Archive for Masters of Horror
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters of Horror: Classic Australian Horror Fiction, Part 5
Posted by: | CommentsRon Breznay’s Old Masters of Horror
Classic Australian Horror Fiction, Part 5
The Authors and Their Works
Ernest Favenc (1845-1908)
Ernest Favenc, who wrote under the pseudonym “Dramingo,” was born in Walworth, Surrey, England, on October 21, 1845. He attended school in Berlin, Germany, and Oxfordshire, England. He moved to Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, in 1864 and worked in a commercial position for about a year. He then went to Bowen and Queensland to work on stations (ranches). During this time, he occasionally wrote for the Queenslander.
In 1877, Favenc was selected to lead an expedition along the western border of Queensland as far as Darwin to see if a transcontinental railway could be built. After this expedition, he settled in Sydney and, on November 15, 1880, he married Elizabeth Jane Matthews, with whom he had a daughter.
Favenc underwent a further expedition in the early 1880s to Western Australia. He is best known for his books based on his expeditions, including The History of Australian Exploration, 1788-1888 (1888), which The Daily Telegraph of Australia called “important” and stated Favenc “treats his subject not in a perfunctory way, but as one who feels the wild charm and the magical attraction of the unknown….”
His first publication was The Great Austral Plain (1887). His other works included the lost-race novel The Secret of the Australian Desert (1895), Marooned on Australia (1896), and The Moccasins of Silence (1896).
He published about 130 stories in various Australian periodicals, and he is known for adventures and fantasies. An early collection of his stories, The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics, appeared in 1893. He also published romances, children’s stories, and verse. In addition, he was an accomplished pencil sketcher.
Among his supernatural stories are “Spirit-Led,” a ghost story; “A Haunt of the Jinkarras,” about an underground cave populated by humanoids and monsters; “The Boundary Rider’s Story;” “What the Rats Brought;” “On the Island of Shadows;” “Doomed;” and “The Land of the Unseen,” in which two men develop a means of seeing the invisible creatures all around us.
He died in Sydney on November 14, 1908.
Mary Helena Fortune (aka Waif Wander) (c. 1833-c. 1910)
Mary Helena Fortune had two literary distinctions. She published the first horror story by a female Australian author, “The White Maniac: A Doctor’s Tale,” published in 1867 under her pseudonym “Waif Wander.” Also, she was one of the first female crime-fiction writers in the world, at a time when crime fiction was in its infancy.
Fortune was born in Belfast, Ireland. She wrote that she “never knew either mother or sister or brother.” When she was a child, she and her father, George Wilson, moved to Montreal, Canada. On March 25, 1851, she married Joseph Fortune, with whom she had a son, George. Her father joined the gold rush in Victoria, Australia, and she and her son later joined him, arriving in Melbourne on October 3, 1855. It is not known if Joseph Fortune moved with her. She later had another son, Eastbourne, and claimed Joseph as the father, but there is no record of Joseph ever being in Australia. She moved about the goldfields with her father and sons, and her memoirs of this time were an important account of life in the goldfields. On October 25, 1858, she married Percy Brett, but that marriage didn’t last. Brett was a mounted policeman, which helped Fortune in her writing of detective stories.
Fortune started her writing career in 1855, publishing various contributions, including radical poetry, under a pseudonym in various goldfield newspapers. This led her to being offered a sub-editorship of the Mount Alexander Mail, but the offer was withdrawn when it was discovered she was a woman.
As Waif Wander, she began publishing stories in 1865 in the Australian Journal of Melbourne. She had a column, “The Detective’s Album,” under the pseudonym “W.W.,” and eventually contributed over 500 short stories as well as serialized novels and reportage. Most of her short stories were crime fiction, of the police procedural type. Some of her detective fiction was collected in The Detective’s Album: Tales of the Australian Police (1871), the only book she published. She also wrote a number of horror and supernatural stories, including “The Spirits of the Tower” and “Mystery and Murder,” and she wrote a gothic serial novel, Clyzia the Dwarf.
Despite her literary accomplishments, a career which spanned 40 years, she lived in obscurity, her identity remaining anonymous to the reading public. It was not until the 1950s that book collector J.K. Moir revealed the real name behind the pseudonyms.
Fortune even died in obscurity: the exact date and place of her death are unknown.
John Lang (1816-1864)
John Lang was the first native-born Australian novelist and the first Australian crime writer. He also penned the first ghost story written by an Australian, “Fisher’s Ghost: A Legend of Campbelltown.” The tale of James Frederick Fisher’s ghost is a true ghost story of Australia, in which the ghost led authorities to the victim’s body, resulting in the arrest and execution of Fisher’s murderer. Altogether, Lang wrote five versions of this legend, including “The Ghost Upon the Rail” and “The Sprite of the Creek,” a poem relating the origin of Fisher’s ghost.
Lang was born in Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia, on December 19, 1816, and was educated at Cape’s School and Sydney College. While in Sydney, he started writing poems, stories, and novels. His first novel became an international bestseller in 1836, but it was published anonymously and he never claimed authorship. He eventually published 20 novels, a travel book, a collection of short stories, and several volumes of poetry.
In 1837, he traveled to England to study law at Cambridge and was admitted to the bar as a barrister. He returned to Sydney to practice law; however, his convict ancestry made it difficult for him to pursue a legal career in Australia. In 1842, he moved to India to work as a barrister. While in India, he founded a newspaper, The Mofussilite. He wrote several novels in serial form, which were published in The Mofussilite and Fraser’s Magazine. Starting in 1853, most of these novels were published in book form.
Lang is best known for his novels Lucy Cooper: An Australian Tale (1846) and The Forger’s Wife (1855), and his collection Botany Bay, or True Tales of Early Australia (1859).
Lang spent some time in England in the 1850s, where he contributed to several magazines and newspapers, including Charles Dickens’s Household Words.
After leaving London, he lived in Calcutta, India, where he published the Optimist.
He died under mysterious circumstances in Mussoorie, India, on August 20, 1864.
NOTE: Stories by the above authors, and many others, both classic and modern, are available in the recently published Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears, edited by Angela Challis and Dr. Marty Young, and published by Brimstone Press, Woodvale, WA, Australia (September 2010).
NOTE II: This is the final installment of Ron Breznay’s Old Masters of Horror. He’s been doing this unique and fascinating column for a number of years and now he’s off pursuing other endeavors. I hope you’ve enjoyed this column as much as Hellnotes has enjoyed bringing it to you. And Ron … thank you so much for all your hard work, research, and time. Old Masters of Horror will never be forgotten. And neither will you!
Old Masters of Horror: Richard Middelton
Posted by: | Comments[The following is a reprint of a column which originally appeared in Hellnotes on September 1, 2006.]
Best known for “The Ghost Ship,” Richard Middleton was an accomplished stylist in writing weird fiction. Among the praise for Middleton’s work is this passage from Horror Literature (1981), edited by Marshall Tymn: “One of the most interesting stylists in British ghostly fiction, Middleton is rich and exuberant in his more traditional ghost stories (especially the humorous ones), lean and concise in his more original psychological tales.” And in Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820-1950 (2000), Neil Wilson writes: “The author’s undeniable literary skill allows most stories to rise above the merely morbid and sentimental.”
Richard Barham Middleton was born on October 28, 1882, in Staines, Middlesex, England. During his school years, the bright, sensitive youth was teased by his peers, experiences that found their way into his story “A Drama of Youth.” He was educated at Cranbrook School in Kent and spent a year at the University of London. He passed the Oxford and Cambridge higher certificate examinations in mathematics, physics, and English. Despite his academic background, he took a job as a clerk with Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation in London. He started publishing essays and short stories in various periodicals during this time, and he joined The New Bohemians, a society of literary men, of which Arthur Machen was a member.
Middleton lasted at his clerical job for only six years, hating the drudgery of office work and lusting after the life of a bohemian writer. He quit his job in 1907 to live his dream life. But his dream turned into a nightmare. He did not make much money from his writing, and he lived in poverty. Though he was published widely in periodicals, such as The Academy and Vanity Fair and the American magazine The Century, he did not see any book publications during his lifetime. He also suffered from a number of physical ailments – either real or imagined – and from romantic disappointments.
Besides short stories and essays, he also ventured into poetry, though The Cambridge History of English and American Literature considers him a “lesser poet.” He held a couple of literary jobs during this time: Lord Alfred Douglas made him a book reviewer for The Academy, and Edward Jepson hired him as a sub-editor for Vanity Fair.
The humorous, much-anthologized story “The Ghost Ship” tells of an unearthly galleon that is blown by a tempest into a turnip field in an inland village, which is “the ghostiest place in all England.” In time, the spectral captain of the phantom ship riles up the respectable ghosts in the village and so upsets the villagers that they are asked to leave. As the ship leaves, the villagers are shocked to see that many of their favorite ghosts are on board.
“The Coffin Merchant” tells of a Londoner who, on a dreary November day, receives a handbill for funeral services. Going round to the undertaker, he finds out to his dismay for whom the services are intended. In “On the Brighton Road,” a tramp meets a boy-ghost wandering the title road, dying over and over. A child in “The Bird in the Garden” wanders through a fabulous garden, waiting for a wondrous bird, “a bird of all colours, ugly and beautiful, with a harsh sweet voice,” but when he wakes up, he finds reality is much different. A failing magician performing in a music-hall in “The Conjurer” tries one last, desperate trick to save his career and makes his beloved wife disappear, to thunderous applause, but then he finds she truly disappeared.
Some of Middleton’s tales tend toward the gruesome. In “The Hand,” a person groping about in the dark finds the severed title object on a tabletop. In “The Luck of Keith-Martin,” a traveler arrives at the darkened house of an old friend, and when a woman’s voice tells him to leave, he turns on the light and finds his friend had just been murdered by the woman, who is covered with his blood. A strangler contemplates the corpse he has just created in “Wet Eyes and Sad Mouth.” Two people chop up a corpse in “The Making of a Man.” Gruesome, but still stylishly written.
Searching for literary inspiration, Middleton moved to Brussels, Belgium, in early 1911. On December 1, 1911, at age 29, he committed suicide there by drinking chloroform. His suicide was a surprise as he had had a healthy personality. Perhaps poverty, failed love affairs, lack of success, and other disappointments built up to push him over the edge.
Middleton’s reputation soared after his death, thanks mainly to Henry Savage, Edgar Jepson, and John Gawsworth. Within a couple of years of his death, Savage published five books of Middleton’s works: The Ghost Ship and Other Stories (1912); Poems and Songs (1912); Poems and Songs, Second Series (1912); The Day Before Yesterday (1912), which is a collection of essays; and Monologues (1913). In 1933, Gawsworth edited The Pantomine Man, a collection of previously uncollected stories, essays, and sketches. Gawsworth also published several uncollected stories in various anthologies, including six stories in New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors (1934).
The Ghost Ship and Other Stories contains the title tale and other stories, including “The Coffin Merchant,” “On the Brighton Road,” “The Conjurer,” and “Shepherd’s Boy.” Machen wrote a preface for the volume, in which he said of “The Ghost Ship:” “I declare I would not exchange this short, crazy, enchanting fantasy for a whole wilderness of seemly novels.”
Many of Middleton’s books and stories are available on-line. If you prefer ink on paper, Wildside Press has reprinted a number of the collections mentioned in this column.
Masters Of Horror: A. Merritt
Posted by: | Commentsby Ron Breznay
[The following is a reprint of a column which originally appeared in Hellnotes on July 5, 2006.]
A. Merritt was a popular pulp writer whose works are primarily categorized as fantasy or science fiction, but they also contain elements of horror. His stories and serialized novels originally appeared in the 1910s through the 1930s. He enjoyed a resurgence of popularity with a new audience when his stories were reprinted in the 1940s. However, as he had written for the audience of his time, his fiction has become dated.
Abraham Grace Merritt was born on January 20, 1884, in Beverly, New Jersey, the son of William Henry and Ida Priscilla Merritt. The family moved to Philadelphia in 1894. In the 1910s, Merritt married Eleanore Ratcliffe, with whom he raised an adopted daughter, Ida Eleanor. They resided in Queens, New York. After Eleanore died, he married Eleanor Humphrey Johnson in the 1930s.
Merritt attended law school but dropped out for financial reasons. Instead, he pursued a career in journalism. In 1902, he became a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and eventually moved up to night city editor. He was assistant editor of The American Weekly, a Sunday supplement published by Hearst, from 1912 to 1937. Then he became its editor-in-chief, a position he held until his death. Merritt’s journalism took precedence over his fiction-writing, possibly accounting for his small output of stories and novels. As editor, he discovered illustrator Virgil Finlay, who would collaborate with all the great names in science-fiction, producing interior illustrations and hundreds of covers for all the pulp magazines, including illustrations for Merritt’s published fiction.
Merritt saw his first publication in 1917, when his story “Through the Dragon Glass” appeared in Argosy All-Story Weekly. This story tells of an adventurer in China who finds a secret room with a magical mirror which leads to a Chinese fairyland. “People of the Pit” followed in 1918 and “The Moon Pool” in 1919, both in All-Story. He next published two serialized novels in All-Story: The Conquest of the Moon Pool (1919) and The Metal Monster (1920). They, as well as other serializations, were eventually published in book form. Among his other short stories are “Three Lines of Old French” (1919), “The Whelming of Cherkis” (an excerpt from The Metal Monster) (1920), and “The Face in the Abyss” (1923), all in All-Story; and “The Pool of the Stone God,” published under the pseudonym W. Fenimore, in American Weekly in 1923.
The Moon Pool, as a novel, is a combination of the short story “The Moon Pool” and the sequel novel, The Conquest of the Moon Pool. The short story tells of Professor Throckmorton, who encounters a non-material, glowing, tinkling monster while exploring ruins in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. The monster attacks and kills his family. Throckmorton escapes to tell his tale, but the monster follows him and kills him. In the sequel novel, Dr. Walter Goodwin and his companions find and open the monster’s door and pass into a hidden land beneath the ocean of Micronesia, where they come upon a lost race and other groups of mysterious inhabitants. Soon after the good doctor and his friends appear on the scene, a civil war breaks out when one of the groups wants to ascend to the surface and conquer the world.
The Metal Monster, which takes place in the Trans-Himalaya mountains, has Dr. Goodwin and companions encountering a gigantic creature that is made of millions of pieces of living metal. These pieces combine and re-combine into any number of configurations, from a huge city to small animal-like things, and are bent on taking over the world.
As with The Moon Pool, the novel The Face in the Abyss (1923) is a combination of a novella, “The Face in the Abyss” (All-Story, 1923), and a sequel novel, The Snake Mother (1930). The story tells of an ancient, very wise, almost extinct, semi-reptilian race. An American mining engineer stumbles across the handmaiden to the Snake Mother while searching the Andes for Incan treasure and is drawn into their world of invisible winged serpents, spider men, and dream machines.
The Ship of Ishtar (1924), which some say is his best novel, is about a man who travels into a magical world and falls in love with a beautiful woman. The ship, which exists in a parallel world, is the setting for a cosmic duel between gods. The novel is an adventure of battles, chases, captures, and escapes.
His other novels include Seven Footprints to Satan (1927), a horror/detective mystery; Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), another lost-race novel and one of his best; and Burn Witch Burn! (1932) and its sequel, Creep, Shadow! (1934), which are about witchcraft, animated dolls, and horror detection. Published posthumously in 1947 was The Black Wheel, an unfinished novel which was completed by Hannes Bok.
A couple of Merritt’s novels were made into movies: Seven Footprints to Satan (filmed in 1929) and Burn Witch Burn!, which was filmed as The Devil Doll (also known as The Witch of Timbuctoo) in 1936.
Merritt participated in a couple of “round-robin” stories. “The Challenge from Beyond” was written with Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, and C.L. Moore and was published in Fantasy Magazine in September 1935. Merritt wrote Chapter 11 of “The Last Poet and the Robots,” a round-robin story that appeared in Fantasy Magazine in April 1934. He also wrote a number of poems and a non-fiction book, The Story Behind the Story (1942), which is about the articles in The American Weekly that he found most interesting.
Among Merritt’s hobbies was the study of mythology and religion. He also had a passion for exotic plants, especially rare, poisonous, and psychedelic specimens. He had “one of the strangest flower gardens in the country,” according to the Associated Press, including Peruvian daffodil, Mexican shell lily, African trumpet, datura, mandrake, and monkshood. Through this hobby, he wrote numerous articles on botany. He also wrote articles on archaeology and modern survivals of ancient cults.
Merritt owned a housing development in Indian Rock Beach, Florida. He arrived there on August 20, 1943, for a combined vacation and business trip. The following day, he suffered a heart attack and died.
Among his honors was having a magazine named after him, A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine, which had a five-issue run from December 1949 through October 1950. In 1999, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Many of Merritt’s books and stories are readily available. Reflections in the Moon Pool by Sam Moskowitz (Donald M. Grant, 1985) is the first full-length biography and critique of Merritt; it also contains a selection of Merritt’s poetry and letters and a previously unknown short story. Grant also published an illustrated edition of The Face in the Abyss (1991). Hippocampus Press published The Metal Monster (2002) as part of the Lovecraft’s Library series.
Old Masters of Horror: W.W. Jacobs
Posted by: | Comments[The following is a reprint of columns which originally appeared in Hellnotes on May 27 and May 28, 2006.]
Best known for the much-anthologized short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” W.W. Jacobs had a prolific career writing satirical, humorous, and nautical fiction. His horror output, though memorable, was small, consisting of approximately 20 stories.
William Wymark Jacobs was born on September 8, 1863, in London, England, to William Gage Jacobs and Sophia Wymark, who died when Jacobs was very young. The elder Jacobs was the manager of South Devon Wharf on the River Thames in the Wapping section of London. The large family was poor, their life generally dreary. Jacobs, who was shy and quiet, and his siblings spent much time at the docks, watching the comings and goings of ships and hanging out with dockworkers. His time on the docks at Wapping inspired much of his fiction. Occasionally, the family would spend a holiday at a cottage near Sevenoaks, Kent, or visit relatives in the countryside of rural East Anglia in eastern England. The visits to East Anglia also provided inspiration for his writing, particularly his Claybury stories.
Jacobs attended private school in London and then studied at Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution (now Birkbeck College of the University of London). In 1879, he became a clerk in the civil service in the Post Office Savings Bank.
Around 1885, Jacobs started submitting anonymous sketches to Blackfriars. In the early 1890s, he had some of his stories published in the illustrated satirical magazines The Idler and Today. “A Black Affair,” a humorous ghost story, appeared in the April 1896 issue of The Idler. The Strand magazine also published his stories. These early works showed promise and received praise from Henry James, G. K. Chesterton, and Christopher Morley.
Jacobs published his first book in 1896, a collection of short stories entitled Many Cargoes. The book included “The Rival Beauties,” a humorous tale of a sea serpent. Punch magazine said his favorite subjects in this collection were “men who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage.” This book was followed in 1897 by a novelette, The Skipper’s Wooing, and in 1898 by another collection, Sea Urchins (also known as More Cargoes).
One of his most enduring characters is a night-watchman on the docks in Wapping, who recounted the adventures of three hapless sailors of his acquaintance who would fall prey to dockside denizens determined to relieve them of their pay. Jacobs’ works demonstrated his penchant for creating memorable characters and satirical situations. Many of his stories depicted the British underclass and contained surprise endings. His deft handling of the rough East End dialect attracted the respect of other writers, such as P.G. Wodehouse, who mentioned Jacobs in his autobiography.
By 1899, Jacobs was financially secure enough to resign from the civil service in order to write full-time. In 1900, he married Agnes Eleanor Williams, a militant suffragette, with whom he would have two sons and three daughters. They lived in Loughton, Essex, where they had two houses, the Outlook in Park Hill and Feltham House in Goldings Hill.
The collection Light Freights (1901) contained the ghost story “Jerry Bundler,” in which an actor dresses up as a ghost to pull a prank on a man who is afraid of ghosts, and the actor pays dearly for his deed. This story first appeared in the Christmas 1897 issue of Windsor Magazine, and Jacobs adapted it for the stage as The Ghost of Jerry Bundler. The play was performed in London in 1899, revived in 1902 with a happier ending, and published in 1908 (with the revised ending).
He next published two novelettes, which are said to be among his best work: the nautical At Sunwich Port (1902) and the humorous Dialstone Lane (1904). These books showed his talent for well-drawn characters and satirical situations.
Also published during this period was his collection The Lady of the Barge (1902), which listed in its table of contents “The Monkey’s Paw,” the classic cautionary tale illustrating that you must be careful what you wish for. (This story first appeared in Harper’s Monthly that same year.) Everett Bleiler, in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, calls this story “one of the most powerful in English literature.” The collection also included “The Well,” which tells of the ghost of a murder victim.
His collection Sailors’ Knots (1909) contained “The Toll-house,” which is about four men staying overnight in a supposedly haunted house. They drink whiskey, play cards, and tease one another until one of them receives a real fright. Also included is “Keeping Up Appearances,” a humorous tale of a ghost impersonator. Along a similar vein, “The Three Sisters,” in The Night Watches (1914), tells of the impersonation of a ghost in a gloomy haunted house. The comic “Sam’s Ghost” appeared in Deep Waters (1919).
After World War I, Jacobs’ short story output declined. Instead, he concentrated on adapting his stories for the stage. The collection Sea Whispers was published in 1926 and relatively few copies were printed due to the decline in his popularity, making this book harder to find than his others. Included were two supernatural tales: “His Brother’s Keeper” and “The Interruption.”
“The Monkey’s Paw” was adapted several times for stage, film, and television. Many of his other stories were filmed in the early twentieth century.
Jacobs died at Hornsey Lane, Islington, London, on September 1, 1943.
Jacobs’ weird tales are gathered in a modern collection, The Monkey’s Paw and Other Tales of Mystery and the Macabre (1998). The 18 stories include a few never before collected and a few that are not supernatural, while missing a couple of weird tales that should have been included. Several of Jacobs’ books are available from Wildside Press. W.W. Jacobs: A Biography, by Anthony James, was published in 1999 by Able.
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters Of Horror: An Introduction
Posted by: | Comments[The blog format has brought Hellnotes many new readers, who may have missed the earlier installments of the Old Masters of Horror column. To bring these new readers up to speed, following is an expanded version of the introduction to the column, which originally appeared on November 21, 2002.]
The roots of English-language horror reach back over a thousand years to Beowulf, the ancient tale of monsters. The following several centuries saw the publication of stories that can be considered horror but, as the people of those times were generally superstitious, those stories were believed to be true.
The eighteenth century saw the birth of modern horror. This was the Age of Reason, and the belief in the supernatural was waning. Horror writing was now viewed as entertainment, not something to be believed.
The first modern horror story is considered to be the ghost story The Castle of Otranto, a novella by Horace Walpole, which was published in 1764. The publication of this novella ushered in the era of Gothic fiction, which was characterized by the grotesque, the mysterious, and the desolate. The Gothic novels were the bestsellers of their day, yet they were disparaged by critics. (Sound familiar?)
The most widely read of all Gothic novelists was Ann Radcliffe. Her novels, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), were full of weird events which were explained plausibly, though in a contrived way, at the end. The Gothic novels of this era tended to titillate readers with vague references to dastardly deeds rather than showing anything gory happening.
Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) changed the convention to that date for Gothic fiction in that he went into lurid detail. The Monk caused a scandal and was banned, with later editions censored. (A new edition of The Monk was recently published by Oxford University Press, with an introduction by Stephen King.)
On Lewis’s last visit to Europe before his death, he met with a group of English writers and exchanged ghost stories with them. One of the members of the group was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and one of the topics of discussion was her work-in-progress, Frankenstein (1818), which would become one of the most famous and influential of Gothic novels. However, around the time Frankenstein appeared, the Gothic novel was falling out of fashion.
In the United States, fiction wasn’t published until the late 18th century. One of the first early American horror writers was Charles Brockden Brown. His three most notable novels are Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 in Two Parts (1799-1800). Wieland deals with a grotesque temple, a weird religion, a supposedly supernatural voice (which were later revealed, a la Radcliffe, to be the work of a ventriloquist), multiple murders, and mental aberration. Edgar Huntly is about madness, murder, and somnambulism. The central incident of Arthur Mervyn is a yellow fever epidemic, with gruesome recountings of the disease and those who handle the dying and the dead.
The first American author to achieve fame abroad as well as at home was Washington Irving. His well known macabre stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “The Spectre Bridegroom,” and “Rip Van Winkle” were published in 1819 in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., also known simply as The Sketch Book. His later tale, “The Devil and Tom Walker,” published in Tales of a Traveller (1824), is about a deal with the devil, but, like his earlier stories, has an underlying theme of social commentary.
Edgar Allan Poe grew up while Irving was publishing his best work. Perhaps the most important horror writer in history, Poe had a troubled life, which he described himself as “insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Poe began writing poetry and later moved into prose. His first stories were the humorous “Tales of the Folio Club,” several of which were published individually in The Philadelphia Sunday Courier in 1832. Poe rarely used the supernatural in his tales of terror, preferring to produce his frights by depictions of madness and murder. Poe wrote many well known weird tales, including “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846). Poe is also considered the father of the detective story, as evidenced by his mysteries “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Gold-Bug” (1843), among others. His most famous poem is “The Raven” (1845).
A contemporary of Poe was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote Gothic and weird fiction. Hawthorne’s work tended more toward the moralistic and abstract, not the concrete terror that characterized Poe. Hawthorne’s stories include “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), about devil-worshippers; “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), a mad-scientist tale about poisonous plants; and “Ethan Brand” (1851), a Gothic tale of the search for the “unpardonable sin.” His novels The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Marble Faun (1860) contain hints of the supernatural.
Ghost stories flourished in the second half of the 19th century, but around 1900, detective stories came into fashion (this is when Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared), which were seen to be more intellectual than horror stories. Around this time, Ambrose Bierce started publishing grim tales. He wrote war stories (he was a Union soldier in the Civil War), black comedy, and tales of the supernatural. Among his better known stories are “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “Oil of Dog,” “My Favorite Murder,” and “The Damned Thing,” collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, also known as In the Midst of Life (1891), and Can Such Things Be? (1893).
It was during this time that Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote some macabre fiction as a sideline, published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Unfortunately, the story is so familiar that it cannot be read as the suspense novel it was intended to be, where it is not revealed until the last few pages of the book that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person.
Other mainstream classic authors have written a few works with supernatural elements: Sir Walter Scott (“Wandering Willie’s Tale” and “The Tapestried Chamber”), Charles Dickens (“A Christmas Carol” and “The Signal-Man”), Edward Bulwer-Lytton (“The Haunted and the Haunters, or the House and the Brain”), Rudyard Kipling (“The Phantom ’Rickshaw” and “The Mark of the Beast”), and Henry James (The Turn of the Screw).
On the other hand, there are mainstream authors who are remembered more for their horror fiction. F. Marion Crawford wrote best-sellers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but he is known for his stories collected in Wandering Ghosts (1894). Robert W. Chambers was famous in his time for his love stories but is mostly remembered for The King in Yellow (1895), a collection of macabre tales.
At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published several Gothic novels, popular then but forgotten now, and then moved on to short stories in the supernatural genre, for which he is better known. One of his innovations was the use of a psychic investigator (Dr. Hesselius in his stories), which was also used by later writers, such as Algernon Blackwood, with his Dr. John Silence. One of the best vampire stories ever written is Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1871), a fast-moving tale of a female vampire who preys on other females.
The book many consider to be the best horror novel of all appeared in 1897: Dracula. It was written by Bram Stoker, who was not a professional writer but the manager of an actor. He wrote other horror novels, but none as good as his masterpiece.
In the early 20th century, William Hope Hodgson published four novels: The Boats of the “Glen Carig” (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909), and The Night Land (1912). He also wrote a number of short stories, which were weird tales about the sea and stories about Carnacki, “the ghost-finder,” a psychic investigator.
The last great master of the Victorian ghost story was M.R. James, who is considered the Father of the Modern Ghost Story. His stylish tales were collected in four books, which were then collected, with a few additional stories, into one volume, Collected Ghost Stories (1931). Among his best known stories are “Mezzotint,” “Casting the Runes,” and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”
Around the end of the 19th century, a secret society called The Order of the Golden Dawn was formed, the members of which were interested in spirituality and the occult. One of the members was Arthur Machen, a Welshman who lived in London. In 1894, two of his best horror tales appeared: “The Great God Pan” and “The Inmost Light.” The following year saw the publication of his great novel The Three Impostors, which contains his most vivid depictions of horror.
Another member of The Order of the Golden Dawn was Algernon Blackwood, who was first published in the early 20th century. His ghost story “The Willows” is considered his masterpiece, and he is also known for the stories of John Silence, an occult detective.
Lord Dunsany was another Golden Dawn member. He is known for the innovation of creating his own supernatural beings instead of relying on those already existing in literature. His first book, The Gods of Pegana (1905), was the first in which he created his own mythology. His work influenced later writers to invent their own supernatural entities. The most widely known of his short stories is “Two Bottles of Relish,” which is what the killer needed in disposing of a corpse.
The 1920s saw the start of the pulp fiction era. Pulp was both a physical and a stylistic characteristic. The magazines were printed on cheap pulp paper and usually had lurid covers. Pulp writing was also typically lurid and was looked down upon by the literati.
The most influential of the pulps was Weird Tales, which first hit the newsstands in 1923 and which is still published today. The most important author published in Weird Tales was H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft took “weird” to a new level. He combined ancient demonology with the then-recent theories of space, time, and relativity to create a new kind of horror. In the process, he created the well known Cthulhu mythos (Cthulhu was a fourth-dimension monster). The Cthulhu mythos remains popular to this day, with magazines and anthologies of Cthulhu-inspired fiction and even role-playing games.
Lovecraft was a mentor for a group of writers which included Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, and August Derleth. Wandrei and Derleth founded Arkham House to publish the works of Lovecraft. Arkham House continues to publish classic horror. Howard, Smith, Bloch, and Derleth were important contributors to Weird Tales. Another contributor was Seabury Quinn, who created the psychic detective Jules de Grandin and wrote almost a hundred stories about him.
Exploring the world of classic horror will reveal innumerable treasures. You will also discover the influences on many modern horror writers.
Most works of fiction mentioned in this article are in print. For non-fiction books on the old masters, see Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (published by Wildside Press), and Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media, by Les Daniels (out of print). For one master’s take on others, see “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” by H.P. Lovecraft (an annotated edition, edited by S.T. Joshi, is available from Hippocampus Press). For a free sampling of classic horror fiction, go to Horror Masters, where you will find oodles of stories by many of the old masters.
Ron Breznay’s Old Masters of Horror: de la Mare
Posted by: | Comments[The following is a reprint of a column which originally appeared in the April 27, 2006, issue of Hellnotes.]
Though he was a prolific writer, Walter de la Mare’s horror output was small. He wrote more extensively in the areas of poetry, both for children and adults, and children’s stories. But what he lacked in quantity in weird fiction, he made up for in quality.
Walter John de la Mare was born on April 25, 1873, in Charlton, Kent, England, to an affluent family. His father, James Edward de la Mare, was an official with the Bank of England. His mother, Lucy Sophia, was related to Robert Browning. He was educated at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School in London. In 1890, he joined the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company in London as a statistician and started writing while employed there. Eighteen years later, he left the company on a government pension, which allowed him to concentrate on his writing. With his wife, Constance Elfrida Ingpen, and their four children, he moved to Taplow in Buckinghamshire to devote himself to writing.
His writing career got underway in 1895 with the publication of “Kismet” in the magazine The Sketch. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a number of milestones: his first book, Songs of Childhood, in 1902 (a collection of children’s poems published under the pen name Walter Ramal); his first novel, the romance Henry Brocken, in 1904; and his first poetry collection for adults, Poems, in 1906. However, he did not obtain success until 1912, with the publication of the poetry collection The Listeners and Other Poems.
Besides Henry Brocken, de la Mare wrote only two other novels: The Return (1910) and Memoirs of a Midget (1921), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
His supernatural works included The Return and stories in several collections, such as The Riddle and Other Stories (1923), The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926), and On the Edge (1930). Some of his poems, including “The Listeners,” have supernatural themes. Most of his supernatural works are classified as “inconclusive” ghost stories; i.e., the supernatural is hinted at but never fully shown. Because of this, some critics hold that his stories cannot be classified as horror. More than the supernatural itself, he was concerned with the world of imagination and the plight of people who are caught up in otherworldly events.
The Return is a story of spirit possession in which the protagonist, after falling asleep on a grave in a churchyard, is changed physically into the person who was buried there. He returns home and is not recognized by his family and friends. As in many of his stories, this novel emphasizes loneliness and isolation.
One of his best-known stories is “Seaton’s Aunt” (filmed for television in 1983). The title character is a bizarre woman who is obsessed by death and may be communicating with spirits. Seaton, who is a loner with few friends, hates and fears his aunt. In the first part of the story, Seaton is a schoolboy and visits his aunt with a friend, who also becomes frightened of her. In the second part of the story, Seaton and his friend meet again after the former is engaged to marry. He dies under mysterious circumstances before the wedding, and it is hinted that his aunt was a psychic vampire who drew his spirit out of him.
In “Out of the Deep,” the hero returns to his deceased uncle’s house, in which he is haunted by ghostly memories of childhood and then dies. There is another haunted house in “A Recluse,” in which a visitor to the house finds the corpse of his host, meaning that he had been visiting with a ghost all along. A haunted church and a mad rector figure in “All Hallows.” In “A House,” the protagonist is forced to leave his longtime home, and when he returns one last time, he is haunted by memories and is finally absorbed into the fabric of the house.
Spooky beings lurk in the pages of several of his stories. In “Crewe,” a greedy servant drives away other servants so he wouldn’t have to share a legacy; one commits suicide and returns to haunt him. “The Green Room” is about a man who meets the ghost of a poet; when he publishes her poetry, she is displeased. “A.B.O.” tells of a monster occupying a chest that is dug up. In “A Revenant,” the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe haunts a lecturer who attacked the works of Poe.
“The Tree” tells of a frightful plant in an artist’s garden. “The Looking Glass” also takes place in a haunted garden. A mad hermit wreaks havoc in his search for a human soul in “Mr. Kempe.” “The Bird of Passage” is a herald of death. “The Riddle” tells of several children who go to live with their grandmother and disappear into a mysterious chest in her attic. In “What Dreams May Come,” a survivor of a car accident meets Death. “Strangers and Pilgrims” is about a ghost searching for his grave.
De la Mare was also a literary critic. Several critical studies appeared in various magazines or were published in book form, and he served as the main critic for the London Times Literary Supplement from 1910 to about 1922, during which time he contributed over 200 reviews and articles.
Another of his literary endeavors was editing anthologies of poetry and prose for both adults and children. Among these are Come Hither (1923), Desert Islands (1930), Early One Morning in the Spring (1935), Behold, This Dreamer (1939), Animal Stories (1939), and Love (1943).
In 1924 and 1931, de la Mare declined the offer of knighthood, but he did accept the lesser royal awards of the Order of the Companions of Honour (1948) and The Order of Merit (1953). He won many other awards, including the Polignac Prize of the Royal Society of Literature (1911), the Carnegie Medal (1947), an honorary degree from Oxford (1951), and the Foyle Poetry Prize (1957).
De la Mare and his wife moved to Twickenham, which is near London, in 1940. His wife died three years later. De la Mare died on June 22, 1956, and is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Ron Breznay’s Old Masters of Horror: Benson Brothers
Posted by: | Comments[The following is a reprint of a column which originally appeared in the March 23, 2006, issue of Hellnotes.]
A.C., E.F., and R.H. Benson, who all wrote weird fiction, were three brothers who lived in Victorian England. Their father was Edward White Benson, an Archbishop of Canterbury. He was an authority on ghosts and other psychic matters and founded the Ghost Society, which later became the Society for Psychical Research. The family’s social circle included Henry James and M.R. James. Edward most likely told his sons ghost stories as they were growing up, thus fueling their interest in the supernatural. The family also included their mother, Mary Sidgwick; another brother, Martin; and two sisters, Nellie and Maggie.
A.C. Benson
Arthur Christopher Benson was born on April 24, 1862, and was the first of the brothers to write supernatural stories. He was educated at Eton and King’s College, and he later became a schoolmaster at Eton and a fellow at Magdalene College.
His first book was an thinly veiled autobiographical novel entitled Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton (1886). Most of his subsequent writing was non-fiction.
While headmaster at Eton, he regaled the boys with stories, which he eventually published in the collections The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1904) (combined into the omnibus Paul the Minstrel in 1911). Some of these stories dealt with the supernatural, many of which were inspired by the vivid nightmares he endured throughout his life. Among these are “The Gray Cat,” a tale of a dark pool in the hills that causes a young man to be plagued by dreams, and “The Closed Window,” which opens onto a dark, bleak landscape and the shape of a crouching man that beckons the protagonist. In 1911 to 1914, seven of his ghost stories, credited to “B,” appeared in the Magdalene College Magazine.
His other literary endeavors included poetry, essays, biographies, and an extensive diary. He earned renown for composing the lyrics for “Land of Hope and Glory,” the national anthem of England, and for editing Queen Victoria’s correspondence.
At various periods in his life, Arthur suffered from depression, which he expressed in his poetry. He died on June 17, 1925.
E.F. Benson
Edward Frederic Benson, known as Fred, was born on July 24, 1867. He was the most prolific of the brothers and is now the best known of the three. Fred did not do well in his early school years as he was the “class clown,” though he excelled at sports. He attended King’s College, where he was graduated with honors in archaeology. In the 1890s, he worked as an archaeologist in Greece and Egypt.
His first book, Sketches from Marlborough (1888), is a memoir of his school days. He was inspired to write fiction when he sat in on the stories Arthur told at Eton. Fred’s first novel was Dodo (1893), the central character of which is a charming but devious woman. This novel brought him acclaim and success. Most of his supernatural stories were published in the collections The Room in the Tower (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928), and More Spook Stories (1934). Others appeared in magazines.
Like Arthur, his dreams inspired his stories, and like Hugh, his psychic experiences provided fodder for his pen. He wrote prolifically, but he tended to use the same ideas repeatedly, and his writing varied in quality.
One of his best stories is “The Room in the Tower,” in which the main character has recurrent dreams of entering a room, but the dreams never reach a conclusion. Eventually, he actually finds himself in such a room and, during flashes of lightning, sees a hideous creature watching him. Another is “How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery,” a humorous tale of a family that moves into a haunted house and is delighted by the ghosts living there – until they encounter two cursed ghosts. Fred did not shy away from the gruesome in his stories. Giant worms and slugs populate many tales, including “And No Bird Sings,” “The Thing in the Hall,” and “Caterpillars.”
Among his novels are Colin (1923) and Colin II (1925), which tell of the descendants of a man who had made a pact with the devil to obtain worldly power. A similar story unfolds in The Inheritor (1930), with alternate generations having cloven-hoofed, misshapen children. His last supernatural novel was the demonic Ravens’ Brood (1934).
Besides his supernatural work, he is best remembered for his comic series featuring mischievous social rivals Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline Lucas (Lucia). Altogether, he wrote about a hundred books, dozens of short stories, articles, and pamphlets. Besides supernatural fiction, his subject matter included humor, history, biography, and sports.
From about 1920 until his death, Fred lived in Rye, in the former house of Henry James. In the 1930s, he served three terms as mayor of Rye. He died in London on February 29, 1940.
R.H. Benson
Robert Hugh Benson, who went by Hugh, was born on November 18, 1871. He was the last of the three to start writing, but his writing is considered to be the best. He was schooled at Eton and Trinity College, where he studied Classics and Theology.
He was ordained an Anglican priest by his father in 1894. He later questioned the Anglican religion and converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1904, he was ordained a Catholic priest, and in 1911, Pope Pius X elevated him to monsignor.
He actively explored the psychic realm, attended séances, performed exorcisms, and practiced hypnotism. It was rumored that he experimented with drugs. While living in an Anglican community at the dawn of the twentieth century, he was inspired by Arthur’s stories and started composing his own, enriched by his psychic experiences. His stories were published in the collections The Light Invisible (1903) and The Mirror of Shallot (1907). He wrote several other books, including supernatural novels, religious fiction, and non-fiction.
The Necromancers (1909) is considered by many to be his best work. This novel tells of a young man whose fiancé dies before their wedding. He joins a group of spiritualists to try to regain her but becomes possessed by an evil spirit.
Hugh died on October 19, 1914, in Salford, England. He was only 42.
