Archive for Masters of Horror
Old Masters of Horror: Robert E. Howard
Posted by: | Comments[The following is an updated and expanded version of a column which was originally published in Hellnotes on February 23, 2006.]
Robert E. Howard is best known for his pulp-fiction historical and legendary action heroes Conan the Cimmerian, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, and Kull. He also wrote in other genres: Lovecraft-style horror, fight stories, historical adventure, humor, westerns, and “spicy” stories. Despite his short life, he wrote over 800 stories, poems and novels. January 2006 saw the centennial of Howard’s birth, and he was the theme of the 2006 World Fantasy Convention in Austin, Texas.
Robert Ervin Howard was born on January 22, 1906, in Peaster, Texas, about 45 miles southwest of Fort Worth. He was the only child of Isaac Mordecai Howard, who was a country doctor, and Hester Jane Ervin Howard. The family moved several times all over Texas and, in 1919, finally settled in Cross Plains, an oil town in central Texas.
Howard became an avid reader early, perhaps nurtured by his mother, who loved poetry. Howard had a few close friends as he grew up, but none of them shared his love of reading. He read very fast and had perfect retention. His personal library grew to include mostly history and fiction, but also biography, sports, poetry, anthropology, works on Texas, and erotica. He also had a passion for oral storytelling. He wrote his first story when he was nine or ten.
As the Cross Plains school only went up to tenth grade, Howard and his mother moved to Brownwood, Texas, so he could finish high school. There, he met Truett Vinson and Clyde Smith, who would be his friends for life and who encouraged his writing. Indeed, Howard’s literary career got underway when he was in high school. Five of his stories were published in the high school paper, The Tattler, but a wider audience was on the horizon.
The first story Howard submitted to a magazine was “Bill Smalley and the Power of the Human Eye.” He sent it to Western Story and Adventure in 1921, but it was rejected by both. He found success at age 18 with the acceptance of “Spear and Fang” by Weird Tales in 1924. This story, about a Cro-Magnon rescuing his mate from a Neanderthal, showed early his penchant for ancient settings.
After he finished high school, Howard and his mother returned to Cross Plains. He resisted his father’s urgings to go to college and become a doctor as he detested school – and he wanted to be a writer, to be his own boss. But his writing brought in only a meager income at the time, so Howard was forced to work a number of jobs, including private secretary, assistant to a geologist, oil-field reporter for various newspapers, public stenographer, and a soda jerk.
Discouraged by his lack of success at writing, in the fall of 1926, he enrolled in a bookkeeping course at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Texas. He did not give up on writing, though. He wrote humorous pieces for the college newspaper, The Yellow Jacket, and he continued submitting to Weird Tales and other magazines.
He finished his college work in 1928 and began in earnest to make it as a writer. It soon became clear that he would succeed, and he never worked at any other job. He had already had a few stories published in Weird Tales, and in 1928, the magazine published four of his stories and five of his poems. After that, his stories and poems appeared in nearly three out of every four issues of Weird Tales.
In 1928, the first of a series of recurring characters appeared: Solomon Kane, a Puritan swordsman who travels the world to avenge wrongs. Seven Kane stories appeared in Weird Tales from 1928 to 1932. In 1929, another series character was born: King Kull, a savage from Atlantis. “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, August 1929) was the first Kull story, and many consider it to be the first true example of sword-and-sorcery, with its blending of heroic adventure, fantasy, and horror. Many of the Kull stories, however, did not see print until collected in book form in 1967.
By 1929 and 1930, besides being a regular contributor to Weird Tales, he also got into Fight Stories, with the tales of Sailor Steve Costigan, and Oriental Stories, with humorous adventures set in the Far East. He also had stories published in Ghost Stories and Argosy.
In 1930, Howard began a correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, which would continue robustly until Howard’s death, with the two writers debating many issues. At first, Howard would defer to Lovecraft, but he later asserted his own views more strongly. This correspondence inspired Howard to try writing Lovecraftian stories. These included “The Children of the Night,” “The Thing on the Roof,” and “The Black Stone,” which introduced Howard’s own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos.
Howard turned his attention to his native Texas in 1932, penning frontier stories with weird twists, such as “Pigeons from Hell,” “The Horror from the Mound,” “Old Garfield’s Heart,” and “The Man on the Ground.” He then created the rollicking hero Breckinridge Elkins, whose tales appeared in every issue of Action Stories beginning in early 1934 and continuing until after his death.
The November 1932 issue of Weird Tales saw the introduction of another popular character: Bran Mak Morn, a barbaric king of the Pict people of Britain, who battled the encroaching Roman legions.
The December 1932 issue of Weird Tales brought to the world Howard’s most famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian, in “The Phoenix on the Sword.” Conan was a savage sword-fighter who lived in the mythical Hyborian age, which ran from the sinking of Atlantis to the dawn of recorded human history. Over the next four years, 17 Conan stories, some serialized, graced the pages of Weird Tales.
In 1934, a new schoolteacher, Novalyne Price, arrived in Cross Plains. Howard had met her a year earlier, and after she moved to his town, an up-and-down relationship between the two ensued. They were both feisty, independent people who shared the same interests but also had major differences. Their relationship ended in the spring of 1936 when Novalyne moved to Louisiana to pursue graduate studies.
Howard reached the height of his output in early 1936. His stories were appearing regularly in Weird Tales, Action Stories, Spicy Adventure Stories, Argosy, Sport Story, Strange Detective, and others. Also, the Kirby O’Donnell and Francis X. Gordon (“El Borak”) adventure series appeared in Street & Smith’s magazines.
Pulp writers achieved success in one of two ways. The first was by creating a popular character who would have readers clamoring for more stories and editors thus buying them. The other path was to be able to write a wide variety of stories that could sell to the many pulp titles of the time. Howard was such a success because he was a versatile writer and he created several popular characters. However, unlike other writers who could pen unlimited tales of their characters, Howard always eventually reached a point where he couldn’t write any more about one of his characters. Howard scholar Patrice Louinet proposed that this was because each character represented a different stage in Howard’s emotional growth, and he would psychologically outgrow them and have to move on to another character.
In the mid-1930s, Howard was increasingly worried over his mother’s health, which had never been good. Medical bills were mounting, creating financial pressure on the family. His father was forced to move his medical practice into their home, making it difficult for Howard to concentrate on his writing. After his mother underwent surgery in 1935, she never regained her health, required frequent medical treatment, and eventually slipped into a coma on June 8, 1936. He had often talked of suicide, being tired of the grinding struggle of life, and made careful plans for taking his own life. He arranged for the handling of his unsubmitted manuscripts after his death, borrowed a gun, and purchased burial plots for his parents and himself. On June 11, 1936, after hearing his mother would never emerge from the coma, he wrote a suicide poem and then shot himself at his home in Cross Plains. He was only 30.
Many editions and collections of Howard’s work came out in the years following his death. Arkham House published a collection, Skull-Face and Others in 1946. In the 1950s, Gnome Press published the Conan stories in hardcover. Conan paperbacks came out in the 1960s, popularizing Howard’s work.
Several movies have been made based on Conan and one on Kull. “Pigeons from Hell” was made into an episode of Boris Karloff’s TV series Thriller. Howard’s romance with Novalyne Price is the subject of the film The Whole Wide World (1996).
In the 1980s, a community group in Cross Plains purchased the Howard home and restored it. Each June, Cross Plains holds Robert E. Howard Day. The wildfires in Cross Plains a few years ago spared the Howard home.
Many trade paperback collections of Howard’s work are readily available in a variety of bookstores. Wildside Press and the University of Nebraska Press have available a large number of books in both hardcover and trade paperback. Girasol Collectables Inc. has produced a number of Howard collections, some in facsimile format, as well as facsimiles of various pulp magazines in which his fiction appeared.
Ron Breznay’s Old Masters of Horror: Charles Dickens
Posted by: | Comments[The following is a reprint of a column which originally appeared in the December 15, 2005, issue of Hellnotes.]
For many people, Christmas isn’t complete without Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” – whether they read the story, go to the local theater to see a stage production, or watch one of the many movie versions. This is probably the best known and most popular ghost story in English literature. However, it is far from the only supernatural tale which Dickens wrote.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Hampshire, England, of John and Elizabeth Dickens. Around 1815, the Dickens family moved to London. A few years later, they moved to Chatham in Kent, and they later returned to London. Dickens was small and sickly, and his mother taught him to read to pass the time.
Dickens had an early exposure to ghost stories when his nanny, Mary “Mercy” Weller, who took care of him from age 5 to 11, regaled him with tales of murder, ghosts, demons, and cannibals. Though Dickens considered Mercy to be the greatest influence on his interest in the macabre, there were other factors as well. His grandmother also told him fantastic stories, and his home’s library contained many fantasy and supernatural books. During his teens, he read The Terrific Register, a popular “penny dreadful” magazine, which contained horrific stories, complete with ghoulish illustrations. Also an influence on Dickens was his environment: working class London of the mid 19th century, with its teeming impoverished masses, slums, smoke-filled air, and grimy factories, such as the shoe-blacking factory where Dickens worked as a child.
His writing career started in 1833 when his short stories and essays began appearing in magazines, some under his pen name, Boz. His collection Sketches by Boz and the novel The Pickwick Papers were published in 1836.
Many of his novels featured stand-alone stories within the main narrative. The first of his novels to contain ghost stories was The Pickwick Papers (serialized in 1836 to 1837), with five tales of the supernatural within its pages: “The Lawyer and the Ghost,” “The Queer Chair,” “The Ghosts of the Mail,” “A Madman’s Manuscript,” and “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.” These were perhaps written originally as individual short stories but were added to the novel to help him meet the monthly publishing deadlines for the serialization. In a similar manner, the humorous ghost story “Baron Koëldwethout’s Apparition” haunted the pages of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839).
“The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” appeared in the Christmas 1836 installment of The Pickwick Papers, thus starting Dickens’s tradition of Christmas ghost stories. This story seems to be a forerunner of “A Christmas Carol” as the two contain several similar elements: a miserable loner, a Christmas setting, and an unearthly apparition who shows the loner the error of his ways. Dickens liked Christmas ghost stories because he believed that while Christmas was a festive season, it was also a time for re-assessment and perhaps change.
“A Christmas Carol” came out in book form in December 1843 and was an instant success, both popularly and critically. The first edition of 6,000 sold out within days, and second and third editions quickly followed. Within a year, over 15,000 copies had been sold.
This story started a tradition among publishers of issuing a special volume for Christmas. Dickens wrote five of these Christmas novellas. Only one other was a ghost story: “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” (1848), which was also his last Christmas book. He continued to write special Christmas tales, but subsequent ones were short stories, three in the horror genre, which were published in magazines or in the women’s annuals that were popular in England at the time.
In 1850, the charming short story “A Child’s Dream of a Star” appeared. In this story, a little girl dies and becomes an angel, and she waits for her brother’s spirit. It is thought this story came from Dickens’s reflections on the happier days of his childhood. That same year saw the publication of “A Christmas Tree” in the December issue of Household Words. Though not entirely supernatural, this story has a section about the different kinds of ghosts that might be experienced at Christmas time. In 1852, the off-beat ghost story “To Be Read at Dusk” appeared in The Keepsake.
Dickens edited Household Words, later retitled All the Year Round, from 1850 until 1870, when his son took over. Dickens encouraged contributors, such as Lord Bulwer Lytton and Wilkie Collins, to write ghost stories for the Christmas issues. Dickens’s “The Ghost Chamber” appeared in Household Words in October 1857. Two years later, Dickens decided to start giving a special title to the Christmas issue, and that year it was The Haunted House. He solicited stories on the theme from his contributors, and wrote two stories himself: “The Mortals in the House” and “The Ghost in Master B.’s Room.”
The Uncommercial Traveller (1860), which collected 17 of the stories Dickens had contributed to his magazine, contained two supernatural stories: “Chambers,” reprinted as “Mr Testator’s Visitation”; and “Nurse’s Stories,” reprinted as “Captain Murderer and the Devil’s Bargain.” The latter was a retelling of stories Mercy had told him in his youth.
“Four Ghost Stories” was published in All the Year Round in September 1861. Dickens later discovered that his fictional account actually happened to someone, who, after reading the story, accused Dickens of stealing his idea. Dickens published the other man’s tale, “The Portrait-Painter’s Story,” in October 1861.
In the 1865 and 1866 Christmas special issues of All the Year Round were, respectively, “The Trial for Murder” and “The Signal-Man.” The latter is perhaps his second most famous ghost story and is thought to be based on an actual train crash in 1861.
After Dickens broke up with his wife, he moved to Gadshill in Kent. He died there on June 9, 1870.
“A Christmas Carol” is readily available in many editions. All of Dickens’s ghost stories have been collected in the out-of-print The Collected Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens, edited by Peter Haining, which contains illustrations from their original publications.
Ron Breznay’s Old Masters of Horror: Seabury Quinn
Posted by: | Comments[The following is a reprint of a column which originally appeared in the January 26, 2006, issue of Hellnotes.]
Who was the most prolific contributor to Weird Tales magazine? Was it H.P. Lovecraft? No. Robert Howard? Nope. It was Seabury Quinn, who contributed 165 stories to “the unique magazine,” including the popular series featuring the French occult detective Dr. Jules de Grandin and his sidekick, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge.
Seabury Grandin Quinn was born on January 1, 1889, in Washington, D.C. He was graduated from the National University Law School (now part of George Washington University) in 1910 and practiced law in D.C.
Quinn served in the Army in World War I. Afterwards, he moved to New York, where he wrote, edited, and taught medical jurisprudence, specializing in mortuary law. He wrote the legal tome A Syllabus of Mortuary Jurisprudence (1933), and he edited many mortuary trade journals, including Casket & Sunnyside. He was married and had a son, Seabury, Jr., who went on to become a playwright and drama professor (Ohio University holds the annual Seabury Quinn, Jr., Playwrights’ Festival, celebrating the work of student playwrights).
Quinn also started writing fiction after moving to New York. His stories were enhanced by his far-ranging reading: horror, supernatural, and weird fiction, as well as non-fiction in the fields of the occult, mysticism, witchcraft, legends, Satanism, and ancient religious customs. His first published story, “The Stone Image,” appeared in the May 1, 1919, issue of The Thrill Book. This tale introduced Dr. Towbridge, who later became de Grandin’s assistant, Trowbridge.
Quinn’s association with Weird Tales began with the appearance of his story “The Phantom Farmhouse” in the October 1923 issue. The outrageously depicted de Grandin was introduced in the story “The Horror on the Links,” in the October 1925 issue, in which de Grandin and Trowbridge investigate the murder of a woman on a golf course. From 1925 through 1951, 93 stories featuring the Frenchman and his assistant were published in Weird Tales. Most of these stories, which take place mainly in haunted Harrisonville, New Jersey, feature the team’s encounters with ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural elements. But some are action stories with odd criminals, mad scientists, foreign assassins, and Nazis as the antagonists. The de Grandin stories were so popular that they almost overshadowed his other writings.
The team of de Grandin and Trowbridge is comparable to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. De Grandin was diminutive in size but a giant in knowledge and skills, even in obscure areas. No matter what the situation required–fencing ability, knowledge of medicine, familiarity with the occult, the use of a variety of firearms – de Grandin pulled it out of his sleeve. These “superman” abilities seemed a little far-fetched to some readers, but they made de Grandin a popular character. On the other hand, Trowbridge, who narrates the stories, is portrayed as loyal and intelligent but not quite as erudite or adept at deduction as his partner. A major criticism of these stories is Quinn’s depiction of minorities as foolish or evil. Quinn appears to have regretted this as later stories were more sympathetic to minorities. Another criticism is that although de Grandin and Trowbridge are well-drawn, most of the other characters are stereotypes or one-dimensional.
In 1937, Quinn moved back to Washington, D.C., to perform legal work for a chain of trade magazines, and during World War II, he was a government lawyer. He continued writing stories for pulp magazines, but he also branched off in another direction. During the 1940s and 1950s, he wrote, under the pen name Jerome Burke, a series of non-fiction pieces for The Dodge Magazine, a mortuary journal published by the Dodge Company, purveyor of embalming fluids. These human-interest stories were based on anecdotes related to him by funeral directors he had known. Nearly 150 of these articles were later collected in the three-volume This I Remember: The Memoirs of a Funeral Director (2002).
Quinn’s first novel was Roads, which is best described as a weird Christmas story. It tells the tale of Klaus the Norseman, who saved the baby Jesus and was granted eternal life. After centuries of adventures, he and his wife decide to return to his homeland in the frozen north. On the way, they run into a band of elves. They join forces and he becomes Santa Claus. This novel is also the story of the various roads we take in our lives and how the choices we make affect our destination. Roads was first published as a short story in the January 1938 issue of Weird Tales, released later that year as a pamphlet by publisher Conrad H. Ruppert, and reissued by Arkham House in a revised edition in 1948.
His only other novel, the violent, sadistic The Devil’s Bride, came out posthumously in 1976. This is a de Grandin adventure about the descendant of a Yezidee high priest who is snatched from her wedding to be the new high priestess of a satanic cult that practices human sacrifice. It is actually a collection of short stories (that originally appeared in Weird Tales in 1932) masquerading as a novel. E.F. Bleiler calls it “a clumsy juxtaposition of shorter works.”
Quinn’s final Weird Tales story, “The Scarred Soul,” appeared in the March 1952 issue. At this time, a series of strokes forced him into semi-retirement. His popularity faded after Weird Tales bit the dust in 1954 as he didn’t have a champion, like August Derleth for H.P. Lovecraft, to preserve and promote his work. Quinn’s final published story was “Master Nicholas,” which appeared in the Winter 1965 issue of Magazine of Horror. He died on December 24, 1969.
Quinn’s work was rescued from obscurity in 2001 when Battered Silicon Dispatch Box Publishers released The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin. This pricey three-volume set contains every de Grandin piece, including 93 stories and one novel. This set and several other Quinn books, including This I Remember, are available from the publisher.
Available from Ash-Tree Press is the collection Night Creatures (2003), featuring 11 Weird Tales stories, but only one with de Grandin. A facsimile of the Arkham edition of Roads was published by Red Jacket Press in 2005.
Old Masters of Horror: Fritz Leiber
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“What is the whole literature of supernatural horror, but an essay to make Death itself exciting – wonder and strangeness to life’s very end?” Fritz Leiber once said. Besides horror, he wrote tales of fantasy and science fiction, and was the first to use the term “sword and sorcery” for that sub-genre. He became a protégé of H.P. Lovecraft and wrote stories in the Cthulhu Mythos, but he developed his own style. Leiber considered his main influences to be Lovecraft, William Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr., was born in Chicago on December 24, 1910, the son of Shakespearean actors Fritz, Sr., and Virginia. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, where he majored in psychology and physiology. He attended Episcopal General Theological Seminary in New York and was an Episcopal minister from 1932 to 1933. Then he got into the theater, acting in his father’s company in 1934 to 1936, and later teaching drama.
Leiber married Jonquil Stephens in 1936. They had a son, Justin, in 1938. Justin is a professor of philosophy at Florida State University and has written some fiction in addition to numerous non-fiction works, mostly in the field of philosophy. Jonquil died in 1969. In 1992, shortly before his death, Leiber married Margo Skinner, who had been his companion for 20 years.
After Leiber married Jonquil, they moved to Hollywood, where he hoped to find work in films. He appeared in Camille (1936), The Great Garrick (1937), The Web (1947), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Equinox (1970), and The Bermuda Triangle (1979). Five of Leiber’s works were adapted for the screen. Conjure Wife was filmed three times: Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (1962), and Witches’ Brew (1980). “The Dead Man,” an episode of Night Gallery (1970), and The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1995), were based on his stories.
Leiber became a protégé of H.P. Lovecraft just as Leiber’s career was starting and Lovecraft’s was winding down. Leiber had long admired Lovecraft’s work, and in 1936, his wife sent Lovecraft a letter telling him how much her husband admired his work. This began a fruitful correspondence between the two writers until Lovecraft’s death the following year. Through these letters, Lovecraft critiqued Leiber’s stories, helped him with his poetry, and offered him advice on writing. Lovecraft’s influence, though, is not clear upon casual reading as Leiber had his own style. S.T. Joshi stated that “Fritz Leiber is the only writer among H.P. Lovecraft’s friends and colleagues who can be placed on an equal footing with him in regard to his literary achievement.”
In 1937, the family moved to Chicago, where Leiber worked for the Consolidated Book Publishing Company. He started writing fiction, beginning with the fantasy genre. His sword-and-sorcery story, “Two Sought Adventure,” appeared in Unknown magazine in 1939. This was the first published story in his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, which related the adventures of two sophisticated rogues, who were modeled, respectively, on Leiber and his friend Harry Fischer. The Fafhrd and Mouser series would span nearly 50 years and eventually fill several volumes, including a novel, The Swords of Lankhmar (1968).
His stories also appeared in such magazines as Astounding, Dangerous Visions, Fantastic, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, Other Worlds, Star Science Fiction Stories, and Weird Tales.
The family moved back to California in 1941, and Leiber began working as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
In 1943, he found success in the horror genre with the publication of Conjure Wife in Unknown magazine (it was published in book form in 1953). This novel tells of witchcraft in a small college town. His other horror works included, among others, You Are All Alone (1950), “Smoke Ghost” (1941), “The Hound” (1942), the vampire story “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949), “The Black Gondolier” (1964), and Our Lady of Darkness (1977). The latter book included Lovecraftian themes and was a tribute to Clark Ashton Smith.
Also in 1943, Leiber started publishing science fiction, with the appearance of Gather, Darkness!, about the overthrow of a religious dictator.
In 1947, Leiber saw his first hardcover publication when Arkham House put out Night’s Black Agents, a collection of his stories. Leiber must have been especially pleased at this publication as Arkham House had been established to publish the works of his mentor, Lovecraft.
The family moved back to Chicago, where Leiber became editor of Science Digest. In 1958, they returned to Los Angeles, at which time Leiber became a full-time writer. After Jonquil’s death, he moved to San Francisco, where he died on September 5, 1992.
Leiber used a personal approach in writing fiction. Characters in several of his works suffer from alcoholism – reflecting his own problems with alcohol, which lasted from the 1950s until 1972. He loved cats and included them in many of his stories. Another frequent theme he used is the threat of modern urban horror, perhaps influenced by the several large cities where he lived. Our Lady of Darkness, written after Jonquil died, is about a writer of weird tales who must deal with the death of his wife and his recovery from alcoholism.
Leiber won many Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and other awards. He received the 1975 Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy Award, the 1976 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the 1987 Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award. He was named Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1981.
Leiber’s books are widely available from on-line booksellers. Some notable editions: Donald M. Grant, Publisher, has available Gummitch and Friends (1992), a collection of Leiber’s cat tales with additional material from other writers. Writers of the Dark (Wildside Press, 2003) concentrates on Leiber’s connection to Lovecraft and contains a selection of correspondence between the two, Lovecraft-inspired stories by Leiber, and essays by Leiber on Lovecraft. Wildside Press has several other Leiber books in print. Midnight House recently published a series of three Leiber collections, which are out of print but well worth seeking out.
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters Of Horror: Robert W. Chambers
Posted by: | Comments[The following is an updated reprint of a column which originally appeared in the July 28, 2005, issue of Hellnotes.]
Robert W. Chambers achieved his greatest success during his lifetime by writing romantic and historical novels, which were extremely popular at the time but are now largely forgotten. He is remembered today for his horror and fantasy fiction, especially for The King in Yellow, a collection of weird stories based around a fictitious play of that name. He was a prolific writer, having published approximately 100 books as well as numerous shorter pieces.
Robert William Chambers was born on May 26, 1865, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, William P. Chambers, was a famous lawyer, and his mother, Caroline Boughton Chambers, was a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. His brother, Walter Boughton Chambers, was a well-known architect.
Chambers started out as an artist rather than a writer. He studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he made friends with Charles Dana Gibson, who would later gain fame as an illustrator. The following year, Chambers traveled to Paris to continue his studies at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julian. His work was displayed at the Paris Salon, which is the official art exhibit of the Academie des Beaux-Arts. When Chambers returned to New York City in 1893, he started selling illustrations to such magazines as Life, Truth, and Vogue.
However, for reasons that are not clear, he soon turned to writing. His first novel, In the Quarter, a melodrama of student life in Paris, was written in 1887 and was published anonymously in 1894. The King in Yellow appeared in 1895. The success of this collection prompted Chambers to drop art as a career and concentrate on writing.
The King in Yellow contains the following weird stories: “The Repairer of Reputations,” “The Mask,” “In the Court of the Dragon,” “The Yellow Sign,” “The Demoiselle D’Ys,” and “The Prophets’ Paradise.” A common theme of these stories, which are otherwise unrelated, is that those who read the titular play suffer madness or some sort of tragedy. This collection also contains non-horror stories about student life in Paris.
In 1898, he married Elsa Vaughn Moller. They had a son, Robert, who also became a writer. Chambers kept an office in New York City, the address of which was unknown even to his family, where he could write without distraction. The family lived in New York City and were active members of society. They spent the summers at Broadalbin, their 800-acre estate in the Adirondack Mountains. There, Chambers would relax by fishing, hunting, riding horses, and collecting butterflies.
For the next few years, he wrote historical novels and fantastic fiction. Examples of the former are The Red Republic (1895), Lorraine (1896), and Ashes of Empire (1897), which, with The Maids of Paradise (1903), centered around the Franco-Prussian War. In 1906, Chambers turned his pen to contemporary society, using his experiences as a socialite, with six novels, from The Fighting Chance (1906) to The Streets of Ascalon (1912).
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters Of Horror: Mary Shelley
Posted by: | Comments[The following is an updated reprint of a column which originally appeared in the September 22, 2005, issue of Hellnotes.]
Frankenstein is, without a doubt, one of the major classics of horror. This novel has inspired countless other novels and dozens of stage adaptations and films. Even nearly 200 years after it was published, it continues to find new readers. Not bad for a book written by an 18-year-old.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, in London, England. Her parents were William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary’s father was a novelist and a social theorist, whose 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice propelled him to fame. Her mother was a pioneer in women’s liberation and wrote the book Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Probably because Mary’s mother died 11 days after she was born (due to complications from childbirth), Mary became extremely attached to her father, and her father favored her over her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who was three years older. In 1801, Mary’s father met Mary Jane Clairmont, who had two children, and they married later that year. Mary’s relationship with her step-mother was strained because of the woman’s resentment of the intense affection between father and daughter and of the special attention the girl received from other people.
Because of her step-mother’s resentment, Mary never received a formal education. She learned to read from family members. She had access to her father’s excellent library, and her self-education was furthered by listening in on intellectual conversations her father had with various visitors, including listening to Samuel Taylor Coleridge read his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
In November 1812, when Mary returned to London from a stay in Scotland, she met Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley, who were frequent visitors to her father’s house. Percy was highly educated and had published two novels before he was 17. Mary and Percy soon began a love affair, and in 1814, they traveled together in Europe.
In 1816, the family moved to Switzerland, where Mary and Percy met and befriended Lord Byron. One rainy evening in June 1816, during a summer of violent thunderstorms in the Geneva area, Mary, Percy, Byron, and others gathered at a villa on Lake Geneva and read aloud German ghost stories, one of which was about the reanimation of a stolen corpse head. Byron suggested they each write a horror story. Mary started on Frankenstein, which she continued working on in London when they moved back shortly thereafter.
In 1816, both Fanny and Harriett committed suicide. In December of that year, Mary and Percy married. Together they had four children, from 1815 to 1819, three of whom died in childhood (after her first baby died in 1815, Mary had a dream about a baby being brought back to life). Many critics have pointed out the connection between all these deaths and the themes of creation and death in Frankenstein.
Mary’s first published book was a travelogue with the imposing title History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: With Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (1817). She later published another, better received travel book, Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844).
On April 17, 1817, Mary finished writing Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (in Greek mythology, Prometheus was a cousin of Zeus, who is said to have fashioned the first man from clay, after which the goddess Athena breathed life into the figure). Despite Percy’s efforts, the book did not easily find a publisher. A not-quite-reputable house, Lackington and Hughes, published the book anonymously on March 11, 1818.
Old Masters of Horror: Oliver Onions
Posted by: | Comments[The following is an updated reprint of a column which originally appeared in the June 30, 2005, issue of Hellnotes.]
Oliver Onions was a master of the supernatural tale. His ghost stories were elegantly written and well plotted, and his characters were fully fleshed. He is known for psychological insight into his characters, and a common theme is a character’s realization that ghosts are not confined to traditional haunted old places but exist in the contemporary world. His theory of ghosts, at least in his fiction, was that they are all around us but are usually not visible. Only when there is a slight shift in the equilibrium between the supernatural and the natural worlds are ghosts sometimes sighted. Though Onions wrote convincingly about the supernatural, he did not believe in ghosts.
George Oliver Onions was born on November 13, 1872 or 1873, in Bradford, Yorkshire, England. He legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918 but used the name Oliver Onions to publish fiction.
Onions studied art from 1894 to 1897 at the National Arts Training Schools (now the Royal Academy) in London, and then for another year in Paris. While in France, he edited a student paper, Le Quartier Latin. During this period, he wrote his first story, “Smoking Flax,” which was published in Lady’s Pictorial, but he did not entertain thoughts of becoming a writer. On his return to England in 1898, he embarked on a career as an illustrator and poster designer. Even after he took up writing, he continued his commercial art work, most notably in the design of book jackets.
His first novel, The Compleat Bachelor, came out in 1901, and was serialized in the United States in Harper’s Bazaar. It was nearly a decade before his next books were published. These included three novels which established his reputation as a master of the psychological thriller: In Accordance with the Evidence (1910), The Debit Account (1913), and The Story of Louis (1913), which make up his Whom God Hath Sundered trilogy. These were published in an omnibus edition in 1925.
At this point, he began making less money from art and more from writing, so he shifted gears to a literary career. At first, his works were not horror but did contain his signature strangeness and were written in the unique style he strove for.
In 1909, Onions married Berta Ruck. They had two sons, Arthur (born in 1912) and William (born in 1913). With her husband’s assistance, Ruck began a career as a prolific and popular writer.
Onions wrote about 24 weird tales. His ghost stories were published in three collections: Widdershins (1911), Ghosts in Daylight (1924), and The Painted Face (1929). These three books were later published in an omnibus edition, The Collected Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions (1935), which, as he states in the “credo” to that book, contains all the stories he cared to collect at that point. Some of these stories were later published in a retrospective collection, Bells Rung Backward (1953).
