Horror: The 100 Best Books (14 page)

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I'm always a bit put off when someone asks me to name my favourite book of all time, or even the three best horror books. It's rather like asking one to name the best wine in the world or the finest dinner ever served. I'm sure that anyone who has read more than a dozen outstanding books -- as you have, or you wouldn't be bothering with this -- can sympathize with me in this problem. When pressed to give an answer, such selections inevitably become personal and quirky. It really would be easier and far more valid to list perhaps one hundred "best" books. Oh, well . . . A few years back I was asked by
The Twilight Zone Magazine
to generate three lists of thirteen books each of the best horror novels ever written. Even with that latitude, choices were of necessity eccentric. Only the Fates know how selection #39 pushed out selection #40. However, one of my selections was
Medusa
by E. H. Visiak. This novel is now among my Top Three selections, and if you asked me how closely it had nudged past David Lindsay's
Devil Tor
, I really couldn't say. Well, I'll try. I believe that I once described
Medusa
as the probable outcome of Herman Melville having written
Treasure Island
while tripping on LSD. I can't add much to that, except to suggest that John Milton may have popped round on his way home from a week in an opium den to help him revise the final draft. We're talking heavy surreal here. However.
Medusa
was indeed written by E. H. Visiak (born London, 20 July 1878; died Hove, Sussex, 30 August 1972). Despite living to the age of 94, Visiak left only three major novels:
The Haunted Island
(1910),
Medusa
(1929) and
The Shadow
(1936). These, in addition to a few short stories, poems, and critical studies of Milton (not surprisingly to one who has read his novels, Visiak was an authority on Milton) are about all he is remembered for today -- and remembered by a few, at best. He was also a close friend of the afore-mentioned David Lindsay, another strange genius whose work has been similarly overlooked. Anyone who has read both writers' works will have readily noted comparisons. All three of the above-listed novels read like drug-induced visionary interpretations of Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island
-- a bit like Ingmar Bergman filming a William S. Burroughs screenplay of the book, with Richard O'Brien as Jim Hawkins.
Medusa
is the most successful of the three. It's a soul-eating Cthulhoid entity, not your common-garden-variety rubber-tentacled monster. It preys upon the human failings and spiritual evils that exist within every human being. We are all of us flawed creatures, flawed beyond the hope of redemption when confronted by genuine evil. Visiak suggests that such destroying evil comes from within ourselves. This is not a happy book. If your horizons reach beyond knife-wielding zombies, check
Medusa
out. It might make you think, and then it might
really
scare you. -- KARL EDWARD WAGNER

An overlapping series of accounts enables a modern American writer in Paris to piece together the story of Bertrand Caillet, the unfortunate offspring of a lecherous priest with an evil family history and a young peasant girl. Although raised by the kindly Aymar Galliez, Bertrand has a troubled childhood and is suspected of lycanthropy, cannibalism and incest. Galliez pursues Bertrand to Paris, but the werewolf's atrocities pale in comparison with the wholesale slaughter taking place in 1870 during the Paris Commune. The werewolf ends his days pathetically in an insane asylum.
The Werewolf of Paris
is
the
classic 20th-century treatment of the Werewolf legend, unequalled until Robert Stallman's
The Book of the Beast
(1980-82). Endore was a commercial writer, who contributed to the screenplays of such classic horror films as
Mad Love
(1935),
Mark of the Vampire
(1935) and
The Devil Doll
(1936).
The Werewolf of Paris
was filmed, with the locale changed to Spain for budgetary reasons, by Hammer Films as
Curse of the Werewolf
(1961), directed by Terence Fisher and starring the young Oliver Reed as the afflicted protagonist.

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Though Guy Endore's
The Werewolf of Paris
boasts characters, settings and diction so convincingly Gallic that one instinctively glances at the title page for the translator's name, it is an English language classic that was first published in 1934, during that nightmarish period of twilight sleep between the two World Wars.
The Werewolf of Paris
is a devastating dissection of the many masks of corruption, whether ethical, familial or governmental. Its hero is the pathetic lycanthrope, Bertrand Caillet; its villains are lascivious priests, bloodthirsty soldiers and inhuman authority figures, such as the doctors and orderlies at the insane asylum where Bertrand spends his last miserable days. Beginning with one of the most dreadful
contes cruelles
ever penned (the tale of Pitaval and Pitamont), Guy Endore tells a grisly and erotic story that masterfully offsets our sympathy for the titular protagonist with towering moral outrage for mankind's burgeoning savagery -- an ironic stylistic device that prefigures the postwar disillusionment of such widely disparate works of fantasy as, say, Eugene Ionesco's absurdist drama,
Rhinoceros
, or Stephen King's popular vampire novel,
'Salem's Lot
, both of which, consciously or unconsciously, are thematically indebted to
The Werewolf of Paris
. Note, especially, this significant passage from Chapter Seventeen:

The Commune shot fifty-seven from the prison of La Roquette. Versailles retaliated with nineteen hundred. To that comparison add this one. The whole famous Reign of Terror in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists executed 20,000 commoners before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs? Bertrand . . . was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a few prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! And . . . future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!

The Werewolf of Paris
is also reminiscent of Theodore Sturgeon's
Some of Your Blood
, a short novel about a sado-masochistic romance that attempts, not altogether successfully, to make the reader sympathize with its tormented hero. But Bertrand Caillet, in spite of the crimes of passion he commits when "the change" is on him, is the novel's ultimate victim. Even by today's jaded standards, Bertrand's bloody affair with the consenting, doomed Sophie de Blumenburg is deeply shocking, not because of its essential gruesomeness, but because Guy Endore treats his lovers with sensitivity and compassion, qualities too often lacking in contemporary horror literature. -- MARVIN KAYE

"Marjorie Bowen" was one of the many pseudonyms used by Mrs. Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long, authoress of a huge number of historical romances, biographies, history books, short stories and thrillers: most of Mrs. Long's macabre output was published under the Bowen name (she should not be confused with her contemporary, Elizabeth Bowen).
The Last Bouquet
is devoted exclusively to ghost stories, typically involving either repressed but wealthy spinsters ("The Last Bouquet", "The Crown Derby Plate") or horrid doings in a period setting ("The Avenging of Ann Leete", "Kecksies"). Her novels of the macabre include
Black Magic
(1909),
The Haunted Vintage
(1921) and
The Shadow on the Mockways
(1932), and she was also the editor of
Great Tales of Horror
(1933) and
More Great Tales of Horror
(1935).

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Among connoisseurs it is commonly heard that Marjorie Bowen is the premiere horror writer of our century. Yet she is under-represented in anthologies. Most of her books are so rare as to be known to the connoisseur and none other. The only modern edition,
Kecksies
(Arkham House, 1976) captures some of her best stories, but also some workmanlike pieces, weakening the overall effect. Far more representative are
The Bishop of Hell
(1949) and especially
The Last Bouquet
. As a prose stylist she was a throwback to the 1890s. Her reader can easily imagine Beardsley her illustrator, Leonard Smithers her publisher. She improves upon the aesthetic and decadent mode in that she is never actually florid, but stylish and moody, dramatic to the highest pitch. Best known in her day as an historical novelist, she had an output so enormous that the term "hack" might appear apropos. Yet she achieved an average quality above the "best" of more lionized writers, while her own best is untouchable by her contemporaries or our modern masters. She certainly could write a trivial tale upon occasion, but none are to be found in
The Last Bouquet
. The low points are probably "Raw Material" and "The Prescription", this latter a retelling of too simple a ghost story previously told by Henry van Dyke as "The Night Call". One of her best-known stories, "The Crown Derby Plate", has always struck me as pointless, yet this "weak" piece is an anthology favorite. Finer is "Kecksies", an anti-heroic fantasy, while the well-known "Avenging of Ann Leete" is quintessentially Bowen in its sinister and romantic evocations; it represents the quality of the majority of these 14 stories. In Bowen's hands, ghost stories are transformed into parables of rage and passion both human and inhuman "The Fair Hair of Ambrosine", regarding precognition and murder, is a period tale of the grimmest sort." Florence Flannery" also has an historical setting and offers a tragic love affair; the suffering protagonist lives through her confused centuries of torment only to find herself, at last, in the arms of a demonic, avenging love. In tales like "The Last Bouquet", "The Lady Clodagh" and "Madame Spitfire", we are treated to exceedingly refined portraits of passionate and insanely evil women, for whom Bowen seems to have had a niggling liking. The famous tale of "The Sign-painter and the Crystal Fishes" -- one of her scant quarter-dozen tales commonly anthologized -- is a break from her usual pattern in that sadness is evoked rather than anguish or hatred. It reveals Bowen's sensitive side to be as horrific as the dark passions. Today's authors are more than ever intrigued by sexuality and horror. None achieves Bowen's heights of evil romance, her
sensuality
and horror. What in other hands is merely tacky or gross is, from Marjorie Bowen, a superior art, chilling and seductive. -- JESSICA AMANDA SALMONSON

Published "as by a Medical Student", with Laing credited only as the editor, this novel purports to be an actual account of a murder case in which David Sounders, the narrator, was a suspect. Gideon Wyck, a sinister and ill-liked member of the faculty of the Maine State College of Surgery, is involved in various bizarre experiments, which focus on the demented Mike Connell, a blood donor who has fits whenever anyone who has been given his blood dies, and on a series of abnormal births. When Wyck disappears, Saunders, his telephonist girlfriend Daisy and Dr. Manfred Ailing, the deformed head of the school, investigate and discover a variety of peculiar circumstances. Later Wyck's corpse turns up, ineptly embalmed, in the school morgue, which has been sealed during the holidays. Further complications lead to several inquests and trials, during which various misdeeds are uncovered and a murderer (or two, or three) is exposed. An early example of the type of medical thriller latterly the province of Robin Cook,
The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck
dabbles in mad science and demonology as it builds to its detective story finale. Laing also wrote
Dr. Scarlett: A Narrative of His Mysterious Behaviour in the East
(1936) and its sequel,
The Methods of Dr. Scarlett
(1937). His
The Motives of Nicholas Holtz
(1936, a.k.a.
The Glass Centipede
) was written in collaboration with Thomas Painter. The character of Dr. Ailing would seem to have impressed Robert Bloch enough to inspire a gruesome short story, "The Mannikin", itself an influence on the film
Basket Case
(1982).

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I venture to say that few of the readers of this volume are familiar with
The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck
, or with its author, Alexander Laing. If this is the case, I'm not surprised, for the novel was published a half-century or more ago in a small hard cover edition, and I've been unable to ascertain if it was reprinted when paperbacks came into vogue. Moreover, "Alexander Laing" was the pseudonym of a writer who didn't wish to risk his stature as a respectable author by attaching his real name to a horror story. Nonetheless, the book attained a small success in its initial publication -- enough, apparently, to encourage an encore, entitled
The Motives of Nicholas Holtz
. The latter died a deserved death, and leads me to wonder if the "Alexander Laing" byline had been used by another. But the first book seemed to me, at the time, to be a genuine
tour de force
, dealing as it did with the then little-exploited phenomenon of teratology [the study of animal or vegetable monstrosities]. I base my esteem for the work on my initial encounter, and in all fairness, should probably re-read the book before giving it a place in this volume, thus ruling out such equally impressive efforts as Ramsey Campbell's
The Face That Must Die
, or work by Grant, Williamson, Straub, Somtow
et al
. But first impressions are inclined to leave the deepest imprint, and I recall
The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck
as one of the most grisly and evocative readings of a misspent lifetime. I do wish I could unearth the volume and discover the real name of its author: both deserved better than this long languishment in obscurity. Strange, how so many worthwhile creations seem to be forever forgotten for lack of proper praise and attention upon first appearance. But for what it is worth, I recommend this chiller to your attention; if you track it down, I think you may share my opinion. -- ROBERT BLOCH