Horror Fiction

IT MIGHT NOT BE IMPOSSIBLE to present an overview of American horror and fantasy fiction during the last thirty years, but it wouldn't be just a chapter in this book; it would be a book in itself, and probably a dull one (maybe even a text, that apotheosis of the Dull Book species).

For our purposes, I can't imagine why we would want to deal with all the books published in the genre anyway; most of them are just downright bad, and as with TV, I have no taste for the job of beating the field's most spectacular violators with their shortcomings. If you want to read John Saul and Frank de Felitta, go right ahead. It's your threefifty. But I'm not going to discuss them here.

My plan is to discuss ten books that seem representative of everything in the genre that is fine: the horror story as both literature and entertainment, a living part of twentieth-century literature, and worthy successors to such books as Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and Chalmers's The King in Yellow . They are books and stories which seem to me to fulfill the primary duty of literature-to tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about people who never existed.

Some of the books discussed here have been "best sellers"; some have been written by members of the so-called "fantasy community"; some have been written by people with no interest in fantasy or the supernatural for its own sake, but who have seen it as a particularly useful tool to be used once and then perhaps put aside forever (although many have also found that the use of this tool is apt to become habit-forming). Most of them-even those which cannot be neatly pigeonholed as "best sellers"-have been steady sellers across the years, probably because the horror tale, which is regarded by most serious critics in about the same light that Dr. Johnson regarded women preachers and dancing dogs, manages to consistently satisfy as entertainment even when it's only good. When it's great, it can deliver a megaton wallop (as it does in Lord of the Flies ) that other forms of literature can rarely equal. Story has always been the abiding virtue of the horror tale, from "The Monkey's Paw" to T. E. D. Klein's utterly flabbergasting novella of monsters (from Costa Rica, yet!) under the streets of New York, "Children of the Kingdom." That being so, one only wishes that those great writers among us who have also succeeded in becoming our greatest bores in recent years would attempt something in the genre and stop poking around in their navels for intellectual fluff.

I hope that by discussing these ten books, I can dilate upon those virtues of story and entertainment and perhaps even indicate some of the themes which seems to run through most good horror stories. I should be able to do this if I'm doing my job, because there just aren't that many thematic trails to go down. For all of their mythic hold over us, the field of the supernatural is a narrow one in the greater spread of general literature. We can depend on the reappearance of the Vampire, and our furry friend (who sometimes wears its fur on the inside) the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name. But the time has also come to bring on that fourth archetype: the Ghost.

We may also find ourselves returning to the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian, since this tension exists in all horror fiction, the bad as well as the good, leading back to that endlessly fascinating question of who's okay and who isn't. That's really the taproot, isn't it?

And we may also find that narcissism is the major difference between the old horror fiction and the new; that the monsters are no longer just due on Maple Street, but may pop up in our own mirrors-at any time.

2

Probably Ghost Story by Peter Straub is the best of the supernatural novels to be published in the wake of the three books that kicked off a new horror "wave" in the seventies-those three, of course, being Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist , and The Other . The fact that these three books, all published within five years of each other, enjoyed such wide popularity, helped to convince (or reconvince) publishers that horror fiction had a commercial potential much wider than the readership of such defunct magazines as Weird Tales and Unknown or the paperback reissues of Arkham House books.*

*A word about Arkham House. There is probably no dedicated fantasy fan in America who doesn't have at least one of those distinctive black-bound volumes upon his or her shelf . . . and probably in a high place of honor.

August Derleth, the founder of this small Wisconsin-based publishing house, was a rather uninspired novelist of the Sinclair Lewis school and an editor of pure genius: Arkham was first to publish H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Bloch in book form . . . and these are only a few of Derleth's legion. He published his books in limited editions ranging from five hundred to twenty-five hundred copies, and some of them- Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep and Bradbury's Dark Carnival , for instance-are now highly soughtafter collectors' items.

The resulting scrambling to get the next "big" shiver-and-shake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the mid-seventies, and more traditional best-sellers began to reappear: stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex.

That isn't to say that publishers stopped looking for occult/horror novels or stopped publishing them; the mills of the publishing world grind slowly but exceedingly fine (which is one reason that such an amazing river of gruel streams forth every spring and fall from the larger New York publishing houses), and the so-called "mainstream horror novel" will probably be with us yet awhile. But that first heady rush is over, and editors in New York no longer automatically scramble for the Standard Contract Form and fill in a meaty advance as soon as something in the story comes out of the woodwork . . . . Aspiring writers please take note.

Against this background, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan published Peter Straub's Julia in 1975. It was not his first novel; he had published a novel called Marriages -a nonsupernatural "this-is-the-way-we-live-now" sort of story-two years previous. Although Straub is an American, he and his wife lived in England and Ireland for ten years, and in both execution and intent, Julia is an English ghost story. The setting is English, most of the characters are English, and most importantly, the novel's diction is English-cool, rational, almost disconnected from any kind of emotional base. There is no sense of the Grand Guignol in the book, although the book's most vital situation certainly suggests it: Kate, the daughter of Julia and Magnus, has choked on a piece of meat and Julia kills her daughter while trying to perform a tracheotomy with a kitchen knife. The girl, it would appear, then returns as a malevolent spirit.

We aren't given the tracheotomy in any detail-the blood splashing the walls and the mother's hand, the terror and the cries. This is the past; we see it in reflected light. Much later, Julia sees the girl who may or may not be Kate's ghost burying something in the sand. When the girl leaves, Julia digs up the hole, discovering first a knife and then the mutilated corpse of a turtle. This reflection back upon the botched tracheotomy is elegant, but it has little heat.

Two years later Straub published a second supernatural novel, If You Could See Me Now .

Like Julia , If You Could See Me Now is a novel occupied with the idea of the revenant, that vengeful spirit from an undead past. All of Straub's supernatural novels work effectively when dealing with these old ghosts; they are stories of the past continuing to work on the present in a malevolent way. It has been suggested that Ross McDonald is writing gothics rather than private eye novels; it could be said that Peter Straub is writing gothics rather than horror novels. What distinguishes his work in Julia, If You Could See Me Now , and, most splendidly, in Ghost Story is his refusal to view the gothic conventions as static ones. All three of these books have much in common with the classic gothics of the genre-The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer , even Frankenstein (although in terms of its telling, Frankenstein is actually less a gothic and more a modern novel than Ghost Story )-they are all books where the past eventually becomes more important than the present.

This would seem a valid enough course for the novel to follow to any people who see uses in the study of history, you would think, but the gothic novel has always been considered something of a curiosity, a widget on the great machine of English-speaking fiction. Straub's first two novels seem to me to be mostly unconscious attempts to do something with this widget; what distinguishes Ghost Story and makes it such a success is that with this book, Straub seems to have grasped exactly-consciously-what the gothic romance is about, and how it relates to the rest of literature. Put another way, he has discovered what the widget was supposed to do, and Ghost Story is a vastly entertaining manual of operation.

"[Ghost Story ] started as a result of my having just read all the American supernatural fiction I could find," Straub says. "I reread Hawthorne and James, and went out and got all of Lovecraft and a lot of books by his 'set'-this was because I wanted to find out what my tradition was, since I was by then pretty firmly in the field-I also read Bierce, Edith Wharton's ghost stories, and a lot of Europeans . . . . The first thing I thought of was having a bunch of old men tell stories to each other-and then I hoped I could think of some device that would link all the stories. I very much like the idea of stories set down in novels-a lot of my life seems to have been spent listening to older people tell me stories about their families, their youth, all the rest. And it seemed like a formal challenge. After that I thought of cannibalizing certain old classic stories, and plugging them into the Chowder Society. This idea excited me. It seemed very audacious, and I thought that was very good. So I went ahead, after I got to that point in the book, and wrote junked-up versions of "My Kinsman, Major Molyneux," The Turn of the Screw , and started on "The Fall of the House of Usher." But by then the lead-in threatened to become the whole book. So I dropped the Poe story (the Hawthorne story came out when I edited the first draft). I was thinking at the time that the Chowder Society would follow these with their own stories-Lewis's monologue about the death of his wife, Sears and Ricky splitting a monologue (trading fours, in a way) about the death of Eva Galli.” The first striking thing about Ghost Story is its resemblance to Julia. That book begins with a woman who has lost a child; Ghost Story begins with a man who has found one. But these two children are eerily similar, and there is an atmosphere of evil about both of them.