Jess Nevins's Blog, page 3

Horror Fiction in the 20th Century on sale now, and one of my favorite Victorian sequences #3: the ending of Westward Ho!

So! Big day, today. My book, Horror Fiction in the 20th Century, is now officially shipping from Amazon.com today!

Publisher’s description here:

Horror Fiction in the 20th Century encompasses the world of 20th-century horror literature and explores it in a critical but balanced fashion. Readers will be exposed to the world of horror literature, a truly global phenomenon during the 20th century.

Beginning with the modern genre’s roots in the 19th century, the book proceeds to cover 20th-century horror literature in all of its manifestations, whether in comics, pulps, paperbacks, hardcover novels, or mainstream magazines, and from every country that produced it. The major horror authors of the century receive their due, but the works of many authors who are less well-known or who have been forgotten are also described and analyzed. In addition to providing critical assessments and judgments of individual authors and works, the book describes the evolution of the genre and the major movements within it.

Horror Fiction in the 20th Century stands out from its competitors and will be of interest to its readers because of its informed critical analysis, its unprecedented coverage of female authors and writers of color, and its concise historical overview.

Amazon; Barnes and Noble; Powells.

But this blog isn’t just about self-promotion—it’s also about me maundering about some of my favorite things. Which, in terms of Victoriana, includes the ending of the Reverend Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!  (1855), a real page-turner and an influential book in its time.

Westward Ho! (novel online here) is the story of a Devonshire lad, Amyas Leigh, and his adventures in England and in the Americas, culminating in Leigh taking part in the fight against the Spanish Armada, and, crucially, what happens during and after that battle.

Amays is a strapping young man in Bideford, Devonshire, who is in love with the prettiest girl in Bideford, Rose Salterne. But Amyas longs for adventure at sea, especially in the New World, and goes around the world with Sir Francis Drake on Drake’s first circumnavigation of the world. When Amyas returns, he is told by a friend, Salvation Yeo, a horrifying story of how Yeo and his friend (John Oxenham) and his friend’s daughter had been captured by the Spanish Inquisition. Amyas, hearing this, wants to join the fight against the Spanish, so Amyas and Yeo join Sir Walter Raleigh in the fight against the Spaniards in Ireland. Amyas captures a Spaniard nobleman, Don Guzman de Soto, and takes him back to Bideford to await his ransom.

Well, things take a turn. Don Guzman catches the eye of Rose Salterne, and she him, and when Don Guzman’s ransom arrives he leaves—and takes Rose with him. At least, Rose disappears, and Amyas and his friends are sure that Rose was kidnaped by Don Guzman.

Amyas and his friends set out to rescue Rose. This leads to a trip across the Atlantic to Caracas, a battle with Don Guzman’s men (in which Amyas’ brother Frank is captured by Don Guzman), an overland march across Mexico, battles with hostile natives, and a native princess (Ayacanora) falling in love with Amyas and accompanying him on his travels. Three years later, Amyas et al. capture a Spaniard galleon, on board of which is Lucy, an English witch, who tells Amyas about how the Spanish Inquisition burned Rose and Frank at the stake (for being Protestants).

Amyas is, naturally, infuriated at this, and swears, “Henceforth till I die no quarter to a Spaniard.” Amyas returns home, drops Ayacanora off with his mother—after all this time Amyas views Ayacanora like a sister, which annoys her no end—and goes off to fight the Spanish Armada. On one of the Armada’s ships is Don Guzman. Amyas goes after Don Guzman, but Don Guzman’s ship is wrecked, Don Guzman is drowned rather than killed by Amyas, and a bolt of lightning strikes Amyas’ ship, permanently blinding him. Amyas goes home, where he is cared for by his friends and mother, and he marries Ayacanora.

Westward Ho! was written by Kingsley to stir up patriotic feelings among the English, so that they would support the Crimean War. Unfortunately, for the first 150 pages of the novel, this means that Kingsley engages in really reprehensible Catholic- and Spaniard-bashing, as well as no small amount of bigotry against those of African and Native American descent. Kingsley was what we call a “muscular Christian,” and equated effeminacy with moral weakness and physical vigor with moral strength. Kingsley’s ideology also leads him to sacrifice historical accuracy in favor of jingo: Spanish cruelties are highlighted while English cruelties are downplayed; the English are portrayed in almost entirely positive terms as pure conquering holy Aryan warriors while the Spanish and the Catholics are portrayed in almost entirely negative terms; and, most damningly, the Elizabethans are shown to have the political attitudes of the Victorians, especially with regard to the slave trade–Kingsley’s Elizabethans abhor it, while the real Elizabethans saw it as just another honorable trade.

But after those first 150 pages, something interesting happens. Kingsley settles down and does not let his agenda get in the way of his telling a cracking good tale. The Catholic- and Spanish-bashing occasionally reappears, but most of the time Kingsley is more concerned with describing Amyas Leigh’s exploits. Westward Ho! reads as if the storyteller in Kingsley, who had been cowed by Kingsley’s religious side at the start of the book, slowly won the struggle for control over the writing of the story. After that one hundred and fifty pages Westward Ho! has enough shipboard combats and sword fights to satisfy any young, adventure-seeking boy or girl. Kingsley himself admitted that the novel was “bloodthirsty,” but modern readers, whose sensibilities are considerably more coarsened than Kingsley’s, should merely find the novel great fun.

So why am I singling it out? Because of the ending. See, Kingsley wasn’t content to let Amyas be a straightforward hero. Kingsley wanted to teach a moral lesson using Amyas. Amyas believes that Don Guzman is responsible for the deaths of both Rose and Amyas’ brother Frank, and Amyas places his own personal vengeance against Don Guzman above his responsibilities to his crew or his duty to Queen Elizabeth. As the years pass and Amyas’ vengeance is increasingly delayed, Amyas’ hate for Don Guzman grows until he becomes filled with it, and all other emotions are driven out. Even Amyas acknowledges that he is so filled with hate that he can feel no joy or love any other man. For this sin God punishes Amyas by taking his vengeance away, by having Don Guzman die in a shipwreck rather than be killed in combat with Amyas, and by blinding Amyas. And then, even more unexpectedly, God sends Amyas a dream in which Amyas sees Don Guzman and Rose together. Amyas at last accepts that Don Guzman and Rose truly loved each other, rather than Rose having been unwillingly abducted from Bideford by Don Guzman, and Amyas then speaks with Don Guzman’s ghost:

And I saw him sitting in his cabin, like a valiant gentleman of Spain; and his officers were sitting round him, with their swords upon the table at the wine. And the prawns and the crayfish and the rockling, they swam in and out above their heads: but Don Guzman he never heeded, but sat still, and drank his wine. Then he took a locket from his bosom; and I heard him speak, Will, and he said: ‘Here’s the picture of my fair and true lady; drink to her, señors all.’ Then he spoke to me, Will, and called me, right up through the oar-weed and the sea: ‘We have had a fair quarrel, señor; it is time to be friends once more. My wife and your brother have forgiven me; so your honor takes no stain.’ And I answered, ‘We are friends, Don Guzman; God has judged our quarrel and not we.’ Then he said, ‘I sinned, and I am punished.’ And I said, ‘And, señor, so am I.’ Then he held out his hand to me, Cary; and I stooped to take it, and awoke.”

After around 450 pages of action and adventure and Amyas’ toxic hatred for Spaniards being repeatedly driven home to the reader, this is a surprising passage, and surprisingly effective.

I can’t recommend reading all of Westward Ho!—those first 150 pages (the first six chapters, basically) are tough sledding for readers with modern sensibilities. But everything after that is a classic Victorian historical adventure novel, and is a rewarding read.

Check it out!

One of my favorite Victorian sequences, #2: the ending of Hereward the Wake.

Well. That was an eventful week. My book on twentieth century horror fiction is now available from my publisher. (Amazon’s publishing date is incorrect). I got to do a Big Idea piece for John Scalzi’s blog. And I got a whole lot of writing done on the game (second game in a row) that I’m writing on spec but have high hopes for.

But that’s not what you’re here for. You’re here for me to tell you about the Real Cool Moment. In this case, it is the ending of Hereward the Wake. I’d hazard a guess that 99% of you haven’t read it, so let me tell you about it.

Hereward the Wake was written by the Rev. Charles Kingsley and first appeared in as a magazine serial in 1865 before publication as a novel in 1869. It is a fictionalization of the life of the historical Hereward the Wake (circa 1035-circa 1072), a rebel against the eleventh century Norman invasion and occupation of England. Although he became a national hero to the English and the subject of many legends and songs, little is known for certain about Hereward, and it is theorized that he was actually half-Danish rather than of Saxon descent.

In Kingsley’s version of Hereward’s life, Hereward is the son of the Lord of Bourne, a Saxon nobleman of a powerful family. Hereward’s mother is Lady Godiva, and Hereward is as rebellious, spirited, irreligious and rambunctious as Godiva is spiritual and kind. After a friar complains to Lady Godiva that Hereward and his band of friends robbed him of Church money, Godiva is angry and hurt, for this is just the latest in a series of Hereward’s misdeeds. She confronts him and he freely admits to it, showing no shame. She is left with no choice but to declare him outlawed, which is what he wants. (It will allow him to have adventures, rather than be stuck at home). Hereward leaves his father’s house, accompanied only by a family retainer, Martin Lightfoot, who vows to serve him as friend and servant. Hereward then begins his adventuring. In Scotland he slays a giant bear and gains much renown thereby; in doing so he saves the life of a young girl, Alftruda, who he would encounter again. In Cornwall he meets the king and saves the king’s daughter from a bad marriage by killing the would-be groom, a red-bearded giant named Ironhook. This frees the daughter to marry the prince she truly loves and adds to Hereward’s reputation. Hereward adventures further about the British Isles, gathering about him a troop of men and becoming widely known as a doughty fighter and a canny captain of soldiers.

Hereward and his men, traveling by sea, are wrecked on the Flemish Coast, and they take service under Baldwin of Flanders, defeating the French for him. Hereward falls in love with Torfrida, a beautiful woman who is reputed to be a sorceress. Torfrida is equally smitten with Hereward, and the two marry and have a daughter. Meanwhile, back in Britain, King Edward dies and Harold Hardraada succeeds him. But William of Normandy invades Britain and defeats Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Hereward is unhappy with the thought of the Normans ruling England and decides to visit Bourne. There he finds that the Normans have driven his mother from her home and are treating the Saxons badly. Hereward kills the Normans in Bourne and vows that he will go back to Flanders and then return with an army to kill every Norman in England. Hereward puts his mother up in Crowland Abbey, is formally knighted by the monks there, and returns to Flanders. Unfortunately, many of the English in Britain are confused and disunited, and the leader the Danes sent to aid Hereward is stupid and vain and refuses to listen to Hereward’s advice, getting many of his men killed and badly damaging the prospects of the English. When Hereward and his men and the Danes eventually land in England, they are easily defeated, and the Danes flee, leaving Hereward to carry on the fight. Hereward and his men stage a brave, lengthy holdout on the island of Ely, but are eventually betrayed by a group of monks.

Hereward and Torfrida and his men live as outlaws in the forests and fens of England, but as time passes and their situation grows increasingly desperate, they grow unhappy. Torfrida is cold toward Hereward and he commits adultery (either in the flesh or in spirit, it is never confirmed which), and when she discovers proof of this she goes temporarily mad and then gets herself to the nunnery at Crowland, where she takes care of Lady Godiva and has her marriage to Hereward dissolved. Hereward, bereft of hope and now his wife, gives up and enlists under King William, marrying the bewitching Alftruda, who has loved him for years. Hereward is not happy, however, for God’s grace has turned against him, he does not love Alftruda (he is afraid of her but besotted with her looks at the same time), and he has many enemies at the French court. Eventually he is tricked into a duel and imprisoned. He escapes and returns to Alftruda, but his enemies surprise him and kill him, although he takes twelve of them with him. When Torfrida hears of his death, she travels to the location where his body is kept and retrieves his body and has it buried in Crowland.

Now, Hereward the Wake—which you can read online here–is mostly forgotten about today. This is understandable; writing styles and readers’ expectations change, and Kingsley’s style in Hereward is a bit dated and subject matter not something that’s going to automatically appeal to modern readers, English or otherwise. Hereward is jingoistic—Kingsley wrote it at a time when the political and cultural revolutions and turmoil on the Continent left many English feeling insecure, so Hereward contains a stirring—and blatantly chauvinistic—call to the English to maintain English culture against external invaders.

But Kingsley wrote Hereward when he was old enough and skillful enough as a writer to smoothly incorporate his didactic intent into the novel and to put enough exciting action into the novel that the reader does not mind the mouthpiece passages. The problem that bedeviled Kingsley in Westward Ho!–the struggle between Kingsley’s ideology and his storytelling sense–is far less evident in Hereward the Wake. The statements of Kingsley’s prejudices are not so crushingly blatant, and the integration of those biases into the story is smoother. Kingsley’s belief in the racial superiority of the British (more broadly, the inhabitants of the British Isles, the Teutons, and the Scandinavians) to Continental Europeans and his belief in the religious superiority of Protestantism to the Catholic Church appear in Hereward the Wake, but they are far more evenly woven into the book than in Westward Ho!

The end result is an excellent read. Despite its length, the lecturing passages, and the occasional chapter or story which has little to do with the overall plot, Hereward is vigorous, full of memorable characters, duels, heroic triumphs and valiant defeats. Hereward the Wake is a fine combination of action and emotion. Although some critics have found and continue to find the battles and duels too numerous and even nauseating, most modern readers will disagree.

My favorite moment in the novel comes near its end, after Hereward has been killed, when his ex-wife Torfrida—who, remember, is rumored to be a sorceress—goes to retrieve Hereward’s body from the wicked, drunken Frenchmen who killed him, mutilated his body, and hung his decapitated head over the door of their drinking hall. Three days later:

It was the third day. The Normans were drinking in the hall of Bourne, casting lots among themselves who should espouse the fair Alftruda, who sat weeping within over the headless corpse; when in the afternoon a servant came in, and told them how a barge full of monks had come to the shore, and that they seemed to be monks from Crowland. Ivo Taillebois bade drive them back again into the barge with whips. But Hugh of Evermue spoke up.

“I am lord and master in Bourne this day, and if Ivo have a quarrel against St. Guthlac, I have none. This Ingulf of Fontenelle, the new abbot who has come thither since old Ulfketyl was sent to prison, is a loyal man, and a friend of King William’s, and my friend he shall be till he behaves himself as my foe. Let them come up in peace.”

Taillebois growled and cursed: but the monks came up, and into the hall; and at their head Ingulf himself, to receive whom all men rose, save Taillebois.

“I come,” said Ingulf, in most courtly French, “noble knights, to ask a boon and in the name of the Most Merciful, on behalf of a noble and unhappy lady. Let it be enough to have avenged yourself on the living. Gentlemen and Christians war not against the dead.”

“No, no, Master Abbot!” shouted Taillebois; “Waltheof is enough to keep Crowland in miracles for the present. You shall not make a martyr of another Saxon churl. He wants the barbarian’s body, knights, and you will be fools if you let him have it.”

“Churl? barbarian?” said a haughty voice; and a nun stepped forward who had stood just behind Ingulf. She was clothed entirely in black. Her bare feet were bleeding from the stones; her hand, as she lifted it, was as thin as a skeleton’s.

She threw back her veil, and showed to the knights what had been once the famous beauty of Torfrida.

But the beauty was long past away. Her hair was white as snow; her cheeks were fallen in. Her hawk-like features were all sharp and hard. Only in their hollow sockets burned still the great black eyes, so fiercely that all men turned uneasily from her gaze.

“Churl? barbarian?” she said, slowly and quietly, but with an intensity which was more terrible than rage. “Who gives such names to one who was as much better born and better bred than those who now sit here, as he was braver and more terrible than they? The base wood-cutter’s son? The upstart who would have been honored had he taken service as yon dead man’s groom?”

“Talk to me so, and my stirrup leathers shall make acquaintance with your sides,” said Taillebois.

“Keep them for your wife. Churl? Barbarian? There is not a man within this hall who is not a barbarian compared with him. Which of you touched the harp like him? Which of you, like him, could move all hearts with song? Which of you knows all tongues from Lapland to Provence? Which of you has been the joy of ladies’ bowers, the counsellor of earls and heroes, the rival of a mighty king? Which of you will compare yourself with him,—whom you dared not even strike, you and your robber crew, fairly in front, but, skulked round him till he fell pecked to death by you, as Lapland Skratlings peck to death the bear. Ten years ago he swept this hall of such as you, and hung their heads upon yon gable outside; and were he alive but one five minutes again, this hall would be right cleanly swept again! Give me his body,—or bear forever the name of cowards, and Torfrida’s curse.”

And she fixed her terrible eyes first on one, and then on another, calling them by name.

“Ivo Taillebois,—basest of all—”

“Take the witch’s accursed eyes off me!” and he covered his face with his hands. “I shall be overlooked,—planet struck. Hew the witch down! Take her away!”

“Hugh of Evermue,—the dead man’s daughter is yours, and the dead man’s lands. Are not these remembrances enough of him? Are you so fond of his memory that you need his corpse likewise?”

“Give it her! Give it her!” said he, hanging down his head like a rated cur.

“Ascelin of Lincoln, once Ascelin of Ghent,—there was a time when you would have done—what would you not?—for one glance of Torfrida’s eyes.—Stay. Do not deceive yourself, fair sir, Torfrida means to ask no favor of you, or of living man. But she commands you. Do the thing she bids, or with one glance of her eye she sends you childless to your grave.”

“Madam! Lady Torfrida! What is there I would not do for you? What have I done now, save avenge your great wrong?”

Torfrida made no answer, but fixed steadily on him eyes which widened every moment.

“But, madam,”—and he turned shrinking from the fancied spell,—“what would you have? The—the corpse? It is in the keeping of—of another lady.”

“So?” said Torfrida, quietly. “Leave her to me”; and she swept past them all, and flung open the bower door at their backs, discovering Alftruda sitting by the dead.

The ruffians were so utterly appalled, not only by the false powers of magic, but by veritable powers of majesty and eloquence, that they let her do what she would.

“Out!” cried she, using a short and terrible epithet. “Out, siren, with fairy’s face and tail of fiend, and leave the husband with his wife!”

Alftruda looked up, shrieked; and then, with the sudden passion of a weak nature, drew a little knife, and sprang up.

Ivo made a coarse jest. The Abbot sprang in: “For the sake of all holy things, let there be no more murder here!”

Torfrida smiled, and fixed her snake’s eye upon her wretched rival.

“Out! woman, and choose thee a new husband among these French gallants, ere I blast thee from head to foot with the leprosy of Naaman the Syrian.”

Alftruda shuddered, and fled shrieking into an inner room.

“Now, knights, give me—that which hangs outside.”

Ascelin hurried out, glad to escape. In a minute he returned.

The head was already taken down. A tall lay brother, the moment he had seen it, had climbed the gable, snatched it away, and now sat in a corner of the yard, holding it on his knees, talking to it, chiding it, as if it had been alive. When men had offered to take it, he had drawn a battle-axe from under his frock, and threatened to brain all comers. And the monks had warned off Ascelin, saying that the man was mad, and had Berserk fits of superhuman strength and rage.

“He will give it me!” said Torfrida, and went out.

“Look at that gable, foolish head,” said the madman. “Ten years agone, you and I took down from thence another head. O foolish head, to get yourself at last up into that same place! Why would you not be ruled by her, you foolish golden head?”

“Martin!” said Torfrida.

“Take it and comb it, mistress, as you used to do. Comb out the golden locks again, fit to shine across the battle-field. She has let them get all tangled into elf-knots, that lazy slut within.”

Torfrida took it from his hands, dry-eyed, and went in.

Then the monks silently took up the bier, and all went forth, and down the hill toward the fen. They laid the corpse within the barge, and slowly rowed away.

Perhaps this sequence only gains its awesomeness after you’ve been with Hereward and Torfrida through their long lives. But for me, it’s great, my favorite sequence in the novel, a touch of sinister magic in a novel that’s anti-magic. (Oh, sure, Kingsley calls it “false magic,” but I think you and I both know it was the real stuff and Torfrida was going to do some horrible things to Tallebois and Ascelin and the others).

Hereward the Wake has its flaws—what novel from 1865 does not? But by my way of thinking it’s one of the best historical romances written before Stanley Weyman took pen to paper.

One of my favorite Victorian sequences, #1: the true climax of Lorna Doone

Hi. So. This blog has gone for long periods with no new posts, for which I apologize, but the new year and new decade are here, and there’s a movement afoot to bring back blogs as a thing, and almost all of my work over the past…gosh, almost a year…has been for roleplaying games, which makes me feel like I’m out of practice writing anything other than material for games.

In other words, it’s time for me to start doing some actual writing again, even if it’s only in the form of a series of blog posts.

As it says on the tin, this is the first in a series of posts about some of my favorite moments of Victorian writing (with one additional moment of non-Victorian historical fiction set in the early nineteenth century, but I’ll get to that much later). As you may or may not know, back in the mid-Aughts I wrote a big encyclopedia of Victorian and nineteenth century genre fiction. And as you may or may not know, a sequel (updated and much-expanded) to that encyclopedia is coming Real Soon Now. (Mid-February? End of February? Sometime in there). I do like me some Victorian fiction, and a lot of it has at least one moment of—if not Awesomeness, then Real Cool-ness.

So I thought I’d write about some of them. Up first: the climax of Lorna Doone.

Lorna Doone, for those of you not familiar with it, was written by an Englishman, R.D. Blackmore and published in 1869. (You can read it online here). The novel is set in the latter half of the seventeenth century, in the area of western England known as Exmoor. John Ridd is a young boy when his father is killed by the Doones of Badgery, a villainous clan of thieves and murderers. But John has a solid, loving family, and with the help of his mother and his sisters Annie and Eliza the family survives. One day John is out exploring when he sees a young girl, at the edge of Doone Valley, who identifies herself as “Lorna Doone.” John is taken with her and remembers her. Years pass, and as a young man John returns to Doone Valley, meets up with Lorna again, and falls in love with her. She is not in love with John, not to the same degree that he is with her, but she likes him, and she hates the Doones. But she is destined to be the wife of Carver Doone, the monstrous son of Sir Ensor Doone, the leader of the Doones, and freeing her from them is no small thing. After months of waiting the worst frost and snow of the century arrive in west England, and under cover of the snow John succeeds in freeing Lorna from the Doones. But the course of love never did run smooth, and before John and Lorna can live happily ever after they must endure separation (Lorna goes to London to assume her role as a lady of a noble family), danger (John goes in search of his sister’s roguish husband and gets arrested and nearly hanged as a rebel during the collapse of Monmouth’s rebellion), and more danger (an attack on Doone Valley). But there is, finally, a happily ever after, and all’s well that end’s well.

Lorna Doone is a “triple-decker,” one of the massive Victorian novels originally issued for publication in three volumes. It’s never been out of print, and it was the most popular, best-selling regional historical novel of the nineteenth century. The critics and academics approve of it, all the best people like it (writers as diverse as Angela Carter, in The Magic Toyshop, and Anita Desai, in Clear Light of Day, have invoked or been overtly influenced by Lorna Doone), and it’s a hell of a good read, even now.

My favorite moment from the novel comes near its end, after the Doones have been seen too and when all that prevents John and Lorna from being completely happy is that they aren’t yet married. The marriage, therefore, is arranged—and the reader expects it to be a final kind of catharsis after 660+ pages of good people struggling and suffering:

[SPOILERS, obviously]

Dear mother arranged all the ins and outs of the way in which it was to be done; and Annie and Lizzie, and all the Snowes, and even Ruth Huckaback (who was there, after great persuasion), made such a sweeping of dresses that I scarcely knew where to place my feet, and longed for a staff, to put by their gowns. Then Lorna came out of a pew half-way, in a manner which quite astonished me, and took my left hand in her right, and I prayed God that it were done with.

My darling looked so glorious, that I was afraid of glancing at her, yet took in all her beauty. She was in a fright, no doubt; but nobody should see it; whereas I said (to myself at least), “I will go through it like a grave-digger.”

Lorna’s dress was of pure white, clouded with faint lavender (for the sake of the old Earl Brandir), and as simple as need be, except for perfect loveliness. I was afraid to look at her, as I said before, except when each of us said, “I will,” and then each dwelled upon the other.

It is impossible for any who have not loved as I have to conceive my joy and pride, when after ring and all was done, and the parson had blessed us, Lorna turned to look at me with her glances of subtle fun subdued by this great act.

Her eyes, which none on earth may ever equal, or compare with, told me such a depth of comfort, yet awaiting further commune, that I was almost amazed, thoroughly as I knew them. Darling eyes, the sweetest eyes, the loveliest, the most loving eyes—the sound of a shot rang through the church, and those eyes were filled with death.

Lorna fell across my knees when I was going to kiss her, as the bridegroom is allowed to do, and encouraged, if he needs it; a flood of blood came out upon the yellow wood of the altar steps, and at my feet lay Lorna, trying to tell me some last message out of her faithful eyes. I lifted her up, and petted her, and coaxed her, but it was no good; the only sign of life remaining was a spirt of bright red blood.

Some men know what things befall them in the supreme time of their life—far above the time of death—but to me comes back as a hazy dream, without any knowledge in it, what I did, or felt, or thought, with my wife’s arms flagging, flagging, around my neck, as I raised her up, and softly put them there. She sighed a long sigh on my breast, for her last farewell to life, and then she grew so cold, and cold, that I asked the time of year.

It was Whit-Tuesday, and the lilacs all in blossom; and why I thought of the time of year, with the young death in my arms, God or His angels, may decide, having so strangely given us. Enough that so I did, and looked; and our white lilacs were beautiful. Then I laid my wife in my mother’s arms, and begging that no one would make a noise, went forth for my revenge.

Yes. Shot at the altar. Now, summarized in this way, it sounds clichéd and perhaps corny, but in context Lorna being shot and killed at the altar comes as one hell of a shock. It’s unexpected, to say the least; it’s bracingly unjust—Lorna is, all things considered, rather sweet and melancholy, deserving of as much happiness as John can give her, and here Blackmore goes killing her!; it flies in the face of contemporary (and later, really) literary convention and reader expectation; it completely wrong-foots the modern reader, who likely thinks they know where the story is going at this point, and discovers that they were wrong, wrong, wrong; heck–it introduces a major plot development with only thirteen pages left in the novel!

What happens next—well, I’ll let Blackmore tell it:

Of course, I knew who had done it. There was but one man in the world, or at any rate, in our part of it, who could have done such a thing—such a thing. I use no harsher word about it, while I leaped upon our best horse, with bridle but no saddle, and set the head of Kickums towards the course now pointed out to me. Who showed me the course, I cannot tell. I only know that I took it. And the men fell back before me.

Weapon of no sort had I. Unarmed, and wondering at my strange attire (with a bridal vest, wrought by our Annie, and red with the blood of the bride), I went forth just to find out this; whether in this world there be or be not God of justice.

With my vicious horse at a furious speed, I came upon Black Barrow Down, directed by some shout of men, which seemed to me but a whisper. And there, about a furlong before me, rode a man on a great black horse, and I knew that the man was Carver Doone.

“Your life or mine,” I said to myself; “as the will of God may be. But we two live not upon this earth, one more hour together.”

I knew the strength of this great man; and I knew that he was armed with a gun—if he had time to load again, after shooting my Lorna—or at any rate with pistols, and a horseman’s sword as well. Nevertheless, I had no more doubt of killing the man before me than a cook has of spitting a headless fowl.

Sometimes seeing no ground beneath me, and sometimes heeding every leaf, and the crossing of the grass-blades, I followed over the long moor, reckless whether seen or not. But only once the other man turned round and looked back again, and then I was beside a rock, with a reedy swamp behind me.

Although he was so far before me, and riding as hard as ride he might, I saw that he had something on the horse in front of him; something which needed care, and stopped him from looking backward. In the whirling of my wits, I fancied first that this was Lorna; until the scene I had been through fell across hot brain and heart, like the drop at the close of a tragedy. Rushing there through crag and quag, at utmost speed of a maddened horse, I saw, as of another’s fate, calmly (as on canvas laid), the brutal deed, the piteous anguish, and the cold despair.

The man turned up the gully leading from the moor to Cloven Rocks, through which John Fry had tracked Uncle Ben, as of old related. But as Carver entered it, he turned round, and beheld me not a hundred yards behind; and I saw that he was bearing his child, little Ensie, before him. Ensie also descried me, and stretched his hands and cried to me; for the face of his father frightened him.

Carver Doone, with a vile oath, thrust spurs into his flagging horse, and laid one hand on a pistol-stock; whence I knew that his slung carbine had received no bullet since the one that had pierced Lorna. And a cry of triumph rose from the black depths of my heart. What cared I for pistols? I had no spurs, neither was my horse one to need the rowel; I rather held him in than urged him, for he was fresh as ever; and I knew that the black steed in front, if he breasted the steep ascent, where the track divided, must be in our reach at once.

His rider knew this; and, having no room in the rocky channel to turn and fire, drew rein at the crossways sharply, and plunged into the black ravine leading to the Wizard’s Slough. “Is it so?” I said to myself with a brain and head cold as iron; “though the foul fiend come from the slough, to save thee; thou shalt carve it, Carver.”

I followed my enemy carefully, steadily, even leisurely; for I had him, as in a pitfall, whence no escape might be. He thought that I feared to approach him, for he knew not where he was: and his low disdainful laugh came back. “Laugh he who wins,” thought I.

A gnarled and half-starved oak, as stubborn as my own resolve, and smitten by some storm of old, hung from the crag above me. Rising from my horse’s back, although I had no stirrups, I caught a limb, and tore it (like a mere wheat-awn) from the socket. Men show the rent even now, with wonder; none with more wonder than myself.

Carver Doone turned the corner suddenly on the black and bottomless bog; with a start of fear he reined back his horse, and I thought he would have turned upon me. But instead of that, he again rode on; hoping to find a way round the side.

Now there is a way between cliff and slough for those who know the ground thoroughly, or have time enough to search it; but for him there was no road, and he lost some time in seeking it. Upon this he made up his mind; and wheeling, fired, and then rode at me.

His bullet struck me somewhere, but I took no heed of that. Fearing only his escape, I laid my horse across the way, and with the limb of the oak struck full on the forehead his charging steed. Ere the slash of the sword came nigh me, man and horse rolled over, and well nigh bore my own horse down, with the power of their onset.

Carver Doone was somewhat stunned, and could not arise for a moment. Meanwhile I leaped on the ground and awaited, smoothing my hair back, and baring my arms, as though in the ring for wrestling. Then the little boy ran to me, clasped my leg, and looked up at me, and the terror in his eyes made me almost fear myself.

“Ensie, dear,” I said quite gently, grieving that he should see his wicked father killed, “run up yonder round the corner and try to find a pretty bunch of bluebells for the lady.” The child obeyed me, hanging back, and looking back, and then laughing, while I prepared for business. There and then I might have killed mine enemy, with a single blow, while he lay unconscious; but it would have been foul play.

With a sullen and black scowl, the Carver gathered his mighty limbs, and arose, and looked round for his weapons; but I had put them well away. Then he came to me and gazed; being wont to frighten thus young men.

“I would not harm you, lad,” he said, with a lofty style of sneering: “I have punished you enough, for most of your impertinence. For the rest I forgive you; because you have been good and gracious to my little son. Go, and be contented.”

For answer, I smote him on the cheek, lightly, and not to hurt him: but to make his blood leap up. I would not sully my tongue by speaking to a man like this.

There was a level space of sward between us and the slough. With the courtesy derived from London, and the processions I had seen, to this place I led him. And that he might breathe himself, and have every fibre cool, and every muscle ready, my hold upon his coat I loosed, and left him to begin with me, whenever he thought proper.

I think that he felt that his time was come. I think he knew from my knitted muscles, and the firm arch of my breast, and the way in which I stood; but most of all from my stern blue eyes; that he had found his master. At any rate a paleness came, an ashy paleness on his cheeks, and the vast calves of his legs bowed in, as if he were out of training.

Seeing this, villain as he was, I offered him first chance. I stretched forth my left hand, as I do to a weaker antagonist, and I let him have the hug of me. But in this I was too generous; having forgotten my pistol-wound, and the cracking of one of my short lower ribs. Carver Doone caught me round the waist, with such a grip as never yet had been laid upon me.

I heard my rib go; I grasped his arm, and tore the muscle out of it* (as the string comes out of an orange); then I took him by the throat, which is not allowed in wrestling; but he had snatched at mine; and now was no time of dalliance. In vain he tugged, and strained, and writhed, dashed his bleeding fist into my face, and flung himself on me with gnashing jaws. Beneath the iron of my strength—for God that day was with me—I had him helpless in two minutes, and his fiery eyes lolled out.

* A far more terrible clutch than this is handed down, to  weaker ages, of the great John Ridd.—Ed.

“I will not harm thee any more,” I cried, so far as I could for panting, the work being very furious: “Carver Doone, thou art beaten: own it, and thank God for it; and go thy way, and repent thyself.”

It was all too late. Even if he had yielded in his ravening frenzy—for his beard was like a mad dog’s jowl—even if he would have owned that, for the first time in his life, he had found his master; it was all too late.

The black bog had him by the feet; the sucking of the ground drew on him, like the thirsty lips of death. In our fury, we had heeded neither wet nor dry; nor thought of earth beneath us. I myself might scarcely leap, with the last spring of o’er-laboured legs, from the engulfing grave of slime. He fell back, with his swarthy breast (from which my gripe had rent all clothing), like a hummock of bog-oak, standing out the quagmire; and then he tossed his arms to heaven, and they were black to the elbow, and the glare of his eyes was ghastly. I could only gaze and pant; for my strength was no more than an infant’s, from the fury and the horror. Scarcely could I turn away, while, joint by joint, he sank from sight.

I know that was relatively long, and told in a somewhat dated fashion, but damn if that isn’t great stuff nonetheless. The reader finally gets their catharsis—not in the way they expected, of course, but it’s there, and in very satisfying form.

Of course, Lorna’s not dead, as John finds out when he rides back. She heals, he heals, and they finally, finally, get their Happily Ever After.

Lorna Doone is compelling reading of surprising depth and well worth the effort it takes to come to grips with the language. As critic Pamela Knights writes, “it contains humour and high adventure, romance and history, lyricism and violence, in settings ranging from the domestic to the demonic – often…within a single chapter.”

Check it out!

An excerpt from my forthcoming book.

Happy New Year!

My new book, Horror Fiction in the 20th Century, is out on January 31st. (Amazon; Barnes and Noble; Powell’s). It turned out pretty well, I think, and even those of you who’ve read a lot of horror fiction should find some surprises within it, some authors you didn’t know about that you’ll want to search out, and in general that it’s a good read and a good guide to the horror literature of the twentieth century.

I hope to have some good news on the promotional front eventually (and will of course post the reviews of the book here), but to whet your appetites, I thought I’d post an excerpt from the book here.

The following is from Chapter Four, “Horror in the Mainstream,” in which I describe the horror fiction that was published in mainstream venues (rather than genre magazines) during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

The Creation of the Mainstream

The American idea that literature consists of, essentially, High Art and Low Art—mainstream literature and genre literature, realism and the fantastic, the serious and the popular—is a creation of the post–Civil War years and was invented by William Dean Howells and James T. Fields, the two editors of Atlantic Monthly, by a select group of Atlantic writers, and by

an alliance between the belletristic branch of the publishing industry and the Boston bourgeoisie . . . in practical terms, it arose from a set of interlocking institutional, social, and aesthetic relations that joined prominent publishing houses such as Ticknor & Fields and Houghton, Mifflin with influential literary journals, a particular collection of editors and writers who circulated among those magazines, and a small but highly influential and socially prominent readership.1

The controversies arising from the literary pronouncements of the “Atlantic group” and their backers, and from their construction of what was “literary” and what was not, dwindled at the turn of the twentieth century so that, by 1900, the influence of the Atlantic and its peer magazines was fading. “What one finds in the Atlantic group instead, at the opening of the twentieth century, is a proliferation of classifications for the fiction currently being produced, some of which discursively echo the debates about realism and other forms that engrossed reviewers in previous decades. . . .”2

By the 1920s, the present system of genre fiction, with what Michael Denning calls “its reified categories,”3 was in place. Before then, genres were far more miscible, their borders much more porous, so that the elements of what would later be seen as genre fiction could appear in mainstream literature without raising a critic’s or reader’s eyebrows. H. G. Wells could publish War of the Worlds and have the book be taken seriously by High Art devotees; so too with Marie Corelli and The Sorrows of Satan.

The 1920s cleavage between the serious and the popular had a sizable impact on how genre literature would be viewed and sold. For horror writers, those who wrote primarily horror fiction, it condemned them to a literary ghetto, one disrespected even by the standards of genre literature. (While Edmund Wilson would famously ask, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” no less a figure than T. S. Eliot would write approving reviews of them, and Vladimir Nabokov was a fan of them,4 but these were forms of approval that High Art critics would never deign to bestow on lowly horror fiction). Mainstream writers conversely could act the tourists and enjoy the money and the fun, while not being tarnished by the label “horror writer.”

Before the Great War

Horror, like science fiction and mysteries and Westerns, was seen by critics and reviewers as a separate genre, but publishers had not yet reacted to this new approach by segregating horror books into individual publishing houses or lines. In 1905, G. P. Putnam published Myrtle Reed’s horror novel At the Sign of the Jack O’Lantern alongside Albert Bielschowsky’s The Life of Goethe and a study of the novels of Henry James, just as Harper Brothers, a year later, published Van Tassel Sutphen’s science fiction novel The Doomsman alongside Lew Wallace’s autobiography, Frederick Jackson Turner’s Rise of the New West, 1819–1829, and William Dean Howells’s Their Husbands’ Wives.

Similarly, the major magazine publishers did not bring out a wave of genre pulps in the 1900s, despite the dime novel publishers having successfully published genre dime novels since 1860. The first genre pulp, Railroad Man’s Magazine, appeared in 1906, but it catered to a very specific market—fans and employees of railroads—rather than to fans of a genre, making it more akin to the hyper-specialized pulps of the 1930s than to the later genre pulps. The first true genre pulps would not appear for another nine years.

America

There were a number of American dabblers in horror in the years before World War I, but only three major mainstream authors who also wrote significant amounts of horror fiction or stories of superior quality.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jack London was a successful journalist and fiction writer and was turning out work as quickly as possible—including horror stories. He was no believer in the fantastic, but London was a working writer, and horror, whether science fictional or supernatural, was a genre in which stories could be sold and money could be made. London’s thirteen horror stories, published from 1889 to 1903, are told in the terse, naturalistic prose style that he made famous, and usually involve the revelation of the innate evil of men or animals. London’s horror fiction could be called West Coast school style, but for London’s independence from Bierce and the group of writers he mentored. Nonetheless, London’s horror stories have the imagination of the West Coast writers as well as the departure from the traditional (i.e., East Coast school) norms of horror fiction.

William Dean Howells wrote ten horror stories between 1902 and 1907. The stories are not highly regarded by most critics of horror; a typical comment is S. T. Joshi’s sneer that “the element of terror, or even the supernatural, in these stories, is so attenuated . . . that the overall effect is a kind of pale-pink weirdness entirely in keeping with the era in which they were written.”5 Critics less wedded to horror fiction tend to be more objective, noting instead the contradiction between Howells’s belief that fiction should spring from the observation of ordinary life and his use of the supernatural. These critics describe the result as “told in a sophisticated rather than a sensational way,”6 and “slow and deliberately unsensational, these stories are interesting as earnest attempts to dissolve the characteristic forms of psychic phenomena into a skeptical worldview, where apparitions become mysterious products of the mind of the beholder.”7 Howells’s horror work should be understood as concerned primarily with the consequences of abnormal psychology and unhealthy obsessions, and only secondarily (if at all) with achieving the terror effect of most horror stories.

Olivia Howard Dunbar was known in her lifetime as a prominent and popular New York City writer, the author of numerous well-reviewed short stories and biographies. Now, however, she is known primarily for her horror stories. Dunbar was a member of what Jessica Amanda Salmonson calls the 1900–1920 “renaissance” in ghost fiction8 and was both a writer of horror and a historian and theorist of it, writing two articles in 1905 and 1912, respectively, that analyzed the contemporary state of the ghost story. Dunbar’s horror fiction emphasizes naturalism in its settings and realism in the psychology of its characters, and is notable for Dunbar’s subtle, well-turned prose. Dunbar’s horror output was small—four stories in all—but they stand comparison with the stories of the best of the East Coast school writers, whose influences were much the same as Dunbar’s.

London, Howells, and Dunbar are the best known of the American mainstream writers to write horror fiction before the start of World War I. If they have one thing in common, it is the influence of the realistic narrative style. Dunbar’s prose style is some distance from that of London, but Dunbar still adheres to the realism, psychological, and narrative, which was the vogue at that time.

England

As in America, there were a number of English mainstream writers who penned the occasional horror story for their own collections of short stories or for the popular magazines, but only three of these authors wrote a number of exceptional horror stories.

Violet Hunt was in her time a notable writer, an important early feminist, one of the archetypal Edwardian New Women, and the model for several fictional New Women characters. Her novels have not endured as well as her horror stories, however, which are of excellent quality and place her solidly among the second rank of British horror writers during the 1901–1939 era. Her eleven horror stories combine her feminism with an emphasis on psychology, in the Henry Jamesian mold. James was a friend and admitted influence on Hunt’s horror fiction and was responsible for naming her second collection of horror stories, but it can be argued that Hunt is, if anything, James’s superior in the writing of horror and that she should be considered as a British Edith Wharton and as a proto–Joyce Carol Oates. Her stories range from the ironic to the somber but are almost always restrained and subtle.

Hunt’s horror was original not for her plots or themes, which were for the most part traditional ghost stories and contes cruel, but for her treatment of psychology and character and for the use to which she put the supernatural. Hunt uses the supernatural subtly, to create a chilling sense of unease, while emphasizing the despair, mental cruelty, errant passions, malfunctioning relationships, and psychological torment of her characters. Many of the stories are semi-autobiographical, featuring “sensitive but independent heroines involved with men who are too weak to contribute emotionally to the relationship.”9

John Masefield achieved fame as a poet and as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 to 1967. However, in his early years, he produced substantial work as a commercial writer, including two collections of sea stories, A Mainsail Haul (1905) and A Tarpaulin Muster (1907), of which most were horror stories. Masefield did not tell William Hope Hodgson–style horror stories—indeed, Masefield’s sea horror stories predate those of Hodgson—but rather stories that combine traditional nautical folklore with a poet’s language and a keen grasp of nautical detail. Masefield’s horror stories, though certainly entertaining and chilling, are more nineteenth rather than twentieth century, obviously pre-Machen quartet, and are far closer to the traditional work of a Quiller-Couch than the modern and innovative work of a Hodgson.

H. Munro, known by his pseudonym “Saki,” was in his time both popular and important. Known and liked for his short fiction and the style in which he wrote—“it guaranteed for the sophisticated reader a certain kind of ironic, perversely amusing short tale, often reminiscent of O. Henry in its laconic surprise ending and of Oscar Wilde in its stylistic sting and witty turn of phrase”10—he was an influence on Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh, and P. G. Wodehouse during and after his lifetime. But he abandoned his best weapon—satire—in his horror fiction. In his mainstream fiction, he wielded satire as a weapon against his enemies, the boors, twits, domestic tyrants, and callous members of the upper classes. But horror, especially the supernatural variety, seemed to hold a special place in Saki’s heart; horror was, however unconsciously, the instrument with which he could come to grips most directly with the unpleasantnesses of life, with the effects of his own miserably unhappy childhood, and with the end-product of his sardonic outlook on life. In his horror, he didn’t use satire to attack his enemies; instead, he used plot, theme, and character and, if need be, a story’s narration itself. Saki never abandoned his trademark wit and incisiveness in his horror fiction, which are an epitome of a certain type of Edwardian horror, and his horror stories are the equal of his mainstream stories. But viewed through the lens of his personal life, they take on an extra poignancy.

 

It’s Halloween: have some public domain horror stories!

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve got a book coming out on January 31st: Horror Fiction in the 20th Century, a guide to horror fiction published around the world (i.e., both inside the US & UK and outside). It’s a combination of history and criticism and best-ofs, with me highlighting the best and most successful authors of the twentieth century and describing what they did best and why they were so good, as well as me laying out the broader history of horror fiction during the century and, when necessary, quarreling with other horror critics about their (wrong!) conclusions or (more often) their inexcusable omissions and inaccuracies.

Given that it’s Halloween, I thought it would be a good idea to bombard Twitter with a list of fourteen of the best stories from my favorite pre-1950s horror writers. Someone suggested that I put all the links to the stories in one place for ease of use. And so here we are!

Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One.” A comparatively well-known (or at least oft-anthologized) classic, by a horror writer who never quite got (or gets) his due.

Margaret Irwin’s “The Book”.  In one of my novels (that I still have high hopes for getting published) I did an homage to this story, which is for the serious readers out there.

Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”. Neither Bowen nor this story get the praise they deserve–at least, not from horror critics. Which is a shame, because this story is really damn good.

Saki’s “Shredni Vashtar”. Has been anthologized a lot, but still retains its bite. (Heh). Horror critics like but don’t love Saki–some don’t even go that far–which mystifies me.

Ellen Glasgow’s “The Shadow Third”. I have a private theory–don’t tell anyone, okay?–that Glasgow was a kind of influence on Lovecraft. But exploring that will have to wait for my “Lovecraft’s Women” article on why Lovecraft was so reluctant to give formal credit to the notable women horror writers of the time. (The answer–sexism!–will not surprise you).

Katherine Fullerton Gerould’s “The Wine of Violence”. Now forgotten and obscure, Gerould was of note during her heyday, and Lovecraft undoubtedly would have read her.

Violet Hunt’s “The Prayer”. A novella, but, well, just read it. I call Hunt a “proto-Joyce Carol Oates” in my book, and the superior of Henry James as a horror story writer.

A.E. Coppard’s “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me”. Once famous and widely anthologized, now just a footnote, like Coppard himself, which is a shame.

Walter De La Mare’s “Seaton’s Aunt”. Oh, this is the good old stuff.

Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Doll”. Written when she was only twenty. I mean, damn.

E.F. Benson’s “Mrs. Amworth”. Benson’s not forgotten about, at least by critics, but I think even the more committed and literate horror fans haven’t read much or anything by him, which is a shame.

A.M. Burrage’s “Smee”. Technically a Christmas story.

W.F. Harvey’s “August Heat”. For full effect, should be read during the irons of summer.

My forthcoming book

 I have a new book coming out this January. Entitled Horror Fiction in the 20th Century: Exploring Literature’s Most Chilling Genre, and will be published by Praeger. The book runs 258 pages and will list for $50.00.

To quote from Praeger’s web page for the book:

Horror Fiction in the 20th Century encompasses the world of 20th century horror literature and explores and describes it in a critical but balanced fashion. Readers will be exposed the world of horror literature, a truly global phenomenon during the 20th century.

Beginning with the modern genre’s roots in the 19th century, the book proceeds to cover 20th century horror literature in all of its manifestations, whether in comics, pulps, paperbacks, hardcover novels, or mainstream magazines, and from every country that produced it. The major horror authors of the century receive their due, but the works of many authors who are less well-known or who have been forgotten are also described and analyzed. In addition to providing critical assessments and judgments of individual authors and works, the book describes the evolution of the genre and the major movements within it.

Horror Fiction in the 20th Century stands out from its competitors and will be of interest to its readers because of its informed critical analysis, its unprecedented coverage of female authors and writers of color, and its concise historical overview.

Features

Covers both the best-known authors of horror literature and a large number of lesser-known or forgotten authors whose work would reward searching out by modern readers
Is unprecedented in its coverage of international horror literature and includes dozens of authors whose horror fiction has never before been translated into English
Covers the major 20th century developments and movements within horror literature in one volume, in a linear and chronological manner
Is a corrective to decades of sexist, racist, colonialist, and provincial horror criticism

If you’re interested, the Table of Contents for the book is up here.

A teaser for the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, Second Edition

I see I haven’t announced this here yet.

A second edition to my Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana is forthcoming. The second edition will have a number of new entries and a huge amount of new material added to the entries from the first edition. In fact, there’s so much new material that the page count for the second edition is over twice that of the first edition–the page count is over 2,200 pages (a little over 796,000 words). Obviously that’s too many pages to fit in one book, so this edition (let’s just call it EFV2e to save space) is going to be ebook only. The cover is being worked on as I type this, and I hope to have the ebook for sale by the time Readercon rolls around. (I’ll plug the release date of EFV2e widely, never fear!)

To whet your appetite, and remind you of what I’m talking about, here’s the title list for EFV2e and here’s a sample entry. Enjoy!

(I’ll be posting more teasers here in the run-up to publication)

 

Some Thoughts on Women Writers and Lovecraft

In Which I Ramble About Indirect Influences and the Pernicious Power of Sexism

The following isn’t going to be an academic article on the subject of How And Which Women Horror Writers Directly Influenced Lovecraft. I’m not literary critic enough or expert enough on Lovecraft to write that.

What this is, rather, is a semi-organized group of thoughts–can’t even call it an essay, to be honest–on a subject that hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage–or any, really, which is which women writers either directly or indirectly influenced or were an important part of the movements that influenced Lovecraft.

Why this subject hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage–well, we’ll get to that, but it boils down to critical sexist myopia on the part of the major Lovecraft scholars.

Lovecraft was a funny old bird. (And, yes, racist and sexist and all the rest–we’ll just accept those as givens for the sake of this blog post). A brief skim through his biographies (I’m making use of S.T. Joshi’s A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time [2001], although Joshi’s H.P. Lovecraft: A Life [1996] and I am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft [2013] would probably do just as well) drives this point home hard. A loner for most of his childhood, an autodidact who spent a great amount of his childhood reading scientific books above his age level, and a boy who much preferred the company of adults to children his own age, Lovecraft’s difficult childhood environment (dominant, smothering, affectionless mother, absent and then dead father) and straitened circumstances (I don’t think he ever knew what it was to be financially secure and comfortable) pretty obviously exerted an enormous amount of psychological and emotional pressure on him. He had four mental/nervous breakdowns before he was fifteen and a serious “nervous collapse” in 1908, when he was eighteen, and it’s unclear whether he ever admitted to himself that his father’s death was from syphilis.

Reading and writing seem to have been the chief pleasures in his life. As we can see from the Chronological Bibliography of Lovecraft’s publications, he began writing at age seven and kept it up more or less continuously through his life. As someone who thought deeply about writing, he was always open–apparently–about the sources of his stories and the influences on them.

The writers who are generally accepted to have been the biggest influences on Lovecraft’s writing, based on his own statements, were men: Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood. And Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature certainly shows Lovecraft to have been well-read in horror, though some and perhaps many of those writers Lovecraft only read as an adult, and various arguments have been advanced about which writers in Supernatural Horror in Literature were influential on Lovecraft.

(As an aside: Lovecraft’s style evolved as he grew older, so the question of who influenced him applies not just to his childhood and teenaged reading but to the reading he did as an adult).

A lot of critical work–a lot of critical work–has been written about the influence of these various authors on Lovecraft’s fiction and poetry. But there’s a curious–or perhaps not so curious–absence, in Lovecraft’s letters, in Supernatural Horror in Literature, and in the secondary, critical work of people like Joshi and Robert H. Waugh in Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors (2013). Largely missing from these biographies and critical works are women–by which I mean women writers of horror.

(Lovecraft’s personal attitude toward women, as expressed in his stories…well, I’ll let Gina Wisker, from New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft, say it:

Despite interest in H. P. Lovecraft’s own relationships with women, his controlling aunts, and his limited marriage, his female characters are rarely explored critically, possibly because they are so few. However, with the depiction of Lavinia Whately, Marceline, Keziah Mason, and other deadly, deranged, dangerous creatures, his work replays various constructions of the monstrous feminine as critically explored by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Barbara Creed, among others. In Lovecraft’s work, there is a fascination with women as the source of disruption and disorder. There are rare examples of the femme fatale figure common in fin-de-siècle art and literature (“Medusa’s Coil”), and frequent treatments of the witch or haglike woman (“Dreams in the Witch-House”). However, Lovecraft’s unique contribution to the depiction of women who elicit terror and disgust is through the figure of those who are culpable of miscegenation, interbreeding with the alien Other, creatures from the seas, from Hell, from other dimensions, and, controversially for contemporary readers, in Lovecraft’s view, the “racially inferior” (Lord, 2004 20). Lord suggests that Lovecraft’s racism is “blunt, ugly, and unavoidable” (Lord, 2004 20) but that the main focus of this fear and distaste is the women, the source of whatever is being bred.)

Women writers of horror should be mentioned in these biographies and critical works. Not because it’s compulsory—though it should be, it’s critically significant if a male writer has no female influences—but because it defies reason that Lovecraft didn’t read them.

Joshi’s first admitted exposure to horror fiction was at age eight (in 1898), when he first encountered the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The subsequent narrative of the writers who influenced him, at least as peddled by S.T. Joshi and his claque, is that Lovecraft stuck to male writers, the Machen Quartet (Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, and M.R. James) foremost among them.

But someone as interested in—as fascinated by—horror as Lovecraft surely did not limit himself to works by the Machen Quartet, or the Gothics (in which he read widely), or the major male horror writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a child or teenager, or even those and other male horror writers through the rest of his life. Lovecraft would have read female horror writers. In truth, there’s no way he could have avoided them.

Horror fiction in America in the nineteenth century was largely the province of women. As scholar and writer Jessica Amanda Salmonson has pointed out, as much as seventy percent of the horror fiction published in the nineteenth century was written by women. Before the 1890s arrival of the Machen Quartet, the biggest names in American horror fiction were women–and (and this deserves emphasis) the biggest names in regional horror of New England were women. Lovecraft was a creature of New England for nearly all of his life, and it would have been impossible for him to have escaped reading women’s horror fiction if he did any reading outside of the cheaper pulps and dime novels–if he read newspapers or the major mainstream periodicals or the major pulps, he would have encountered women’s horror fiction.  As omnivorous a reader of horror as Lovecraft was, it’s very difficult to believe he didn’t consume, say, Argosy or Saturday Evening Post or Cosmopolitan (a major source of fiction, Way Back When–first to serialize Wells’ War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon) or the other venues which published women’s horror fiction. Women’s horror fiction was everywhere during Lovecraft’s childhood and teenage years—the Machen Quartet were among the best and most influential male writers of horror fiction during the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, but their popularity didn’t mean that women stopped writing horror fiction or stopped having their horror fiction published  in prominent periodicals, in collections, and in novels. He couldn’t have avoided seeing women’s horror fiction, and I think he wouldn’t have wanted to avoid reading it.

After all, in Supernatural Horror in Literature Lovecraft writes about the Gothics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—many written by women—and singles out some female horror writers, particularly Ann Radcliffe. Mary Shelley, too, (somewhat surprisingly) Emily Brontë, (very surprisingly) Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Clemence Housman, and May Sinclair.

Too, in his personal library Lovecraft had horror novels and horror stories written by women. We know what was in Lovecraft’s personal library circa 1932.

(There’s actually a book, twice updated, titled Lovecraft’s Library, which apparently covers all the books Lovecraft mentioned in his letters as well as those known to have been in his personal collection when he died. But I don’t own Lovecraft’s Letters and I’m certainly not going to buy it solely for this blog post. So there may be more horror works by women writers that I don’t know about. But the 1932 personal library is a good starting place).

Among the novels we find:

Mary Bligh-Bond’s Avernus
Esther Forbes’ A Mirror for Witches
Signe Toksvig’s The Last Devil

Among the magazines we find a complete run, as of 1932, of Weird Tales, which published well over one hundred women writers, including, most notably, Allison V. Harding, Mary Counselman, and Margaret St. Clair.

And then there are the anthologies:

Masterpieces of Mystery. A four-volume set, but Lovecraft only had three volumes, one of which was undoubtedly volume three, “Ghost Stories.” Katherine Rickford is in there, for “Joseph: A Story” (1920).
The Best Psychic Stories, which also has Rickford’s “Joseph” as well as Elsa Barker’s “The Sylph and the Father” (1920).
The Not at Night Series: Not at Night, which has Greye La Spina’s “The Tortoise-Shell Cat.”
You’ll Need a Night Light, which has Zita Inez Ponder’s “His Wife” (1927), and Christine Campbell Thompson’s “Out of the Earth;” Gruesome Cargoes, which has Thompson’s “When Hell Laughed,” and Dora Christie-Murray’s “Drums of Fear” (1926); By Daylight Only, which has Thompson’s “At Number Eleven,” Signe Toskvig’s “The Devil’s Martyr” (1928); and Switch on the Light, which has Thompson’s “The Red Turret.”
Beware After Dark, which has Cynthia Stockley’s “The Mollmeit of the Mountain” (1913), Ellen Glasgow’s “The Shadowy Third” (1916), and Gertrude Atherton’s “The Striding Place” (1896).
The Omnibus of Crime, which has Margaret Oliphant’s “The Open Door” (1882), Marjorie Bowen’s “The Avenging of Ann Leete” (1923), and May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” (1922).

Most of these works are sufficiently different in style and substance from what Lovecraft wrote that no argument can be made of their influence. Most–but not all:

Bligh-Bond’s Avernus is a fantasy novel about reincarnation romance that includes the psychic experiences of other species. Now, I haven’t read Avernus—I’m relying on secondary critical works for information about the novel—but that summary puts me in mind of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow out of Time.” And since Avernus was published in 1924 and “Shadow out of Time” was written in 1934, there’s no chronological problem with the former influencing the latter.

Forbes’ A Mirror for Witches is a historical fantasy set in 17th century New England during the Salem Witch trials, and is about a girl who confesses to being a witch, because she believes she is one. I haven’t read A Mirror for Witches—no time—but the reviews praise the novel’s quality and evocation of the “eerie atmosphere of New England’s dark past,” and makes me think of Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House.” Again, there’s no chronological difficulties in Forbes having influenced Lovecraft—A Mirror for Witches was published in 1928 and “Witch House” was written in 1932.

More interestingly, there are authors and works who we can be relatively sure of having an influence on Lovecraft but who are nowhere represented in his library or in his biographies or critical works about him. Two in particular are worth noting:

Sarah Orne Jewett. Now known mostly to Victorianists and scholars of women’s writing, Jewett was once a giant of American letters, heavily influential on a generations of New England writers and praised by the likes of Rudyard Kipling and M.R. James.

Jewett would seem to be an odd choice for writers that Lovecraft might have been influenced by—except that Jewett, who wrote what is now called “regional fiction” about Maine, was the foremost promulgator of the fictional New England town phenomenon—that is, writers making up a fictional New England town or city, like Lovecraft’s Arkham and Innsmouth and Dunwich, as the site for their stories. Sarah Orne Jewett didn’t invent this, but in Lovecraft’s childhood and teens Jewett was the major practitioner of a story-cycle set around a fictional New England locale, in Jewett’s case Deephaven and then Dunnet’s Landing. As Jessica Amanda Salmonson wrote,

Dunnet Landing is the most famous non-existent town of Maine & reminds us of Lovecraft’s Dunwich, Massachusetts. The influence of regional fiction from the nineteenth century on American horror writers has long been underestimated, though many of the ghost stories of August Derleth are frank imitations of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman & Sarah Jewett. The idea of a totally invented town was well established among the New England regionalists, & it is safe to say there never would have been a Dunwich or an Arkham had there never been a Deephaven or a Dunnet Landing…

 Vernon Lee. One of the best writers of the supernatural of her time, Lee was also a noted writer on art and aesthetics.

Lee, like Jewett, is not the first writer that people would choose for Lovecraft to have been influenced by. She’s far more of a writer of psychological hauntings and psychological horrors than Lovecraft was. And as Anthony Camara writes, “Whereas the weird horror of Lovecraft and the ‘Modern Masters’ revolves around the destabilization of matter, nature, and the cosmos, and is thus intrinsically ontological and/or metaphysical, Lee’s fiction does not show the slightest interest in destabilizing physical reality.”

But Lee was in fact influential on Lovecraft in two ways. It must be remembered that Lee was a significant writer of supernatural weird horror during the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900; Lovecraft, so eager to read horror fiction, must have heard of her, and undoubtedly would have read some of her work. (Absence of evidence—that is, none of Lee’s collections being in Lovecraft’s library, and none of Lee’s stories being in any of the anthologies in Lovecraft’s library—is not evidence of absence).

The first influence is in the psychological effects of horror on Lovecraft’s protagonists. They are generally high-strung, not particularly stable to begin with and rendered unstable because of brushing up against the unnameable and indescribable, and in general the opposite of the rugged, hyper-masculine, implacable and unmoveable male characters of most adventure fiction of the time. Lee’s horror stories, like Lovecraft, emphasize the baleful effect of the weird—the formless supernatural in Lee’s case, the alien space-gods and their spawn in Lovecraft’s. This emphasis on the psychological effects of horror on protagonists was a common enough authorial trick, but Lee’s prominence among writers of the weird and horrible would have meant that it would have impressed itself on him as an authorial trick to emulate, or at the very least as a modern version of the hysteria-causing horrors of Poe’s fiction.

The second influence, the broader and deeper one, lies in the combination of Lee’s materialism—because for her the weird can be reduced to scientific principles and facts—and her conception of (in Camara’s words) “human subjectivity and the forces that haunt it as explicable by the mechanisms of heredity.” These were significant departures from the prevailing horror and weird fiction dynamics of the time—but are themes that repeatedly appear in Lovecraft’s work. Moreover, Lee’s emphasis on the primacy of human psychology as the ultimate source of “supernatural” and psychic horrors, being so different from Lovecraft’s work and from the work of the Machen Quartet, can be argued to have been influential on Lovecraft as themes to be avoided. Again, Lee was a major weird and horror author of the time. Lovecraft would have read her and—thoughtful about writers as he was—would have taken note of her aesthetics and thematics, and would have struck out in the opposite direction, away from her and towards the Machen Quartet. Not every influence is going to be a positive one.

That’s four women authors of horror fiction who may—in my view, who did—influence Lovecraft. My position is arguable—but no less plausible, I think, than the many other arguments critics and scholars put forth about the various male writers who supposedly influenced Lovecraft.

So why hasn’t anything been written about these women writers or other significant women writers of horror of the time influencing Lovecraft’s writing?

One reason, of course, is the absence of their names from Lovecraft’s letters and Supernatural Horror in Literature and the absence of their works from Lovecraft’s library. But as only a moment’s consideration shows, this doesn’t mean he didn’t read them—again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Why didn’t Lovecraft write about women writers he had read or was reading?

Well, read that Gina Wisker quote again about women in Lovecraft’s writing. It’s sometimes risky to extrapolate what a writer actually believes from that writer’s fiction, but in this case Lovecraft’s fiction seems to have accurately reflected Lovecraft’s beliefs, at least as far as women are concerned. Lovecraft didn’t have many female friends, as a child, teenager, or adult. His was a largely homosocial world. But despite his revulsion at the mechanics of sex with women and his nearly entirely male circle of friends, he wasn’t gay—if anything, he was asexual.

Which would be irrelevant to this discussion—plenty of aces are friends with and love women and even have sex with women—except I’d argue that Lovecraft, vain as he was, took his antipathy toward the physical act of sex and toward romance with women and not only projected them into his fiction, but allowed it to fuel a kind of embarrassment at the very idea of being influenced by women. Misogyny has many manifestations, after all, and it’s quite possible that Lovecraft’s misogyny was the type that saw viewed men who allowed themselves to be influenced by women as lesser men or lesser beings. This particular variety of misogyny would have manifested itself in silence when it came to women’s horror writing that influenced him—he may have been influenced by this female writer or that female writer, but he would never admit that influence to himself, much less to other men.

Armchair psychologizing? Perhaps—but so much that is written about Lovecraft is also armchair psychology.

The larger reason that no one’s written about women horror writers influencing Lovecraft—well, I’ll let Jessica Amanda Salmonson say it, and depressingly and angrily note that she wrote this thirty years ago and nothing’s changed:

Women have been overlooked by many means, so that if you set out to find tales of strangeness & terror by women, you would have a difficult time of it. This is no place for a synopsis of Joanna Russ’s brilliant How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), but the fate of women’s supernatural & horrific writings could have provided textbook cases for all her points. Mention Mary Higgens Clark or V. C. Andrews & be told, “Yes, but their gothicisms are not ultimately supernatural, so they don’t count.” Mention women’s dominance in Victorian ghost stories (Riddell, Molesworth, Oliphant, Broughton, Wood, ad infinitum, not to mention the neglected American portion) & be told, “Yes, but those are not always horrific in intent, & that’s a long time ago, so it doesn’t count.” Mention the horrorific fiction of Ruth Rendall & Patricia Highsmith, it’s “But only a little of their output is supernatural & they’re really closer to mysteries.” Mention Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s vampire tales & be told, “Yes, but these are more romance than horror; they don’t count.” Mention Russ or Tiptree or Charnas & a dozen other moderns who’ve written first-rate horror, & it’s: “They’re better known for their science fiction, so we can’t count them.” Mention Kathryn Ptacek & it’s, “But she was helped by a husband, Charles Grant, the real star of the family” (as there was only one Browning?). How about Shirley Jackson, the real beginning of the modern horror genre without whom Stephen King would have found no road paved for his success. According to the naysayers, “She was an anomaly & anyway she didn’t produce that much overall.”

As a general rule critics and historians of horror fiction have slighted women’s contribution to the genre, and the major recent histories of horror literature have not improved matters. Joshi & Stefan Dziemianowicz’s Supernatural Literature of the World (2005), Joshi’s Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2014), Xavier Aldana Reyes’ Horror: A Literary History (2016), Matt Cardin’s Horror Literature Through History (2017), Kevin Corstorphine & Laura Kremmel’s Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018)—certain women writers are described or mentioned or referred to in these works (because they are too famous and influential to omit), but the great mass of second-rankers, and even the majority of the first-raters, who happen to be women simply don’t appear in them, or (in the case of Joshi) are slighted by the writers, who apply ludicrously uneven standards to them and seem wholly unaware of their own misogyny and sexism.

(At the risk of being self-congratulatory and self-serving: my two books on horror fiction, Horror Needs No Passport, a guide to international [non-US, non-UK] horror fiction of the 20th century, and my A Chilling Age of Horror [due out out next year from Praeger], about 20th century horror fiction, were written with this gender gap in mind—I tried my best to rectify it).

As long as men are writing the histories of horror fiction and writing about the influences on Lovecraft, this state of affairs won’t change. In the past twenty years we’ve had feminist and queer studies readings of Lovecraft’s work, but more is needed, about Lovecraft’s background, about the major female horror writers of Lovecraft’s childhood and teenaged years, and about Lovecraft’s fiction.

A short history of 20th century African-American horror literature

As I may have mentioned here before, I’m writing A Chilling Age of Horror: How 20th Century Horror Fiction Changed The Genre for Praeger (due out late spring 2020). A Chilling Age of Horror is, as the title says, a look (as panoptical as I could make it) at 20th century horror fiction, starting with the Machen Quartet (Machen, Blackwood, Dunsany, James) and following all the major and the important minor writers and trends in horror fiction published during the century.

This being Black History Month, and with the trailer to Us fresh on my mind, I thought I’d post my take on 20th century African-American horror fiction.

In a very real sense horror, in the form of slavery, was a part of the African-American experience from the beginning. Unsurprisingly, horror was a part of African-American narratives from the first as well. The folklore, legends, and myths brought over from Africa during the Middle Passage and turned into oral literature by the slaves was one significant element of pre-twentieth century African-American horror literature.1 A second, which long outlasted the African folklore and legends as a source of African-American horror, was the Gothic, which in its “Afro-Gothic” form was as popular by the end of the twentieth century as it was in its more primitive form centuries earlier.

Viewed collectively, the titles of canonical and lesser-known African-American texts project a long-standing–if unintentional–concern with the nexus between blackness, fear and terror. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There [Harriet E. Wilson, 1859]; “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare” [Charles W. Chesnutt, 1899]; Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self [Pauline Hopkins, 1902-1903]; Invisible Man [Ralph Ellison, 1952]; Shadow and Act [Ralph Ellison, 1964]; The Spook Who Sat By the Door [Sam Greenlee, 1969]; A Visitation of Spirits [Randall Kenan, 1989]; Let the Dead Bury Their Dead [Randall Kenan, 1992]–these titles’ common bloodline is that they pulsate with gothic traits: the split or divided self, a theme which has epidermal, psychological, spatial, and national implications; the preternatural concern with blackness as the unconscious horror haunting the personal and collective white American psyche; the omnipresence of blackness as a befouling but ineradicable presence in the American psychic landscape; and the irrepressible materiality of those things designated alien and grotesque–the black, the female, the homosexual, the nationally dispossessed, all of which constitute an abject morass sullying America’s mythic sense of innocence, equality, and opportunity. If the “unspeakable” is “one of the most distinctive of Gothic tropes”…then the gothic is and has been secretly implanted in the black imagination….2

The first published form of African-American literature, the slave narrative, was Gothic:

As Hannah Crafts astutely notes in her own slave storyline, the slave narrator’s life was extraordinary and innately gothic, needing no fictionalizing to augment market appeal. Despite their formulaic tales and determinations to prove their claim that they are not fictionalizing…the ex-slave writers, among many others, manage to inscribe gothic formulations within their narrative beyond mere plot. The very life of a slave is also inevitably a gothic existence. The murders/suicides, rapes, entrapment and escape cycles, torture (brutal whippings), and familial secrets (illegitimate births) that make up numerous gothic plots constitute real, daily existence under slavery. Therefore, these writers have recourse to gothic ideological tropes, exercising them as rhetorical asides upon an already gothic plot. Furthermore, as texts such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl illustrate, the slave narrative easily transitions, typologically and ideologically, into the gothic novelistic mode.3

By the turn of the twentieth century, when horror was cohering into a discrete and marketed commercial entity, African-American authors were producing Gothic fiction, both in stories and at novel-length. A number of the stories in Charles W. Chesnutt’s collection The Conjure Woman (1899) make use of Gothic elements either partially or wholly:

Although the stories do not achieve gothic effect–the shudder-provoking end often undone by the revelation of Julius’ varied ulterior motives–they do have frequent recourse to the gothic’s tropes. Chesnutt combines gothic elements with sociological observations to achieve a “gothic texture” (Edwards 90). Significantly, this “texture” is apparent in the cases of haunting, murder, inter- and intraracial violence, and implied rape that haunt Chesnutt’s stories. Chesnutt’s use of the genre results in a series of stories that invert the gothic tropes in ways similar to slave narrative use: the tales “identify the positive effects of darkness set against the demonic effects of whiteness associated with the perpetuation of slavery…[thus] situating whiteness…as the inspiration of fear and a more appropriate shade of the gothic” (Crow 2009, 90).4

Chesnutt “uses the gothic as a vehicle of an African-derived sense of time and space which allies nature with the sacred: time and space expand and alter because they are animated.”5 Similarly, his The Marrow of Tradition (1901) makes heavy use of the ruined, blasted Gothic landscape as “a metaphor for all of America when viewed through the lens of race.”6

Pauline Hopkins wrote her Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902-1903) to raise what she called the “stigma of degradation” from African-Americans and to stress the unity of biological kinship of all human beings, but its concluding chapters rely heavily on the Gothic. A riot is described in Gothic and horror story terms, with lingering, nightmarish effects, rioters described as vampires, a doctor makes his way through a landscape of mutilated black corpses;

the novel notably ends in this environment of horror, its characters surrounded by scenes of mob violence and brutality in which white men become the bogeymen to blacks. The atmosphere and haunted landscapes introducing each of these texts hint at the actual problematic recurrence of violence and racial oppression reminiscent of slavery, and thus illustrates important moments of temporal collapse.7

The earlier appearance of a ghost, a traditional Gothic trope, is by contrast “tempered: ghostly appearances in these novels are not traditionally Gothic in that the ghosts evoke neither fear nor dread in the reader.”8

Jean Toomer’s collection Cane (1923) is critically acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of Harlem Renaissance literature, and one of the first novels to sensitively and insightfully portray the African-Americans of the American South. Cane is also a Gothic: “Toomer’s interest in generic and genetic impurity (for example, the U.S. history of miscegenation) places him firmly within the territory of the Gothic, as does his exploration of the history and meaning of slavery and the modern insistence on uniformity and conformity that he associates with industrialization.”9 As with other African-American Gothics, the ruined landscape of the South–ruined in this case by what Maisha Wester calls “slavery’s haunting specter”10–is a recurring Gothic trope in Cane: “the entirety of the South proves a wild and ruined ‘home’ that hints at a terrible past of sexual violation, gross abuses of authority, and criminal disenfranchisement, much like the haunted houses of the traditional gothic.”11

It might be expected that there would have been African-American horror writers from the beginning of horror as an organized commercial genre. There may well have been such writers during the dime novel era of the nineteenth century and the pulp era of the twentieth century, but they remain unknown: “As Harlan Ellison once noted to Samuel Delany, nothing is known of dozens of the writers of the pulps of the first half of the 20th century. Many of them might have been women or people of color.”12 So the first known horror story of the twentieth century by an African-American author is Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk” (1925). “Spunk” is told in the vernacular of African-Americans of rural central Florida and displays the author’s expertise in the folk beliefs of the people she portrays—beliefs alien to most readers of “Spunk,” then and now. “Spunk” is a well-wrought distillation of local folklore into the form of horror fiction, with Hurston’s strong narrative voice and expert use of dialogue emphasizing the horror elements of the story; an intriguing theory that the story is a “complex allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet” should add to the reader’s appreciation of Hurston’s artistry.13

Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) is about the life of a black woman and single mother, and deals with themes of racism, sexism, and classism. The Street was critically acclaimed on publication and was seen as breathing new life into the social criticism novel and the naturalistic novel. Less commented upon by critics are the deeply Gothic aspects of the novel. Keith Clark is undoubtedly correct when he writes that “at least through the 1960s, the preponderance of black literature might be considered a ‘literature of terror,’ with slavery of course standing in as the ‘original sin’ which provided the artistic matrix for subsequent black authors,”14 with The Street standing as an exception:

Petry’s Afro-Gothic defies such jejune categories as protest gothic or feminist gothic or Afrocentric gothic…the scope of Petry’s narrative concerns—horror; sexual and racial neuroses; unquenchable materialism and the dis-ease it engenders; spatial confinement; commodity, racial, and gender fetishisms—moves The Street beyond the realm of “social” terror. The novel’s catholicity marks Petry’s as a malleable gothic architectonics, the framework of which she manipulates and alters for manifold rhetorical ends.15

The list of the Gothic tropes in The Street reads like a checklist of archetypal Gothic elements: “catatonia, paroxysmal, blood-curdling violence; confinement and entombment; psychosexual neuroses; villainous and shape-shifting characters who worry and dislocate the line separating ‘good’ and ‘evil’; and an omnipresent and palpable specter of impending death.”16

Alice Walker’s “The Child Who Favored Daughter” (1973) makes for horrifying, if mesmerizing, reading. About a sullen, Bible-thumping African-American sharecropper who deals with the guilt over his sister’s life and suicide and with his attraction to his own daughter by imprisoning, torturing, and killing her, “The Child Who Favored Daughter” has no supernatural elements, but needs none to be thoroughly horrific and terrifying. The story is a thoroughly professional mixture of technique, emotion, storytelling, horror, and confronting what in the African-American literary community of the 1960s aroused only “silent but unreconcilable antipathy.”17 Further, as Maisha Wester argues, “The Child Who Favored Daughter” “challenges the ideas of black monolithic identity and allegiance using the tropes of incest, murder, torture, and suicide to illustrate the dire consequences of melancholic subject formation in connection to the construction of racial allegiance.”18

The wave of paperback horror novels during the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was in some respects similar to the wave of pulp horror stories published in the 1920s and 1930s, with a number of novels written by authors about whom there is little information. Just as with the pulps, so too with the paperback horror novels: some or perhaps many of these authors could have been men or women of color. One author who is known to have been African-American was Joseph Nazel, the writer of the Blaxploitation horror novel The Black Exorcist (1974), a Blaxploitation version of Blatty’s The Exorcist. The Black Exorcist uses familiar Blaxploitation tropes, from a Satanic cult that was a front for the Mafia to the protagonist, a former pimp who found God, as well as a surprising dose of realism: “Nazel was an African-American man deeply tied to his community, and so The Black Exorcist has a real feel for L.A. street life.”19 However, The Black Exorcist did not spawn imitators or create a wave of African-American authors writing commercial horror novels.

Arguably the first work of horror by a professional African-American writer of fantastika was Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984). “Bloodchild,” a science fiction novella which tells the story of human males on another planet who bear alien children, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award in 1985. “Bloodchild” “explores the paradoxes of power and inequality, and starkly portrays the experience of a class who, like women throughout most of history, are valued chiefly for their reproductive capacities.”20 “Bloodchild” does this through squirm-inducing implantation scenes, creating a body horror narrative that is both visceral and philosophical, and which Butler wrote as a way to “ease an old fear of mine…I worried about the botfly—an insect with, what seemed to me then, horror-movie habits.”21

Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985) centers around an affluent black suburb and spotlights its material corruption and moral decay. A contemporary allegory with Gothic overtones, Linden Hills is

a modern version of Dante’s Inferno in which souls are damned not because they have offended God or have violated a religious system but because they have offended themselves. In their single-minded pursuit of upward mobility, the inhabitants of Linden Hills, a black, middle-class suburb, have turned away from their past and from their deepest sense of who they are.22

As Maisha Wester writes,

Naylor’s text is overtly gothic. The villain, Luther Nedeed, is a mysterious and anachronistic mortician often described as better placed in the nineteenth century. The neighborhood of Linden Hills winds and rambles, replacing the gothic’s sprawling mansion with its unusual occurrences and haunting noises, and its residents are inhuman automatons who serve the will of a single, demonic, seemingly ageless man. Willa, the novel’s heroine, is not only a variation of the stock “mad-woman-in-the-attic” character, but also frequently compared to Poe’s vengeful Madeline Usher…Naylor even symbolically evokes cannibalism to round out her gothic story.23

Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is a ghost story about the horrific prices slavery demanded from the enslaved. Although Beloved contains a number of frightening supernatural moments, its central purpose is to conceptually horrify–that is, to appall the reader through the knowledge of what was done to slaves like the protagonist and her family and loved ones. “Beloved is more of a work of magical realism than it is a traditional ghost narrative in that the appearance of the supernatural is not necessarily a disturbing disruption of reality, but instead an accepted part of the daily world.”24 Beloved is, as S.T. Joshi notes, “an exquisite prose poem…[that] focuses so intently on the horror and tragedy of slavery that all other features in it dwindle to insignificance.”25

Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989) depicts the traumatic effects of slavery on generations of African-Americans, but the primary driver of events is the protagonist’s confusion, guilt, and disgust at his own homosexuality. The protagonist ends up possessed by demons–who may only be imaginary–and commits suicide after a night of horrifying psychological struggle. As Maisha Wester writes, Kenan “performs revisions of the Gothic that prove particularly noteworthy and complex. Kenan uses the genre to reveal the archetypal depictions of racial, sexual, and gendered Others as constructions useful in the production of (white) patriarchal dominance.”26 Kenan’s stylistic razzle-dazzle is technically superb but diminishes the emotional impact of the horror aspects of protagonist’s struggle, leaving it only conceptually horrific.

Jewelle Gomez’s novel The Gilda Stories (1991) is both the first vampire novel with a black protagonist and the first vampire novel written by an African-American author. A kind of revision of Stoker’s Dracula and of the literary vampire tradition more generally, The Gilda Stories not only makes the vampire a hero–an authorial maneuver that was becoming more common in 1991–but also a black lesbian. This “‘recasting the mythology’ of the vampire…into a black, lesbian, fugitive slave politicizes a nexus of issues, including sexuality and race,”27 and its positioning of the protagonist vampire as the hero of the story, both signal the author’s intention not to tell a traditionally horrifying vampire story. Instead, the horror is, as with most of the narratives described in this chapter, primarily conceptual: what is done to the protagonist through her history, because of her ethnicity and sexuality, is disturbing, even without the expected scenes of vampires menacing innocents.

Tananarive Due’s The Between (1995) is a combination horror novel, detective story, and suspense/thriller, about a man who was saved from drowning as a child, but as an adult begins to believe, thanks to messages from his subconscious, that his survival was a mistake. An intriguing story, full of suspense, tension-filled moments, and elements of Ghanian folk tales and ghost stories, The Between also boasts strong characterization and a protagonist whose crumbling sanity is chillingly drawn.

Linda Addison’s collection Animated Objects (1997) contained science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories and poems. Addison’s horror is variable, appropriate for each story but without a unifying theme or underlying philosophy. Technically, though, Addison is a skilled horrorist, capable of describing bleak and frightening urban landscapes, literally hellish paranoia, and nightmarish claustrophobia with equal intensity.

When the writer Zora Neale Hurston went on an African-American-folklore-gathering expedition in 1927 and 1928, she gathered nearly 500 primarily west African folktales, of which fifteen were in the categories “Devil Tales” (stories in which the Devil was either the protagonist or the antagonist) and “Witch and Haunt Tales” (stories about witches and ghosts). While these stories were told by people unexposed to Western horror literature or traditions, they nonetheless had substantial horror elements and provided a foundation for the first African-American horror writers.
Keith Clark, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2013), 93-94.
Maisha L. Wester, African-American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 35.
Wester, African-American Gothic, 69.
Ellen J. Goldner, “Other(ed) Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison,” MELUS 24, no. 1 (Spring, 1999): 71.
Wester, African-American Gothic, 71.
Wester, African-American Gothic, 72.
Christine A. Wooley, “Haunted Economies: Race, Retribution, and Money in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece,” in Haunting Realities: Natguralist Gothic and American Realism, ed. Monika Ebert and Wendy Ryden (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 134.
Daphne Lamothe, “Cane: Jean Toomer’s Gothic Black Modernism,” in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 56.
Wester, African-American Gothic, 107.
Wester, African-American Gothic, 109.
Jess Nevins, “The Black Fantastic: Highlights of Pre-World War II African and African-American Speculative Fiction,” io9.com, accessed Feb. 18, 2019, https://io9.gizmodo.com/5947122/the-b....
David G. Hale, “Hurston’s ‘Spunk’ and Hamlet,” Studies in Short Fiction 30.3 (Summer, 1993), 397.
Clark, Ann Petry, 95.
Clark, Ann Petry, 97.
Clark, Ann Petry, 97.
Trudier Harris, “Tipotoeing through Taboo: Incest in ‘The Child Who Favored Daughter,’” Modern Fiction Studies 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 495.
Wester, African-American Gothic, 150.
Hendrix, Paperbacks from Hell, 30-32.
Sherley Anne Williams, “Sherley Anne Williams on Octavia E. Butler,” Ms., March 1986, 70.
Octavia E. Butler, “Afterword,” in Bloodchild and Other Stories (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1995), 36.
Catherine C. Ward, “Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills: A Modern Inferno,” Contemporary Literature 28, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 67.
Wester, African-American Gothic, 150-151.
June Pulliam, “Morrison, Toni,” in Supernatural Literature of the World, ed. S.T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 821.
Joshi, Unutterable Horror, 684-685.
Maisha Wester, “Haunting and Haunted Queerness: Randall Kenan’s Re-Inscription of Difference in ‘A Visitation of Spirits,’” Callaloo 30, no. 4 (Fall, 2007): 1035.
Cedric Gael Bryant, “‘The Soul has Bandaged Moments’: Reading the African-American Gothic in Wright’s ‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’ Morrison’s ‘Beloved,’ and Gomez’s ‘Gilda,’” African-American Review 39, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 550.

Table of Contents for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

So in case you haven’t heard, I’m writing a second edition of the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. In all likelihood self-published, this time, because the second edition will have around 150,000 new words–new entries, added scholarly apparatus, corrections and additions–and that pushes the Encyclopedia up over 790,000 words, which is much too long for one book and for any publisher to be interested in. I’ll be doing an eBook of the second edition, of course, since as a print book it’s going to run to three volumes.

(All that being said, there’s the slightest chance that a traditional publisher might be interested in the book, and we’re pursuing that chance now).

The manuscript is finished and proofed and spell-checked. All that it needs now is an index (which I won’t build until I know whose pagination I’ll be drawing from, my own or a publisher) and a cover (which my wife will create unless a publisher grabs the book). In the meantime, would you like to see the table of contents?

 

The List of Titles & Entries for The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, second edition