Horror: The 100 Best Books (13 page)

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Around 1920, as around 1947, the horror story experienced a sea-change. At both periods, a generation desperate to put behind them the realities of war sought the kind of writing that would justify them and repudiate the ways of their elders. Economics and the psyche were in; destiny and the soul were out. Updated horrors were fine; old-fashioned ones were not. The touch of grue in some of Michael Arlen's stories suited the survivors of Verdun excellently, just as Fritz Leiber's citified ghosts suited the survivors of the Normandy beachheads. What was sought was the kind of shudder that might be seen to afflict that peculiar creature, "the contemporary man" (as if there had ever been born a man who was not "contemporary"!) At all events, precisely what was
not
wanted was a story about eschatological horror, that kind of horror that has afflicted all the sons of Adam, and no doubt Adam himself in his latter days. Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that
A Voyage to Arcturus
was a complete and commercial failure. Had it emerged in 1947, the result would almost certainly have been the same. E. H. Visiak -- himself not unaccomplished in this genre -- described the novel as inducing "a state of spiritual terror". Alas! Such an adjective, at such a time, was a complete no-no. Well, if Lindsay's novel went down like the proverbial lead balloon, what feature does it have to enable its author to correctly predict that, as long as publishing existed at all, it would always have readers, however few? What was his "secret ingredient"? The ingredient is utter honesty in the face of life and of death. The stories of Lindsay's contemporaries in the occult genre -- Oliver Onions, E. Nesbit, Sax Rohmer, R. H. Benson, for example -- were all dealing with "entertainments": the terrible things that have happened to Miss M-- or Mr. Y-- . Miss M-- and Mr. Y-- are characters beheld in your mind's eye -- they are, in that sense, outside of you. For a moment, as their fate befalls them, you, as one with them, are seized with fear. After that, there remains only the memory of a not-unpleasant thrill. You remain untouched (I can think of one exception to this, from the writings of the twenties: May Sinclair's "Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched"). Lindsay's book, however, is simply not pitched at this level. He is not an entertainer: he is a reporter, bringing you an in-depth account of the interior existence. This account is full of strange colours and eerie sounds: the characters met are often physically bizarre. The superficial reader might call all this "romantic". It would be hard to imagine a greater error. The landscape described is actually that of one's own soul, and the characters are ourselves as seen in a distorting mirror. Maskull and Nightspore are you and I. For that matter, we are also Corpang, Tydamin, Spadevil and the rest of the Arcturian crew. But our relationship towards them is different from that we have with Maskull and Nightspore, just as in everyday life we know that we are "different" from those other bodies we see about us -- that we are the centre about which they revolve. Of course, a moment's introspection will destroy this illusion of ours -- which is why we are at such pains not thus to introspect. No, Lindsay was a realist, just as Cabell and Dunsany were realists, whatever the romantic disguises they employed. But he is the more brutal, since he singularly refuses to give us even the most provisional final answer to the riddles he sets. He is, too, at singular pains not to let us off lightly. Has
any
English writer devised a more effective way of describing that certain aspect of life that Lindsay sums in his "Crystalman" concept? For myself, I cannot recall a more ice-cold moment of horror than that experienced when reading Nightspore's climactic ascent of the tower of Muspel. There is no evasion on Lindsay's part in leaving his novel on a suspended ending, for that suspended ending is us. It is not Nightspore who has to confront these issues, issues where, as Krag says, "nothing will be done without the bloodiest blows." It is you and I. There's terror for you! -- GEORGE HAY

Joseph K., an ordinary office worker, is arrested one morning on an unspecified charge and sucked into a vast legal bureaucracy that will never let him go. He tries to reason with a succession of officials, but never does find out what exactly is happening to him. His life is ruined and, after a protracted legal wrangle, the court sends a pair of executioners to put him out of his misery. Mainly written some time before 1920,
Der Prozess
did not see publication until after the author's death in 1924, and even then was issued against the wishes Kafka expressed in his will. Like
The Castle
, it is an unfinished novel: although the last chapter -- the execution -- was written, Kafka never got around to producing the sections of the book describing the actual trial. It was idiosyncratically filmed in 1963 by Orson Welles, with Anthony Perkins as Joseph K.

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In a passage Kafka deleted from
The Trial
(perhaps because it made his meaning too explicit), Joseph K. tells us that "waking up was the riskiest moment of the day":

. . . it requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening.

From Kafka's diary during this period:

My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle.

It is interesting to keep these statements in mind when reading this dreamlike, paranoiac novel. No modern novel captures the sense of a waking nightmare better than Kafka's
The Trial
. The obsessions of the dream are continued into waking life and embodied in the objects and people which surround the protagonist. Although the novel's setting is naturalistically detailed, its logic is that of a dream landscape. Joseph K. is never told what he is accused of, and after only a few initial queries he does not ask. He is strangely obsessed by a degenerate sexuality he sees all around him, and is unable to stop himself from seducing his lawyer's maid when he should be discussing his case. He encounters people he should know but he does not recognize them -- their identities change from one scene to the next. The Court of Inquiry where he must go is disguised within a tenement and once inside he discovers that this chamber is impossibly large for the structure . As in a dream, he is at times uncharacteristically brave in his speeches and lacking in impulse control. As in a dream, rooms are impossibly transformed: a bank's storage room suddenly becomes a torture chamber for two of his guards. As in a dream, his body rebels in small ways, he becomes lost easily, and his own self-destructive behavior is frightening to him. His accusers are everywhere; he is acutely aware of faces watching him from windows and keyholes; he senses ears pressed against doors. He considers compiling a written defense which might have been designed against an unsettling and ambiguous dream reality:

In this defense he would give a short account of his life, and when he came to an event of any importance explain for what reasons he had acted as he did, intimate whether he approved or condemned his way of action in retrospect, and adduce grounds for the condemnation or approval . . .

Although not the first work to use such techniques,
The Trial
has at least indirectly influenced much of modern horror fiction. Joseph K."'s environment alternatively convinces us with its realism and then is fantastically transformed so that K. is able to see his buried obsessions acted out by the people and city around him. His confidence in reality is thus eroded: this is a harbinger of the paranoid landscapes of such writers as Ramsey Campbell and Dennis Etchison.
The Trial's
blurring of the line between character and landscape demonstrates the way characterization functions in much of fantasy fiction. Critics who label Kafka's characters two-dimensional haven't realized that much of this characterization occurs within Kafka's personalized, transformed landscapes. As in a dream, every object and person in the city is a transformed piece of Joseph K."'s character. Consider again Kafka's diary entry mentioned earlier. The fact that his protagonist is named K., and one of K.'s guards is called Franz, might suggest that
The Trial
is a portion of Kafka's own internal landscape and that all its pieces, collectively, characterize
him
. Kafka maximizes the efficacy of his characterization technique by burying the individual personalities of the subordinate characters within their bureaucratic masks, making them more emblematic of K."'s personal obsessions. Other techniques in
The Trial
which support this approach to characterization (and which have come to typify much of modern horror fiction) are the novel's minimal sense of time passage, and the focus on tone and atmosphere accompanied by a deep probing of internal, subjective states -- as opposed to the focus on plot progression found in "realistic" fiction. In
The Trial
, Kafka created a landscape in which every detail is potentially significant and a clue to the character of Joseph K. Although more opaque than the many dream narratives which have followed, it stands as a significant precursor to the psychologically informed, contemporary novel of dark fantasy. -- STEVE RASNIC TEM

In 1805, a Southern gentleman called Gerald Musgrave, wishing to evade the attentions of his married cousin, Evelyn Townsend, strikes a bargain with Glaum of the HauntingEyes, a demon. Glaum agrees to become Gerald's doppelgdnger and take over his life, th us freeing the young man to pursue a life of itinerant adventure. Gerald's haphazard quest for the magical city of Antan leads him to encounter a series of peculiar characters, most notably a succession of scheming, charming, seductive and dangerous women.
Something About Eve
is the eleventh volume in the loosely connected epic romance
The Biography of the Life of Manuel
, which consists of over twenty books, including
Jurgen
(1919)
The High Place
(1923) and
The Silver Stallion
(1926), and takes the incredibly complicated family of its knightly hero from the imaginary medieval French province of Poictesme to 20th-century America. To put it tactfully, Cabell's writing remains, like that of Robert E. Howard, something of an acquired taste.

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Something About Eve
is perhaps the crowning achievement of a man who, speaking in a purely literary sense, is undoubtedly the ablest writer of the present age. Here let me remark that there is nothing ambiguous or vague about Cabell's style -- there is nothing of the rambling, incoherent maunderings of most of the modern school of writers, who seek to conceal their own ignorance by making the reader feel confused and bewildered. Cabell writes with a diamond pen, if you understand me. Well,
Something About Eve
would be a masterpiece if for no other reason, because of its perfect English and its juicy morsels of carefully turned obscenity. Cabell has the elegant knack of being beautifully vulgar, and of concealing -- from the mass -- the most jubilant depravities in innuendo. This alone should be attraction enough for the feminine readers of the nation. But there is more than this to
Something About Eve
. I was not able to discern whether or not Cabell believed himself in the existence of a Third Truth, but he at least pointed out two minor facts: that most men desire a Third Truth and no man finds it -- this side of Hell, at least. And he shows clearly that women are fatal to endeavour -- whether they be the home-loving kind or the butterfly breed. And of the two, Maya is infinitely more to be feared than Evadne of the Dusk. For in the arms of Evadne, a man loses only his manhood, his reputation, his honour, and frequently his life, while with Maya he loses his only worthwhile possessions -- ideals and ambition. Circe made boars out of men, but Maya makes steers out of them, to browse over her level pastures of convention forevermore in content -- Oh Judas -- content! Let me content myself with Evadne -- Better the serpent fangs of Evadne than the cloying and stultifying domesticity of Maya and her brood -- for they are both daughters, after all, of the nameless goddess, though men call one Lilith and the other Eve. And Evadne is but an affair of the road, a wandering off the path, an unpleasant episode, which if it be unforgettable, may at least be concluded, whereas Maya, being utter illusion, can never be brought to an end, and means the permanent halting of the rider who goes down the long road to that utterly barren and arid goal of all dreamers which is the only thing worthwhile, which is worth more than any earthly kingdom -- and which most men squander for a fat, sluggish life in the arms of a whining, waddling daughter of Maya. Well, the Adversary be thanked, there is nothing about me to attract either a daughter of Eve or one of Lilith -- so I will ride relentlessly down the long road to Antan and the doom that waits there, while the great majority of you, my sneering masculine readers, will be sitting under your chestnut trees with the scent of Maya's cooking in your nostrils, watching the antics of your brood through rose-coloured glasses. -- ROBERT E. HOWARD

A young lad, William Harvell, accompanies an expedition to the Indian Ocean for the purpose of ransoming captives from pirates. The pirate ship is discovered empty but for a single madman, who directs the would-be rescuers towards destruction in the maw of an ancient and evil monstrosity. On its original publication,
Medusa
was something of a failure, partially thanks to a ferocious review in
The Times
(somewhat too late, the paper referred to it as a "tour-de-force" in the author's obituary). Visiak, not a prolific fantasist, lived long enough to see the novel back in print in the sixties and was encouraged by its renewed reputation to take up the pen again. Besides his three novels, he turned out several books of poetry,
Buccaneer Ballads
(1910) and
The Phantom Ship
(1912) among them, and a handful of fine short stories including "In the Mangrove Hall", "The Cutting", "Medusan Madness", and "The Queen of Beauty".