, Montague.
Further Reading
Hervey, Ben. 2014. Schalcken the Painter. BFI Flipside: 1–9.
James, M. R. 2001. Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels. In A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings by M. R. James, edited by Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden, 486–490. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press. Originally published in Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, edited by Vere H. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).
Le Fanu, Sheridan. [1839] 2014. “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter.” In Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson, edited by Darryl Jones, 76–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pardoe, Rosemary. 1988. “Schalken the Painting.” Ghosts and Scholars 10: 28, 34.
Rockhill, Jim. 2002. Introduction to Schalken the Painter and Others by J. S. Le Fanu, ix–xxxiii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.
Sullivan, Jack. 1978. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Bruno Schulz was a Polish author and artist of Jewish heritage, best known for his collections of fantastic short stories. He wrote atmospheric, phantasmagorical fiction that dwelt on humdrum images and scenes in a way that saturated them with a curious beauty. In some ways, Schulz’s work seems to anticipate what would later be called magical realism, in association primarily with Latin American literature. He was more interested in mystery, wonder, and the play of the grotesque and the beautiful than he was in terror, although much of his fiction does involve a kind of intense emotion of expectancy, if not dread. In modern horror fiction his presence and significance can be felt through his impact on a number of authors, including the American writer Thomas Ligotti and the British writer Mark Samuels.
Schulz was born in Drohobycz, Poland (but now part of Ukraine), where he lived almost his entire life, and which was the backdrop and subject of his fiction. He left home to study art and architecture, then returned, and supported himself by teaching.
Schulz had already been writing for some time, starting no later than 1925, when a friend showed some of his letters to Zofia Nalkowska, a Polish novelist and an important member of the Polish Academy of Literature. She saw Schulz’s extraordinary talent, and encouraged him to publish his work. Schulz’s first collection was published in 1934. Entitled Sklepy Cynamonowe, or Cinnamon Shops, it consisted of a series of linked, dreamlike stories drawn from Schulz’s own childhood and adolescent experiences. The collection was published in English under the title The Street of Crocodiles in 1963. A masterpiece of Polish prose, of delicate fantasy and subtle characterization, the work attracted enough praise to prompt a second book in 1937, Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra, published in English as The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass in 1988.
In 1938, Schulz won the Golden Laurel, a prestigious award presented by the Polish Academy of Literature, identifying him as one of the most important living Polish authors. His reputation outside Poland took longer to develop, but he is now internationally recognized as one of the greatest fantasists of all time.
Schulz managed to avoid being forced to enter a concentration camp like many other Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation, mainly because he had the protection of Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who appreciated Schulz’s art. However, in 1942, Schulz was murdered in the streets of Drohobycz by Karl Guenter, another officer of the Gestapo.
There are three primary recurring characters in Schulz’s stories, apart from the narrator, who is usually more or less a stand-in for Schulz himself. The first is his father, a quixotic, imaginative man who is not referred to by name; while benign, he has attributes of a sorcerer, alchemist, or mad scientist. Many of the most fantastic elements of the stories center on him. The second character is a female servant named Adela; while she works for the family, Adela is no menial, and seems to fill the void in authority, and real solidity, left behind by the remoteness of the father. The third character is Drohobycz; one dimension of Schulz’s work is the animation and expressiveness he attributes to landscape, weather, and above all the town—its buildings, streets, various objects. The moods and desires of the characters are always reflected in local variations in the spirit of the setting, which always plays a dynamic role in these stories.
In 1973, Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy created a feature film version of The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, called “The Hourglass Sanatorium.” A story from Cinnamon Shops, entitled “The Street of Crocodiles,” was adapted into a stop-motion animated film by the Quay Brothers in 1986.
Michael Cisco
See also: Dreams and Nightmares; The Numinous.
Further Reading
Banks, Brian R. 2006. Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination, & Legacy of Bruno Schulz. Ashby-de-la-Zouch: InkerMen Press.
Ficowksi, Jerzy. 2004. Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait. New York: W. W. Norton.
Grossman, David. 2009. “The Age of Genius: The Legend of Bruno Schulz.” The New Yorker, June 8. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/08/the-age-of-genius.
Nolen, Larry. 2013. “The Fragile Reality of ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.” Weird Fiction Review, June 4. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/06/101-weird-writers-25-bruno-schulz.
SCHWEITZER, DARRELL (1952–)
Darrell Schweitzer is known to the horror community as principal or co-editor of Weird Tales magazine from 1987 to 2007, a man behind numerous horror anthologies, a ubiquitous critic and reviewer, and the most active interviewer of authors in the horror field. Alongside these efforts, Schweitzer has generated several novels and more than 300 short stories in the horror, fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction genres.
Schweitzer’s critical reputation is of long standing. Tackling the most famous of modern horror writers, his early The Dream Quest of H. P. Lovecraft (1978) is a standout piece of scholarship: a critique of Lovecraft’s work from a writer/editor’s perspective that yields refreshingly frank assessments. His “Readers” series of essay collections, focusing on Thomas Ligotti, Robert E. Howard, and Neil Gaiman, gathers the views of the best of today’s genre critics, and is well known to devotees of horror.
This same community is somewhat less aware of Schweitzer’s own fiction. His outright horror stories can be found in Transients (1993), and his Cthulhu Mythos tales in Awaiting Strange Gods (2015); all hinge on intrusions of the strange and supernatural into contemporary life and are written in a disarmingly understated prose style, often in the first person. The imagery is nightmarish, and the events typically fateful. His characters—innocents, frequently children—explore Schweitzer’s themes of suffering, sacrifice, the meaning of courage, and bewilderment in the face of the unknown. The bright themes that Schweitzer links with the dark—humility, grace, transformation, holiness—share an equal place.
Allowing for invented settings and mythic/religious overtones, Schweitzer’s fantastic fiction can easily be gathered under the horror umbrella as well. The terror of these fantasies is profound and direct: Schweitzer scorns any “Dunsanian restraint” (i.e., the practice of shying delicately away from direct depictions of horror in the manner of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany) and presents chilling images of horror and scenes of bloody death that are shocking and effective. And while he keeps well to the “mythic” tradition in fantasy, the gods that weave the destinies of his characters work to a pattern that these characters will never understand.
In his harrowing best novel, The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995), the child Sekenre, son of a sorcerer, is driven to an act of parricide, by which he himself becomes a sorcerer. This is like contracting Soul Cancer, and it fills him with the souls of all the sorcerers his father had killed. Schweitzer meets the challenge of portraying the psychology of a child whose head is stuffed with the evil, dehumanized spirits of the dead. His “Goddess” series (The Shattered Goddess [1982] and a dozen stories) explores a far-future earth reeling from the death of this titular deity, a time of random horrors and miracles. The linked stories of Living with the Dead (2008) find Schweitzer working in a new palette, spare, pale, absurdist: a town must eternally suffer the cargo-ship loads of undecaying corpses left stacked on its docks.
Schweitzer has been awarded a World Fantasy Award for his editing of Weird Tales. He lives and works in Philadelphia.
Steve Behrends
See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Weird Tales; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Behrends, Steve. 1989. “Holy Fire: Darrell Schweitzer’s Imaginative Fiction.” Studies in Weird Fiction 5 (Spring): 3–11.
Loban, Leila. 1996. “The Sorcerer behind the Mask: Darrell Schweitzer Interviewed.” Interzone 111 (September): 35–39.
Rand, Ken. 2004. “Darrell Schweitzer” (interview). The Internet Review of Science Fiction, January. http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10014.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 1997. Windows of the Imagination: Essays on Fantasy Literature. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
“THE SCREAMING SKULL”
F. Marion Crawford, a popular and successful American novelist, wrote a small number of ghost stories in the course of a long career. His ghost stories were sufficiently atypical of his work—he mostly wrote mainstream novels set in Italy—that they were only collected posthumously in Wandering Ghosts (1911). Most of them have become anthology standards. And while one of these, “The Screaming Skull” (first published in 1908), is a powerful story, it is the tale’s technique that most singles it out for study.
It was common for writers of Crawford’s era (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to frame a story by carefully describing the circumstances under which it is told. Here Crawford builds a spooky atmosphere by taking this technique to an extreme. Two retired sea captains are talking on a dark night. The story is told as a monologue, almost stream of consciousness, by one of them, who also acts out part of the continuing drama as he relates the tale—for example, by fetching the box in which the skull of the title is kept, only to discover it missing. According to the narrative, the skull, which has the disconcerting habit of screaming if moved from where it wants to be, was found in the possession of the late Dr. Pratt. The sea captain narrator has a guilty conscience because he told Pratt how a murder was committed by drugging the victim, then pouring hot lead in through an ear. The doctor’s wife, Mrs. Pratt, mysteriously died soon thereafter, and it is uncertain whether the screaming skull, which belonged to Dr. Pratt, is actually hers or just a medical specimen (although something does rattle inside it). Later, the doctor himself was found dead, as if something bit his throat and crushed his windpipe. The narrator says he has inherited the doctor’s house, skull and all. He is convinced that it hates him.
While the reader can easily conclude that the skull is indeed screaming, as opposed to the sound merely coming from the wind, and that Pratt indeed killed his wife and that this is her skull with a lump of lead rattling inside it, the narrator uses his own diffuse narration to avoid coming to terms with these facts until it is too late, and he is likewise found dead “by the hands or teeth of some person unknown.”
The story was adapted to film—although the screenplay’s source in Crawford’s story was unacknowledged and uncredited—in the 1950 low-grade American horror film The Screaming Skull, about a woman who thinks her new husband’s first wife is haunting her.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Crawford, F. Marion; Part One, Horror through History: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories.
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 2004. “F. Marion Crawford: Blood-and-Thunder Horror.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale, 26–38. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Moran, John C. 1981. An F. Marion Crawford Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Morgan, Chris, 1985. “F. Marion Crawford.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 747–752. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
She: A History of Adventure is a novel by H. Rider Haggard. It was serialized in The Graphic between October 1886 and January 1887 and then published in book form in America in 1886 and England in 1887. Haggard was an extremely popular writer, and She was his most popular book, rivaled only by his King Solomon’s Mines (1885). It remains one of the best-selling novels in publishing history, and its influence on subsequent writers of fantasy and horror has been extensive and profound, with its concepts of ancient immortals and lost civilizations influencing writers as diverse as Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, and J. R. R. Tolkien.
She at first appears to be a traditional ethnographic adventure story, which is to say, an adventure story in which the narrative core depicts Anglo-European travels to another land, often for personal gain but occasionally to resolve ancestral issues, and the travelers’ interactions with the indigenous peoples. She is thus told from the viewpoint of Horace Holly, a middle-aged Cambridge professor, guardian of the young and handsome Leo Vincey. Leo’s father told Holly of his family’s heritage, left Holly with an iron box not to be opened until his son was twenty-five, and died that evening. Holly raised Leo, and on Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday, the two open the box and find in it the Sherd of Amenartas, which gives them traveling instructions.
In East Africa they are captured by the Amahaggers, who are ruled by a mysterious white queen, “She-who-must-be-obeyed.” Leo has married Ustane, one of the Amahaggers, when there is a fight in which he is wounded. He is near death when they are taken to the lost city of Kôr, which predates the Egyptians, and meet She, also known as Ayesha, whose scientific knowledge is incredible and whose lifespan is in excess of 2,000 years. She has lived in Kôr following the death of her Greek lover Kallikrates, whom she slew in a jealous rage. She has not seen the ailing Leo, but when she does, she believes him to be the reincarnation of Kallikrates and heals him. She is jealous of Ustane and kills her, and though Holly and Leo object, She is overwhelming. She wants Leo to join her as an immortal ruler, a process that involves an immersion in the Pillar of Fire. To show Leo that it is safe, She immerses herself again, but this second time undoes the benefits and She withers away. Her last words are a promise to return.
The character and story of She proved immensely popular with Haggard’s late Victorian readership, and the book was immediately dramatized, parodied, and pastiched. (Haggard himself assisted in some of these.) She was a strong and independent woman, something relatively rare in Victorian ethnographic adventure stories, which focus on the men; indeed, so strong was She that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung later used her as the embodiment of an archetype, the woman as sustainer and devourer. In addition, Haggard’s presentation of the “Other,” while leaving no doubt of the superiority of the English, is neither patronizing nor demeaning: his characters are sympathetic, even when their ends are, to European eyes, objectionable. She’s “scientific” knowledge and abilities are likewise intriguing, but most intriguing of all, She is riddled with erotic imagery and behavior, presented almost explicitly. These include Holly’s sexuality, Leo’s marriage with Ustane, and the character Bilali’s obsessions, but even She/Ayesha is depicted as having slept next to the corpse of Kallikrates for 2,000 years. Even if they could not put a word to it, Haggard’s audience undoubtedly responded to this.
Haggard wrote continuations and sequels to She: Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1920), and Wisdom’s Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923). His attitudes toward the characters gradually shifted and evolved until, at the end, the love triangle resolved itself with She being Kallikrates/Leo Vincey’s destined bride and Amenartas/Ustane being the interloper. All of these works remain readable, and She remains consistently fascinating. Its cultural reach has been extended by multiple extraliterary adaptations. It was adapted for the stage and first filmed in 1899 by cinema pioneer Georges Méliès; there have been many additional productions for film, radio, and other media, including a rock opera.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Haggard, H. Rider; Mummies.
Further Reading
Brantlinger, Patrick. 2001. Introduction to She: A History of Adventure, edited by Patrick Brantlinger, vii–xxviii. London and New York: Penguin.
Deane, Bradley. 2008. “Mummy Fiction and the Occupation of Egypt: Imperial Striptease.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 51, no. 4: 381–410.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. “Rider Haggard among the Mummies.” In The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, 185–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nelson, Dale J. 2006. “Haggard’s She: Burke’s Sublime in a Popular Romance.” Mythlore 24, nos. 3–4: 111–117.
SHEA, MICHAEL (1946–2014)
Michael Shea was one of the most versatile, brilliant, and sadly neglected talents in modern horror and dark fantasy literature. He began publishing short fiction in 1979 and had soon authored one of the most brilliantly horrific tales in the contemporary canon, “The Autopsy” (1980). His early tales were gathered in a 1987 Arkham House collection, Polyphemus; the eponymous novella, like “The Autopsy,” fuses science fictional and horror elements, depicting the grotesque biology of extraterrestrial beings in imagery and language straight out of H. P. Lovecraft. Shea’s debts to that author were profound, most evident in his 1984 novel The Color out of Time, a Cthulhu Mythos tale of malign alien presences infesting a secluded New England valley. Shea produced several more stories in a Lovecraftian vein, which were eventually gathered into Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales (2010). Some of these stories evoke the antiquarian milieu of the originals, while others deploy more modern settings, such as his 1987 novella Fat Face, in which a prostitute down on her luck runs afoul of an eldritch monstrosity.
Shea’s uncanny ability to capture the sensibility of a major forerunner of modern dark fantasy was clear from his first publication, the 1974 novel A Quest for Symbilis, which is set in the decadent far future of Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” series. Shea crafted his own lush science-fantasy venue, reminiscent of Vance and Clark Ashton Smith, in his 1982 novel Nifft the Lean (1982), a picaresque tale with horror elements that was continued in two sequels, The Mines of Behemoth (1987) and The A’rak (2000). The series was well received by critics, with the first book winning a World Fantasy Award, though it did not connect with readers, perhaps because of its unsettled genre status—part sword-and-sorcery, part weird fiction, part quest fantasy—and its tendency to revel in scenes of baroque Gothic excess. His best work simply defies categories: the World Fantasy Award–winning story “Growlimb” (2004), for example, is science fiction in conception but horror in execution, while his 1985 novel In Yana, The Touch of Undying is sui generis (of its own unique kind): an other-world fantasy teeming with bizarre invention. By contrast, Shea’s final novel, Assault on Sunrise (2013), is a more conventional tale of dystopian apocalypse, intended as part of an unfinished trilogy.
Shea’s sudden death in 2014 deprived the genre of one of its most unusual and compelling voices. An excellent “tribute” anthology—And Death Shall Have No Dominion, edited by S. T. Joshi—was released by Hippocampus Press in 2016 and may perhaps begin to revive Shea’s dormant reputation. It is, at present, the only book of his work in print.
Rob Latham
See also: Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Splatterpunk.
Further Reading
Cox, Arthur J. 1988. “The Grim Imperative of Michael Shea.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrel Schweitzer, 115–120. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
“Michael Shea.” 1996. In St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle. New York: St. James Press.
Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Michael Shea.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed., vol. 2, edited by Richard Bleiler, 839–843. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
SHELLEY, MARY (1797–1851)
Despite her accomplished literary life, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is known for two things: writing the novel Frankenstein (1818, 1831) and keeping company with a crowd of highly significant literary figures. This included her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her), and her father, the political philosopher and novelist William Godwin, from whom she inherited a political and literary mindset. It also included her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who complicated the authorship of her work, and Lord Byron and John Polidori, with whom she participated in a famous ghost story contest while staying in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816. Her novel, Frankenstein, arose from this contest and would not only alter the course of the Gothic tradition with its relatable, tortured monster and its universal questions of life, death, and scientific pursuit, but its creation would also become a scholarly and popular obsession for the next 200 years. It has been a source of inspiration for countless works within Gothic literature, film, and visual art, and recent scholarship has increasingly considered Mary for her own genius rather than for her relationship to the writers around her.
Part of the reason why Mary Shelley continues to fascinate is because early political and social manipulations of her biography caused its veracity to be in a constant state of fluctuation. What is certain is that Shelley’s life was fraught with traumatic births and deaths, the first of both being her entrance into the world, when Mary Wollstonecraft suffered puerperal fever following childbirth. It is rumored that young Mary made frequent visits to her mother’s grave, learning to read by tracing the name in the stone, and eventually holding a courtship with her future husband over the burial plot. Her family life was unconventional for the time, including illegitimate siblings from both her mother’s previous relationship and her father’s remarriage after Wollstonecraft’s death, establishing an early progressive view of human relationships beyond the limitations of law and social structure. She also experienced a high intellectual expectation in such a family, which received frequent visits from the great political and literary minds of the day. It was an expectation she had no difficulty meeting.
At the age of sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, then twenty-one and already married, accompanied by her step-sister Claire Clairmont. It was a tempestuous relationship that would occasion two suicides (Mary’s half-sister Fanny and Shelley’s wife, Harriet). The group expanded to include Byron, who fathered a child with Claire and who would add to the scandal already brewing, as the group was dubbed the “league of incest.” The Shelleys married shortly after the famous summer of 1816 in an attempt to gain custody of Percy’s children via Harriet. They failed in this, with courts questioning Percy’s morality and lifestyle. He and Mary would relocate between England and the continent many times throughout their life together, creating their own circle of friends who shared their political, intellectual, and moral beliefs.
The death of Mary’s first child soon after its birth left a lasting mark on the author, and she notes in her journal that she dreamed it had returned to life after she rubbed it by the fire to warm it. It would be the first glimmering of the central concept (of gaining the power to animate the dead) in Frankenstein, her first novel, which she would write more than a year later. The first edition was published anonymously in 1818, with a revised edition that bore Mary’s name following in 1831. The extent of Percy’s involvement in the writing of these editions and earlier drafts has been a matter of intense scholarly debate, a matter complicated by the Shelleys’ frequent literary collaboration throughout their relationship. The novel became and remained popular in England through its many dramatizations.
Mary was a voracious reader, growing up in her father’s library, finding a haven in her husband’s library, and participating in the latest literary discussions among her intellectual circles. Surrounded by scientific and literary thinkers, she was impressively knowledgeable about the latest in scientific and medical research and political thought, a background that has kept scholars busy in their analysis of the historical and medical context of Frankenstein and her other novels. In the character of Victor Frankenstein, the scientific creator, critics also read motherhood and artistic creation, following the lead of Mary’s biography in their analyses, as intensified by the recovery work of Ellen Moers and the idea of the “Female Gothic” that Moers established in the 1970s. As Frankenstein demonstrates, much of Mary’s work articulates her parents’ politics, particularly the politicization of the domestic sphere—family and education—and individual power and responsibility for egalitarian reform and positive change.
Frankenstein was far from Shelley’s only literary progeny; she wrote six novels, many short stories, several poems, and extensive travel narratives, journals, and letters. In 1818 her one-year-old daughter, Clara, died of dysentery, and less than a year later her son, William, died of malaria at the age of three. These two deaths, in combination with tensions caused by Mary and Percy’s notoriously open relationship, devastated her, driving her into a deep depression. She channeled this grief into the writing of Matilda, originally titled The Fields of Fancy after her mother’s unfinished The Cave of Fancy. Though it was written in 1819, Matilda was not published until 1959 due to its preoccupation with incest and suicide: a father, obsessed and in love with his daughter when they are reunited after a long absence commits suicide when she fails to return this love. While the psycho-biographical approach taken by current scholars confirms the novel to be the product of a deeply depressed mind, the tendency of earlier critics to assign biographical status to much of Shelley’s work becomes problematic here. Godwin, Mary’s father, was disgusted by the text and urged her to hold its publication to prevent adding further scandal to her already unconventional domesticity, a relationship that Godwin did not support until she and Percy married, despite its similarity to his own romantic relationships. She agreed that it would not be published in her lifetime.
In her next three novels, Mary shifted to more historical themes. Written in Italy and influenced by her time there, Valperga (1823) involved extensive research into fourteenth-century Italian politics. Mixing a fictionalized version of this history with the politics of her own day, the novel follows conflicts between two political parties, the Guelphs and the Ghibelines, and attempts by the central characters, Castruccio and Euthanasia, to create a bond between the parties with their love, one that would eventually fail with the fall of Valperga, with Euthanasia’s fictional castle representing republicanism and peace. The novel takes on themes of violence and power, with shades of Machiavellianism and Napoleon. As was the case for many of Mary’s works, however, critics would take the cue of female authorship to prioritize the love story over its political commentary and experimentation.
In 1822, shortly before Valperga’s publication and less than a month after Shelley had suffered a miscarriage, Percy went sailing in the Bay of Spezia and drowned. When Byron died in Greece in 1824, Shelley would write in her journal of feeling like “the last man,” left behind by her children, husband, and friend (Bennett 1998, 83). In her next novel, The Last Man (1826), she embraced biographical connection to its fictional characters as a way of grieving, reserving a place for the central figures in her life within the central characters of her novel. The plot, a kind of fictionalized future history, is one part romance, one part sociopolitical intrigue, and one part Gothic apocalyptic disease narrative. It follows efforts by a first-person narrator and his circle as they successfully replace the monarchy with a republic, but even its leaders are no match for the plague, which systematically dismantles institutions and their laws, leaving men and women as equals and devoid of the restrictions imposed on them by society, before wiping out all of humanity. The narrator soon becomes the last man alive, leaving his narrative behind as a testament to the works and fate of humanity, just as Shelley would strive to memorialize and document her husband’s lifeworks.
Percy’s father, Sir Timothy, approved of his relationship with Mary even less than Godwin did, and he made several attempts to prove that her marriage to his son was invalid and to assume custody of his remaining grandchild, Percy Florence, all of which failed. He agreed to support the dwindling family financially, but only if Shelley agreed to move back to England, which she had no choice but to do. He also forbade her from publishing his son’s biography, and, while Mary waited for the end of his life to lift that ban, she did go ahead and publish a collection of Percy’s poetry, with extensive biographical annotations and additions.
She returned to history in her authorship of The Adventures of Perkin Warbeck (1830), a text that is rarely read and little studied today. It was largely a response to the conservative, transitional sociopolitical environment she found in England when she returned with her son. Historical and cultural research for this novel found her reaching out to friends in Ireland and Scotland, including Walter Scott, to collect folklore and regional histories. The title character Warbeck historically claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes imprisoned in the Tower of London by Richard III. He was forced to confess the falsity of this claim and was executed, but Shelley’s novel presents his case as truthful and explores questions of citizenship and national and personal identity.
In a drastic turn from the historical novel, Shelley situated her last two novels in her own present day. Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) are often discussed together and widely believed to be the least dynamic of her novels, written to support her family. Lodore demonstrated a return to her parents’ radical views on education and gender that surfaced in Frankenstein, though the story itself is a conventional tale of a mother/daughter relationship and a father’s education of his daughter. Its inclusion of multiple forms of education amid this common plot has caused critics to disagree drastically as to its radical or conservative leanings. Falkner, written after Godwin’s death, continues the father/daughter theme and is described by some as a rewriting of Lodore. In it, the orphaned Elizabeth has been cut off from a Catholic family that disapproved of her parents’ marriage. When she interrupts Falkner’s suicide (inspired by the guilt of ruining and abandoning a woman), he takes her under his wing, involving her in his past life and its consequences, showing a repetition of some of the themes found in Matilda. Despite its lukewarm reception, Shelley claimed that it was her favorite.
The end of Shelley’s writing career saw a turn from fiction to biographical and travel works, as well as short periodical pieces. While writing Falkner, she took on five volumes of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1835–1839), in which she chronicled the lives of great thinkers who asserted the ideals of social reform and liberty that she shared. Her last work, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, 1843 (published 1844) detailed her travels alongside her trademark political commentary. Throughout her work, she championed equal education, individual responsibility, egalitarian reform, travel and mobility, rationality, independence, imagination, and science, all sociopolitical topics glossed over by the critics of her day in favor of more “womanly” literary products. This has only recently begun to change, with scholars making concentrated efforts to recover a biography and system of thought that has been sanitized since the nineteenth century.
In the last years of her life, Mary Shelley traveled with her son, Sir Percy Florence, and his wife, Jane, while continuing to prepare her husband’s writings and biography. In 1851, she fell into a week-long coma and died of a brain tumor that had plagued her for many years. She wished to be buried with her parents. They were disinterred from St. Pancras Churchyard, the historic site of her mother’s grave where Mary had spent so much of her youth, and moved to Bournemouth to join the daughter who inherited and built upon their sociopolitical ideologies and intellectual gifts to claim a gradually recognized position of her own within Gothic studies, women’s writing, progressive politics, and the English novel.
Laura R. Kremmel
See also: Byron, Lord; Frankenstein; Mad Scientist; Monster; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.
Further Reading
Allen, Graham. 2008. Critical Issues: Mary Shelley. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bennett, Betty T. 1998. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fisch, Audrey A., Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. 1993. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mellor, Anne K. 1989. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge.
Montillo, Roseanne. 2013. The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece. New York: William Morrow.
Schor, Esther, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SHIEL, M. P. (1865–1947)
Matthew Phipps Shiell, who dropped the final letter of his name for all purposes after coming to England in 1885, was a British writer of supernatural horror and science fiction. He was born in Monserrat in the West Indies, the son of a lay preacher, Matthew Dowdy Shiell. Much research has been carried out into the elder Shiell’s ancestry, in association with the supposition that he was the son of a female slave, thus rendering the younger Shiel’s insistence that he had “no black blood” suspect, although the small quantity in question hardly seems relevant now.
Shiel liked to tell the story of how his father once took him to the uninhabited islet of Redonda and crowned him king, thus entitling him to create the mythical literary kingdom of Redonda in England, bestowing theoretical titles on many of his friends. That institution still exists, although it is possible that Shiel borrowed and adapted the anecdote, along with the plot of his novel The Lord of the Sea (1900), from Camille Debans’s Les Malheurs de John Bull (1884; translated as The Misfortunes of John Bull), whose hero assumes the kingship of the uninhabited island of Pola and similarly distributes titles to his associates.
Shiel’s early literary endeavors were heavily influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and the French writers who had adapted Poe’s work as key exemplars for the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement. Prince Zaleski (1895) features a detective whose lifestyle and posturing are based on Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin, but extrapolated to extremes of bizarrerie in the spirit of Decadent style and lifestyle. Shapes in the Fire (1897), similarly issued by Yellow Book publisher John Lane, performs the same function for several of Poe’s other subjects, with an unparalleled flamboyance; alongside five stories and a narrative poem it provides a literary manifesto, “Premier and Maker,” in the form of a dialogue between an alter ego of Shiel and a prime minister identifiable as Lord Rosebery. The cream of Shiel’s short fiction is contained in the collection, including “Xélucha,” in which the eponymous “splendid harlot” returns from the grave in the guise of a Piccadilly whore, and “Vaila,” a vivid transfiguration of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The stories in The Pale Ape and Other Pulses (1911) are watered down by concessions to convention, but Here Comes the Lady (1928) contains transfigurations of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and “A Descent into the Maëlstrom” in “The Primate of the Rose” and “Dark Lot of One Saul.”
Shiel’s only full-length Decadent fantasy, The Purple Cloud (1901), is a transfiguration of the biblical book of Job, in which the population of the Earth is destroyed, except for Adam Jeffson, who spends seventeen years as emperor of the empty Earth, assailed more sharply than any potentate of old by the classic Decadent afflictions of impuissance, ennui, and spleen (weakness, listlessness, and bad temper), before he is obliged to move on by the discovery of a female born as the world died and raised in ignorance of its plight. Stephen King has cited The Purple Cloud as one of the inspirations for his apocalyptic novel The Stand, and Eugene Thacker has identified it as arguably “the text that establishes the blueprint” for the type of modern story in which fogs or mists are portrayed “as gothic, malevolent forces, often that serve as cover for ghosts, monsters, or unknown miasmas,” with examples of texts that follow this blueprint including James Herbert’s The Fog (1975), Stephen King’s The Mist (1980), and director John Carpenter’s movie The Fog (1980) (Thacker 2011, 83, 84).
Few of Shiel’s other novels contain substantial elements of horror, although The Last Miracle (1906) and Dr Krasinski’s Secret (1929) feature the imprisonment and torture of innocents by seeming villains possessed of allegedly respectable ideals. In 1975 Arkham House published a collection of the thirteen stories that Shiel considered his best, Xélucha and Others, some three decades after the book had first been announced. This was followed by a second Arkham House collection, Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk, in 1977.
Brian Stableford
See also: Arkham House; Dark Fantasy.
Further Reading
Bleiler, E. F. 1999. “Shiel, M. P. (1865–1947).” In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, 2nd ed., edited by Richard Bleiler, 697–704. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Morse, A. Reynolds, ed. 1983. Shiel in Diverse Hands: A Collection of Essays on M. P. Shiel. Morse Foundation.
Stableford, Brian. 1995. “The Politics of Evolution: Philosophical Themes in the Speculative Fiction of M. P. Shiel.” In Algebraic Fantasies and Realistic Romances: More Masters of Science Fiction, 73–98. The Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today 54. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Thacker, Eugene. 2011. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
THE SHINING
The Shining (1977) is a horror novel by American author Stephen King. It is King’s third published novel, following Carrie (1974) and ’Salem’s Lot (1975). Its success established King’s prominence in the horror genre and introduced motifs that recur throughout his body of work, such as childhood trauma, uncanny psychic abilities, and anxiety regarding creative freedom.
The novel depicts the plight of the Torrance family during their overwinter stay as caretakers in Colorado’s isolated Overlook Hotel. The Torrances—Jack, Wendy, and five-year-old Danny—experience horrors both human and supernatural as they unearth the hotel’s monstrous history. Danny’s latent psychic power (the eponymous “Shining”) provides fuel for the hotel’s evil, while his father begins to unravel mentally under the pressure of isolation, alcoholism, and writer’s block. Eventually the secure family dynamic degenerates as Jack is driven into a murderous rage directed at his family, whom he sees as a barrier to his own happiness and literary success.
As with so many of King’s novels, it is possible to trace autobiographical links between author and protagonist. In the case of The Shining, King concedes the association, admitting that the novel addresses his own ambivalent feelings toward his young family at the start of his writing career. In an interview with Playboy, King spoke of feeling “pressure” and “experiencing a range of nasty emotions from resentment to anger to occasional outright hate, even surges of mental violence that, thank God, I was able to suppress” (Norden 1988, 32). Pressure and suppression are key themes in The Shining, where the ever-building pressure within the hotel boiler serves as an external metaphor for the violence rising within Jack.
The novel’s psychological subtext is overt. The Shining offers a Freudian triangle in microcosm, where the struggle between son and father is cast against the blank canvas of the hotel and its snowy surroundings. So central is Sigmund Freud to the plot of The Shining that, when Steven Bruhm makes the point that the contemporary Gothic is distinguished by its self-conscious application of psychoanalytic theory, he uses this novel as the definitive example (see Bruhm 2002, 263–268).
Though The Shining is a foundational text of modern horror fiction, it is perhaps more widely known in its cinematic adaptation. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, the 1980 film is regarded as a classic of horror cinema, though King himself famously dislikes Kubrick’s interpretation. The most famous scene, in which a deranged Jack Nicholson demolishes a bathroom door with an axe, regularly tops lists of “scariest scenes of all time.” The film itself has occasioned much scholarly debate. The 2012 documentary film Room 237 presents several elaborate analyses of the film, ranging from a reading of it as a commentary on the Native American genocide to “proof” that Kubrick was involved in the moon-landing hoax.
Such obsessive devotion to Kubrick’s film often overshadows the impact that King’s novel had on horror fiction. As the most influential haunted house story since Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), The Shining helped launch a new era of horror. Such is the power of The Shining that when King returned to Danny Torrance nearly four decades later in the sequel, Doctor Sleep (2013), he did so with trepidation, admitting that “nothing can live up to the memory of a good scare” (King 2013, 484).
Neil McRobert
See also: The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Bruhm, Steven. 2002. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Gothic, edited by Jerrold Hogle, 259–276. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Indick, Ben P. 1982. “King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural.” In Fear Itself, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 153–167. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller. Rpt. in Children’s Literature Review, vol. 194, 2015, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale.
King, Stephen. 2013. Doctor Sleep. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2013. The Shining. London: British Film Institute.
Norden, Eric. 1988. “Interview with Stephen King.” In Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, 24–56. New York: McGraw-Hill.
SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDS
The Shirley Jackson Awards were created to acknowledge excellence in the literary genres of the dark fantastic, horror, and psychological suspense. Named after the late Shirley Jackson, the Shirley Jackson Awards also acknowledge the lasting impact that Jackson has had on modern writers of numerous genres. The Shirley Jackson Awards thus honor the contributions of Jackson while simultaneously recognizing those works that best carry on her legacy in fiction.
First presented in 2007 with approval from the Jackson family and delivered every year at Readercon (a science fiction convention established in the 1980s by Bob Colby and Eric Van) in Burlington, Massachusetts, the Shirley Jackson Awards are given for six categories: novel, novella, novelette, short fiction, single-author collection, and edited anthology. The awards are voted on by a five-person jury that consists of academics, critics, editors, and writers. An advisory board offers input and recommendations to the jurors, but does not have voting power. There is also a board of directors made up of the jurors from the 2007 awards and the administrator. The awards maintain a website and social media presence for publicity purposes. Previous recipients of the awards include Alison Littlewood, Greer Gilman, Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Yoko Ogawa, Lucius Shepard, Gemma Files, Steve Duffy, Lynda E. Rucker, Kelly Link, Simon Strantzas, and Laird Barron.
Despite their relatively young age, the Shirley Jackson Awards have nonetheless served an important role in the field of horror literature by honoring talented authors of genre-specific fiction who might otherwise be overlooked. The awards have received praise from publishers, commentators, and academics alike, with many noting the significance the awards have had on the genres they acknowledge. Likewise, the awards have helped raise awareness of Jackson’s own literary accomplishments, most notably “The Lottery” (1948), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which did not receive much attention outside of horror circles for many years after her death, until the transition to the twenty-first century. Although the awards are not the sole indicator of an increased awareness of Jackson’s literature in recent years, they are certainly an important one that has helped secure her position as a major figure in American literature. With an impressive list of recipients and nominees every year, along with a rise of appreciation for Jackson’s work, the Shirley Jackson Awards have provided an important outlet for the horror fiction community and are likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Joel T. Terranova
See also: Barron, Laird; Bram Stoker Award; Dark Fantasy; Gaiman, Neil; Hand, Elizabeth; The Haunting of Hill House; Jackson, Shirley; King, Stephen; Link, Kelly; Psychological Horror; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Miller, Laura. 2010. “Is Shirley Jackson a Great American Writer?” Salon, July 14. http://www.salon.com/2010/07/14/shirley_jackson.
The Shirley Jackson Awards. Accessed December 1, 2016. http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org.
“A SHORT TRIP HOME”
“A Short Trip Home” is a ghost story by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in October 1927 and first published in The Saturday Evening Post on December 17 of that year. Its plot concerns the rescue of Ellen Baker, a young female student at home for Christmas vacation who has been seduced by an incubus—dead man Joe Varland, who in life had been a petty swindler of women traveling alone by train. At the story’s climax, narrator Eddie Stinson defeats Varland’s ghost by professing his love for Ellen, freeing her from Varland’s malign supernatural influence.
Recalling Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, whose ambiguous ending it both evokes and simplifies, the story reads as a Gothic allegory dramatizing sexual corruption and the redemption of innocence through love. Whereas James treated these themes with characteristic obscurity, Fitzgerald’s story presents them in terms of a fairy tale–like triumph of good over evil. Varland’s phantom incubus, like the would-be sex-ghosts of Turn of the Screw, “possesses” his innocent victim, making Ellen complicit in her own moral destruction. By this means, Fitzgerald’s story develops a symbolic equation between supernatural threat, corrupt adult (implicitly male) sexuality, working-class criminality, and death.
The way the rhetoric of romance (“bewitchment,” falling “under the spell” of the beloved [Fitzgerald 2003, 372, 376]), which characterizes Stinson’s feelings for Ellen, lapses perversely into signs of sexual/supernatural predation/seduction in the story’s symbolic register is one of the story’s more disturbing elements, since it suggests that redemptive love and corrupting sexuality are part of the same ill-defined continuum. The story’s ambiguous evocation of “home,” which is not a place of safety, but a place of danger, associated both with Ellen’s seduction and with the ghost’s criminality, is similarly unsettling. Stinson’s heroic rescue of his demonically “possessed” beloved from Varland’s incubus has the quality of a successful exorcism, but it also suggests that the story may have been a wish-fulfillment for Fitzgerald, who was coping with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald’s increasingly worsening schizophrenia throughout the period of the story’s composition.
Fitzgerald regarded this critically neglected tale highly enough to include it in his fourth collection of short fiction, Taps at Reveille (1935), a companion volume to his novel Tender Is the Night (1934), which, published at the height of the Great Depression, was a commercial and critical failure. “A Short Trip Home” is noteworthy for being Fitzgerald’s first foray into the ghost story genre, and also because Fitzgerald repurposed the story’s description of Varland’s ghost to describe another street hustler in Tender Is the Night. Although Fitzgerald typically sets his fiction in a realistic social world, his writing is also widely marked by forays into surrealism, romance, and fantasy, notable not only in this story but also in works such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922; loosely adapted to film in 2008) and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922).
Brian Johnson
See also: Incubi and Succubi; Possession and Exorcism; The Turn of the Screw.
Further Reading
Buell, L. 1982. “The Significance of Fantasy in Fitzgerald’s Fiction.” In The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 23–38. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 2003. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner.
Petry, A. H. 1989. Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories 1920–1935. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
“SILENT SNOW, SECRET SNOW”
Written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, novelist, and short story writer Conrad Aiken, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” was first published in Virginia Quarterly Review in 1932 and later collected in The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken in 1960. Perhaps Aiken’s best-known story, it is a recognized classic that stands as one of the most widely read works of American short fiction from the twentieth century.
“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” focuses on twelve-year-old Paul Hasleman, an intelligent boy who is gradually and semi-deliberately becoming estranged from everybody and cut off from his world. He envisions snows that cover everything and muffle all noises, obscuring footfalls of postmen; ultimately, the snows communicate with him, sending him messages only he can perceive. Paul’s distracted behavior causes concerns for his parents, and they summon a doctor, who can find nothing physically wrong with him, but the snows are telling him what to do, and he retreats to his room. When his mother knocks on his door, he yells for her to go away, that he hates her. This said, his world fills completely with the snow that only he can perceive.
Opinions differ on how Aiken’s story is to be received. Some have seen it in an essentially Freudian light, interpreting the story as a retreat from the dirty maturity of adulthood into a dream world of pure white snow, and Aiken did indeed claim to be inspired by Sigmund Freud. Others have assessed the story in more abstract terms, with Paul’s behavior seen as an act of creation, making Paul into what is essentially an artistic figure attempting to bring form and meaning into a structureless world. Still others have seen Paul’s withdrawing from humanity as marking the onset of a mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, and in this they reference Aiken’s life, in which his respected father killed Aiken’s mother and committed suicide, leaving young Conrad (age eleven) to discover their bodies. Because it is so open, presenting details without providing facile explanations, the story remains idiosyncratically powerful, horrible by implication.
“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” was recognized early for being appreciable as part of the canon of terror and horror literature. Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser chose to include it in their classic 1944 Modern Library anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. The story was also adapted as a segment for a 1971 episode of Rod Serling’s horror-themed television series Night Gallery, with narration provided by Orson Welles.
Richard Bleiler
See also: Dreams and Nightmares; “Mr. Arcularis”; Psychological Horror.
Gossman, Ann. 1964. “‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’: The Child as Artist.” Studies in Short Fiction 1, vol. 2 (Winter): 123–128.
Spivey, Ted R. 1997. “Fictional Descent into Hell.” In Time’s Stop in Savannah: Conrad Aiken’s Inner Journey, 91–105. Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press.
Stevenson, Simon. 2004. “The Anorthoscopic Short Story.” Oxford Literary Review 26: 63–78.
SIMMONS, DAN (1948–)
Dan Simmons is an American writer who has published award-winning novels in genres as diverse as mainstream literary fiction, science fiction, dark fantasy, historical fiction (featuring such characters as Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, George Custer, Vlad Tepes, Mark Twain, Sherlock Holmes, and the crew of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus), hard-boiled crime fiction, and psychological suspense and horror. His work is often informed or influenced by classical poets such as Dante, T. S. Eliot, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Proust, Chaucer, and Homer.
Simmons was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948. His family moved around the Midwest when he was a child. One of their stops, Brimfield, Illinois, became the fictional Elm Haven of his novels Summer of Night (1991) and A Winter Haunting (2002). He received a BA in English from Wabash College, along with a Phi Beta Kappa award for creativity in writing and art. During his time at Wabash, he and his roommate published an underground paper called The Satyr. He earned a master’s in Education from Washington University in St. Louis, where his thesis was on television’s effects on cognition and IQ.
In 1969, while working as a teacher’s aide at a school for the blind, he lived in an attic apartment in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, where he witnessed the gang battles and race riots that later appeared in his apocalyptic vampire novel Carrion Comfort (1989). For the next eighteen years, he taught in Missouri, New York, and Colorado, and ended his career in education teaching gifted and talented children. During his years teaching sixth grade, he told an epic story half an hour per day for six months to his students. It featured the first incarnation of the character that would later become the Shrike in his Hyperion Cantos series of science fiction novels, but he lost the manuscript during a move.
His first short story sales were to Galaxy and Galileo, but both magazines folded before his contributions appeared. The American science fiction author Harlan Ellison critiqued Simmons’s story “The River Styx Runs Upstream” at the Writer’s Conference in the Rockies in the summer of 1981. Ellison encouraged Simmons, who was on the verge of quitting writing, to submit his story to Twilight Zone magazine’s short fiction contest for beginning writers, where it tied for first place, won the Rod Serling Memorial Award, and was published in February 1982, on the day Simmons’s daughter was born.
During the summer of 1982, he wrote the horror novel Song of Kali, about an American writer who travels to Calcutta and gets caught up in a horrific cult that worships the eponymous Hindu goddess. It took three years to find a publisher because of the darkness of the story and its failure to follow genre formula. Tor published the book in 1985, and it became the first-ever first novel to win the World Fantasy Award for best novel, although Simmons himself has said that he does not consider it a fantasy. After the success of Kali, he retired from teaching to write full time.
In interviews and essays, Simmons has explained that he vowed to himself that if he had any success in writing, he would not be bound to one form—that he would write whatever moved him, and never allow an editor or publisher to dictate what he worked on. He acted on the assumption that if one publisher was uninterested in a given work, he would be able to find another publisher for it. This proved to be the case, but it has also meant that he is often forced to find different publishers for projects that deviate from prior expectations, as with his Joe Kurtz noir crime novels. This has had the effect of dividing his audience, and he has acknowledged that, for example, only a very small percentage of the people who read his horror novels also read his science fiction works.
In 1989, Simmons released three books, Phases of Gravity, Carrion Comfort, and Hyperion. He tackled the two long science fiction novels—Fall of Hyperion came out in 1990—because the advance allowed him to make a down payment on a house.
Simmons is known for his extensive research and attention to detail and has traveled as far as Romania and Thailand for research. He brought to life the Darwin Awards (the Internet meme that mocks supposedly true stories of people being killed in foolish accidents) in Darwin’s Blade (2000), about an insurance investigator who looks into wrecks caused by vehicular stupidity; and he fictionalized the creation (and near-destruction) of Mount Rushmore in Black Hills (2010). One of his stated rules when using historical figures—even those who are fictional—is to have them refrain from doing anything that contradicts the known facts of their lives; however, the unknown interstices and gaps in their biographies are fair game.
Simmons’s contributions to horror literature include vampires—of the bloodsucking and psychic varieties—ghosts, a godlike killing machine called the Shrike, malicious deities, ancient evils, and soul-devouring monsters. His version of space travel involves being crushed to death and painfully resurrected at the destination.
The author of nearly thirty books and roughly the same number of short stories and novellas, Simmons is the recipient of several Bram Stoker Awards, nearly a dozen Locus Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, a Hugo, a British Fantasy Award, a British Science Fiction Award, and two World Fantasy Awards, and he has been nominated for many others, including the Nebula and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
While many of his books have been optioned for film and television over the years, none have been produced yet, although Simmons did write two teleplays for the Monsters television series in 1990. His script of his 1992 novel Children of the Night was almost the first to be filmed, but the project collapsed. Plans to film his original film treatment “The End of Gravity” aboard the International Space Station did not come to fruition. Darwin’s Blade was green-lit for an ABC series that never launched. Screenwriters have been stymied by the multiple viewpoints and scope of the Hyperion Cantos. Director Guillermo del Toro acquired the rights to Simmons’s novel Drood (2009), about dark goings-on during the final years of Charles Dickens’s life as told by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins, but del Toro put the project on the back-burner when he was hired to direct The Hobbit (which ended up being directed by Peter Jackson instead). In 2016 AMC announced plans to turn Simmons’s historical novel The Terror (2007), which fictionalizes the disastrous arctic journey of Captain Sir John Franklin in the 1840s, into a horror series to air in 2017.
In 1995 Wabash College awarded Simmons an honorary doctorate for his contributions in education and writing. In 2013 he received the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award.
Bev Vincent
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Carrion Comfort; International Horror Guild Award; Song of Kali; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Clasen, Mathias. 2011. “Primal Fear: A Darwinian Perspective on Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali.” Horror Studies 2, no. 1 (May): 89–104.
“Dan Simmons: A Man for All Genres.” 2002. Locus 49, no. 4 (October): 6–7, 59, 61.
Shindler, Dorman T. 2000. “Dan Simmons: Between Two Worlds.” Publishers Weekly (November 6): 65–66. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/33845-dan-simmons-between-two-worlds.html.
Shindler, Dorman T. 2001. “Dan Simmons.” The Writer 114, no. 2: 30–33.
SMITH, CLARK ASHTON (1893–1961)
Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who is often grouped with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard in discussions of the most significant writers who contributed regularly to Weird Tales in the 1930s. He was also an accomplished poet and sculptor whose dark and powerful imagination gave birth to an extraordinary body of creative work.
Smith was born in Long Valley, California, and spent most of his life living in a cabin built by his parent near the town of Auburn. He did not attend high school, and he completed his education himself, with his parents’ assistance. An inveterate reader blessed with an exceptional memory, he read and digested Webster’s Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica. He began writing exotic adventure fiction at an early age and published a number of stories in his teens.
Smith’s literary vocation reached its first important landmark when he made the acquaintance of the “Bohemian” poet George Sterling, who was heavily influenced by Charles Baudelaire and other French Decadent writers; Smith became an enthusiastic translator of such material. His first poetry collection, The Star Treader and Other Poems (1912), won some critical acclaim, but he had difficulty following it up; his health was frequently poor and his production slow. A second landmark was reached when he became part of a circle of literary correspondents that included H. P. Lovecraft, who waxed enthusiastic about Smith’s exceedingly exotic narrative poem “The Hashish Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil,” in his third collection, Ebony and Crystal (1922).
When Smith was forced to attempt to make money from his pen in order to care for his aged parents, it was Lovecraft’s lead that he followed, although he did so with a stylistic and thematic extravagance that was unique to him. The stories he produced during his one brief phase of hectic productivity, between 1929 and 1934, constitute one of the most remarkable oeuvres in imaginative literature. His highly ornamented prose was directed to the purpose of building phantasmagoric dream-worlds stranger than any that had ever been described before. It was not enough for his fantastic narratives to escape the mundane world; Smith wanted to outdo in imaginative reach all the established mythologies of past and present. These tales were first collected in the Arkham House collections Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci and Other Tales (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960) and Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), but they have since been sampled in many other collections and anthologies.
Smith had some difficulty finding an appropriate milieu for his fiction. The imaginary French province of Averoigne allowed scope for pastiches of French fantasy, but not for the products of his wilder imaginings. The lost continent of Hyperborea suited him better, employed in heavily ironic “grotesques” that combined elements of horror and sharp wit evident in the savagely sarcastic “The Testament of Athammaus” (1932) and “The Seven Geases” (1934), in which a prideful magistrate is condemned to descend through a series of hell-like realms to “the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination.” “Ubbo-Sathla” (1933) accommodated Hyperborea to the Lovecraftian schema that became known as the Cthulhu Mythos, as did the magnificently bizarre “The Coming of the White Worm” (1941).
The most dramatically appropriate of Smith’s imaginary worlds was far-future Zothique, “the world’s last continent,” in which science and civilization are extinct, and everything that happens is a mere prelude to final annihilation. Some stories set there are as ironic as the Hyperborean grotesques, but the best are possessed of an unparalleled dramatic momentum that carries them through a mass of bizarre detail to devastating conclusions, juxtaposing the necrophiliac eroticism of “The Witchcraft of Ulua” (1934) and “The Death of Ilalotha” (1937) with the savage cruelty of “Xeethra” (1934), “The Dark Eidolon” (1935), and “Necromancy in Naat” (1936).
These features are not evidence of depravity on the author’s part, but represent a determined effort to confront the most nightmarish products of the imagination and render them intellectually manageable. Even so, they resulted in numerous tales being censored by their original editors; where original texts could still be found they were restored in a series of booklets published by the Necronomicon Press.
Smith’s mother died in 1935 and his father in 1937. Having already slowed down considerably, Smith then gave up writing fiction almost completely, although he continued to write poetry. At the age of 61 he married a widow with children, Carolyn Jones Dman, and lived with them in Pacific Grove, but his health was poor and he eventually died of a stroke at the age of 68.
Brian Stableford
See also: Arkham House; Baudelaire, Charles; Cthulhu Mythos; Howard, Robert E.; Lovecraft, H. P.; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.
The Eldritch Dark: The Sanctum of Clark Ashton Smith. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://www.eldritchdark.com.
Joshi, S. T. 2013. “A Triumvirate of Fantastic Poets: Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, and Clark Ashton Smith.” Extrapolation 54, no. 2: 147–161.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Sidney-Fryer, Donald. [1963] 1997. The Sorcerer Departs. West Hills, CA: Tsathoggua Press.
Stableford, Brian. [1995] 2006. “Outside the Human Aquarium: The Fantastic Imagination of Clark Ashton Smith.” In The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors, 148–167. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Wolfe, Charles K. 1973. “Introduction.” In Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Charles K. Wolfe, ix–xii. Baltimore: Mirage Press.
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a modern Gothic novel by Ray Bradbury that was published in 1962. It represents the culmination of the dark carnival theme that Bradbury had explored in a number of earlier works, notably his short story “Black Ferris” (1948) and the frame story that wraps the contents of his collection The Illustrated Man (1951), which themselves had been influenced by The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), a short novel by Charles G. Finney that Bradbury had reprinted in the anthology Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (1956). The novel is also set in the same Midwestern milieu as the mostly nonfantastic stories that Bradbury assembled for his novel Dandelion Wine (1957)
The novel’s two main characters, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, are best friends living in Green Town, Illinois. Will was born one minute before midnight on October 30, and Jim one minute after on October 31, Halloween, a distinction that seems relevant to Will’s more cautious behavior and Jim’s attraction to life’s dark side. On October 24 in their thirteenth year a traveling carnival, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, sets up magically overnight in their town, much later than such seasonal entertainments usually operate. When the boys patronize the fair they discover things seriously amiss: the carnival has a house of mirrors that appears to trap people with images of what their lives might have been, and a carousel that can accelerate or reduce aging depending on the direction in which it spins. Will’s father Charles, the only adult who believes in what the boys claim to have seen, is of the opinion that the carnival’s crew are “autumn people” (Bradbury 1998, 193), steeped in death and the grave, who “live off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets” (204). Both Charles and Jim are tempted by the “empty promises” the carnival offers—Charles with the promise of youth that he is now beyond, and Jim with the promise of maturity that he has yet to grow into—before the three find a way to resist its allure and neutralize its threat.
Something Wicked This Way Comes crystallizes themes and approaches that had characterized Bradbury’s writing for the two decades preceding its publication. It extends the investiture of ordinary life with aspects of the Gothic and grotesque that characterizes the stories he collected in Dark Carnival (1947) and The October Country (1955). It also shows Bradbury deploying familiar tropes of weird fiction to address concerns about the everyday lives of people that transcend most genre treatments—notably, the temptation to enjoy experiences that have not been earned and regret for life’s missed opportunities. The novel marks a turning point in Bradbury’s fiction, which, at the time of its publication, was increasingly inclined toward the literary mainstream.
Something Wicked This Way Comes exerted an enormous influence on subsequent fantasy and horror fiction, and has been adapted for radio, stage, and screen, including a 1983 movie produced by Disney and written for the screen by Bradbury himself.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Bradbury, Ray; Dark Fantasy; The Grotesque.
Further Reading
Bradbury, Ray. [1962] 1998. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Avon.
Eller, Jonathan R. 2004. Ray Bradbury Unbound. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Eller, Jonathan R., and William F. Touponce. 2004. “Fathering the Carnival: Something Wicked This Way Comes.” In Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, 256–309. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.
Wolfe, Gary K. 1983. “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol. 4, 1769–1773. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.
SONG OF KALI
Song of Kali is a novel by Dan Simmons, published by Tor in 1985. It was the first debut novel to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. The plot concerns a supposedly mythical cult devoted to Kali, which attempts to introduce the goddess of violence to the larger world through an epic poem.
In the novel, a protégé of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet M. Das, has been presumed dead for eight years. Recent reports from Calcutta claim he is alive and has produced a new manuscript. Harper’s magazine sends poet Bobby Luczak on assignment to India for an interview article and to acquire Das’s poetry for publication. Luczak takes his Indian-born wife Amrita along as a translator, together with their infant daughter, Victoria.
Das’s new poetry is a rambling tribute to the goddess Kali, Calcutta’s namesake. One man Luczak meets claims Das was reanimated during a Kapalika cult initiation. Luczak is constantly assailed by various factions with murky motives, and ultimately his daughter is kidnapped and murdered, her body used in a failed attempt to smuggle gemstones out of India. Seduced by the violent message of the Song of Kali, Luczak returns to Calcutta after burying his daughter, intending to kill everyone he blames for her death, but he overcomes the temptation.
In 1977, Simmons spent ten weeks in India as part of a group Fulbright Fellowship of visiting educators. He came home from that trip with notebooks filled with details and sketches, planning to write an article for The Atlantic magazine. However, after receiving encouragement from author Harlan Ellison at a writing workshop, Simmons decided to use the material as the basis for his first novel, which he wrote in the summer of 1982.
Though he spent only a couple of days in Calcutta, the city made an impression on him, and not a particularly favorable one based on the way he portrays it. The notion that a city could be “too evil to be allowed to exist” or “too wicked to be suffered” (Simmons 1985, 1) permeates the novel, as does the overcrowded city’s miasma, arising from its oppressive climate and environment.
Simmons wrote without a specific genre in mind. The potentially supernatural elements in Song of Kali have alternate rational explanations. Many of the details he incorporated into the novel came from things he either witnessed personally or heard about second-hand. For example, a day spent attending the Calcutta Writers’ Workshop, run by famous poet P. Lal in an ancient hotel with unreliable electric power in stifling heat, inspired the character of M. Das. The novel’s success allowed Simmons to retire from teaching and become a full-time writer.
Bev Vincent
See also: Simmons, Dan; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Bryant, Edward. 1988. “On Song of Kali.” In Horror: The 100 Best Books, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, 277–280. New York: Carroll & Graf.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 2002. “Dan Simmons.” In Speaking of the Fantastic: Interviews with Writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 158–171. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press.
Simmons, Dan. 1985. Song of Kali. New York: Tor.
“Song of Kali.” 1987. In Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 44, edited by Sharon K. Hall, 253–255a. Detroit, MI: Gale.
THE SONGS OF MALDOROR (LES CHANTS DE
MALDOROR)
The Songs of Maldoror was first printed in its complete form in late 1869. It had been composed in the two years prior by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, a Uruguay-born Frenchman living in Paris. It is a bizarre, fragmented work of heightened prose, which tells of the cruel deeds of its eponymous antihero.
The first Chant, or “Song,” of Maldoror was published at Ducasse’s expense in late 1868. It received a review in a literary journal, which praised the work’s originality and strange savageness, but otherwise it went unnoticed. It was published anonymously, but subsequent printings gave the author as the Comte de Lautréamont, a pseudonym Ducasse took from Latréaumont, the eponymous character of an 1838 Gothic novel by Eugène Sue.
In writing Maldoror, Ducasse was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, whom he read and admired at a young age, and by Adam Mickiewicz, John Milton, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Charles Robert Maturin—all writers who had dealt with the theme of evil. Ducasse wished to explore evil in a new and shocking way; the name Maldoror is likely a pun on mal d’aurore or “evil dawn.”
Ducasse’s use of the word chants in his title is interesting. Chants implies “canto,” “lay,” or “epic,” as well as “song.” This leads the reader to expect verse and musicality, but Maldoror is, in fact, a prose work, and a jarring patchwork of many different genres. There are textual appropriations from diverse literary sources: Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, Dante, Baudelaire, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. At some points, long descriptions of fauna and flora, many transcribed from textbooks, are interpolated. At others the book breaks into gothic horror, serial-novel melodrama and sentimentality, and passages of sexual transgression reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade. Maldoror is predatory in its borrowings. It divests itself of an authorial voice, as well as any claim to authority or even significance. It also has an amorphous, hybrid quality. Its metamorphoses can be seen as protean attempts to escape from morality and law.
Ducasse died of uncertain causes on November 24, 1870, at his lodgings in a modest Parisian hotel, during the siege of the city by the Prussian army. At the time, his work was unknown. The original printer of the full texts of The Songs of Maldoror, perhaps fearing a prosecution for blasphemy, did not distribute copies to booksellers. But they were eventually circulated in small numbers, and the book slowly gained a minor following among Symbolist writers. However, it was not until 1890, when the publisher Léon Genonceaux reprinted the work in France, that the book’s reputation was sealed.
The text subsequently has had a major impact, in particular on the Surrealists, who saw in it an almost mystical dimension. It has also had an influence on cinema; Kenneth Anger admired the book and attempted to film it, but could not get together the funds, and a film adaptation in parts by London’s Exploding Cinema Collective and Germany’s Filmgruppe Chaos was completed in 2000.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: Baudelaire, Charles; Byron, Lord; Gautier, Théophile; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Grotesque; Maturin, Charles; Melmoth the Wanderer; Surrealism; Transformation and Metamorphosis.
Lautréamont, Comte de. 1994. Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont. Trans. and with an introduction, notes, bibliography, and afterword by Alexis Lykiard. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change.
Thacker, Eugene. 2015. Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
SPIRITUALISM
The term “Spiritualism” refers to a religion that began in the 1840s in North America and that emerged out of modest and controversial origins to make an indelible mark on the literature of horror and the supernatural. The most significant belief of Spiritualism is that it is possible for the living and the dead to communicate. In 1848, two young sisters from Hydesville, New York, reported making contact with a disembodied entity called Mr. Splitfoot. This was later revealed as a ruse by the girls, but not before their elaborate codes of communication using handclaps and reciprocal “spirit rapping” inspired a generation of mesmerists (hypnotists), psychical researchers, and Spiritualists eager to communicate with the dead. It was Spiritualism that gave rise to the famous Victorian subculture of séances led by spirit mediums who manifested supernatural marvels and conveyed messages from the spirits.
The arcane and obscure nature of Spiritualism also saturated Victorian literary culture, which incorporated the movement’s expanding range of strategies, including “spirit raps,” clairvoyance (psychic seeing), clairaudience (psychic hearing), telekinesis (the movement of objects through sheer mental power), trance talking, and the manifestation of phantom odors, “spirit lights,” and ectoplasm, a gooey substance emitted by mediums and attributed to a spirit’s physical materialization). The influence of Spiritualism on the literature of horror and the supernatural was likewise diverse. When Spiritualism first appeared, it appealed to people who had grown frustrated with conventional religion and were turning away from mainstream belief systems to more liberal and scientific explanations of reality and human life (and death). Committed advocates of Spiritualism such as Edgar Allan Poe, Florence Maryatt, and Elizabeth Phelps included variations of Spiritualism, mesmerism, and Transcendentalism (the influential mid-nineteenth-century American philosophical and social reform movement) in stories that centered on themes of loss and contributed to a growing idealization of the dead—those same stories were often macabre in nature.
Spiritualism was also a powerful social movement, especially in terms of women’s rights, since most mediums were women, and the movement thus enabled women to hold positions of authority. The purported female sensitivity to the spiritual world helped to establish a strong community of female writers of the transgressive supernatural tale, including Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, and Edith Wharton.
However, by the turn of the century Spiritualism was beginning to lose its viability as a social and religious movement of reform, and its associated literature began to represent an increasing culture of ambivalence and unease surrounding both the authenticity and the nature of the movement. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), for example, represented the prevalent fear that Spiritualism was a vehicle for social and sexual violation. Arthur Machen’s stories of Spiritualist villains also echoed this concern. By the mid-twentieth century, many of the beliefs surrounding communion with the dead had dissipated altogether, but Spiritualism continued to be a vital, if distorted, underpinning of supernatural horror. In some rare cases such as Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971), psychic phenomena remained a horrifying reality. However, increasingly in twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror, Spiritualism became a source of psychological ambiguity. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), for instance, used mediums and Spiritualists to subvert reader expectations about the meaning of haunting, locating spirits and ghosts not in the beyond but within the psyche of the novel’s characters.
Eleanor Beal
See also: Dracula; Ewers, Hanns Heinz; The Haunting of Hill House; Hell House; Lee, Vernon; Machen, Arthur; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Turn of the Screw; Wharton, Edith.
Further Reading
Bloom, Clive. 2010. “Do You See It?: The Gothic and the Ghostly.” In Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present, 141–162. London and New York: Continuum.
Braude, Ann. 1989. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Geary, Robert F. 1992. “The Gothic Transformed: The Victorian Supernatural Tale.” In The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change, 101–120. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press.
Grimes, Hilary. 2013. The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny and Scenes of Writing. Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate.
Leonard, Todd Jay. 2005. Talking to the Other Side: A History of Modern Spiritualism and Mediumship. Lincoln: iUniverse.
SPLATTERPUNK
Splatterpunk refers to a specific subcategory of the horror genre marked by extreme violence and graphic descriptions of gore, often blended with explicit sexual content. Splatterpunk originated in the 1980s, predominantly among a small group of American horror writers, reaching its height in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The term was coined by writer David J. Schow in 1986 at the twelfth World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island. The term “splatterpunk” was meant as a kind of off-handed joke, a play on the term “cyberpunk” that had been recently coined to describe the movement of science fiction writers who focus on how high technology affects the lower classes in a futuristic society. The genesis of the movement is usually traced to Michael Shea’s 1980 story “The Autopsy.” Though the movement did not have any sort of true organization, several writers in the early to mid-1980s began writing similar fiction, all in reaction to what had previously been published in the horror world, specifically, the rather restrained style popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Bloch, one of the older writers whose style was being exploded by the so-called “splatterpunks,” famously criticized the subgenre, saying that “there is a distinction between that which inspires terror and that which inspires nausea” (Ross 1989, 64).
In many ways, splatterpunk is a type of pulp fiction, especially in its big and graphic descriptions of violence used for entertainment purposes. While critics complained that the movement cheapened horror literature by simply aiming to “gross out” readers, supporters of splatterpunk praise its ability to push the boundaries and become a subversive medium, much like the role of punk music; in this way, the subgenre could be considered an amalgamation of the popular (and joyfully gory) “splatter” films and the irreverent punk rock bands of the 1980s. Taboo topics are explored widely in splatterpunk because nothing is truly off limits. This inclusivity has made many argue that splatterpunk is a progressive subgenre, and in a way, that is true. Men and women are equal victims, as are gay or transgendered characters and characters of all ethnicities. No one is exempt from the pain and suffering.
Because of the indefinite boundaries that surround splatterpunk and its somewhat nebulous beginnings, defining splatterpunk writers is a difficult task, and one that is debated and contested. Writers who could be considered as writing in the splatterpunk tradition include David J. Schow, John Skipp, Robert McCammon, Joe R. Lansdale, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, Richard Christian Matheson (not to be confused with his father, horror writer Richard Matheson), and Edward Lee. One of the earliest examples of splatterpunk is Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (1984–1985), a collection that included such stories as “Rawhead Rex” and “The Midnight Meat Train,” which pushed the boundaries of horror with its visceral descriptions of bodily horror. Barker’s books marked a shift to the new style of horror, influencing novels such as Joe R. Lansdale’s The Nightrunners (1987), which tells the story of a young married couple trying to deal with the aftermath of the wife’s rape. Lansdale uses the brutal attack as a contrast to the supernatural God of the Razor who emerges as the novel progresses. Both the real crime and the supernatural serve to shock the readers with vivid imagery of dismemberment, skinning, and sexual violence. Another exemplary novel of the splatterpunk subgenre is The Scream (1988), written by John Skipp and Craig Spector. Skipp and Spector’s novel, about a rock-and-roll group that turns its fans into zombified maniacs, is over the top in its blood and gore, but the tale is also tongue-in-cheek, riffing off the long history of religious leaders criticizing rock music for introducing Satan to the country’s youth. More than any other writers, Skipp and Spector seem to truly embrace the title of “splatterpunk” as they relish the outlandish nature of exploding body parts and spewing bodily fluids. They continued to work together, establishing themselves as the leaders of the splatterpunk movement, writing such novels as The Cleanup and The Light at the End. Other notable texts are David J. Schow’s novel The Kill Riff (1988) and Silver Scream (1988), a splatterpunk anthology edited by Schow; Richard Christian Matheson’s short story collection Scars (1987); Joe R. Lansdale’s The Drive-In (1988); and Edward Lee’s The Bighead (1997). Though the splatterpunk movement was primarily active in the late 1980s, writers such as Edward Lee kept it alive throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.
Paul M. Sammon, who edited the 1990 anthology Splatterpunk: Extreme Horror, called this group of writers the “outlaws” of the horror genre. Not all writers who have been classified as splatterpunk, however, accept the label. Joe R. Lansdale has said in interviews that he does not like it, mainly due to the fact that it restricts his writing to just one idea, and he wants to be more than just a label. Other authors have also spoken out against the categorization, such as Richard Laymon, who said in a New York Times article, “I don’t want to be identified with that group, especially that one” (Tucker 1991).
Lisa Kröger
See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; Brite, Poppy Z.; Ketchum, Jack; Lansdale, Joe R.; McCammon, Robert; Pulp Horror; Shea, Michael.
Further Reading
Bail, Paul. 1996. John Saul: A Critical Companion. Westport and London: Greenwood Press.
Errickson, Will. 2015. “Evil Eighties: The Hollywood Horrors of David J. Schow.” Tor.com, March 13. http://www.tor.com/2015/03/13/evil-eighties-david-j-schow.
Joshi, S. T. 2004. “David J. Schow and Splatterpunk.” In The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Kern, Louis J. 1996. “American ‘Grand Guignol’: Splatterpunk Gore, Sadean Morality and Socially Redemptive Violence.” Journal of American Culture 19, no. 2: 47–59.
Latham, Rob. 2007. “Urban Horror.” In Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, edited by S. T. Joshi, 591–618. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ross, Jean W. 1989. “Bloch, Robert (Albert).” In Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, vol. 5. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.
Sammon, Paul. 1990. Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Tucker, Ken. 1991. “The Splatterpunk Trend, and Welcome to It.” New York Times, March 24. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/24/books/the-splatterpunk-trend-and-welcome-to-it.html?pagewanted=all.
“SREDNI VASHTAR”
“Sredni Vashtar,” the tenth story in Saki’s second collection The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), is widely considered to be a masterpiece of short fiction and one of Saki’s most horrifying tales. Ten-year-old Conradin is a delicate boy, treated harshly by his domineering female guardian, Mrs. de Ropp, whom he eventually contrives to do away with via a large polecat ferret he keeps hidden away in a hutch as his only solace. The story concludes with the child calmly eating a previously forbidden treat of buttered toast as his guardian’s mauled body is discovered.
Similarities exist between the life of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) and Conradin, the protagonist of “Sredni Vashtar.” Like Conradin, young Hector was thought to be a sickly boy, subjected to “illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dullnesses” (Saki 1976, 136). Hector spent his childhood in his grandmother’s house under the reign of two aunts, who are supposed to be the originals for Conradin’s guardian. Like Mrs. de Ropp, the aunts did their duty by the Munro children, but showed little love, imposing “a regime of seclusion, restraint and arbitrary rules” marked by beatings and “coldness, removal of privileges and guilt” (Byrne 2007, 17). In “Sredni Vashtar,” Mrs. de Ropp’s treatment of Conradin leads to the development of a fierce hatred in the boy, “which he was perfectly able to mask” (Saki 1976, 137). In fact, “Sredni Vashtar” may be interpreted as one of the first sightings of that twentieth-century human monster, the amoral psychopath, and Conradin an ancestor of Robert Bloch’s Psycho, with its outwardly meek, mother-obsessed serial killer who cleverly masks his violent impulses. As much as the reader may sympathize with the bullied boy and enjoy his revenge, the conclusion that a cold-blooded murderer might have been unleashed upon the world still lingers.
As in other Saki stories, the animals that Conradin keeps hidden away in his haven, a disused toolshed, represent the feral impulses of Nature versus the oppressive artifice of adult institutions. Thus, the “lithe sharp-fanged beast” (137), the polecat-ferret itself, mirrors Conradin in its eventual escape from the toolshed, passing bloodstained but free into the world after killing Mrs. de Ropp. Like his fictional counterpart, Hector kept a Houdan fowl as a pet. It had to be euthanized, and his sister Ethel described the “hateful smile” on their aunt’s face when this occurs (Byrne 2007, 21). In “Sredni Vashtar,” the first animal to succumb to Mrs. de Ropp’s incursions on Conradin’s retreat is his Houdan hen. In taking this pet from him, she crosses the line, unleashing Conradin’s hatred and inspiring him to pray to his idol, the ferret, for her to be punished.
The transformation of the mundane by the supernatural is a perennial horror trope. In “Sredni Vashtar,” Saki leaves open the possibility that more may be at work than the natural world reasserting itself. Conradin comforts himself by inventing a “god and a religion” around Sredni Vashtar, which is the exotic name he gives the polecat-ferret. Conradin’s worship, in contrast to Christ’s injunction to make peace, values “the fierce impatient side of things” and calls for the death of Sredni Vashtar’s enemies. Mrs. de Ropp’s churchgoing is contrasted with these bloodthirsty rites. Saki leaves it to the reader’s imagination as to what exactly happened to Mrs. de Ropp in the toolshed; Conradin’s “simple brown ferret” may indeed have been a god after all.
Aalya Ahmad
See also: Saki.
Further Reading
Byrne, Sandi. 2007. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Drake, Robert. 1963. “Saki’s Ironic Stories.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 5.3 (Autumn): 374–388.
Harding, James. 1994. “Sredni Vashtar: Overview.” In Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, 1038. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.
Saki (H. H. Munro). 1976. The Complete Works of Saki. Introduction by Noël Coward. New York: Doubleday.
Salemi, Joseph S. 1989. “An Asp Lurking in an Apple-charlotte: Animal Violence in Saki’s The Chronicles of Clovis.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 4: 423.
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850–1894)
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, travel writer, and short story writer. An extremely productive figure, he is best known for his longer narratives The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, and Treasure Island. Although he was a literary celebrity within his own time, Stevenson was, after his death, critically regarded as being a second-rate writer, known for children’s stories and horror narratives. In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of critical interest in Stevenson, with greater attention being given to his imaginative writing, religious and folkloric interests, and deeply nuanced explorations of guilt, duality, and morality. His works have been adapted numerous times, and he is the twenty-sixth most translated author in the world.
Born in Edinburgh to a leading lighthouse engineer of the day, Stevenson was a rather ill child, and poor health would dog him his entire life. Often confined to bed, he was impacted from an early age by his nanny, Alison Cunningham, a devoutly Calvinist woman who was herself deeply influenced by Scottish folk stories. Religious ideas and the folklore of Scotland were to be enduring influences on Stevenson throughout his work. After a sporadic but thorough education, including studying both engineering and law, Stevenson left Scotland for London and by late 1873 was active on the London literary scene, publishing his first essay in The Portfolio. Much of his time was spent occupied in travel (often to warmer climes) for the benefit of his deeply fragile health. His first full-length publication was An Island Voyage (1878), inspired by a canoe trip taken around France and Belgium. The following year he traveled to America to be with his then lover and future wife Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. The trip would result in the publication of The Amateur Emigrant but would also result in his health failing completely—it almost cost Stevenson his life. Between 1880 and 1887, Stevenson traveled extensively, seeking a climate beneficial to his health, summering in various places across the United Kingdom. In this period he was at his most productive, writing Treasure Island (1883)—his first successful book—Kidnapped (1886), and, most famously, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), as well as several notable short stories. Over the course of the next two years, Stevenson resumed traveling, spending time in New York, Tahiti, and the Samoan Islands. In 1890, he purchased a tract of land of around 400 acres on one of the Samoan Islands, and it was there he wrote The Beach of Falesa, Catriona (titled David Balfour in the United States), The Ebb-Tide, and the Vailima Letters, as well as enjoying excellent relations with the local people.
While Stevenson was well regarded during his lifetime, the rise of modernism left him behind. His work was seen as being inferior, less realistic, and thus less skilled. This is principally attributable to Stevenson’s own views on the creative act. Unlike his close friend Henry James, who believed that art should be a reflection of reality, Stevenson argued that the novel exists and thrives through emphasizing its difference from the actualities of life. As a result, much of Stevenson’s fiction does not aim for the unity and psychological insight that the modernist writers so praised, preferring instead to show the divided nature of existence. This duality between the appearance of things and their actuality is a consistent theme throughout his writing and a strong contribution to the tradition of horror literature, as Stevenson explored the divisions between public respectability and private vices on multiple occasions. This was best exemplified in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which has gone on to enter the cultural vernacular in reference to a divided self and become one of the most adapted horror texts of all time. This division between the public and private, between the benign and the immoral, also appears in several of his short stories, drawing upon the Calvinism of his youth and the folklore of Scotland that he was raised with. As a result, Stevenson’s narratives frequently tend toward psychological simplicity and the fantastic, which explains his enduring popularity. However, this also contributed to his critical neglect during the advent and rise of literary modernism soon after his death.
The burgeoning interest in Stevenson has sought to connect him to other more plot-based writers of the day, seeing him as a contemporary of figures such as Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, 1899) and H. Rider Haggard (She, 1886–1887), as well as J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan, 1904) and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901–1902). Rather than praising psychological sophistication and narrative realism, Stevenson’s focus on imaginative and fantastic plot with the aim of provoking readers into emotional investment lends itself well to Gothic and horror writing and has been highly influential and much imitated. With the increasing popularity of horror fiction and the commensurate rise of horror scholarship, proper and much overdue critical work is more common on Stevenson as one of the most successful and popular writers of the Gothic canon. His wide range of literary works, including children’s stories, poetry, novels, short stories, literary theory, and essays, shows a great breadth of talent, and his enduring popularity is testament to the power his works still hold in engaging the imagination of readers.
Stevenson died very suddenly at the age of forty-four on December 3, 1894, possibly from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was buried at Mount Vaea on the island of Upolu in Samoa, overlooking the sea.
Jon Greenaway
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Psychological Horror; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “Thrawn Janet.”
Further Reading
Ambrosini, Richard, and Richard Dury, eds. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fielding, Penny. 2010. The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gray, William. 2004. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harman, Claire. 2010. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: HarperCollins.
Livesey, Margot. 1994. “The Double Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.” The Atlantic (November): 140–146.
STOKER, BRAM (1847–1912)
Abraham (“Bram”) Stoker is best remembered today as the author of the most famous vampire novel ever written, Dracula (1897), but in his day he was most notable for his association with his friend and employer, the celebrated English actor-manager Sir Henry Irving of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker served as business manager for Irving’s Lyceum for nearly thirty years and published in the interim a number of fictional works (many of which appropriated Gothic themes), including more than seventeen short stories and works of poetry, three short story collections (one posthumously), and twelve novels. One of these, The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), although it was long considered a relatively minor work, has gradually (with the help of multiple movie adaptations) come to be regarded as a semiclassic mummy novel. Stoker continued to write until his death in London in 1912.
Stoker was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. Born a sickly child, he suffered from a mysterious illness that kept him bedridden through much of his youth. During his bedridden years he was kept entertained by his mother’s stories and legends from her native town of Sligo. Her stories bore themes of the supernatural, as well as death and disease, themes that would resurface in Stoker’s fiction, especially Dracula. Stoker entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1864, but by then he was a strong young man who competed in athletics and received awards for debate and oratory.
Even before graduating in 1870, Stoker had already started following in his father’s footsteps in the Irish civil service in Dublin, accepting a position there in 1866. In 1875, he was still working for the civil service when he purchased his master’s degree (a common practice at the time that continues to this day), but in the meantime he indulged his creative passions by writing theater reviews and short fiction. Indeed, it was his review of Hamlet that led to a face-to-face meeting with actor Henry Irving. The encounter changed the course of Stoker’s life, so that in 1878, two years after his father’s death, Stoker accepted Irving’s offer to become the manager of the new Lyceum Theatre, and then immediately moved to London with his new bride (and former Oscar Wilde sweetheart), Florence Balcombe.
Stoker’s demanding responsibilities at the Lyceum and the lengths he went to organize Irving’s English provincial and American tours, including several trips to America by himself, provided experiences that greatly informed his writing of Dracula, which he started in 1890 and continued intermittently until the novel’s publication in 1897. Dracula was immediately popular throughout the English-speaking world, and literary critics showered it with praise through at least the 1910s. However, although Dracula serves suitably well as an autobiographical lens into Stoker’s life, perhaps its greatest value is in laying bare the many tensions of fin de siècle (i.e., late nineteenth-century) England, including the evolving role of women, advancements in science and technology, criminality, and religion.
Stoker suffered two strokes and his health gradually declined after the death of his longtime friend and employer, Irving, in 1905. Still, Stoker wrote several works, including two more Gothic novels, The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), before dying at home on April 20, 1912. His body was cremated and his remains were interred at Golders Green in London. Stoker’s title character Count Dracula remains one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world, and his novel Dracula remains one of the most reprinted works in history.
John Edgar Browning
See also: Dracula; The Jewel of Seven Stars; Mummies; Vampires.
Further Reading
Belford, Barbara. 1996. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Browning, John Edgar, ed. 2012. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Critical Feast, An Annotated Reference of Early Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1913. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.
Farson, Daniel. 1975. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. London: Michael Joseph.
Hopkins, Lisa. 2007. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hughes, William. 2000. Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Murray, Paul. 2004. From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker. London: Jonathan Cape.
Murray, Paul. 2014. “Bram Stoker: The Facts and the Fictions.” In Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays, edited by Jarlath Killeen, 56–72. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was first published in 1886. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the inspiration for the story came, at least partly, from a dream the author had. In October 1885, Stevenson’s wife Fanny was awakened one night because Stevenson was crying out in his sleep. Thinking he was suffering from a nightmare, Fanny woke him, only to find Stevenson was quite angry at being disturbed in the midst of his nocturnal imaginings, with the author exclaiming that he had been dreaming a wonderful frightening tale. Stevenson often found inspiration from his dreams: his short story “Olalla,” published in 1885, was also prompted by his nighttime visions. Stevenson referred to these dreams as “brownies,” benign spirits that would take his unconscious imaginings and shape them into material for his stories as he slept.
Despite the interruption, Stevenson worked on his story feverishly. His stepson Lloyd Osbourne later recalled that writing the first draft took Stevenson no more than three days, and the processes of writing and editing were completed in six weeks.
The story opens not with Dr. Jekyll, nor even with Mr. Hyde, but with the respectable lawyer Mr. Gabriel Utterson. The entire story is told from his perspective, despite the fact that he is eliminated from nearly all film and television adaptations of the work. Utterson is out for a weekly walk around London with his cousin Mr. Enfield when the conversation turns to a repulsive, violent man named Edward Hyde whom Enfield has encountered. Mr. Hyde is somehow connected to a mutual acquaintance, the upstanding and respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, who pays for the damage Hyde causes. Jekyll refuses to answer questions about Hyde, but as time passes he becomes withdrawn and reclusive. Eventually, Hyde commits murder and Jekyll vanishes from society. His friends break down his door and find Hyde dead from suicide, dressed in Jekyll’s clothes. The solution is found in a letter left by Jekyll: he discovered a “draught” to turn himself into Mr. Hyde and enact his repressed, socially unacceptable desires while maintaining his respectable reputation as Dr. Jekyll. He lost control of his alter ego and Hyde took over. Wanted for murder, Hyde killed himself, and so the sorry tale of the doctor’s split personality ends.
The hastily written novella was an immediate success, which is ironic, given that Stevenson had previously labored for eight years on a novel called Prince Otto (1885) that has languished in obscurity ever since it was published. The novella has been interpreted as a detective story, a Gothic tale, and a sensation novel (akin to the Victorian penny dreadful) by literary critics. Like many Gothic and horror tales, Jekyll and Hyde expresses fears and uncertainties prevalent at the time of its writing. Unlike many Gothic tales, however, these fears are not supernatural, but are rooted in apprehensions about science and progress. It expresses these anxieties through tropes and ideas common to both Victorian and Gothic fiction, notably the concept of the double.
The double appears in other late Victorian and early Edwardian fictions such as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910). It also appeared in the scientific theory of the era through Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious versus the conscious mind, which raised the frightening prospect of the repressed, unconscious self taking control of the conscious personality. The double, or the doppelgänger, appears in numerous Gothic texts ranging from Jane Eyre (1847) to episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Jekyll and Hyde remains the most famous example of the double in literature.
Furthermore, the fear of degeneration permeates the story. Degeneration was a notion that developed after Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, detailing his theory of biological evolution. Degeneration was the fear that Darwin’s theory could be inverted, and that humanity could regress into a beastlier, more vicious version of itself, like the repulsive Hyde. Degeneration was a widespread concern in Victorian society and found expression in other literary works such as H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), various stories by H. P. Lovecraft, and Stevenson’s own short story “Olalla.” It was not confined to literature: several major scientific works were written about the theory, notably Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892).
Jekyll and Hyde also expresses fears about the city and the rise of urban living. Not for nothing is London chosen for its setting; the city in Stevenson’s novel is represented as a dark, threatening space where crime can flourish. Only a few years later, in 1888, Jack the Ripper would bring terror to the streets of Whitechapel. Although the nature of Jekyll’s nastier, unrestrained self is never explained, all sorts of criminality (particularly sexual deviance) is implied. Literary critic Elaine Showalter even suggests that Hyde is an outlet for Jekyll’s repressed (illegal) homosexuality.
The story about the doctor’s ill-fated experiments concerning his split personality is so well known that it is strange to remember that the story was originally written as a mystery. It has been adapted on numerous occasions for stage and screen, with the earliest stage versions appearing only a year after the book’s first American publication in Boston. There are also plenty of works “inspired” by the tale that depict Jekyll’s unfortunate descendants or else put a new twist on the transformation, such as the film Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), in which Jekyll turns himself into a wicked woman. Perhaps the most impressive indicator of the book’s profound and pervasive cultural impact is that the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” has passed into the English language as a figure of speech to describe someone with a split personality or severe mood swings.
Carys Crossen
See also: Body Snatching Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Stevenson, Robert Louis.
Further Reading
Dryden, Linda. 2003. The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frayling, Christopher. 1996. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, 114–161. London: BBC Books.
Harman, Claire. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: Harper Perennial.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2006. “Introduction.” In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Tales, edited by Roger Luckhurst, vii–xxxii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maixner, Paul. 1995. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge.
Showalter, Elaine. 1992. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Virago.
Stepan, Nancy. 1985. “Biology: Races and Proper Places.” In Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, edited by J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman, 97–120. New York: Columbia University Press.
STRAUB, PETER (1943–)
Peter Straub is a best-selling American novelist, poet, and editor who is most famous for his horror novels, some of which were among the central texts that drove the horror publishing boom of the late twentieth century. He is a two-time recipient of the World Fantasy Award, ten-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, two-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award, Grandmaster of the World Horror Convention, and recipient of the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. His work has helped to shape the face of American popular literary culture, especially, but not solely, in the field of horror publishing, where his status is iconic.
Peter Francis Straub was born in 1943 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1965, he received a BA from the University of Wisconsin; a year later, he earned a master’s degree in Contemporary Literature from Columbia. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Susan. He is father to a son, Ben, and a daughter, Emma. Emma has also pursued a writing career, to date having published three well-received novels and a short story collection.
Straub began his writing life as a poet; among his first published works were a series of six pamphlets that he and longtime friend, horror writer Thomas Tessier (The Nightwalker), put out under the name Seafront Press. Other volumes include My Life in Pictures (1971), Ishmael (1972), and Open Air (1972). Probably the most readily available volume of his poetry is Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970–1975, published in 1983 by Underwood Miller, the closest thing the author has to a “collected works” volume of his poetry.
Straub soon gravitated to writing novels, publishing the mainstream works Marriages in 1973 and Under Venus in 1974. He followed these two efforts with his first forays into the macabre, publishing Julia in 1975 and If You Could See Me Now in 1977.
In 1979, he became something of a brand-name horror author with the publication of his breakout novel Ghost Story. His friend (and later collaborator) Stephen King lauded its virtues in a lengthy chapter in Danse Macabre, his nonfiction survey of horror fiction, where he described it as “the best of the supernatural novels to be published in the wake of the three books that kicked off a new horror ‘wave’ in the seventies—those three, of course, being Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other” (King 2010, 266). It also was included as a title in Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s Horror: 100 Best Books, where it was deftly analyzed by speculative fiction scholar Peter Nicholls.
Interestingly, the only books in Straub’s canon to be adapted to film were two of the early works noted above. Julia appeared in 1976 as Full Circle and was later re-released as The Haunting of Julia. In Straub’s mind, much of the casting was suspect, and the film’s script did not hold up very well. Ghost Story appeared in movie theaters in 1981. Although the film received praise for its effective casting of John Houseman and Fred Astaire as the central characters of Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, and for the debut of Alice Krige as the preternaturally threatening Alma Mobley, it was not a critical success, as Straub’s plot was severely downsized. It did do respectable business at the box office, though.
Shadowland was published in 1980, a novel heavily influenced by John Fowles’s The Magus. Straub followed that effort with Floating Dragon (1983), an expansive, bombastic story of terror set in suburban Connecticut.
His next project was a collaboration with Stephen King titled The Talisman (1984), a fantasy that chronicled the adventures of a boy named Jack Sawyer in a parallel universe. King and Straub published a sequel, Black House, in 2001. Besides updating fans on Jack’s doings, it also established specific links to the worlds that King created as part of his epic Dark Tower saga. The two have discussed a third book in the series, but have not written it as of 2016.
In 1988, Straub published Koko, the first book in what was to become known as his Blue Rose Trilogy. A New York Times best seller, Koko appeared on that list simultaneously with another memorable novel, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. Their appearance there signaled the beginning of a new era in thriller fiction, that of the serial killer as enigmatic antihero.
Like Harris, Straub had not yet finished wringing the last ounce of story value from his situations and characters; unlike Harris, Straub’s subsequent forays into this strange landscape proved just as intriguing as their predecessor, as the author found numerous and creative ways to riff on the situations he set up in Koko, penning two additional novels—Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993)—and writing several striking short stories that gave insight into the characters featured therein (including “Blue Rose,” “The Juniper Tree,” “The Ghost Village,” and “Bunny Makes Good Bread”). In 2010, Straub collaborated with actor Michael Easton to write the graphic novel The Green Woman. Illustrated by John Bolton, the book looks in on serial killer Fee Bandolier, who featured heavily in The Throat.
The Blue Rose Trilogy introduced the character of Tim Underhill, a writer (he purportedly wrote the story “Blue Rose”) who became both Straub’s alter ego and, according to subsequent works, his collaborator. Underhill also played key roles in the novels lost boy, lost girl (2003) and In the Night Room (2004).
Straub introduced one of his most memorable and beloved villains, the despicable Dick Dart, in 1985’s Hellfire Club. He delved into Lovecraftian themes in 1999’s Mr. X. His most recent novel, A Dark Matter, a reflection on the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, appeared in 2010. An alternate version of this story, the novel The Skylark, was published by Subterranean Press that same year.
Although rightfully famous for his novels, Straub has also penned short stories, which have been showcased in his collections Houses Without Doors, Magic Terror, and 5 Stories. In 2016, he published Interior Darkness: Selected Stories. That book, originally conceived as a two-volume edition of his collected stories, features sixteen shorter works, written over the course of some three decades. Writing about the collection in the Washington Post, reviewer Bill Sheehan stated, “There may be no better introduction to Straub’s accomplishments than this new, aptly titled career retrospective” (Sheehan 2016).
Besides his work as a novelist and short story writer, Straub has paid his dues as an editor, helming the Horror Writers Association anthology Peter Straub’s Ghosts in 1995, guest editing an edition of Conjunctions in 2002 (Issue 39, titled The New Wave Fabulists), selecting stories for the Library of America’s H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (2005) and editing a volume titled Poe’s Children, subtitled “The New Horror” (2008). Most recently, he served as editor for a two-volume set, again from the Library of America, titled American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now (2009). As an editor, Straub has sought to point out the richness and diversity of the genre, including stories from horror stalwarts such as Ramsey Campbell and Stephen King, but also promoting the talents of relative newcomers to the genre such as Kelly Link, Glenn Hirschberg, and Nalo Hopkinson, or such unlikely suspects as Dan Chaon and Jonathan Lethem.
Jazz informs much of Straub’s work. His novella “Pork Pie Hat” is a good example, featuring a character based on jazz legend Lester Young. This influence extends to the titles he has used and the names he has chosen for his characters over the years. Jazz-influenced titles include Koko, “The Blue Rose,” and The Skylark. Names such as Teagarden, Mobley, and Parker, and characters such as Henry Leyden of Black House in his guise as Symphonic Stan, the Big Band Man, proliferate. The final few pages of Koko are especially illuminating. There, a minor character named Spanky Burrage explores the differences between two tunes with the novel’s name, one by Duke Ellington and another by Charlie Parker, who borrowed his song’s chord progression from the song “Cherokee,” written by Ray Noble. Parker’s improvisation “bends” those chords, producing an entirely new tune. In a way, this is what Straub does with his stories, using variations on a theme to explore ideas and search for meaning; he often turns his stories inside out, looking at the same events from other angles, all in an effort to get at core truths.
Childhood trauma has always played an important part in Straub’s fiction, from the sexual molestation endured by the narrator of the extremely disturbing short story “The Juniper Tree” (1988) to the terrible car accident that Tom Pasmore, the protagonist of Mystery, suffered in that novel. Not surprisingly, pieces of Straub’s fiction are deeply informed by the events in his own life. In the May 1993 edition of the Village Voice Literary Supplement, Straub described one such event: “As a child, I was hit by a car. I was killed in effect, momentarily, and slowly and to some degree unwillingly returned to an unhappy, pain-ridden, angry frustrated life. I was crazy both with the physical pain and the horrible dread that kind of pain brings—and also, I now know, with anger at having been slapped down so severely” (Stokes 1993, 25). Fortunately for readers of horror fiction, the author has found ways to channel that anger and frustration into some of the most exquisite horror and thriller writing of the modern era.
Hank Wagner
See also: Bram Stoker Award; Ghost Story; International Horror Guild Award; King, Stephen.
Further Reading
Bosky, Bernadette L. 1996. “Mirror and Labyrinth: The Fiction of Peter Straub.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, edited by Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, 68–84. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Collings, Michael. 2000. Hauntings: The Official Peter Straub Bibliography. Woodstock, GA: Overlook Connection Press.
King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.
Sheehan, Bill. 2000. At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press.
Sheehan, Bill. 2016. “‘Interior Darkness’ for Those Who Love Horror—and Even Those Who Don’t.” Washington Post, February 8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/interior-darkness-for-those-who-love-horror--and-even-those-who-dont/2016/02/08/53b1210a-ce6f-11e5-b2bc-988409ee911b_story.html.
Stokes, Geoffrey. 1993. “Ghosts: The Many Lives of Peter Straub.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 115 (May): 25–26.
Tibbets, John C. 2016. The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Wolfe, Gary K., and Amelia Beamer. 2010. “Peter Straub and Transcendental Horror.” In Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, 151–163. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
STURGEON, THEODORE (1918–1985)
Over the course of a publishing career that spanned nearly five decades, Theodore Sturgeon established himself as one of the most important short story writers in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His nearly 200 published stories, the best of which were published in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, are characterized by emotional depth and stylistic maturity unmatched by other writers in the field at the time. Even his lighter stories demonstrate a quality and craftsmanship achieved by few of his contemporaries. His attention to matters of narrative style and character was profoundly important for a field that was at the time moving away from its roots in the pulp magazines, and his influence has helped shape the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field that we have today. While he is best known as a science fiction writer who addressed issues of difference and sexuality—as in his best-known work, More Than Human (1953), and in works such as Venus Plus X (1960) and “The World Well Lost” (1953)—Sturgeon’s work often makes use of supernatural elements or pathological behavior to create a sense of terror.
As early as 1940, with the publication of the story “It,” Sturgeon was crafting polished and intense tales of horror. The titular It in this case is a swamp creature, prefiguring DC Comics’ Swamp Thing by more than thirty years. Motivated by neither anger nor revenge, the creature nevertheless cuts a violent swath across the countryside in its futile attempts to come to terms with its environment and its emerging consciousness. The destruction It wreaks on one family, and on one teenaged girl in particular, is especially heart-wrenching, all the more so for the creature’s total lack of awareness of the consequences of its actions. “Killdozer” (1944) presents a very different kind of monster, a bulldozer possessed by an ancient alien entity that has been unintentionally unearthed by a construction corps. A story of possession masquerading as a hard science fiction story, “Killdozer” presents the entity’s exorcism as an engineering problem to be solved, which of course it is by the highly competent engineer who is the story’s lead. It remains a readable and at times intense working out of what would be an absurd notion in the hands of a lesser writer. In this sense Sturgeon laid the foundation for what followed decades later in Richard Matheson’s Duel and Stephen King’s “Trucks” (1978) and Christine (1983). Another story of possession, and one of Sturgeon’s finest, “The Perfect Host” (1948) explores the emotional devastation a body-hopping entity leaves in its wake—and does so through a narrative ploy that contemporary audiences would consider postmodern.
These stories and most others in Sturgeon’s oeuvre can be characterized as horror, fantasy, or science fiction, but “Bianca’s Hands” (1947) eschews these trappings for a study in psychological pathology that is all too believable and all the more disturbing for it. The story follows a man who becomes obsessed with the hands of a possibly mentally deficient teenaged girl, the titular Bianca. After a brief courtship, Bianca’s mother agrees to let them marry, and the man moves in. His obsession grows and worsens, and the ensuing downward spiral that all their lives take is vividly rendered in Sturgeon’s polished prose. An even more powerful portrayal of deviance is played out in “Bright Segment” (1955), in which a solitary man rescues a woman after an auto accident and nurses her back to health in his apartment. As she becomes the focal point of his life, his ministrations turn to imprisonment and torture.
Sturgeon’s work often features protagonists, often children or young adults, confronted by threatening or overwhelming forces. “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” (1948) incorporates time travel into a story of a possessed teddy bear that affects its owner from childhood into adulthood, with a terrifying resolution that effectively undermines its innocuous imagery.
In “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall” (1951) an entity, either alien or supernatural, inhabits the shadow of a child’s room and wreaks destruction on his family. “Prodigy” (1949), one of Sturgeon’s shortest but best stories, relates the fate of a special child and raises disturbing questions about how society manages and reacts to difference. The monstrous child motif, in this case an all-powerful adolescent who can do anything he thinks, appears in “Talent” (1953)—the same year that Jerome Bixby’s classic short story “It’s a Good Life,” about an omnipotent child terrorizing a small town (adapted as the iconic Twilight Zone of the same title), was published. “Twink” (1955) demonstrates Sturgeon at his most humane in a story that explores the burgeoning telepathic relationship between a child in utero and her father. The terror here is one of birth, but it is a trauma elided by familial and human connection—another dominant theme in Sturgeon’s work.
Surgeon was adept at producing stories in various modes. Examples of his lighter, if still darkly tinged work include “Shottle Bop” (1941), “Blabbermouth” (1947), and “Fluffy” (1947), all of which can be read as prefiguring the popular urban fantasy that emerged in the late 1980s and the paranormal romance that has existed as a marketing category since the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. “So Near the Darkness” (1955) is a noir mystery that hints at a lurking supernatural presence. “The Graveyard Reader” (1958), with its protagonist who learns how to read the life stories of the dead by examining their gravestones, anticipates in tone and mood the early work of Neil Gaiman. And “Vengeance Is” (1980) anticipates the HIV/AIDS crisis through a disturbing exploration of rape and revenge via the transmission of a sexually transmitted virus.
Of Sturgeon’s handful of novels, Some of Your Blood (1961) is most relevant here. Told through a series of letters and personnel files, the novel gradually unpacks the life of a soldier committed to a psychiatric ward. What gradually emerges is a childhood history of abuse and neglect and an adult life marked by loss, instances of extreme violence, and blood drinking. It is a remarkable study of aberrant psychology that implies a supernatural underpinning that is left tantalizingly unconfirmed.
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1994–2010) collects in thirteen volumes all the short fiction along with insightful story notes from the editors. Taken as a whole, the retrospective illuminates a career of importance, influence, and sustained brilliance.
Javier A. Martinez
See also: Novel versus Short Fiction; Possession and Exorcism; Psychological Horror.
Further Reading
Hartwell, David G. 1989. “An Interview with Theodore Sturgeon, Part 1.” New York Review of Science Fiction 7 (March): 1, 8–11.
Hartwell, David G. 1989. “An Interview with Theodore Sturgon, Part 2.” New York Review of Science Fiction 8 (April): 12–15.
Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. “Theodore Sturgeon.” In Science Fiction Voices #1, 4–18. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Stableford, Brian M. 1985. “Theodore (Hamilton) Sturgeon.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, Volume 2, edited by Everett Franklin Bleiler, 941–946. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Williams, Paul. [1976] 2010. “Theodore Sturgeon: Storyteller.” In Case and the Dreamer, Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, 327–354. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Also at http://www.theodoresturgeontrust.com/williams.html.
THE SUBLIME
“Sublime” is a term belonging to aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy devoted to the study of artistic values. It designates an affect (subjective emotional state) or experience that exceeds the ordinary limits of an individual’s capacities. Since horror fiction often deals with overwhelming emotions—whether fear, disgust, or denial—as well as the existence of some other realm beyond the everyday world, the concept of the sublime can be an important tool in understanding horror.
The sublime in ancient literature signified some event or person, or perhaps a thing, that rose above its own level and took on something of a divine aspect. The sublime was the object of considerable attention among eighteenth-century thinkers who endeavored to define laws governing the human response to beauty in art and nature. One of these thinkers, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), published a treatise titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756, which would become an important early critical text for scholars of horror literature. Rather than seeing the sublime as a form of superior beauty, Burke separated it from beauty and identified the sublime instead with horror. Much of the current discussion of horror literature still draws on Burke’s idea that horror exerts its own kind of attraction, independent from beauty. It seems clear that Burke’s ideas influenced the development of Gothic fiction. Horace Walpole celebrated Gothic architecture in part because it was grotesque in comparison with the more stately classical architecture of the eighteenth century, which was modeled on ancient Greek and Roman aesthetic ideas of beauty and dignity.
Romantic philosophy took a modified view of the sublime, largely inspired by the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). While Burke made the sublime an aspect of certain kinds of naturally occurring events, such as natural catastrophes, Kant saw the sublime as an aspect of the human mind. The mind, according to Kant, seeks to understand whatever it encounters in reality. Some encounters, however, are overwhelming; the event is simply too large or too powerful for the mind to comprehend. The mind falls short, but, in its failure, still finds something to admire in itself anyway: namely, the heroic effort of the mind to understand something far larger than itself. This mixed feeling of incomprehension and self-respect is what Kant considers the sublime. Later Romantic writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose importance for horror fiction is considerable, would adopt something resembling Kant’s idea, seeing the sublime in ways that mixed psychology with aesthetics.
Edgar Allan Poe provides a good example of the way this altered idea of the sublime affects horror fiction. He pays close attention to both the physical and psychological aspects of overwhelming experiences in order to depict them as intensely as possible, which gives his work its exceptional power. In his essay on horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft wrote: “Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal” (Lovecraft 2012, 55).
The sublime tends to fade in significance, while the psychological aspect of horror grows more important in horror criticism, as the twentieth century begins. The domain beyond, which was once considered sublime, is approached by more contemporary authors in a way having to do with the philosophy of existence, rather than aesthetic philosophy.
Michael Cisco
See also: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; The Numinous; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Walpole, Horace.
Brown, Marshall. 1987. “A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel.” Studies in Romanticism 26: 275–301.
Burke, Edmund. [1756] 2013. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Doran, Robert. 2015. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. New York: Routledge.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Mishra, Vijay. 2015. “The Gothic Sublime.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 288–306. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Voller, Jack G. 1994. The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
SUMMERS, MONTAGUE (1880–1948)
Augustus Montague Summers was an English author, vampirologist, demonologist, and clergyman of dubious religious orders. Enigmatic occultist and sometimes participant in the Black Mass in his earlier days, today Summers is primarily known for his scholarly works on Restoration drama and the Gothic and his occult works on vampires, witches, werewolves, and demons, figures in which he professed his firm belief. Summers was also responsible for the first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (1928), the infamous fifteenth-century witch hunter’s manual.
The youngest of seven children, Summers was raised in Clifton, Bristol, then educated at Clifton College before going to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied theology, intending to become a priest in the Church of England. After receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1905, he attended the Lichfield Theological College to further his religious studies. In 1908, Summers was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, but following accusations of sexual impropriety he converted to Catholicism in 1909, supposedly obtaining holy orders in Italy, and thereafter passed himself off as a Catholic priest, self-styled as the Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers. He wore clerical garments until the day he died in 1948.
Before turning to writing full-time, Summers worked as an English and Latin teacher at various schools in England and London for several years. Summers’s prose, according to Gerard P. O’Sullivan, “was solemn, archaic, and often impenetrable” (O’Sullivan 2011, xxix). His other important occult works include The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926), The Geography of Witchcraft (1927), The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), The Vampire in Europe (1929), The Werewolf (1933), A Popular History of Witchcraft (1937), Witchcraft and Black Magic (1946), and The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (1947).
Perusing older as well as newer texts on the topical areas Summers pursued can scarcely be done without encountering his name and mention of his works, a fact owing as much to his curious demeanor, erudition, and rather quirky, ornate writing style as it does to the breadth of research he published in his lifetime. However, these same texts also reveal the curious absence of any real depth in Summers’s work, and it is perhaps because of this that a stigma has been attached to Summers’s writings for almost as long as they have been in print. Summers’s rather orthodox belief in supernatural figures, his sometimes impenetrable writing style, and the documentation errors his works occasionally show have contributed to a partial and sometimes outright avoidance of his work by researchers.
Summers died suddenly in his home in Richmond, Surrey, on August 10, 1948, with only a handful of close friends in attendance at his simple graveside service three days later. After his death, Summers’s contribution to the critical methodologies used for studying vampires has become undeniable. Without his frequently reprinted works, the image of the vampire that is widely recognized today might have had considerably less to do with comparative cultural studies and more to do with predominantly anglicized representations in film and literature. Indeed, it is because of Summers that the modern serious study of the vampire figure exists today.
John Edgar Browning
See also: Incubi and Succubi; Vampires; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Jerome, Joseph. 1965. Montague Summers: A Memoir. London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf.
O’Sullivan, Gerard P. 2011. “Prologue: The Continuing Quest for Montague Summers.” In The Vampire, His Kith and Kin: A Critical Edition, edited by John Edgar Browning, xxviii–lxxii. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press.
Sewell, Brocard. 1991. Tell Me Strange Things: A Memorial to Montague Summers. Upton: Aylesford Press.
Summers, Montague. 1980. The Galantry Show: An Autobiography. London: Cecil Woolf.
Summers, Montague. 2011. The Vampire, His Kith and Kin: A Critical Edition. Edited by John Edgar Browning. Berkeley: Apocryphile Press.
Summers, Montague. 2014. The Vampire in Europe: A Critical Edition. Edited by John Edgar Browning. Berkeley: Apocryphile Press.
SURREALISM
Surrealism is a movement in poetry, painting, fiction, and film in which the artist attempts to tap directly into the subconscious, using such means as dreams or automatic writing to fuse subconscious and conscious thought to create a new type of reality. The movement was heavily influenced by Freudian theory and by the Gothic novel, which the founder of surrealism, the French poet Andre Breton, felt was a similar reaction against the art and social mores of an earlier era. These influences perhaps account for touches of horror that may surface in surrealist works.
Founded by Breton in 1924, surrealism grew to prominence between the two World Wars. It diverged from the earlier, nihilistic, Dadaist movement, in which artists rebelled against reason and logic in a disillusioned postwar Europe. The Surrealists sought to create something new and positive, if also shocking and discordant.
Because the term “surrealism” signifies a method of creation rather than a particular style or subject matter, there is little consistency in works so classified, but they do commonly feature strange and disquieting juxtapositions of objects and concepts, as often seen in surrealist paintings. Horrific imagery is often more apparent in film, as in Andalusian Dog (1929) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, with its shocking scenes of a woman’s eye being sliced by a razor and ants crawling out of a wound in a man’s hand. Later Surrealist-influenced films include L’Age d’Or (1930) by Buñuel, Beauty and the Beast (1946) by Jean Cocteau, Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch, and El Topo (1970) and Sante Sangre (1989) by Alejandro Jodorosky.
Surrealist fiction may also contain horrific elements. In The Fashionable Tiger (1947) by Jean Ferry, a vicious tiger is forced by hypnotism to dress and behave as a human in a circus performance. The Rabbits and The Debutante by Leonora Carrington (1939) respectively feature carnivorous rabbits and a hyena who eats a young woman and wears her torn-off face. The Lost Traveller (1943) by Ruthven Todd, based on a series of dreams, follows a man on a quest across a bizarre landscape with bleeding statues and faceless people.
Surrealism largely disappeared as an organized movement after World War II, but its effects were widespread. Some later writers, such as Rikki Ducornet, actually employed surrealist techniques, but the movement also had a more superficial influence on many writers such as William S. Burroughs, Nathanael West, William Sansom, and J. G. Ballard, who often employed the type of disconcerting imagery or disjointedness seen in surrealist works.
The movement was one of many streams of influence on the development of weird fiction and in particular on writers such as Robert Aickman and Angela Carter. More recently, the influence can be seen in the work of the New Weird movement, including China Miéville, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco, and Caitlín Kiernan.
Lee Weinstein
See also: Aickman, Robert; Ballard, J. G.; Carter, Angela; Dreams and Nightmares; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; Ligotti, Thomas; Miéville, China; New Weird.
Further Reading
Bradley, Fiona. 1997. Surrealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hopkins, David. 2004. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer. 2011. The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. New York: Tor.