YARBRO, CHELSEA QUINN (1942–)
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is a prolific American author who is probably best known for a series of historical vampire novels, although she writes in other genres as well. She has written (and published) more than sixty novels, numerous short stories, and several works of nonfiction. She was the first female president of the Horror Writers Association, and to date is one of only three female recipients of the World Horror Convention Grand Master’s Award, the others being Anne Rice and Tanith Lee.
Yarbro’s writing career has spanned over forty years, and in that time she written under a number of pseudonyms, including Quinn Fawcett (which represents the historical mysteries she has written, including a series centered on Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft); Camille Gabor (fantasy); T. F. C. Hopkins (works of historical nonfiction); and Trystam Kith (horror). Nonetheless, she is best known as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and has published the majority of her work under that same. She has also collaborated with a number of different authors, notably Armin Shimerman (who is better known as an actor, having played Quark on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Principal Snyder on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). She also collaborated with fellow horror author Suzy McKee Charnas on the short story “Advocates,” published in 1991.
Yarbro has contributed to many different genres of fiction, including science fiction, young adult, and Westerns, as well as a few poems. She has said she writes three to four books in a typical year, as advances for her work remain modest and she needs to earn a living. Arguably she is best known for her historical fantasy writing, and perhaps her best known creation is the aristocratic vampire the Comte de St. Germain. This character made his literary debut in 1978 in the novel Hotel Transylvania, only a few short years after Anne Rice revolutionized the literary vampire in Interview with the Vampire (1976). Although he has never quite attained the same level of fame as rock star vampire Lestat de Lioncourt from Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, St. Germain is far more thoughtful and conscience-bound than the rebellious Lestat. He is also noticeably less violent than the majority of fictional vampires, despite facing some truly diabolical nemeses. Introduced amidst the corruption of pre-Revolutionary France in Hotel Transylvania, St. Germain is the prototypical “sympathetic vampire”: he is sophisticated, philosophical, and compassionate, and spends much of his immortal life musing on the shortcomings and follies of mankind. Yarbro deliberately crafted her vampire to be at odds with traditional portrayals of the vampire such as in Stoker’s Dracula, and yet still have him be recognizable as a member of the undead. Nor did she stint on the eroticism that has come to be associated with the modern vampire (with the exception of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series). Although incapable of penetrative sexual intercourse (he has no blood flow), St. Germain finds satisfaction in pleasuring women, a bold stance to take at the time the first books in the series were written, but one that possibly demonstrates the influence of second-wave feminism and a new emphasis on female sexual pleasure.
St. Germain has been portrayed in settings that range from ancient Rome to post–World War II France, and Yarbro continues to plan novels featuring him. He has featured in several of her short stories as well. Yarbro has also produced two spin-off novels, Out of the House of Life (1990) and In the Face of Death (2004), featuring Madelaine de Montalia, St. Germain’s protégé, whom he transforms into a vampire in Hotel Transylvania. A second spin-off series features another prominent lover of St. Germain’s, Atta Olivia Clemens, who stars in a trilogy of her own: A Flame in Byzantium (1987), Crusader’s Torch (1988), and A Candle for D’Artagnan (1989).
Of her other novels and short stories, Yarbro has not written much science fiction since the early 1980s, and much of her fictional output consists of horror and fantasy, including two books devoted to the vampire’s close cousin, the werewolf: Beastnights (1989) and The Lost Prince (originally published as The Godforsaken in 1983). The former focuses on a bestial murderer and rapist stalking the streets of San Francisco, while the latter is a total contrast in that it focuses on the heir to the Spanish throne when the Inquisition was at its most powerful. These novels were inspired by a conversation with her then-editor in which she explained that lycanthropes did not interest her, as she perceived them as victims of fate who were incapable of dealing with their lycanthropy. She wondered why they would not simply end things if life became intolerable. When her editor queried what would happen if suicide was not an option, Yarbro was sufficiently intrigued to begin writing the story of the cursed Spanish prince. The novel is yet another example of how Yarbro typically endeavors to explore established horror themes and motifs from different perspectives and undermine the clichés that have arisen.
Of her nonfiction, Yarbro has authored a book on Middle Eastern history, entitled Empires, Wars, and Battles: The Middle East (2007), and on a naval battle between the Turks and European Crusaders, titled Confrontation at Lepanto (2006). Her works on Spiritualism, Messages from Michael, have also drawn considerable attention. What have become known as the Michael Teachings—a series of four books, the first published in 1979—record the three-decade-long conversations between a spiritual entity known as Michael and a group of friends based in San Francisco. The teachings endorse reincarnation and explore the experiences souls undergo during each lifetime.
She has received a number of award nominations for her writing and has been the recipient of three lifetime achievement awards: a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award, and an International Horror Guild Living Legend Award. Strangely, despite the popularity of St. Germain and other stories Yarbro has written, there have yet to be any TV or film adaptations of her work. She continues to be a prolific writer.
Carys Crossen
See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Spiritualism; Vampires; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Bogstad, Janice M. 2003. “Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn 1942–” In Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Edited by Richard Bleiler, 993–1002. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Fitzgerald, Gil. 1988. “History as Horror: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 128–134. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.
Howison, Del. 2015. “Inkslinger of the Highest Degree: Exclusive Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” Blumhouse.com, December 31. http://www.blumhouse.com/2015/12/31/inkslinger-of-the-highest-degree-exclusive-interview-with-chelsea-quinn-yarbro.
Phin, Vanessa Rose. 2015. “An Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.” Strange Horizons, September 21. http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20150921/4yarbro-a.shtml.
Swift, Sondra F. 1999. “Toward the Vampire as Savior: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain Series Compared with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni.” In The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature, edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr, 155–164. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
October 2016
In this interview Yarbro shares some of the reasons behind several prominent aspects of her authorial career: her reasons for writing across a very broad spectrum of genres, her reasons for writing about vampires and werewolves, and her reasons for approaching established generic and mythic tropes in a way that subverts them. She also talks about her personal interest in Spiritualism and the occult, and she offers a list of recommended genre reading—not just horror but also science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. She closes with some thoughts on the purpose of horror fiction and the reasons why people seek it.
Matt Cardin: In a career spanning five decades, you have not only written a huge number of books, but you have written across a huge span of forms and genres. What is it that drives you toward such diversity in your authorial output? And is there any central impulse lying behind that diversity, a kind of core mission that threads its way through your work and unites it into an organic whole?
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: Most simply put, I like to read in a wide variety of genres, and as a result, I like to write in a wide variety of genres. Doing the same mindset book after book tends to slow me down, but by genre-jumping and genre-straddling, my story sense stays fresh. As to a thematic element in my work, I’m sure there is one, but I don’t worry about it, since paying attention to it would make me self-conscious and that is pure poison to fictionists.
MC: The character of Comte de St. Germain has now entered the canon of vampire literature. What led you to write about vampires in the first place? And why do you think they continue to exert such a mesmerizing power over the minds of not just the reading public but people in general? What’s the fascination?
CQY: I wrote about vampires because there is something fascinating about them, and that’s still true. As I have said before, after reading Dracula at fourteen, I read a lot more vampire fiction, and after a while, I wondered how far the Dracular model of vampires could be turned to the positive and still have a recognizable vampire. I’m still exploring that issue. I think some of the fascination comes from the high level of the ambiguity of the vampire—improperly dead, dependent on the living for its continued survival—which is at the heart of the whole vampire myth.
MC: How about werewolves, which have also played a part in your novels? What fascinates people about them? What fascinates you about them?
CQY: Werewolves are trickier beasties, and not nearly so engaging as vampires, although they, too, are ancient mythic archetypes in all known present and historical human societies. If vampires are The Other outside us, werecreatures are The Other within us. The most fun I’ve had with were-ness has been in The Vildecaz Talents, with Ninianee, who for the three nights of the full moon turns into a mammal, but she doesn’t know which mammal until her first transformation for the month.
MC: In your horror writing you have tended to approach established themes, tropes, and motifs in a way that overturns and undermines them. You greet clichés and then explode them. Is this something you consciously set out to do? Is it perhaps linked to that core sense of authorial mission alluded to above?
CQY: Yes, you’re right—I like to turn mythic figures upside down, back-to-front, inside-out, and so forth, and I do it deliberately, especially where there are inconsistencies in the archetype I’m dealing with. It lets me explore those figures in ways I couldn’t do if I were dealing directly with the folkloric image, and what’s the fun in that?
MC: The fact that you write supernatural horror while also writing about, and being personally involved in, Spiritualism, as expressed in your Messages from Michael series, puts you in relationship with a venerable line of authors in the horror and Gothic traditions—such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Shirley Jackson—who have likewise held personal beliefs about the supernatural that worked its way into their written fictions. How do you personally understand the striking doubleness or duality of the supernatural, which in one context is the standard subject matter for stories about fear and horror, and in another is a source of much more benign and comforting notions and emotions about the nature of reality?
CQY: First, I don’t believe in the supernatural—I believe everything that’s happening, no matter how weird or creepy, is natural, or it wouldn’t be able to occur. What is causing these things to happen is what interests me, and why I’ve been involved in occult studies for years, and so far, continue to do so. My work may reflect my interests in occult matters, but rarely do they reflect my opinions, since one of the most important aspect of writing, at least for me, is to take a story on its terms, and to reveal the experiences and opinions of the characters who inhabit it. The Michael material, which is taken from a real group and actual channeled information, is fictional only in that the identities of group members are not revealed, and most of those characters in the group in the Michael books are amalgamations of members, not portraits.
MC: Having made your mark on horror, what authors and works would you recommend in general to those who are looking to explore this wing of the literary universe? Or feel free to aim the question at the larger universe of speculative fiction as a whole, since you have worked for so long in all areas of it. Which books and authors strike you as especially important and profound both for speculative fiction and for literature as a whole?
CQY: I’m not very good at recommendations for newcomers to the various genres—I’ve read far too much over the years to be able to know what to point out as a first step. But I can make some generalities. If you haven’t read Dracula and you like vampires, by all means do so. A lot of people like Lovecraft (I don’t very much) for horror, and M. R. James (me, too). Of course, I recommend Robert Bloch for that most difficult of all forms, the funny horror story. If you like science fiction, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, C. L. Moore, and Theodore Sturgeon were among my early favorites; Sturgeon and Moore remain so to this day. If you like mysteries, Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Thorne Smith, James Ellroy, and Dick Francis are some writers whose work sticks with me. As fantasy goes, Roger Zelazny, Tanith Lee, and Ursula Le Guin held my interest more fully than some others. Sitting in his own multi-universe between fantasy and science fiction, R. A. Lafferty was a unique voice in my developmental period. I mention these because they were the ones I liked early in my career, when I was eager to see how the Big Names did it. On the other hand, some of my opinions are colored by having known a number of the ones listed, which probably flavors my understanding [of] their work. Almost all of them are senior citizens now, or no longer with us, and don’t reflect the current array of Big Names, though I like Neil Gaiman very much, and Charles de Lint. I hope this might provide some useful ways to begin; they certainly did for me.
MC: Finally, do you have any thoughts on the purpose or meaning of horror fiction? What does it give us? Why do people actually seek the distressing emotional experiences of fright, dread, disgust, and dismay?
CQY: Most human beings don’t mind being frightened if they’re not in any real danger—think of roller-coasters and films—because it is thrilling to have that frisson that horror provides. A great many folk-stories and fairy tales are not only cautionary but scary because that cold finger down the spine is a lot of fun when it is imaginary, and we seek it out in stories for that reason. Such tales make it okay to be frightened and promise you a kind of vaccine against the very actual dangers and threats of real life. If you know how to handle a Lovecraftian sea monster, there’s a chance that you can deal with dry rot under the deck or the political news from the Middle East.
“THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER”
“The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a horror story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, written in June 1890 in Pasadena, California and published in the New England Magazine (January 1892) under her married name, Stetson. She had suffered from postpartum depression while with her first husband in New England and was ordered by the prominent neurologist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell to take his rest cure, consisting of enforced bed rest for a month, followed by a prescription ordering her to limit her intellectual activities to two hours a day and never to write again. The result brought her to the edge of suicide, until she fought back, left the East Coast for California, and wrote the story over two days in 103-degree weather. She sent the published story to Mitchell, but contrary to rumor, he never responded or changed his therapy.
The semi-autobiographical story, in the form of a diary, recounts the experience of a clinically depressed woman given a rest cure similar to Mitchell’s. The entire story is set in an upper room of a rented house where the woman is allowed nothing but rest, and she has nothing to do but stare at the ugly wallpaper. Eventually, she begins to see something moving behind the wallpaper’s patterns. She soon realizes it is a woman who appears to be trapped behind the twisting pattern and is trying to get out. She decides to free the other woman by stripping off the wallpaper. By the end she has seemingly become the other woman.
Several interpretations are possible. Initially “The Yellow Wall-Paper” was seen as a powerful, Poe-esque description of a woman’s psychological descent into madness. This fits with the author’s stated intention in writing it.
Gilman was a feminist activist, and a later view interprets it as a feminist allegory in which the hallucinated woman behind the wallpaper is the narrator’s doppelgänger, and the imprisoning wallpaper pattern symbolizes the contemporary patriarchal social norms. The room where the protagonist is confined is described as a nursery, which has been interpreted as symbolizing the way women were treated as children.
It can also be interpreted as a tale of possession. The woman in the wallpaper is the spirit of a madwoman who had previously been imprisoned in the room and had died there. The room’s barred windows, rings in the walls, nailed-down bed, and deep gouges in the plaster are more suggestive of a prison than a nursery. At the end, the madwoman’s soul possesses the narrator’s mind.
“The Yellow Wall-Paper” has been filmed more than once, by the BBC for Masterpiece Theater (1980) and as a student film by Alyssa Lundgren (2011). A feature film, The Yellow Wallpaper (2012), directed by Logan Thomas, is about Gilman’s creation of the story.
Lee Weinstein
See also: Psychological Horror; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Dock, Julie Bates, ed. 1998. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Golden, Catherine, ed. 1992. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” New York: Feminist Press.
Scharnhorst, Gary. 1985. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. 1989. “Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’: A Centenary.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, edited by Sheryl L. Meyering, 51–64. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
“YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN”
The author of this story, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was one of the first writers to make use of the darker corners of America’s Puritan past. He was uniquely suited to do so, born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804 and a descendant of John Hathorne, one of the judges involved in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Nathaniel later changed the spelling of the family name, adding the “w,” to distance himself from his notorious ancestor.
Published in 1835, “Young Goodman Brown” is set about the time of the Salem witch panic; an offhand reference to “King William” dates the setting to 1688–1702. The story is heavily allegorical, but anticipates much modern horror fiction. This and others of Hawthorne’s works attracted the admiration of Edgar Allan Poe and had an enormous influence on H. P. Lovecraft.
The “goodman” (i.e., member of the Puritan community) of the title sets out from Salem into a dark forest at night. His wife, “aptly named” Faith, begs him not to go, but he has an urgent “errand.” Once in the woods he meets a man who is clearly the Devil and who proceeds to disabuse him of the notion that the respectable members of Salem society are true Christians at all. Each of them is in league with Satan in one way or another. Brown overhears the conversation of two prominent clergymen as they ride by on horseback on their way to a witches’ sabbat. Even as he comes to fear that all the world is corrupt, he clings to the hope that his wife, Faith, is pure; but a cloud passes over, he hears voices from it, and a ribbon like the ones Faith wears in her hair drifts down. When he reaches the sabbat itself, he is horrified to discover that just about everybody he knows, both sinners and the supposedly pious, including Faith, are present. He and Faith are to be initiated into the Devil’s communion that night. A demonic preacher delivers a sermon to the effect that sin is the natural state of mankind, which is actually an orthodox Puritan view of things (thus generating a further irony: that the Devil’s theology is quite sound). But right before the two are baptized into evil, Goodman Brown calls out to his wife to resist and look to heaven. The witches vanish. He is alone in the woods.
The implication is that it may have been a dream, and certainly, Goodman Brown gains no comfort from the notion. As he returns to Salem, he sees hypocrisy everywhere, and his ultimately long life ends in despair.
One of the great mysteries of this story is the question of what Goodman Brown was doing in the forest in the first place. Perhaps he was already planning to sell himself to the Devil, and he was only incidentally saved by his horror of seeing his wife succumb to similar corruption. Or perhaps the “gloom” that followed him for the rest of his days was a matter of guilt. As a Calvinist (as Puritans were), he would have believed in double predestination, the idea that some people are bound for heaven and others for hell, and nothing they can do will change the outcome. While it would not be possible to know who is going where, the events of this story are surely not a good sign. In this story, Hawthorne effectively captured the sense of spiritual dread that filled the Puritans’ lives and formed the foundation for some of America’s most sinister folklore.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Demons and Devils; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Magee, Bruce R. 2003. “Faith and Fantasy in ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 29, no. 1: 1–24.
Miller, Edwin Haviland. 1991. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 111–120. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Olson, Steven. 2009. “A History of the American Mind: ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 52: 31–54.
“Overview: ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” 1997. In Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events That Influenced Them, Vol. 1: Ancient Times to the American and French Revolutions (Prehistory–1790s), edited by Joyce Moss and George Wilson, 420–426. Detroit, MI: Gale.
“YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER”
“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” is a short story by Robert Bloch that was first published in the July 1943 issue of Weird Tales and collected in his first American short fiction collection, The Opener of the Way (1945). It has become Bloch’s best-known short story, in part because it was instrumental in popularizing the theme of Jack the Ripper and his traits as a serial killer in horror fiction.
The story unfolds in (then) contemporary Chicago, where British Ripperologist Sir Guy Hollis enlists psychiatrist John Carmody (who narrates the story) in his search for Jack the Ripper, the infamous murderer of five women in London’s Whitechapel district in 1888, who was never caught and whose identity has never been established. Sir Guy purports to have proof that Jack the Ripper’s kills were blood sacrifices made to maintain his immortality, and that he is still alive. He believes that the Ripper’s next cycle of murders is about to take place, and he enlists Carmody to introduce him to Chicago society where he thinks the Ripper may be hiding. The Ripper’s identity, when revealed at the story’s end, comes as a jarring surprise: he is none other than Carmody, the narrator, who has achieved immortality through his murders, which are actually blood sacrifices to dark gods.
“Your Truly, Jack the Ripper” is one of the earliest stories in which Bloch explored the psychology of a serial killer, an interest that would culminate in his renowned novel Psycho (1959). The story became part of an informal trilogy formed by Bloch’s futuristic Ripper story “A Toy for Juliette” and Harlan Ellison’s sequel “Prowler in the City on the Edge of Forever,” both published in the anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). Bloch’s novel Night of the Ripper (1984), an adjunct to “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” is a period tale about efforts to apprehend the Ripper at the time of his murders. Bloch also wrote the script for the 1967 Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” featuring another take on an immortal Jack the Ripper. “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” has inspired several anthologies of horror stories on the theme of Jack the Ripper, notably Michel Parry’s Jack the Knife (1975), Susan Casper and Jack Dann’s Jack the Ripper (1988), and Ross Lockhart’s Tales of Jack the Ripper (2013). The story has been adapted many times for extraliterary media, first for The Kate Smith Radio Hour in 1944 and, most memorably, as the April 11, 1961, episode of Boris Karloff’s Thriller.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Bloch, Robert; Psychological Horror; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Larson, Randall. 1986. Robert Bloch: Starmont Reader’s Guide 37. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
Zinna, Eduardo. “Yours Truly, Robert Bloch.” Casebook: Jack the Ripper. Accessed July 5, 2016. http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-bloch.html.