Horror: The 100 Best Books (12 page)

This volume assembles Bierce's two major collections of short stories ,
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
(1891, a.k.a.
In the Midst of Life
) and
Can Such Things Be?
(1893). His most famous (and imitated) story remains "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", which was filmed by Robert Enrico as
La Riviere d'Hibou
(1961), an Oscar-winning short later transmitted as part of the original
Twilight Zone
series. His other major horror and ghost stories -- which range in subject from the American Civil War through lycanthropy, hauntings, vengeful zombies, robots and psychological terror to simple human vileness -- include "The Death of Halpin Frayser", "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot", "Moxon's Master", "The Damned Thing", "Chickamauga", "The Man and the Snake" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa". The last named was drawn upon by Robert W. Chambers for a few names which crop up in
The King in Yellow
(1895) and were then picked up by H. P. Lovecraft and his followers for the Cthulhu Mythos.

***

Ambrose Bierce, probably the most important and influential American horror writer since Edgar Allan Poe, was born in a log cabin on a small farm in southwest Ohio on 24 June 1842, grew up in northern Indiana, suffered a serious head wound as a Union soldier in the American Civil War, became a prolific journalist and short-story writer, and was last seen on 11 January 1914 at the battle of Ojinaga in Mexico, where he was a war correspondent covering Pancho Villa's military actions. Bierce's chosen fictional form was the short story. In
The Devil's Dictionary
he disparaged the "novel" as "a short story padded". He preferred imagination to realism. He defined realism as "The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads." Bierce's stories are cynical, sardonic, ironic, pessimistic, brutal and filled with black humour. His trademark is the cruel surprise ending. He was a pioneer in the tale of psychological horror. The Civil War stories begin realistically and end as imaginative tales of terror. In "Chickamauga" a deaf-mute child watches as a group of soldiers he thinks are playing war games slaughters his family. In "A Tough Tussle", a young Union lieutenant guarding a dead Confederate soldier is killed by his own imagination, as is the soldier in "One of the Missing", trapped in a fallen building with what he believes to be a loaded rifle pointing at him. In Bierce's most famous story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", an Alabama planter about to be hanged on a bridge for attempted sabotage escapes and makes his way home only to discover the real horror. Again and again Bierce uses fantasy to reveal the brutality, stupidity and horror of war. Another group of Bierce's stories are poised between natural and supernatural horror and in them Bierce is often ahead of his time "Moxon's Master", in which a chess-playing automaton kills its maker, is a forerunner of the robot-run-amok story. In "The Man and the Snake", a civilian version of "One of the Missing", a man is killed by imagining a stuffed snake to be real. The Death of Halpin Frayser" in which the victim is attacked by the ghost of his murderously possessive mother is a portrayal of an Oedipus complex long before Freud's hypothesis. "The Moonlit Road" tells its story from three conflicting points of view, including that of a murdered woman speaking through a medium, a narrative device used 42 years later in Kurosawa's film
Rashomon
. In Bierce's supernatural tales, life is depicted as horrible and the afterlife as a continuation of the horror. Horror is primarily psychological. In
the Devil's Dictionary
, Bierce defines "ghost" as "the outward and visible sign of an inward fear". Whether dealing with werewolves ("The Eyes of the Panther"), the avenging dead ("The Middle Toe of the Right Foot"), creatures which cannot be detected by human senses (The Damned Thing"), premature burial ("One Summer Night"), agoraphobia ("An Inhabitant of Carcosa") or corpse-watching ("A Watcher by the Dead"), the ultimate horror is always in the human mind and in man's own capacity for self-destruction. Among later horror writers influenced by the imagination and techniques of Ambrose Bierce are Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth and Robert Bloch. -- MILTON SUBOTSKY

The centrepiece of this collection is "The Beckoning Fair One", a much-anthologized novella often cited as one of the best ghost stories in the English language. A writer moves into an old house to finish a novel, and finds a love-hungry female ghost who usurps his heroine, drives him mad, and jealously murders a romantic rival. Many of Onions' best stories combine ghostliness in the M. R. James tradition, with his main characters -- often writers or artists -- driven to psychological extremes.
Widdershins
also includes such memorable stories as "Rooum", "The Lost Thyrsus", "The Accident", "The Cigarette Case" and "Hie Jacet". Onions produced two later volumes,
Ghosts in Daylight
(1924) and
The Painted Face
(1929); the cream of the three books can be found in his
Collected Ghost Stories
(1935). The author's preferred pronunciation of his name was "O-ny-ons".

***

Finding titles for books is not easy, but when Oliver Onions called his first collection of ghost stories
Widdershins
he came up with a humdinger. No matter what the word means (and its meaning -- contrary to the normal way of things -- is singularly appropriate) it sounds right. It conjures up an image of something not quite right, and the reader's in the haunted mood at the very start. The title doesn't describe only the title of the book, it describes its author. George Oliver Onions (1873-1961) was an artist-turned-writer who strove always to do something different, something out of the ordinary. A no-nonsense Yorkshireman, he had no time for spooks and phantoms but that did not stop him turning to the ghost story when the mood hit him. That mood came one crisp winter's night when his wife was combing her long hair, the air crackling with static. Onions became conscious of the unmistakable sound. "Imagine if one heard that sound without seeing any woman standing there," he remarked. That was the catalyst and out of it came the lead story in
Widdershins
"The Beckoning Fair One". Algernon Blackwood thought of it as "the most horrible and beautiful ever written on those lines"; Robert Aickman claimed it as "one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field", whilst E. F. Bleiler has said of it, "in the opinion of many, the best classical ghost story". It alone is worth the price of admission because Onions created a story that, of its kind, cannot be bettered. With no overt spectral manifestations, but with mere hints and suggestions, he portrays the accelerated mental disintegration of the protagonist, Paul Oleron, whilst establishing an almost suffocating atmosphere of ghostly doom.
Widdershins
contains eight further stories and though none is the equal of "The Beckoning Fair One", all are highly original in theme and treatment. "Rooum", for instance, is another unsettling story about an engineer who is haunted by something unseen which he claims pursues him and even runs "through" him. To the reader that unseen pursuer becomes frighteningly real in Onions' portrayal of Rooum's reactions. Writing of this perception does not come easily, but Onions was able to draw upon his skills as a draughtsman and artist, and in a third story, "Benlian", he creates one of the ultimate in artists' fantasies. Benlian is a sculptor who has created a hideous stone statue which he comes to regard as his god and to which he seeks to transfer his personality. In this story, as in "The Beckoning Fair One", "Rooum" and others in the collection, we find a portrayal of madness that leaves the reader uncomfortably unsure about the state of reality and sanity. This was always Onions' aim. In writing his ghost stories he set out to "investigate the varying densities of the ghostliness that is revealed when this surface of life, accepted for everyday purposes as stable, is 'jarred' and, for the time of an experience, does not recover its equilibrium." In reading
Widdershins
the reader is likewise jarred and never again quite recovers his equilibrium. -- MIKE ASHLEY

Drawing on Benson's collections
The Room in the Tower and Other Stories
(1912),
Visible and Invisible
(1923),
Spook Stories
(1928) and
More Spook Stories
(1934), editor Alexis Lykiard here presents a fine selection of the more gruesome stories of E. F. Benson, with vampirism and slug-like monstrosities well to the fore. The more recent collection
The Tale of an Empty House and Other Ghost Stories
(1986), edited by Cynthia Reavell, has some overlap with
The Horror Horn
, but concentrates more on the author's gentler ghost tales, most memorably the well-regarded "Pirates". Although often adapted for the radio, Benson's horror output has not been much filmed. However, of this selection, "The Room in the Tower" was the credited but vague inspiration for one of the episodes of
Dead of Night
(1946), which also features the author's "The Bus-Conductor", and "Mrs. Amworth" became a short TV film with Glynis Johns in 1971.

***

Fingers at the window; the cough in the courtyard; the laugh in the darkness at the top of the stairs. The subtle, the restrained; the terror induced by fog, firelight or shadow in which we see little and our imagination supplies the rest. These are the materials from which are woven the stories of the macabre writers I most admire; those who work within the parameters first set by Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, Arthur Machen, H. R. Wakefield, Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, W. H. Hodgson, Henry James, Lord Dunsany, Sheridan Le Fanu and H. P. Lovecraft, to name but a few. In this superlative company the name of E. F. Benson must stand high. Yet his work, which has a chilling horror at its very best, has been strangely neglected from the forties onward and it is only in the last 15 years or so that paperback collections of his work have begun appearing. Edward Frederic Benson came of a distinguished family -- his father was a former Archbishop of Canterbury, his elder brother A. C. Benson an essayist and poet, his younger brother Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson also a novelist -- and he was a highly regarded classical scholar at Cambridge. His prodigious output as a novelist -- he published over 80 books, including his still much acclaimed
Mapp and Lucia
series, recently televised,
Dodo
, and many other works of social comedy -- did not prevent him working for the British School of Archaeology in Athens or being Mayor of Rye in Sussex from 1934 to 1937, where he lived at Lamb House, formerly occupied by Henry James. Yet, for all his humorous output, Benson (1867-1940) had a darker side to his nature and there are striking parallels with W. W. Jacobs and Jerome K. Jerome. The former could turn with ease from comedy to the chill terrors of "The Monkey's Paw" or "His Brother's Keeper"; and the latter, while convulsing the world with
Three Men in a Boat
, also produced the horrific "The Dancing Partner". Benson's art in the macabre field was wrought from the same materials. One of his most famous stories, "The Room in the Tower", first published in 1912, relates in the most prosaic way a recurring dream which haunts the narrator: that he was a guest at a house and his hostess gives him the room in the tower. The dream comes true and at the height of a storm he is in bed when a hand is laid on his shoulder and he smells "an odour of corruption and decay". Benson is good at this; he and Lovecraft together with James stand almost alone in their mastery of these effects. There is blood on his shoulder when his host bursts in, and in a nearby room, a shroud spotted with earth. A woman who committed suicide had previously occupied the room. The tale ends with her body being secretly dug up when "the coffin was found to be full of blood". Even more awful in its implications is Benson's celebrated tale "Caterpillars", which combines the unique terror of the caterpillars' squirming on the victim's bedding with most human beings" everyday fears of falling victim to a dreaded disease. Benson also wrote one of the most celebrated of vampire stories, doubly chilling because it takes place in a modern setting, its focus of evil a smilingly benevolent middle-aged woman, "Mrs. Amworth". This is one of my all-time favourites and is the perfect expression of the ordinary made terrible, an art which Alfred Hitchcock was to perfect in another medium, that of the cinema. Equally disturbing is the fourth in Benson's quartet of most powerful stories, "Negotium Perambulans", rather reminiscent of F. G. Loring's "The Tomb of Sarah", in which a land-owner in a lonely part of Cornwall inadvertently disturbs a
thing
which eventually wreaks havoc. All this is described in the gentle, measured prose of a scholar, thus making the events both more awful and more plausible, which, after all, is the art which conceals art. The climax involves a giant slug-like creature, which gives off "a stale phosphorescent light". There are many other tales from his gifted pen; most of them with evocative titles which chill even before the reader turns the page: "The Thing in the Hall", "The House with the Brick-Kiln", "The Face", "The Bed by the Window" and "The Horror Horn". In describing some of my favourites I hope to strike a sympathetic chord in the reader and can only hope that she or he will turn to some of Benson's neglected masterpieces, whose very pages seem to breathe out the odour of decay. But there are also many delights among the horrors. -- BASIL COPPER

Among the people assembled for a seance in Hampstead are three strangers -- Maskull, a rootless man, and Nightspore and Krag, two peculiar visitors from Tormance, a planet orbiting Arcturus. Nightspore and Krag take Maskull with them on their journey back to Tormance, and the Earthman is left to wander the surreal symbolic landscapes of the new planet, where it becomes obvious that his
Pilgrim's Progress
is of a psychological rather than an actual nature. Experiencing everything from love to murder, Maskull is caught between Krag and a rival divinity variously known as Surtur, Shaping and Crystalman, unable to tell which is an angel and which the Devil. An odd refinement of the "interplanetary voyage" genre of early science fiction, comparable with Wells, Verne, and Burroughs,
A Voyage to Arcturus
has been influential on authors as diverse as Jack Vance and Clive Barker. Lindsay also wrote
The Haunted Woman
(1922),
Sphinx
(1923), and
Devil's Tor
(1932).