WAGNER, KARL EDWARD (1945–1994)
Karl Edward Wagner was an American writer, editor, and publisher of fantasy and horror fiction whose career coincides with the ascent of horror and dark fantasy as popular categories in trade publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. Wagner’s earliest published work—the novels Darkness Weaves (1970), Bloodstone (1975), and Dark Crusade (1976), and the collections Death Angel’s Shadow (1973) and Night Winds (1978)—featured his immortal Byronic swordsman Kane, a character inspired partly by Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Richard Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, whose adventures straddled the boundary between sword-and-sorcery and horror fiction. Wagner’s interest in Howard would lead him to edit three collections of the restored texts of Howard’s tales of Conan, all published in 1977: The Hour of the Dragon, The People of the Black Circle, and Red Nails.
Wagner’s complete short tales of the supernatural were collected in three volumes: In a Lonely Place (1983), Why Not You and I (1987), and Exorcisms and Ecstasies (1997). The best of these stories are informed by his familiarity with classic supernatural fiction, including “In the Pines,” a variation on the theme of Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One,” and “The River of Night’s Dreaming,” which references the work of Robert W. Chambers. His best-known story, “Sticks,” first published in 1974. was both a tribute to the work of Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye and a contribution to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Its central concept and visual image of mysterious lattice-like stick formations that are discovered in the woods, and that seemingly hold horrific supernatural or occult significance, was borrowed for the first season of HBO’s True Detective in 2014 and also, to all appearance, by the makers of The Blair Witch Project (1999). “The Fourth Seal” and “Into Whose Hands” are both macabre ruminations on the modern medical profession (for which Wagner, as a nonpracticing psychiatrist, had trained), while a number of his stories—“Neither Brute Nor Human,” “The Last Wolf,” “Silted In,” ‘‘Lost Exits,” and “The Slug,” among others—are macabre tales about artists undone by their own flaws and vulnerabilities, a recurring theme in his later work.
With David Drake and Jim Groce, Wagner founded the publishing imprint Carcosa, which published four collections of pulp fiction by E. Hoffmann Price, Hugh B. Cave, and Manly Wade Wellman, including the World Fantasy Award–winning Worse Things Waiting (1973) and Murgrunstrumm and Others (1977). Wagner compiled three anthologies of classic sword-and-sorcery fiction in the Echoes of Valor series between 1987 and 1991, and an anthology of medical horror stories, Intensive Scare (1989). Between 1980 and his death in 1994, Wagner edited fifteen volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, an annual series that, in his hands, was instrumental for celebrating the small press’s important contribution to modern horror fiction.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; Dark Fantasy; Howard, Robert E.; Onions, Oliver; Wellman, Manly Wade.
Further Reading
Ashley, Mike. 1996. “Wagner, Karl Edward.” St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle, 583–584. Detroit, MI: St. James Press.
Drake, David. 1989. “A Brief Introduction to Karl Edward Wagner.” Weird Tales 51, no. 1 (Spring/Fall): 110–112.
Howard, John. 2014. “In Lonely Places: The Essential Horror Fiction of Karl Edward Wagner.” In Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic, 187–202. Staffordshire, UK: Alchemy Press.
Mayer, John. 1997. “The Dark Muse of Karl Edward Wagner.” New York Review of Science Fiction 112, no. 1 (December): 8–17.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 1985. “Karl Edward Wagner and the Haunted Hills (and Kudzu).” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction, 86–91. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
WAKEFIELD, H. R. (1888–1964)
Herbert Russell Wakefield was an English writer and editor, the best of whose work is noted for its intelligence, dark sensibilities, and clever variations on existing formulas for supernatural fiction. Wakefield matriculated at Marlborough College in Summerfield House from 1902 to 1906, then attended Oxford University, where he received a second-class degree in history, and from 1912 to 1914 he served as secretary to Lord Northcliffe. Wakefield’s father was Bishop of Birmingham, and in 1920, following Wakefield’s service in the First World War, where he achieved the rank of lieutenant, he briefly became his father’s secretary. He later joined publisher Philip Allan (some say Collins) as editor, and in 1932, with Charles Birkin, Wakefield began the editorship of the Creeps series, some fourteen titles of which were published before the series concluded with The Creeps Omnibus (1935). This latter series contained twenty-nine stories, seven of which were by Wakefield.
Wakefield’s first collection of ghost stories, They Return at Evening (1928), was jointly published by Philip Allan and an American publisher, Appleton, Century; in “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,” M. R. James praised the volume and described the contents as “a mixed bag, from which I should remove one or two that leave a very nasty taste. Among the residue are some admirable pieces, very inventive” (James 2009, 348). This was followed by additional collections of short stories and a handful of crime novels. At the time of his death, Wakefield had published more than seventy-five short stories, many of them ultimately supernatural, though with a strong element of physical horror. His ghosts were rarely metaphysical.
Largely on the strength of “He Cometh and He Passeth By” (1928), a tale of rival magicians inspired by M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes,” Wakefield is sometimes considered one of the writers indebted to M. R. James and referenced somewhat dismissively as one of the “James Gang.” This classification and categorization does him no service, for although he lacked James’s enormous intelligence, he had a far greater palette than James, a far greater awareness of the world at large, and he was capable of telling more than one kind of ghost story. Wakefield recognized that hauntings did not necessarily need to involve medieval cathedrals and manuscripts or the English public schools; indeed, hauntings could occur in the twentieth century and did not need to involve the English upper classes. Wakefield thus occasionally made use of the traditional English country estate in such works as “The Red Lodge” (published in They Return at Evening), but his settings included golf courses (“The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” in They Return at Evening), and could involve even used cars and American gangsters (“Used Car,” 1932).
Equally diverse were his characters: the misanthropic, seething, and murderous Pownall of “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” (published as “The Unseen Player” in 1928) is beautifully characterized, and his murder of the amiable, better looking, and seemingly luckier Morisson, so that he might win a chess game, is convincingly detailed, as is his fate. At a time when most popular writers were incapable of recognizing the humanity of Asians, Wakefield’s “And He Shall Sing . . .” (in They Return at Evening) matter-of-factly makes use of Japanese as characters, one of whom is a poet; and Agatha of “Damp Sheets” (1931) is not only a strong female character but one who precipitates the action. The relatively late “The Gorge of the Churels” (1951) in many ways epitomizes Wakefield’s fiction: the protagonist is Indian, and when supernaturally threatened, he turns to his ancestral faith, which is superior to Christianity at dealing with local threats.
Wakefield could likewise see new elements in an established situation: the aforementioned “Professor Pownall’s Oversight” does not follow the traditional pattern of supernatural fiction but extends Pownall’s feud with Morisson to a new group of chess players. Finally, Wakefield had a pleasing and occasionally puckish sense of humor: those anticipating the titular story of his collection Imagine a Man in a Box (1931) to be horrific, and perhaps involving coffins and premature burials, will be pleasantly surprised.
In a letter to August Derleth, quoted in editor Peter Ruber’s Arkham’s Masters of Horror, Wakefield boasted: “I had over a million words published before you’d even written one word. I’d had articles in most ever leading English periodical on a variety of subjects from Gold to Economics, from water sports to Shakespearean criticism, from Pan-Uranianism to Fox farms” (Ruber 2000, 134). This material, as well as a number of shorter works of fiction, remains uncollected. It should also be noted that Wakefield’s personal life and habits led to the estrangement of most of his family; in addition, he occasionally claimed the birth date of 1890, apparently fictionalized other aspects of his life, and thoroughly frustrated future researchers by destroying most of his papers and likenesses late in his life. Finally, the date of his death appears to be 1964 rather than the 1965 stated by some reference sources. His best fiction, however, remains timeless.
Richard Bleiler
See also: “Casting the Runes”; Derleth, August; James, M. R.
Further Reading
Indick, Ben P. 1992. “H. Russell Wakefield: The Man Who Believed in Ghosts.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction 1, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 73–93. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 120, edited by Janet Witalec. Detroit, MI: Gale.
James, Henry. [1904] 2009. “M. R. James on Ghost Stories.” In Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories by Henry James, edited by Michael Cox, 337–352. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Ruber, Peter. 2000. “H. Russell Wakefield.” In Arkham’s Masters of Horror, edited by Peter Ruber, 130–135. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.
WALPOLE, HORACE (1717–1797)
The youngest son of Great Britain’s first prime minister, Horace Walpole lived an extravagant life of opulence and privilege typical of many eighteenth-century aristocrats. He was also a voluminous writer whose letters have provided historians with much insight into the political, cultural, and social aspects of the eighteenth century, and his role in the development of the horror genre cannot be overlooked or overstated. It was not until he was in his late forties that he published The Castle of Otranto (1764), a strange work that established the genre of Gothic fiction. As the progenitor of the Gothic, Walpole laid the foundation for what would become the most popular type of literary fiction by the end of the century, directly influencing writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Walpole’s achievements have left a lasting impact on the horror genre, with writers such as Stephen King remarking on his importance to the field.
In the middle of the eighteenth century there was a resurgence of interest in the medieval period among historians, antiquarians, and other intellectuals. Walpole was among those who were fascinated with the Middle Ages, not seeing it as a dark period in history but rather as a more ideal era than previously believed. Using his vast wealth, Walpole constructed a Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill for his personal amusement. His castle, an artificial eighteenth-century construction designed to look ancient, not only influenced others to create similar structures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, but it also served to inspire Walpole in his later literary endeavors. Claiming it came to him in a dream one night in Strawberry Hill, Walpole conceived of the idea to write a Gothic story, called so because of the word’s association with the medieval period, which would take shape as The Castle of Otranto. Unsure of how the reading public would receive his text, Walpole published it anonymously under a fictitious identity who claimed it was a modern translation of a sixteenth-century Italian text. As his novel proved an immediate success, Walpole claimed ownership of his work and republished it in a new edition with an introduction that declared it was the first of a new genre of romance, one that blends the old and new: the Gothic. In 1766, Walpole wrote a Gothic play entitled The Mysterious Mother. However, because his play featured incest between a mother and son, he was again unsure how it would be received, and it was thus only distributed in small numbers to close friends during his lifetime.
Inheriting his family’s earldom in 1791, Walpole died six years later in 1797 at the age of seventy-nine. He left behind a vast art collection, numerous writings, and a significant legacy in horror fiction.
Joel T. Terranova
See also: The Castle of Otranto; The Haunted House or Castle; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Radcliffe, Ann.
Further Reading
Kallich, Martin. 1971. Horace Walpole. New York: Twayne.
Mowl, Timothy. 1998. Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider. London: Faber and Faber.
Sabor, Peter. 2013. Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge.
WANDREI, DONALD (1908–1987)
To readers of horror, Donald Wandrei is first remembered as the co-founder of Arkham House publishers, and as co-editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s Selected Letters. Less known is his genre fiction, produced in the 1930s with the encouragement of his friends, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and made available in recent years in Colossus (1989), Don’t Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei (1997), and Frost (2000), which collect his science fiction, horror stories, and mysteries, respectively. While critics and readers mostly dismiss much of this work as being of poor quality, especially the bulk of the science fiction, the best of Wandrei’s fiction is distinctive and exceptional.
Donald Albert Wandrei was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he spent most of his life living there in his parents’ house. He suffered a lifetime of vivid nightmares, which disposed him toward writing horror stories, stocked his psyche with unearthly imagery, and provided him an intuitive grasp of the Lovecraftian “stricken awe” that arises from glimpses of the nonhuman universe. Horror and science fiction legend Fritz Leiber, who, like Wandrei, was among the writers whose talent Lovecraft nurtured, famously said he thought Wandrei seemed Lovecraft’s most obvious successor.
Though a few brief, moody pieces transcribe Wandrei’s bizarre nightly visions—such as “The Crater” (1967), “Nightmare” (1965), and “The Lady in Gray” (1933—his best work finds Wandrei mining them for startling images, dreamlike strangeness, and incursions of the terrifying and the irrational. In “The Painted Mirror” (1937; dramatized on the horror television series Night Gallery in the 1970s), a young boy discovers such a thing in an attic, and chipping away the paint reveals a vague, terrible landscape with the figure of a girl in the distance. Each night as he scrapes, the girl draws closer; at the end of this Borgesian tale, the girl/entity switches souls with the boy and paints over the mirror. In “The Eye and the Finger” (1944), this pair of disembodied objects nightmarishly plagues the main character, hovering in his living room, staring, pointing. “Uneasy Lie the Drowned” (1937), a neglected classic of weird fiction, tells of revenge reaching out from an unlived other life.
While these true-felt horror stories are arguably his finest productions, Wandrei’s best science fiction, like that of his friend Smith, is imbued with strong elements of horror as well. An exceptional set of otherwise widely different stories—“Giant-Plasm” (1939), “The Crystal Bullet” (1941), “Something from Above” (1930), and “The Monster from Nowhere” (1935)—finds characters terrified or destroyed by mere chance encounters with alien beings. The nightmarish intrusions here come not from the supernatural, but the abyss of space. One of Wandrei’s last works is a fine novel of cosmic terror, The Web of Easter Island (1948), which has been out of print for more than fifty years, though an early draft (Dead Titans, Awaken!) has recently been made available.
Beyond prose, the young Wandrei was an acolyte of Smith and George Sterling, and produced Dark Romantic and fantastically themed poems of considerable quality. As can be said of much of Wandrei’s work: these are difficult to find today, but are worth the search.
Steve Behrends
See also: Arkham House; Derleth, August; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Behrends, Steve. 1988. “Something from Above: The Imaginative Fiction of Donald Wandrei.” Studies in Weird Fiction 3 (Fall): 22–34.
Klein, T. E. D. 2009. “Donald Wandrei: A Haunted House.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 541–543. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press. Originally published in Studies in Weird Fiction 6: 35–36 (Fall 1988).
Ruber, Peter. 2000. “Donald Wandrei.” In Arkham’s Masters of Horror, edited by Peter Ruber, 64–68. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.
Schwartz, Julius. 2009. “Donald Wandrei.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 534–540. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press.
Tierney, Richard L. 1989. “Introduction: Donald A. Wandrei.” In Colossus: The Collected Fiction of Donald A. Wandrei, ix–xxix. Minneapolis: Fedogan & Bremer.
WEIRD TALES
Weird Tales was an American pulp fiction magazine published between 1923 and 1954 that, in its initial run of 279 issues, featured the work of most significant writers of horror and fantasy fiction in America in the first half of the twentieth century. Its impact on the shape and direction taken by modern weird fiction is incalculable.
Weird Tales debuted in March 1923 under the editorship of Edwin Baird, a fiction writer who also edited its sister magazine, Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories. Although Weird Tales was subtitled “The Unique Magazine,” the thirteen issues that Baird edited through the mid-1924 issue were full of mostly run-of-the-mill neo-Gothic potboiler stories. Baird published little fiction of note, but under his editorship he introduced readers to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Seabury Quinn, all of whom became distinguished contributors during the magazine’s golden age.
Having failed to find a supportive readership—even after enlisting the services of celebrity magician Harry Houdini, who put his name on several ghost-written stories published in the magazine in early 1924—Weird Tales went on hiatus after the May/June/July 1924 issue. It resumed publication with the November 1924 issue with a new editor, former contributor and first reader Farnsworth Wright. Unlike Baird, Wright was enthusiastic about weird fiction, and the magazine flourished artistically, if not financially, under his stewardship. The 1930s were the magazine’s greatest years as Wright published stories that attested to the diversity and variety of the weird tale as it had evolved in Weird Tales: Clark Ashton Smith’s imaginary world fantasies, Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery tales of Conan the Conqueror, Henry S. Whitehead’s tales of occult marvels in the West Indies, August Derleth’s traditional ghost stories, Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s Southern Gothic tales, Seabury Quinn’s psychic detective series featuring Jules de Grandin, Edmond Hamilton and C. L. Moore’s scientific fantasies, and stories by H. P. Lovecraft that would later be acknowledged as the foundation for the shared fictional universe known today as the Cthulhu Mythos. Contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos also helped to launch the careers of Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, who would earn distinction for work independent of Lovecraft’s influence. It was during these years that Weird Tales also enlisted the services of artists whose names would become synonymous with that of the magazine: Margaret Brundage, who was known for her cover images of scantily clad, sexually alluring women, and Virgil Finlay, whose black-and-white interior art had a distinctive photorealistic character.
Weird Tales was sold in late 1938 and its offices moved from Chicago to New York. Wright continued to edit the magazine through the March 1940 issue, after which he was replaced by Dorothy McIlwraith, who also edited the new publisher’s general fiction magazine Short Stories. Nearly a year before Wright’s departure the magazine had shifted from monthly to bi-monthly publication as a cost-saving measure. Although the character of Weird Tales changed during the McIlwraith years, the magazine continued to feature work from a lineup of stalwart contributors including Bloch, Derleth (under his own name and his Stephen Grendon pseudonym), and Quinn. Manly Wade Wellman became a regular contributor with his tales of supernatural investigator John Thunstone, as did Ray Bradbury with his modern American Gothic stories. Other contributors of note included Fritz Leiber, Joseph Payne Brennan, Harold Lawlor, and Alison V. Harding. Many stories first published in Weird Tales by these authors would be collected in books published by Arkham House, a publishing company started in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei with whom the magazine developed a close relationship in the 1940s and 1950s. Faced with the same financial pressures and competition from paperbacks and comic books that killed off other pulp magazines, Weird Tales shrank to digest size with the September 1953 issue and ceased publication after the September 1954 issue.
Weird Tales has been revived several times since its original run: for four issues edited by Sam Moskowitz between 1973 and 1974, and for four mass-market paperback anthologies edited by Lin Carter between 1981 and 1983. The two issues edited by Gordon M. D. Garb between 1984 and 1985 were notable for publishing mostly new stories rather than reprints, a trend that continued with subsequent revivals. Between 1988 and 2016, Weird Tales published seventy-two issues under a variety of editors, including four issues published between 1994 and 1996 when the magazine’s name briefly changed to Worlds of Fantasy & Horror.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Arkham House; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Brennan, Joseph Payne; Derleth, August; Howard, Robert E.; Kuttner, Henry; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Pulp Horror; Quinn, Seabury; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wellman, Manly Wade; Whitehead, Henry S.
Further Reading
Everett, Justin, and Jeffrey H. Shanks. 2015. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Weinberg, Robert. 1999. The Weird Tales Story. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.
WELLMAN, MANLY WADE (1903–1986)
Manly Wade Wellman was an American writer who is best remembered today for his supernatural fiction, especially for his stories of John the Balladeer, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s and were collected in the Arkham House volume Who Fears the Devil? (1963).
Wellman was born to missionary parents in Portuguese East Africa (now Angola), where he lived with native children and spoke their language before he spoke English. His family returned to the United States, where he was educated in Washington, D.C., Salt Lake City, and Wichita, Kansas. In the 1920s he became friends with a noted folklorist and took many trips through the Ozark Mountains. Later, after a time in New York, Wellman settled with his own family in North Carolina. Culturally, Wellman was a Southerner and always identified himself as such.
He began writing for the pulps in his mid-twenties, with his first story appearing in Thrilling Tales in 1927. Soon he was contributing to Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder, Startling Stories, and Weird Tales. He wrote one genuinely distinguished science fiction novel, Twice in Time, published in Startling Stories in 1940 and reprinted many times since, about a time-traveler who becomes the figure known to history as Leonardo Da Vinci. Wellman also contributed one novel in the Captain Future space-opera series, then moved on to comic books. He also wrote nonfiction and juvenile fiction about the South and its Civil War heroes.
His character John the Balladeer is a wandering singer who travels the backwoods of Appalachia, encountering folkloric spooks, many of which are the subjects of the songs that John sings. The lyrics quoted in the stories are more often than not Wellman’s own and are excellent examples of what folklore scholars call “fakelore,” that is, items or motifs that sound absolutely authentic but are not. In 2004 singer Joe Bethancourt released an album of the songs of John the Balladeer, with Wellman’s lyrics occasionally expanded by Bethancourt and set to traditional melodies.
Wellman’s other series characters, notably Judge Pursuivant and John Thunstone, whose adventures appeared in Weird Tales in the 1930s and 1940s, also regularly confront supernatural menaces. Pursuivant is retired, but, vastly learned in both legal and occult lore, he sallies forth from his home in West Virginia to do battle with evil. John Thunstone is a playboy Manhattanite who carries a sword cane, but he, too, is learned in the occult and adept at disposing of demonic menaces. Thunstone in particular is an idealization of Wellman himself, a huge, burly man with a moustache, a man of action who is also learned, sophisticated, and a proper gentleman. (Wellman was himself a large, muscular man with a moustache, educated, gracious, etc.)
The majority of the lore in the Wellman stories is by no means made up. Indeed, his greatest strength is the authenticity of the settings he depicts, drawn from those Ozark trips in his youth and from his own long residence in the North Carolina mountains. He was, like Stephen Vincent Benet, one of the genuinely American fantasy writers, drawing on uniquely American motifs and subject matter. Nevertheless, he does invent, sometimes very persuasively, most strikingly in the Thunstone series with the legend of the Shonokins, a dispossessed race that preceded the American Indians, perhaps descended from Neanderthals. The Shonokins are the ancient enemies of the rest of mankind, who work sinister magic but have strange limitations and seek to regain mastery of the Earth. As these stories appeared in Weird Tales at about the same time as Richard Shaver’s “Shaver Mystery” stories (which pretended to be based on fact, also involving sinister ancient races), some readers who were duped by Shaver also began to wonder if the Shonokins might also be real.
After a hiatus in the 1960s, Wellman returned to the fantasy field to much acclaim in the 1970s. He wrote five novels about John the Balladeer (this remained Wellman’s preferred term, despite the publisher’s coinage of “Silver John”). There were also three John Thunstone novels. An expanded volume, John the Balladeer, containing additional stories written later in Wellman’s career, appeared in 1988. Several of his stories have been adapted for television, most notably “The Valley Was Still” as “Still Valley” on The Twilight Zone in 1961. Who Fears the Devil? was filmed badly with the insulting title of The Legend of Hillbilly John in 1972. Wellman despised the film.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Arkham House; Dark Fantasy; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Elliot, Jeffrey M. 1982. “Manly Wade Wellman: Better Things Waiting” (interview). In Fantasy Voices: Interviews with American Fantasy Writers, edited by Jeffrey M. Elliot, 5–18. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Jones, Jeremy L. C. 2014. “Dark Hearts & Brilliant Patches of Honor: A Tribute to Manly Wade Wellman.” Clarkesworld 89 (February). http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wellman_interview.
Meyers, Walter E. 1985. “Manly Wade Wellman.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 947–954. New York: Scribner’s.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “Manly Wade Wellman” (interview). In Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of the Supernatural, 93–101. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
WELLS, H. G. (1866–1946)
Herbert George Wells was a prolific British author and social thinker. Through his imaginative blend of science and speculation, Wells laid the foundations for twentieth-century science fiction and horror literature. One of the most popular writers of his day, Wells published dozens of books and short stories, beginning with his early science fiction in the late nineteenth century. In later life he devoted himself more frequently to realist novels and political tracts, writing new work until his death in 1946.
Wells was born to a lower-middle-class family in Kent. Originally a draper’s apprentice, the academically gifted Wells eventually succeeded in establishing a teaching career. After publishing short newspaper pieces, Wells produced a series of “scientific romances,” beginning with The Time Machine in 1896. These imaginative fictions, heavily informed by contemporary scientific discoveries, launched his literary fame.
Most frequently in his fiction and commentary, Wells attacked the complacency of polite society, seeking to fire the imagination of his readers with novel imagery and perspectives. As a futurist, Wells called up visions of technologically advanced civilizations, often under the control of powerful political oligarchies (When the Sleeper Wakes, 1899), as well as utopian states built upon rational lines (A Modern Utopia, 1905; The Shape of Things to Come, 1933). Most often, these visions of the future emphasize the alienating and violent consequences of technological progress, confronting everyday life with strangely transformed human beings (as in 1897’s The Invisible Man and the chemically produced giants of 1904’s The Food of the Gods), or the ravages of technological warfare. Wells is often credited as the source for such concepts as the time machine, the tank (“The Land Ironclads,” 1903), and the atomic bomb (The World Set Free, 1914).
From his training in biology, Wells also liberally applied concepts from natural history to his thought, most notably the pressures of evolution on humans and civilization (such as the splitting of humankind into two species in The Time Machine, or the Martian invaders of 1898’s The War of the Worlds, evolved into ambulatory brains). Wells repeatedly emphasized the startling commonalities between human beings and the animal world, most strongly in 1896’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Wells’s influence since his death in London in 1946 has been significant and wide-reaching. His works are continually adapted and retold, owing to the continued relevance of the ethical and practical problems of technology and human identity that he proposed.
Miles Link
See also: The Invisible Man; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Mad Scientist; The Night Land.
Further Reading
Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber.
Hillegas, Mark. 1967. The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wells, Herbert George. 1934. Experiment in Autobiography. London: Victor Gollancz.
West, Anthony. 1984. H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. New York: Random House.
WELTY, EUDORA (1909–2001)
In her ninety-two years, Eudora Alice Welty became a canonical American literary figure, who was also associated with the Southern Gothic genre. Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909 and died there on July 23, 2001. Southern settings constructed from both nostalgic dreams and twisted nightmares are a common backdrop for her fiction. She was an author who experimented with and had a complex relationship to genre fiction in its many forms. Some scholars, such as Mitch Frye, see traces of “Southern Fantastic” in Welty’s style. Frye defines this categorization as a “mutant form that borrows provocatively from the speculative fiction genres of dystopia, fantasy, science fiction, and the weird tale” (Frye 2013, 75–76). Indeed, her special brand of domestic horror lapses into dark fantasy and the weird.
Welty is generally considered proximal to the horror genre: an important author who chose to “dabble in the supernatural and the psychotic” (Fonseca and Pulliam 1999, 24). Yet she had an understanding of and appreciation for horror fiction. As Suzanne Marrs has suggested, Welty’s prose can be humorous and simultaneously “hauntingly enigmatic” (Marrs 2005, ix). Welty’s narratives expose the deeply insightful within the everyday, through “the comic horror of the small town” (Marrs 2005, ix) or a “tortured interior monologue” (Marrs 2005, x). At times, as in “The Wanderers” (1949), her grotesque reflections juxtapose the horrors of life and love, always with a genteel, perceptive, and elusive lilt, even when decapitation is involved.
Welty produced a substantial corpus of literature during her lifetime, from her early short stories, such as “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Magic” (both published in 1936), to her later nonfiction, such as One Writer’s Beginning (1984). Her major creative works include two novels, four collections, and four novellas.
Of Welty’s vast literary output, critics such as David Pringle suggest that The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943) contains the best examples of her horror fiction. Darker elements run through “The Wide Net” that connect Welty’s allusions to the rape and murder of a pregnant woman to a still more grim tradition of horror tales. “A Still Moment” conveys, in the narrated perception of one of its characters, “horror in its purity and clarity” (Welty 1998, 238), punctuated by an ephemeral surrealist vision that reinforces her dark aesthetic. She plays with notions of time, distorting them to evoke suspense, dread, or terror. The Wide Net and Other Stories initially divided critics. At the time, some reviewers concluded that the collection was filled with impropriety, while others argued that Welty had developed “her vision of horror to the point of nightmare” by examining “the clear day-to-day horror of actual life” and “the horror of dreams” (Trilling 1943, 386–387). Joyce Carol Oates sees strong horror themes in Welty’s later works. She notes that Welty’s short story “The Demonstrators” (1966), with its “unfocused horror” and depiction of racial tensions, “is horrible” and that “the grotesque has been assimilated deftly into the ordinary, the natural” (Oates 1969, 57).
Not only was Welty adept at portraying realistic horror, as in the evocation of the civil rights era in “The Demonstrators,” but she effectively wrote fantastic fairy tale horror more reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm as well. Her first novella, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), is frequently analyzed for its use of dark fantasy. Studies by Eunice Glenn, Sally McMillan, Rosella Orzo, and Richard Gray explore Welty’s morbid use of fairy tales and the manipulation or “conjuring” of what Glenn once called “scenes of horror” tinctured by Poe and Kafka (Glenn 1947, 81, 90). Sometimes dubbed a “Southern fried fairy tale,” Welty’s novella merges the Grimms’ original fairy tales with American folklore. A unique blend of realistic and fantastic, The Robber Bridegroom depicts bloody violence, torture, and death in a Southern setting (the Natchez Trace) populated by legendary and savage outlaws. The violation of an unnamed native girl in the novella shocks the reader out of fairy tale mode, and through legend ties it to brutal realistic events. In her 1975 essay “Fairy Tales of the Natchez Trace,” Welty describes how she embedded horror in her reimagining of “The Robber Bridegroom.” But she contended that Grimm’s horror exceeds even her own. Her use of these dark stories harkens back to their primary function as horror tales that shock and moralize through fable.
On her own admission, Welty led a sheltered life. Yet within her many macabre and fantastic fictional worlds, there is an undeniable magnitude and depth. Welty was radical and fearless in her exploration of genre, and this extended to her use of horror motifs. In 1969, Joyce Carol Oates extolled the beauty and brutality of what she deemed Welty’s “unintended” horror fiction (54). However, Welty was well versed in horror literature, and her appreciation for and interest in classic horror is evident in reviews such as “Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Jumbees” (1944), where she examines “[g]ood, dependable horror conjurers” like M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, August Derleth, John Collier, and H. P. Lovecraft, differentiating between “comfort horror” and weird tales (5).
Welty’s strange fantasies and distorted realities have had a far-reaching impact. In a 2006 New York Times interview, Stephen King cites Welty as a new literary influence for his novel Lisey’s Story. Michael McDowell’s fiction has been shaped by the stylistic extravagance of Welty, through her use of Southern Gothic and horror. Her innovations, created by mixing genre conventions, garnered her much acclaim. Welty received a Pulitzer Prize in 1972, thirty-nine honorary degrees, eight O. Henry Awards, the Medal of Freedom, and numerous other prestigious accolades.
By the time Welty died in 2001 of cardiopulmonary failure, she had already cast a mythic shadow over the literary landscape. In recent years, scholarship on the Weird South, the Gothic South, and the Fantastic South has increased for a variety of complex reasons related to the institutionalization of Gothic studies in the American canon and changing notions of genre. As a result, there is renewed interest in the darker aspects of Welty’s fiction.
Naomi Simone Borwein
See also: Dark Fantasy; Faulkner, William; The Grotesque; McDowell, Michael; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Fonseca, Anthony J., and June Michele Pulliam. 1999. Hooked on Horror: A Guide to Reading Interests in Horror Fiction. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.
Frye, Mitch. 2013. “Astonishing Stories: Eudora Welty and the Weird Tale.” Eudora Welty Review 5: 75–93.
Glenn, Eunice. 1947. “Fantasy in the Fiction of Eudora Welty.” In A Southern Vanguard, edited by Allan Tate, 78–91. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Marrs, Suzanne. 2005. “Introduction.” In Eudora Welty: A Biography, ix–xix. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 1969. “The Art of Eudora Welty.” Shenandoah 20 (Spring): 54–57.
Trilling, Diana. 1943. “Fiction in Review.” Nation CLVII, October 2: 386–387.
Welty, Eudora. 1944. “Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Jumbees.” New York Times Book Review, September 24: 5, 21.
Welty, Eudora. 1978. “Fairy Tales of the Natchez Trace.” In The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, 306. New York: Vintage Books.
Welty, Eudora. 1998. Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir. New York: Library of America.
Weston, Ruth D. 1994. Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press.
THE WEREWOLF OF PARIS
The Werewolf of Paris is a historical horror novel written by Guy Endore and published in 1933. The book is narrated by an unnamed American who travels to Paris to complete his PhD and discovers a testimony written in 1871 by Aymar Galliez in defense of a man called Sergeant Bertrand. Galliez’s testimony tells the story of Bertrand Caillet, the werewolf of the title, and the various crimes this man has committed. It follows Bertrand into the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, ending with his capture and incarceration during the Paris Commune of 1870–1871.
The lycanthropic Bertrand was born to a servant in the employment of Galliez’s aunt. The book’s title leaves little mystery as to the nature of this young man, and so the early chapters are concerned with Galliez’s attempts to come to terms with the “monster” who resides under his roof. Prior to the introduction of the main characters, the reader is told a family history from the Middle Ages. When Jehan Pitamont murdered two members of the rival noble Pitaval family, he was consigned to an oubliette (a small dungeon accessible only from a hatch in the ceiling), fed only on chunks of meat thrown into his prison, and gradually became little more than a wild animal. Centuries later, a descendant of Jehan Pitamont, a priest, raped a teenaged servant girl called Josephine, leaving her pregnant (Bertrand’s mother). Lycanthropy in this novel is treated as a congenital condition—indeed, in a later chapter of the novel, a doctor misreads some of Bertrand’s symptoms as those of “hereditary syphilis,” before consigning him to a cell in an asylum that serves as a modern version of the oubliette.
The suggestion that lycanthropy is the product of the degenerate aristocracy fits with the setting of the Paris Commune. Particularly in the novel’s early chapters, there is implicit criticism of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie. However, this is combined with a rather unsympathetic portrait of the communards and their cause, with Galliez coming to believe that the revolutionaries are themselves a race of werewolves. The book is characterized by brutality and violence, including sexual violence enacted toward women, and Bertrand ends up in a relationship with a masochistic young woman named Sophie whose relationship to the Commune is ambiguous. Nevertheless, the storytelling style, in which Galliez’s matter-of-fact tone is mediated through the detached narration of the unnamed American, encourages the reader to view these acts with distaste and horror.
The Werewolf of Paris reached number 1 on the New York Times best-seller list when it was first published, and it remains a cult classic. It was adapted for the screen as The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), though the setting was altered and the political content removed.
Hannah Priest
See also: Monsters; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Martin, Carl Grey. 2014. “Guy Endore’s Dialectical Werewolf.” Le Monde diplomatique, September 15. http://mondediplo.com/outsidein/guy-endore-s-dialectical-werewolf.
Stableford, Brian. 1983. “The Werewolf of Paris.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, vol. 5, edited by Frank N. Magill, 2102–2106. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.
WEREWOLVES
The werewolf has been a popular and ubiquitous presence in folklore, mythology, and literature for centuries, almost always taking the form of a human capable of shape-shifting into a wolf or wolf-like hybrid under certain conditions. Half-human and half-animal, the werewolf has long been a powerful and versatile symbol; a liminal figure (that is, one existing on the boundary or threshold between two distinct realms) representing the eruption of the wild into civilization, the beast within the human soul, the werewolf is unable to be fully reconciled with the human or the animal. It is, as such, an endlessly malleable symbol, appearing time and again in popular culture when chaos threatens to disturb an established order.
The modern-day werewolf has its roots in ancient folklore, such as the Greek myth of Lycaon and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE), and also in ancient legends from the early Christian era (ca. first century CE), which portray the werewolf as a savage, bloodthirsty beast, afflicted with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Roman works, such as Petronius’s Satyricon (ca. late first century CE), later used the werewolf to comedic effect, depicting mysterious men who transform into wolves under the light of the moon. Some medieval romances, by contrast, viewed the werewolf in a benevolent light: several French lais, including “Bisclavret” by Marie de France and the anonymous “Melion” (ca. 1200) and “Guillame de Palerme” (ca. 1200), for instance, portrayed the werewolf as a dignified creature, a pathetic victim of circumstance.
In the sixteenth century, the bloodthirsty werewolf of antiquity was revived in legends circulated across the European countryside, which influenced later depictions of the werewolf in nineteenth-century Gothic novels such as Sutherland Menzies’s Hugue the Wer-Wolf (1838), an early example of a psychological study of lycanthropy, and G. W. M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1847), in which a lonely man makes a deal with the devil, becoming a werewolf in exchange for wealth and eternal youth. Though Wagner regrets his decision, he is condemned to prey upon the human species for eighteen months. Other nineteenth-century texts also drew on legends of the werewolf as a bloodthirsty, violent creature: the were-protagonist of Prosper Mérimée’s novella “Lokis” (1869), for instance, murders his wife with a bite to the throat, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s werewolf in “A Pastoral Horror” (1890) commits a string of bloody murders while in his wolf-like state. Female werewolves in nineteenth-century Gothic literature proved to be as savage as their male counterparts, often using their sexually enticing human forms as lures for potential male victims. In Clemence Housman’s acclaimed Gothic novel The Were-Wolf (1896), the rapacious female werewolf can only be killed by one whose blood is as pure as Christ’s.
The bloodthirsty werewolf of antiquity and of nineteenth-century Gothic literature continued to inform depictions of the werewolf in American and British literature of the first half of the twentieth century, despite the rise of the tragic, sympathetic werewolf in popular American horror films such as Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935) and George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941). In the first decades of the twentieth century, Algernon Blackwood published a number of werewolf and similar shape-shifter stories, such as “The Camp of the Dog” (1908), “The Wendigo” (1910), and “Running Wolf” (1921), while Weird Tales contributed to the figure’s increasing popularity with works like H. Warner Munn’s The Werewolf of Ponkert (1925) and “The Werewolf’s Daughter” (1928) and Robert E. Howard’s “Wolfshead” (1926).
The savage werewolf was memorably depicted in Guy Endore’s critically acclaimed The Werewolf of Paris (1933), arguably the most important werewolf novel ever published and widely considered by many to have done for the werewolf what Dracula did for the vampire. Endore’s werewolf Bertrand is a violent, sadistic beast, a product of the cursed Pitamont clan who were doomed to lycanthropy as punishment for a long-standing feud with a neighboring clan. Bertrand commits impulsive, violent acts against the backdrop of a chaotic Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, leading some critics to view the novel as an allegory. The murderous werewolf—albeit this time depicted in a more complicated manner—also appears in Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think (1944), a noir-influenced dark fantasy in which humans and werewolves have been involved in an eternal war for control of the planet.
Though the murderous werewolf continued to make appearances in the latter half of the twentieth century in horror novels such as Gary Brandner’s The Howling (1977), postmodern and contemporary werewolf texts have often taken a more complicated view of the figure, especially in light of the widespread and increasing popularity of environmental movements. Whitley Strieber’s well-received novels The Wolfen (1978) and The Wild (1991), for instance, depict wolf-like creatures and werewolves as means through which humans can reconcile with nature. In The Wolfen, the eponymous lupine beings prey upon humans as a natural check to the human population, and in The Wild, the werewolf functions as a conduit for reintroducing humans to nature. Twentieth-century werewolf literature has also long recognized the werewolf’s potent charge as a symbol of puberty and dawning sexuality. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) features a number of werewolf stories that invoke this theme to great effect, offering new takes on girlhood and puberty with “Wolf-Alice” and powerful, feminist inversions of the Little Red Riding Hood myth in “The Company of Wolves” and “The Werewolf.”
The werewolf’s perennial presence in mythology, folklore, literature, and cinema has contributed to its versatility in the horror genre as an enduring and ever-changing symbol of spiritual, sexual, and psychological transformation. Forced to stand at the boundary between human and animal, the werewolf’s liminal status renders it forever ambiguous, forever mutable, and forever intriguing.
Brittany Roberts
See also: Carter, Angela; Monsters; Transformation and Metamorphosis; Weird Tales; The Werewolf of Paris.
Further Reading
Jones, Stephen, ed. 2009. The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men. Philadelphia: Running Press.
Lowder, James, ed. 2010. Curse of the Full Moon: A Werewolf Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press.
Otten, Charlotte F., ed. 2002. The Literary Werewolf: An Anthology. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Stypczynski, Brent. A. 2013. The Modern Literary Werewolf: A Critical Study of the Mutable Motif. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
WHARTON, EDITH (1862–1937)
Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, was born in New York, and her most famous works explore the city’s haute society in intricate novels of manners like The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which have critical, naturalist, and anthropological bents, despite her vexed relations with literary naturalism. But the supernatural was also a literary avocation for her; she published about a dozen supernatural short stories. These stories almost all first appeared in lucrative, prestigious magazines, and a few are in her short story collections. Shortly after her death, the nigh-complete collection Ghosts (1937) appeared.
Two major interpretations of Wharton’s supernatural oeuvre compete. The first interpretation concerns the violence and stultifications of domestic life in the stories. In “Kerfol” (1916), a ghost dog pack avenges a French aristocrat’s brutal treatment of them and their mistress. The second interpretation discerns the stories’ anxiety over class division, servants’ roles, and concepts of money, inheritance, and property. “The Looking Glass” (1935) overlays messages from the dead with Wharton’s interest in con artists and business swindlers (from texts like “A Cup of Cold Water,” 1899). Ghostly epistles also factor in “Pomegranate Seed” (1931); a wife intercepts a letter from her husband’s dead first wife and, in an unnerving anticlimax, finds the writing too faint to discern. Sexual and economic anxieties intertwine in “The Eyes” (1910) as a haunted Henry James– or Dorian Gray–esque narrator is unveiled, to his audience’s horror, as a sterile, exploitative parasite.
Wharton lacks many direct inheritors in horror, for during her lifetime pulps came to dominate in supernatural publishing rather than prestigious magazines. Yet her supernatural fiction’s quality, subtlety, and frisson set her as a late apogee for the Anglo-American nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ghost story tradition. She is often associated with her older friends James and W. D. Howells, for the projects of all three involve both unsentimental novels of manners and supernatural short fiction. But the preface of Ghosts reserves Wharton’s highest esteem for supernatural short stories for J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Fitz-James O’Brien, F. Marion Crawford, and the collection’s dedicatee, Walter de la Mare. In one tribute, the U.K. television anthology series Shades of Darkness (1983) adapts a de la Mare tale and three of Wharton’s (their only multiply adapted writer): “The Lady’s Maid Bell” (1902), “Afterward” (1910), and “Bewitched” (1925).
Bob Hodges
See also: Crawford, F. Marion; de la Mare, Walter; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; O’Brien, Fitz-James.
Further Reading
Jacobsen, Karen. 2008. “Economic Hauntings: Wealth & Class in Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories.” College Literature 35.1: 100–127.
Killoran, Helen. 2001. The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.
McMullen, Bonnie. 2012. “Short Story Markets.” Edith Wharton in Context, edited by Laura Rattray, 103–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shades of Darkness. 1983. Television. Pt. Washington: Koch, 2006. DVD.
WHEATLEY, DENNIS (1897–1977)
British author Dennis Wheatley fundamentally changed horror writing when he developed a form of occult- and satanic-influenced horror that has links to the work of H. P Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Machen. In Wheatley’s work, the appearance of the Devil and his minions in the comfortable British shires and home counties (Berkshire, Essex, Surrey, and Hampshire) can be counteracted first by consulting complex reference tomes of magical lore, and then by the decisive acts of strong, chivalric, upper-middle-class men. Wheatley wrote more than 100 books and sold more than fifty million copies.
Born and raised in South London, Wheatley left his family’s Mayfair wine business after being expelled from Dulwich College, joined the Merchant Navy, and was gassed in World War I. He worked in security in London during World War II, in Churchill’s underground fortress, constructing false stories to mislead the Nazis. He wrote a mystery crime novel, adventure novels, and some science fiction, but is better known for his eight black magic novels—The Devil Rides Out (1934), Strange Conflict (1941), The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948), To the Devil a Daughter (1953), The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), The Satanist (1960), They Used Dark Forces (1964), Gateway to Hell (1970)—plus his short stories and edited collections of horror tales. In the 1960s and 1970s each of his black magic books averaged yearly sales of 80,000 copies.
Wheatley’s popularity waned, probably because of the values his novels promote: fear of the foreign, fear of disability (seen as degeneracy), and a patriarchal-based assertion of the need to preserve women’s morality. Each of his novels is related to threats to British respectability, and each is ultimately controlled by the actions of dashing, upper- or upper-middle-class men (such as John in To the Devil a Daughter and the Duke of Richlieu and Rex in The Devil Rides Out).There are levels of voyeurism in Wheatley’s work; for instance, in To the Devil a Daughter the morally righteous reader gains vicarious pleasure observing Christina, a semiclad young woman, rescued by a dashing young man from being sacrificed to the Devil, following a pact agreed by her father, at her birth. Speed, power, reason, and occult knowledge are used against the dark forces. David Punter notes that Wheatley can “smooth out the moments of terror and vision which comprise experience and render them into a unitary whole” (Punter 1980, 407).
While his conservatism, misogyny, and class distinction are rather controversial for today’s readers, it can be argued that the investment in homeland security and leadership by powerful men underpinning such popular entertainments as the James Bond series reflect the same values that infused Wheatley’s work. So do a host of horror and disaster movies, such as the Die Hard series, with each entry featuring Nazi-influenced fanatical villains. Wheatley’s occult horror infuses the everyday and is resolved through strong values and action. Wheatley died of liver failure in November 1977.
Gina Wisker
See also: The Devil Rides Out; Devils and Demons.
Further Reading
Baker, Phil. 2011. The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus.
Caines, Michael. 2013. “Feasting with Dennis Wheatley.” The TLS Blog at The Times Literary Supplement. December 31. http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2013/12/feasting-with-dennis-wheatley.html.
Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman.
Wisker, G. 1993. “Horrors and Menaces to Everything Decent in Life: The Horror Fiction of Dennis Wheatley.” In Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 99–110. London: Pluto.
First published in 1973, Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” was inspired by the mainly inaccurate March 1964 report in the New York Times that claimed Katherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese was murdered outside of her Queens apartment in full view of thirty-seven of her neighbors, all of whom refused to render aid. Evidence since the initial publication of the story proves convincingly that no single individual witnessed the murder, which had initially been reported to the police as a domestic argument. Nevertheless, the incident became a kind of urban legend as it captured the idea of an apathetic populace made callous by the dehumanizing effects of life in the American city.
These themes of detachment and dehumanization inform “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” Beth O’Neil, recently come to New York from rural Vermont, witnesses a brutal murder in her apartment building courtyard one evening. She notices that her neighbors are also watching and that some seem to take a perverse pleasure from the spectacle. She is further shaken by a fog that suddenly rises up from the courtyard and, if only for a moment, assumes almost human features. Soon afterwards Beth becomes romantically involved with a neighbor, Ray Gleeson, but as their relationship edges toward emotional and physical violence, Beth ends things. One night Beth awakens to the sound of someone moving about in her apartment. She encounters a burglar who, upon being discovered, attacks her. Their struggle takes them to the balcony, where, on the verge of losing consciousness, Beth notices her neighbors watching. Fearful that past events will replay themselves, Beth has a sudden revelation: In order for people to survive in the city, they must give part of their humanity to it. Ray’s advances were actually an invitation to join a cult that worships the God of the City. She cries out to her neighbors that she understands and wishes to join them, and her assailant is suddenly whisked away, shredded into pieces yet somehow left alive, and dropped onto the courtyard below, which has become a type of sacrificial altar.
Ellison carefully builds toward his reveal, blending the grind of daily existence in the city with an encroaching dread. As with all of his work, the story is saturated with his characteristic judgmental anger. In this case, that fury is built upon a false foundation, but it gives Ellison the opportunity to chastise the world. The story received the 1974 Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
Javier A. Martinez
See also: Ellison, Harlan; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”
Further Reading
Cook, Kevin. 2014. Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America. New York: Norton.
Francavilla, Joseph, ed. 2012. Critical Insights: Harlan Ellison. Pasadena: Salem Press.
Weil, Ellen R., and Gary K. Wolfe. 2002. Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
“The White Hands” is a short story from Mark Samuels’s debut fiction collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003). It was nominated for a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 2004. It has subsequently been reprinted, notably in editor Stephen Jones’s The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 15 (2004) and editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012). Probably the best-known of Samuels’s tales, “The White Hands” is steeped in the author’s knowledge of the supernatural fiction genre.
John Harrington, the narrator of the tale, tells of his association with Alfred Muswell, a disgraced and reclusive scholar, who has an obsession with a Victorian author of ghost stories, Lilith Blake. Harrington is drawn in by Muswell’s enthusiasm, and he also develops a powerful interest in Blake, partly spurred by the delicacy and paleness of her hands in a surviving photograph. After Muswell dies, Harrington has Blake’s corpse exhumed and, when he opens her coffin, finds her still living, though she swiftly crumbles to dust. Some time later, Harrington decides to attempt to transcribe and interpret The White Hands and Other Tales, Blake’s last collection, dictated after death to Muswell. But the act drives Harrington mad.
“The White Hands” has an ambiguous ending—something common in Samuels’s work, which often explores the transformative (as opposed to the destructive) aspects of an encounter with the Weird. Though it ends with Harrington confined to a psychiatric hospital, plagued by visions of disembodied white hands, there is in his madness much more of ecstasy than despair.
It is typical of Samuels’s erudite work that his best-known tale should have a scholar of supernatural fiction at its heart. Muswell’s thesis regarding the weird tale is expounded at the opening of the story. All great literature, he claims, is concerned with “the quest for hidden mysteries,” and also “should unravel the secrets of life and death,” and therefore bring about “some actual alteration in the structure of reality itself” (Samuels 2003, 2–3). In this statement can be seen Samuels’s own authorial and philosophical approach.
Samuels has said his stories often evolve from a single image that he cannot shake off. In the case of “The White Hands,” this image was that of Blake’s disembodied hands. The image’s source was literary rather than “real world”; it was inspired by Eddy C. Bertin’s “Like Two White Spiders” (1973) and ultimately by the whole lineage of Gothic tales of preternaturally animated severed hands, including William Fryer Harvey’s “The Beast with Five Fingers” and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Hand.” In addition to its intrinsic excellence, “The White Hands” is noteworthy because it has influenced the development of new writing in the weird field that is subtle and metatextual in its approach.
Timothy J. Jarvis
See also: “The Beast with Five Fingers”; Maupassant, Guy de.
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. 2003. The White Hands and Other Weird Tales. Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press.
“THE WHITE PEOPLE”
First published in 1904, Arthur Machen’s story of a young girl’s initiation into witchcraft was actually written in 1899, the same year as the publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It is nevertheless pre-Freudian and pre-Jungian (the latter term referring to the psychological system created by Freud’s onetime colleague, Carl Jung), despite its extraordinarily suggestive imagery and barely sublimated sexuality. The author was a mystic and a Catholic whose writings show no interest in psychoanalytical theory, even if he wrote about beautiful women achieving sensuous ecstasy when covered by supernatural snakes.
As is a common technique for Machen, his characters talk out a philosophical idea, after which a narrative is presented to illustrate it. The philosophical idea under question in “The White People” is the nature of evil, which is framed in the opening debate between two characters as “the taking of heaven by storm . . . an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner” (Machen 1922, 117). Evil is a subversion of the natural order, as if roses began to sing. Sorcery and sanctity are “the only realities” (113). Great sinners are probably rarer than great saints.
To demonstrate his point, one debater hands the other the diary of a sixteen-year-old girl who was introduced to witchcraft at a young age by her nurse. Her narrative is near stream-of-consciousness and unparagraphed, which perfectly captures the naïveté of the character as she describes things she only half understands and repeats several sinister fairy tales that contain veiled warnings about her eventual plight. After visits with the sinister “white people,” several ventures into strange, unworldly landscapes, and the occurrence of as yet harmless magical pranks such as overturning tables, she is found dead before an ancient pagan statue, poisoned “in time,” as we learn in an epilogue (165).
H. P. Lovecraft, who regarded this as the second greatest weird story in English (the first being “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood), found himself explaining the ending to correspondents. It is subtle: The girl has become pregnant with a monstrous thing, but feeling a mother’s sympathy with her unborn child, she became aware of the abomination within her and so killed herself. When Lovecraft reworked this situation in “The Dunwich Horror,” he was less subtle about it. “The White People” might be imagined as “The Dunwich Horror” from the point of view of a young, innocent Lavinia Whateley (the character in Lovecraft’s tale who is impregnated by an other-dimensional entity). Here we see a major statement of Machen’s “Little People” mythos, which also influenced Lovecraft and numerous others: the idea that the “fairies” of legend are survivals of some ancient race that has gone underground and turned to evil, never having lost its links to prehuman magic.
Apparently “The White People” was intended to be a part of a larger work, a fragment, cleverly made complete by its framing device. If this is true, then the circumstance may be deemed fortunate or even regarded as a stroke of genius, because the story’s fascination stems precisely from Machen’s refusal to go on too long or explain too much.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: The Ceremonies; “The Dunwich Horror”; “The Great God Pan”; Machen, Arthur; “The Novel of the Black Seal”; “The Willows.”
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 1990. “Arthur Machen: The Mystery of the Universe.” In The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Machen, Arthur. 1922. “The White People.” In The House of Souls, 111–166. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
WHITEHEAD, HENRY S. (1882–1932)
Henry St. Clair Whitehead, a frequent contributor to Weird Tales magazine and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, is best known for writing weird tales set in the West Indies. Born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, Whitehead attended both Columbia College and Harvard University, but failing to earn a degree at either school, he entered Berkeley Divinity School, where he was ordained as a deacon in 1912, entering the priesthood a year later. It was Whitehead’s profession that brought him to the West Indies, where he lived in St. Croix, serving as an archdeacon. Whitehead’s tales, blurring the lines between fantasy, horror, and ethnography, focus on native magic of the West Indies.
Whitehead’s stories explore colonial and native relations in the Caribbean through their investigation of island jumbee, a term related to zombi but here connoting any island spirit or ghost. His tales often involve an academic-minded protagonist who must act as a detective when confronted with irrational forces of native magic. Gerald Canevin, a New England writer living in the West Indies and an obvious stand-in for Whitehead, frequently narrates the West Indies stories. Canevin is an expert on the supernatural and uses his knowledge of island magic to solve mysteries that often shed light on the colonial history of the islands. In “The Shadows” (1927) it is Canevin’s understanding that island magic is not mere superstition that allows him to uncover the story of Old Morris, a colonist whose attempt to harness the powers of an island fish-god for his own gain ends in his death, and in “Black Tancrède” (1929) Canevin discovers that the disturbance at a St. Thomas hotel is the work of the jumbee of a slave seeking revenge on the judge who sentenced him to death for his part in a slave revolt. While Whitehead’s depictions of West Indies natives and native culture often rely on racist stereotypes, they also reveal a more complex understanding of racial relations in the colonial West Indies. Many of his tales reveal coercive practices of colonial representatives, and island magic is often portrayed as a means of resistance for the native population. In “Hill Drums” (1931), for example, when a colonial diplomat offends the native population, they use magic to possess him and force him to leave the islands.
Not all of Whitehead’s tales, however, are set in the West Indies. Some take place in New England or Europe and adhere more to the mode of the antiquarian ghost tale. For example, “The Shut Room” (1930) is a haunted inn story set in England, and “The Trap” (1932) is a haunted mirror story set in a boarding school in Connecticut. However, these tales often refer to Canevin’s time spent in the West Indies as the source of his understanding of supernatural events.
Whitehead spent the last years of his life in Dunedin, Florida, where he died, likely due to a gastric illness. His tales were collected posthumously by Arkham House in Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944) and West India Lights (1946).
Travis Rozier
See also: Arkham House; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Weird Tales; Zombies.
Searles, A. Langley. 1995. “Henry S. Whitehead: A Retrospection.” Fantasy Commentator 8 (3–4): 186–200.
Whitehead, Henry S. 2012. Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.
“THE WILLOWS”
First published in Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 collection The Listener and Other Stories, “The Willows” has a reputation as a seminal and definitive example of the classic weird tale. Praised by H. P. Lovecraft as a story “without a single strained passage or a single false note” (Lovecraft 2012, 88), its emphasis on carefully established mood and ambiguity contribute to a sustained atmosphere of dread. Its central mystery remains nebulous, adding to the potency of the overall effect.
The story has its origins in a 1901 account of one of Blackwood’s expeditions written by him for Macmillan’s Magazine, “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe.” “The Willows” begins similarly as a travelogue describing the canoe journey along the Danube undertaken by the narrator and his Swedish traveling companion. They become stormbound on an island in a desolate, sparsely populated region of marshland and ever-shifting sandbanks and islets; the surrounding wilderness seems to become imbued with a hostile intelligence. Their supplies unaccountably disappear, their equipment is sabotaged, and the narrator witnesses an indistinct, semimaterial presence somehow associated with the willows. They find odd “funnels” in the sand, and the banks of willows seem to encroach ever closer upon their camp. The mysterious assault intensifies until the Swede desperately attempts to drown himself to placate their persecutors, but is rescued by the narrator. Before the Swede passes out, he claims that the immediate threat has been lifted since “they’ve found another victim” (Blackwood 1973, 50). They later discover the drowned corpse of a peasant who had earlier attempted to warn them away from the island, and are horrified when they see the funnel-shaped wounds covering his face and chest.
The story’s power is generated largely through Blackwood’s refusal to specifically delineate the exact nature of the threat facing the two protagonists. The hostile forces in “The Willows” are tenebrous and obscure, in the tradition of Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” (1859), Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1887), and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” (1893). Even when the events are directly witnessed by the narrator, we are given little more information than that they are vague “shapes” or “presences.” Although he continually tries to rationalize their experiences, he is ultimately unable to successfully do so. In contrast, the Swede, through his less hesitant recourse to supernatural or metaphysical speculation, is more immediately able to parse the nature of the encounter. At various points in the narrative, the Swede discusses hostile pagan forces suggestive of a malevolent genius loci, the numinous spirit of a particular place in ancient Roman religion, and themselves as interlopers within a sacred grove. Although Blackwood strongly hints at a supernatural explanation, the two opposing viewpoints create a sustained mood of queasy uncertainty. Blackwood’s particular skill lies in his ability to sustain ambiguity without detriment to the narrative force of the tale. Its cumulative power is enhanced by the increasingly desperate speculation of the protagonists as they struggle to understand their experience.
Included by Dorothy Scarborough in her influential 1921 collection Famous Modern Ghost Stories, “The Willows” has been a staple of horror anthologies ever since. In the Weird Tales golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, the novella was repeatedly singled out for praise by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, who both identified it as among the best supernatural horror stories ever written. It retains its reputation to this day and is the third item in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s seminal attempt at creating a canon of weird fiction, The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories (2012).
James Machin
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; “The Horla”; The Numinous.
Further Reading
Blackwood, Algernon. 1973. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover.
Camara, Anthony. 2013. “Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows.’” Horror Studies 4, no. 1 (April): 43–62.
Joshi, S. T 1990. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. 2012. The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories. London: Tor.
WILSON, F. PAUL (1946–)
F. Paul Wilson is an American horror and science fiction novelist who has also worked in a few other genres, including historical fiction and medical thrillers. Wilson was born in New Jersey in 1946 and has remained a lifelong resident. In his formative years, he sampled, among other eclectic works of art, the classic horror comic books from EC Comics in the 1950s, the stop-motion special effects extravaganza movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the stories and novels of H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1968.
Wilson began selling short fiction as a first-year medical student. He sold a number of comic scripts to Creepy and Eerie during the 1970s, but generally concentrated on prose fiction. His short stories and novelettes have appeared in all the major markets and numerous best-of-the-year collections; his novels have made various national best-seller lists. His novels The Keep (1981) and The Tomb (1984) both were New York Times best-sellers. His novels and short fiction have appeared on the final ballots for the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, and the Bram Stoker Award.
Wilson’s first three novels, all science fiction, form what later came to be referred to as the LaNague Chronicles. Each reflects the author’s libertarian leanings. They were followed by further forays into science fiction later in Wilson’s career.
In 1981 Wilson published his first horror novel, The Keep, about Nazis accidentally awakening a supernatural evil in a remote castle in the Transylvanian Alps during World War II. After this novel, which was included as one of the one hundred best horror novels in the Stephen Jones–edited Horror: 100 Best Books, Wilson published five more books in what he called his “Adversary Cycle”: The Tomb (1984), The Touch (1986), Reborn (NEL, 1990), Reprisal (1991), and Nightworld (1992). The Adversary Cycle introduced several concepts that came to form the core of much of Wilson’s fictional universe: the ancient, evil entity called Rasalom, his eternal opponent Glaeken, the town of Monroe, Long Island, the wandering healing spirit known as the Dat-tay-vao (first seen in The Touch), and the modern pulp hero known as Repairman Jack.
The secretive Jack, who conceals his very existence from the world, made his first appearance in The Tomb. Not intending to establish a series character, Wilson left him near death at the end of that novel, only to have him reappear in Nightworld, playing a key role in frustrating Rasalom’s bid to enslave humanity. Jack’s fans proving persistent, Wilson responded with a new Repairman Jack novel titled Legacies in 1998. That book was followed by thirteen additional Repairman Jack novels, published from 1999 through 2011. Wilson also added six prequels to The Tomb, three set during Jack’s formative years, and another three set during his first months in New York City. Set between the events in The Tomb and Nightworld, the books chronicle Jack’s growing awareness of the battle between Rasalom and the entity he refers to as “the Otherness” or “the Ally,” forming the core of what Wilson has come to call “The Secret History of the World.”
The Keep was adapted as a horror movie by director Michael Mann in 1983. The movie version has attained something of a storied status due to its much-discussed history as a prototypical “troubled production,” and the final result is mostly an incomprehensible mess, but aspects of its lush visual design, courtesy of director Mann and cinematographer Alex Thomson, as well as the hypnotic musical score by Tangerine Dream, have rendered it somewhat memorable.
James Machin
See also: Bradbury, Ray; Lovecraft, H. P.; Matheson, Richard.
Further Reading
Coker, Jennifer R. 2007. “F. Paul Wilson.” Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works 1. Literary Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed August 6, 2016).
“F. Paul Wilson.” 2015. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.
Grossberg, Michael. 2011. “The Untrod Path: Interview with F. Paul Wilson.” Prometheus: Newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society 29, no. 3 (Spring). http://lfs.org/newsletter/029/03/FPWilson.shtml.
WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT
The word “witch” derives from the Old English verb “wiccian,” meaning to use sorcery or enchantment. “Witch” is often used as an umbrella term for all practitioners of magic, though this obscures historical and regional differences. Historically, the English terms “witch” and “witchcraft” have specifically referred to European traditions. Contemporary horror fictions that employ the words undeniably evoke the tradition of European witchcraft, though there is often some intermingling with other traditions (e.g., Louisiana Voodoo, Haitian Vodou). Additionally, as European witchcraft has a long and complex history, contemporary horror may approach the idea of the “witch” from varying perspectives.
European traditions of practicing and condemning witchcraft have their antecedents in antiquity. There is evidence that some practitioners of magic faced harsh punishments in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Babylonia. There are also prohibitions against some forms of sorcery in the Old Testament. In these ancient texts, there is a recurrent concern about malicious harm to men, livestock, and crops caused by sorcery. The Christian tradition of condemning witchcraft began to be codified with the Council of Elvira (ca. 305 CE), which decreed that the act of causing death through malicious intent could not be effected without “idolatry.” This decree associated witchcraft with devil or demon worship, and this association continues throughout the European tradition.
Although most early legal prohibitions do not specifically gender witchcraft, there is some evidence of a growing association of malicious sorcery with women throughout the early Middle Ages. This may be a reflection of classical distinctions between types of magic and their respective practitioners, but it may also draw on classical mythology and literature, in which there are a number of malicious female sorcerers (for instance, Circe, a character in Homer’s Odyssey, and Hecate, a Greek goddess). Many texts made the distinction between “necromancy” (learned or ceremonial magic) and “witchcraft” (possession by the devil). The former was the province of clerical and educated men, and the latter of uneducated peasants and women. This distinction was not a rigid one, but it had far-reaching consequences.
In order to draw a clear distinction between necromancy and witchcraft, clerical writers elaborated on the idea of diabolical witchcraft. Drawing on earlier legal codes, medieval writers increasingly began to associate witchcraft with a satanic pact to explain how “common” people might enact feats of magic to rival those of learned magicians. By the thirteenth century, this pact with the devil was imagined as a formal initiation rite or ceremony known as the Sabbat or “witches’ sabbath,” and clerics decried the rite in sermons. At the same time, the repertoire of crimes associated with witchcraft also expanded, incorporating transgressions previously included in accusations of heresy. As well as traditional complaints of malicious harm to livestock and crops, accusations of witchcraft now included references to sexual deviancy, cannibalism, and infanticide. The medieval connection of witchcraft to both idolatry and satanic pact also led to the idea that witches worshipped “familiars,” or demonic spirits concealed in animal form.
In the fifteenth century, accusations of diabolical witchcraft began to become more systematic, and Europe entered a period of organized witch-hunting. Both Protestants and Catholics formed “Inquisitions,” under which thousands of trials were conducted. In some regions, “werewolves” were tried alongside witches, as some Inquisitors (such as Henri Boguet) argued that witchcraft could include demonic shape-shifting—or at least the appearance of shape-shifting. Confessions were sometimes extracted under torture, though this varied dramatically by region, and death by burning, decapitation, or hanging was often the outcome. Corporal punishment, exile, and monetary fines were also passed as punishments. In most areas of Europe, the majority of the accused were women, though Iceland, Estonia, and Russia prosecuted more male than female witches. Throughout Europe, the majority of the accused belonged to lower socioeconomic classes. A number of witch trials were also conducted in European colonies, most famously in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692–1693. However, the fervor for witch trials abated toward the end of the seventeenth century, with a number of legal and religious edicts passed to curtail it. In England, for example, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 dismissed witchcraft as an impossibility and decreed that individuals purporting to practice the craft should be tried as confidence tricksters.
During the period of witch-hunting, numerous publications circulated that denounced and described the practices of witchcraft. In addition to religious and legal guidelines, broadsheets depicted (often in lurid detail) the various crimes of the witches. Additionally, fictional accounts of occult and demonic practice were popular in early modern Europe, and increased literacy meant that these fictions were more widely circulated. As well as behaviors, certain visual characteristics and accessories began to be associated with witches, such as the flying broomstick or distaff, black cats, and, later, the pointed hat.
By the end of the witch trials, the figure of the witch began to appear in other forms of literature. Witches appeared in children’s chapbooks as early as 1710, foreshadowing their common role in folk and fairy tales. The Victorian era saw the beginnings of a more sympathetic understanding of the women tried during the witch-hunts; for instance, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) has a heroine who revises an earlier narrative of persecution, identifying the witch-hunters as the guilty parties and the accused witch as an innocent victim. At the same time, an increasing interest in (reconstructed) pre-Christian beliefs, including Viking, Celtic, and Germanic folk traditions, paved the way for twentieth-century witchcraft “revivals” and modern paganism, such as the development of the contemporary pagan religion of Wicca in the 1920s–1940s. Associated with Neo-Druidism, countercultural movements, New Age philosophy, and reconstructionist pagan traditions, Wicca has also been heavily influenced by the second-wave feminism of the 1970s.
The history of European witchcraft is reflected in contemporary horror in a number of ways. Indeed, the complexity of the history allows for multiple and varied representations of witches. Arcane (often gendered) magical practices can be a source of horror, as in Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943); however, books such as Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches (2011) blur genre boundaries by combining sinister occult practices with positive protagonists and fantasy creatures like the romantic vampire. The idea of the “coven” (either a family or social group of witches) often appears in contemporary fiction; for instance, Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches series presents a matriarchal family of witches and the malevolent spirit with whom the witches are connected. Elsewhere, it is the practice of witch-hunting that is used to evoke terror and fear. Syd Moore’s Witch Hunt (2012) depicts a present haunted by the specters of women killed during witch-hunts in Essex, and, though its specter is somewhat less sympathetic, “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) by H. P. Lovecraft draws on the history of the Salem witch trials. Demonic pacts, diabolical cannibalism, and infanticide also appear frequently in modern horror. As with much of the fiction that refers to witch-hunts and trials, there is a tradition of referencing historical and pseudohistorical cases of demonic witchcraft; for instance, Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952) is based on an alleged case of demonic possession (and its brutal punishment) in seventeenth-century France. The reclamation of the witch as a positive figure has also been subverted in recent fiction, with paganism and Wicca (rather than witchcraft) being a trope of folk horror fiction, such as Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2014).
Hannah Priest
See also: Devils and Demons; Incubi and Succubi; Possession and Exorcism; Spiritualism.
Blumberg, Jess. 2007. “A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials.” smithsonian.com, October 23. Accessed March 26, 2016. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/?no-ist.
Clark, Stuart. 1997. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutton, Ronald. 1996. “The Roots of Modern Paganism.” In Paganism Today, edited by Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, 4–15. London: Thorsons.
Kieckhefer, Richard. 1989. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Purkiss, Diane. 1996. The Witch in History. London: Routledge.
THE WOMAN IN BLACK
Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) revived the British ghost story, introducing social and historical concerns particularly affecting women and families. It enacts social and family cruelties and losses, using the ghostly figure of a woman in black who wreaks deadly revenge on a society whose shortsighted, gendered bigotry separated her from her own child, who drowned tragically when the pony and trap he was traveling in was overwhelmed by sea mist and fell into the marsh sea. The lives of those unlucky enough to come into range and consciousness of the revengeful dead are both haunted and blasted as the curse of Jennet Humfrye, the woman in black, leads to the death of local children.
The first-person narration of Arthur Kipps, solicitor, authenticates this traditional Christmas Eve ghost story (a formula reminiscent of M. R. James) as the book begins on that day with Kipps’s step-children asking him to tell them a ghost story. Being too disturbed by the story he has to tell, he instead writes it down.
In his narrated story, Kipps is sent to the remote village of Crythin Gifford to settle the will of the reclusive, heirless Mrs. Drablow. Her home, Eel Marsh House, Lincolnshire, is isolated across a spit covered by sea at high tide. Readers are reminded of the law, inheritance, injustice, fog, and contagion in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and contradictory social values and growing up in Dickens’s Gothic Great Expectations (1861), which also deals with damaging hauntings, and in which Miss Havisham’s house resembles Mrs. Drablow’s with its paralyzing past. The Woman in Black uses familiar ghost story strategies, including spectral visits, sounds in the night, empty rooms echoing with past activities, and an overwhelming atmosphere of dread.
Hill’s novel has a feminist message concerning “fallen women,” focusing on Jennet Humfrye, whose illegitimate son Nathaniel was adopted by her sister, Mrs. Drablow, and whose impoverishment, shame, and mental state disempowered her in life. Nathaniel was brought up at Eel Marsh House without connections to the real world or his increasingly desolate, maddened mother, product of a bigoted age that banished, silenced, and incarcerated unmarried mothers. Her fate, as well as her son’s and subsequently that of the village children, are an indictment against the age.
Isolation is spatially represented by the landline, the narrow spit linking and dividing the house and its wealth from the village, as well as life from death. On his first visit to Eel Marsh House, isolated across the misty marshes, Kipps is traumatized by ghostly movements and sounds, particularly of pony and trap crashing, a terrified child crying, sounds of drowning, then silence. Nathaniel and his nurse Rose Judd, caught in the mist, drowned in the marshes and are condemned beyond death to repeat the fatal accident that drove Jennet to haunt graveyard, marsh, and village while the child’s ghostly crying presence remains on the spit, and at night in the nursery.
Jennet lost everything, went mad, and died. But she returns and wanders as a ghost. Her revenge for her son’s death is wreaked on those whose normal family structures condemned her to the margins. She haunts both graveyard and village, and the children begin to die, one by one. When attending Mrs. Drablow’s funeral, Kipps hears of these losses. He also sees the woman in black.
The ghost actually gains a voice beginning when Kipps finds Jennet’s letters begging to see her son. Finally Kipps, too, is caught up in her malevolent revenge cycle. When his wife and son visit and go for a spin in a pony trap he notices, all too late, the woman in black standing at one side. The trap crashes, killing his son and fatally wounding his wife.
The Woman in Black was adapted for the stage in 1987 by playwright Stephen Mallatratt. A British television adaptation was released in 1989 with a script adapted from Hill’s novel by Nigel Kneale. A second film adaptation, directed by James Watkins and starring Daniel Radcliffe as Kipps, was released in 2012 and became a critical and financial success. A sequel, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, was released in 2015.
Gina Wisker
See also: Frame Story; The Haunted House or Castle; Hill, Susan.
Further Reading
Cox, Donna. 2000. “‘I Have No Story to Tell!’: Maternal Rage in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.” Intertexts 4, no. 1: 74–89.
Jones, Alan. 2003. “Who Is Haunted by What in The Woman in Black? Alan Jones Considers the Multiple Relations of Susan Hill’s Novel with Its Predecessors in the Gothic Tradition.” English Review 13, no. 3: 10–12.
Kattelman, Beth A. 2014. “Still Scary after All These Years: Gothic Tropes and Theatricality in The Woman in Black.” In Frightful Witnessing: The Rhetoric and (Re)presentation of Fear, edited by Beth A. Kattelman and Magdalena Hodalska, 37–54. Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press.
WORLD FANTASY AWARD
The World Fantasy Awards are given annually by the World Fantasy Convention, an annual gathering of fantasy and horror professionals and enthusiasts. They are widely recognized as one of the most prestigious awards in the field of speculative fiction. Awards were given at the first convention in 1975 and at all subsequent ones (with some changes in the categories) for best novel, novella (this category was added in 1982), short story, story collection, anthology (added in 1988), artist, Special Award professional, Special Award non-professional, and Life Achievement. A Special Convention Award has sometimes been given. The award is juried by a panel of five judges (usually professional writers, editors, and critics) appointed by the Awards Administration, which is a subgroup of the World Fantasy Convention’s board of directors. Popular nominations may add two items to the final ballot beyond the judges’ choices.
Among prominent novels to have won the World Fantasy Award are The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip (1975), Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson (1976), Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1978), The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe (1980), Little, Big by John Crowley (1982), Towing Jehovah by James Morrow (1995), Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2005), and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (2011). The Life Achievement Awards often reach beyond the usual genre suspects and have been given to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Madeleine L’Engle, and Angelica Gorodischer, in addition to such expected figures as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, and more.
The short story category has also sometimes stretched beyond the expected. In 1989 it went to “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station,” a narrative poem by John M. Ford, and in 1991 to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a Sandman comic by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. The rumor has persisted that the rules were changed to prevent another comic book from winning. This is not true, though if a graphic novel were nominated today it would go in the Special Professional category.
The Special Awards are often given to scholars or editors for a body of effort, not a specific work. The Non-Professional special award often goes to publishers of small-press magazines or books, not amateur material by any means, but endeavors too small for anyone to be doing it for a living.
Given that the first World Fantasy Convention was held in Providence, Rhode Island, and its theme was H. P. Lovecraft and his Circle (with many of his old friends and protégés actually present), it was unsurprising that the award itself took the physical form of a bust of H. P. Lovecraft sculpted by Gahan Wilson. This remained the case for the next forty years, but in 2015, after some recipients expressed unease over Lovecraft’s undeniable racism, the bust was retired amid considerable controversy. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi (who has won twice) angrily returned his awards and announced a boycott of the convention. To date, no new design has been announced, but the award will continue.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Lovecraft, H. P.; Shirley Jackson Award.
Flood, Allison. 2015. “World Fantasy Award Drops HP Lovecraft as Prize Image.” The Guardian, November 9. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/09/world-fantasy-award-drops-hp-lovecraft-as-prize-image.
Leiber, Fritz, and Stuart David Schiff. 1980. The World Fantasy Awards, Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday.
Wilson, Gahan, ed. 1977. The World Fantasy Awards. New York: Doubleday.
World Fantasy Convention. 2016. http://www.worldfantasy.org.
WYNDHAM, JOHN (1903–1969)
Written during the time of the Cold War (1947–1991) between Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the science fiction horror of British-born John Wyndham—whose full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris—reinvigorated the theme of invasion and end of days, providing a link with and mutual influence between U.S. and British science fiction and fantasy. It also established the disaster focus popular in contemporary films including Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996), 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2009), and the 1953 and 2005 adaptations of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898), a major influence on Wyndham’s own writing.
Wyndham’s work depicts strong women as well as men and reflects an island nation’s fear of the invasion of the Other, the terrors of invasion, and a sense of xenophobic powerlessness before the foreign Other with their strange ways. The invasion comes in Day of the Triffids (1951) in the shape of monstrous plants seemingly at home in people’s gardens but actually turned into man-eating, ravenous, independently mobile creatures that prey on helpless people blinded by a meteor shower. In The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), an alien invasion takes place through insemination of human women and the birth of a race of beautiful, soulless blond children (similar to Adolf Hitler’s Aryan youth) who are terrifying partly because of their extreme intelligence.
In Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (1973), Brian Aldiss misleadingly labeled Wyndham’s work “cosy catastrophe.” The flowering of his science fiction horror (or “logical fantasy,” or “reasoned fantasy” novels—a rejection of the Jules Verne–inspired, largely American label “science fiction”) begins with Day of the Triffids and is followed by The Kraken Wakes (1953), named after Tennyson’s poem “The Kraken” (1830), and serving as a possible influence on director James Cameron’s science fiction action film The Abyss (1989). In Wyndham’s novel the invasion is in the form of alien sea creatures, gas monsters landed from another planet by a meteor shower, which lie dormant inhabiting the sea depths. Living alongside them is impossible, as they harvest humans. The Japanese develop an ultrasonic destructive device that destroys the creatures, but climate change and depopulation have devastated the world. The U.K. edition is less bleak than the U.S. version, implying that humanity is rebuilding civilization.
Wyndham has been recognized as influencing such noted speculative fiction authors as John Christopher, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and Christopher Priest. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (filmed 1956, remade 1978 and 1993) reminds us of both The Day of the Triffids, an example of plant horror, and The Midwich Cuckoos, a changeling tale in which those like humans are in fact inhuman and could take over the world unless destroyed. Wyndham’s final novel, Web (1963), published posthumously, is about spiders on a remote Pacific island that, like Daphne du Maurier’s birds in “The Birds,” suddenly turn en masse against human beings. Wyndham’s invasion disaster horror tales continue to have a widespread influence on contemporary fiction and film.
Gina Wisker
See also: Wells, H. G.
Further Reading
Aldiss, Brian W. 1973. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City: Doubleday.
Ketterer David. 2004. “Questions and Answers: The Life and Fiction of John Wyndham.” New York Review of Science Fiction 16 (March): 1, 6–10.
Manlove, Colin N. 1991. “Everything Slipping Away: John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 4, no. 1: 29–53.
Moskowitz, Sam. 1966. “John Wyndham.” In Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, 118–132. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.