Archive for Masters of Horror
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters Of Horror: M.P. Shiel
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[The following is an updated reprint of a column which originally appeared in the August 25, 2005, issue of Hellnotes.]
M.P. Shiel is probably best known for his masterpiece, The Purple Cloud. This last-man-on-earth novel, which H.G. Wells called “colossal” and “brilliant,” doesn’t contain any supernatural elements but is no less horrific. Shiel wrote about 25 novels and dozens of short stories. His body of work, which is noted for poetic, mellifluous prose and underlying philosophical themes, includes romantic mysteries, adventures, horror, and science-fiction.
Matthew Phipps Shiell (he later dropped the second “l” ) was born in Plymouth, Montserrat, the West Indies, on July 21, 1865. He wrote of his birth: “I was born at the moment of an earthquake and a storm, or, rather, these were born at the moment of me. Nature sneezed at my coming. The sheet-lightning, like a sheeted ghost, came peering into the chamber, winking a million to the second. And, with lullaby rough enough, this mixture of Heaven and Earth and Hell which I call ‘I,’ and sometimes ‘We,’ came out, and began to cry.”
His father, Matthew Dowdy Shiell, was of Irish descent, and his mother, Priscilla Ann Blake, was of mixed race. Shiel had nine sisters and was the sole son in the family. His father laid claim to the island of Santa Maria la Redonda, which he called the Kingdom of Redonda, and at age 15, Shiel was crowned King Filipe of Redonda (or so goes the legend he perpetuated).
Shiel started writing young. He produced a newspaper when he was 11, and then a novel and a serial by the time he was 13. When he was 17, he discovered Edgar Allan Poe and many of his writings were influenced by Poe’s work.
He had an extensive education, first at Harrison College in Barbados and then at King’s College in London. He spoke eight languages and worked as an interpreter. He first tried medicine as a career, but he almost fainted when he saw his first surgery. He then taught math, but he didn’t like that either. He turned to writing and sold his first story in 1889.
After 1885, Shiel lived mostly in London and Paris, gravitating toward the Bohemian lifestyle and associating with Arthur Machen, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Shiel traveled extensively through Europe, especially Italy and Spain, and he finally settled in Horsham, Sussex, England.
Shiel was married twice. The first time was to Lina Garcia Gomez, in 1898, with whom he had a daughter. In 1903, he left them in Paris. He married Esther Lydia Furley in 1919, and after ten years, they parted ways. In between these marriages, he had an affair with Elizabeth Price. This relationship produced a daughter and perhaps a son. From 1931 until his death, he held a long-distance love affair by correspondence with Annamarie Miller of New York.
In 1895, he published his first book, the collection Prince Zaleski. These stories were in the vein of Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin. The work was described as “Sherlock Holmes in the House of Usher” (Sam Moskowitz) and “Poe with an unearthly radiance” (Machen). The comparisons continued with Machen calling the horror collection Shapes in the Fire (1896) “a wilder wonderland than Poe ever dreamt of.” Also in 1896, Shiel published his first novel, The Rajah’s Sapphire, written in collaboration with W.T. Stead.
Shiel gained fame in 1898 with the publication of his commissioned magazine serial The Empress of the Earth. This futuristic world-war story was influenced by the crisis in China at the time, and actual events were incorporated into the serial as the crisis unfolded. Later that year, this serial was published in book form as The Yellow Danger, which was extensively reprinted, reserialized (as The Yellow Peril), and revised (to incorporate the 1900 Boxer Rebellion). However, Shiel considered the story hackwork and was not proud of it. Subsequent Asian crises inspired The Yellow Wave (1905) and The Dragon (1913).
The Purple Cloud (1901) tells the story of an adventurer who, while at the North Pole, escapes a cloud of poisonous gas that wipes out the Earth’s population. He explores the world of corpses, leaving his mark here and there and surviving for decades alone, while wondering if there were any other survivors. This novel received high praise from many quarters, including August Derleth, Hugh Walpole, E.M. Benson, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Dashiell Hammett. H.P. Lovecraft said this story was “delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty.”
The Purple Cloud used the device of transcriptions of visions of the future seen by one Mary Wilson while in a hypnotic trance. Her visions were also the basis for the novels The Lord of the Sea (1901) and The Last Miracle (1906).
In 1911 came “The House of Sounds,” one of Shiel’s most celebrated stories. It is the tale of a strange bronze house built on an island off the coast of Norway. The house is continually buffeted by strong winds and rushing waves. This story has been likened to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” (An earlier version, “Vaila,” appeared in Shapes in the Fire.) This story and other weird tales were published in The Pale Ape and Other Pulses (1911).
From 1913 to 1923, Shiel did not publish anything. His books published from 1923 on were mainly mysteries and romances. In his last years, Shiel, perhaps influenced by his father’s lay ministry, worked on Jesus, a New Testament study that he called “a truer translation of Luke” from the original Greek, with commentary. He finished this shortly before he died, but the manuscript went unpublished and now much of it is lost.
Shiel died on February 17, 1947, at St. Richard’s Hospital in Chichester, England, at age 81.
Available from Tartarus Press are Prince Zaleski, a collection of six stories with a new introduction, and The Pale Ape and Other Pulses, containing a new introduction and ten stories. Available from Hippocampus Press is The House of Sounds and Others, a trade paperback containing the title story, seven other stories, and The Purple Cloud. From Arkham House, you can get the collection Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk. Aegypan has published a reprint of Shapes in the Fire.
Ron Breznay’s Old Masters of Horror: Shirley Jackson
Posted by: | Comments[The following is an updated reprint of a column which originally appeared in the May 19, 2005, issue of Hellnotes.]
Best known for “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson wrote non-genre fiction in addition to gothic horror. Some of her work is light and witty, contrasting with her darker works that deal with the evil lurking beneath everyday life. Her writings dealt more with psychological horror than the supernatural, and her style was sparse and understated (Stephen King wrote in the dedication to Firestarter: “In memory of Shirley Jackson, who never needed to raise her voice”).
Shirley Hardie Jackson was born on December 14, 1916 (some sources incorrectly say 1919), in San Francisco, California, and spent most of her early life in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame. She became interested in writing as a child and won a poetry award when she was 12. Unfortunately, her earliest attempts at writing were rejected by her parents. But she didn’t let that stop her.
In 1933, the Jackson family moved to Rochester, New York, where she attended Brighton High School, graduating in 1934. She enrolled in the University of Rochester, but left after a short time because of an attack of depression, which periodically recurred in her later years.
Her lifelong anxiety and depression, however, fueled her creativity. In an unsent letter to poet Howard Nemerov, she wrote, “I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.” Later in life, Jackson was beset by physical and psychological problems, including paranoia, emotional problems, obesity, asthma, arthritis, overwork, and drug dependence.
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters of Horror: Classic Australian Horror Fiction, Part 4
Posted by: | CommentsThe Authors and Their Works
Marcus Clarke (1846-1881)
Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke was born in London, England, on April 24, 1846, and had a privileged upbringing. In 1863, after his father lost the family fortune, Clarke moved to Australia, where his uncle, James Langton Clarke, was a judge. He first took a clerk position at the Bank of Australasia, but he had no aptitude for business, so in 1865 he moved to his uncle’s sheep stations on the Wimmera River in Victoria. He enjoyed station life and eventually sought his own land, but that expedition proved disastrous as he lost a great deal of money and a companion lost his life. He returned to Melbourne in 1867. He married Marian Dunn, an actress, in 1869, and they had six children.
Soon after moving to Australia, he started writing stories for Australasian Magazine. In 1867, after returning to Melbourne, he became a staff writer for Argus, penning a column, often humorous, entitled “The Peripatetic Philosopher.” He later went on to the Melbourne Herald, the Daily Telegraph, and the Age. He also wrote for the theater, including pantomimes, comedies, and operettas. He was involved with the Melbourne Public Library, first as a secretary to the trustees and later as an assistant librarian.
His writings appeared in Australian Monthly Magazine, which he later bought and edited (1868-1869) under the new title of Colonial Monthly. He also published in The Australasian and other periodicals, and edited the Australian Journal.
His most famous work is the novel His Natural Life, which was originally serialized in Australian Journal from 1870 to 1872. It was published in book form in 1874, and a different version, For the Term of His Natural Life, was published posthumously in 1884-1885. The novel tells the tale of Rufus Dawes, a young man convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and transported to Australia. The book is a powerful indictment of the harsh and inhumane treatment convicts received, some of whom were guilty of only minor crimes. Clarke based his novel on research as well as a visit to a penal colony at Port Arthur.
Clarke became an important literary figure in Australia and was the center of a bohemian circle of artists. Despite his success, he had financial difficulties. He died on August 2, 1881, in Melbourne, of erysipelas (a bacterial infection).
Jessie Couvreur (aka Tasma) (1848-1897)
Jessie Catherine Couvreur was born in London, England, on October 28, 1848, to James and Charlotte Huybers. She emigrated with her family to Hobart Town, Tasmania, in 1852, where her father had a prosperous warehousing and merchant business. She married Charles Fraser on June 8, 1867, but they proved not to be a good match. In 1879, they separated due to Fraser’s gambling, obsession with horse-racing, financial problems, and roving eye, and Jessie moved back to Europe. She started a successful career lecturing on Australia throughout Europe. She journeyed to Australia in 1883 to divorce Fraser, after which she returned to Europe. In 1885, she married Auguste Couvreur, a Belgian politician and journalist. They lived in Brussels, where she began to write novels and enjoy a life of culture and politics. After her husband died in 1894, she took over as the Brussels correspondent of the London Times newspaper. At the time, it was unheard of for a woman to be a foreign correspondent for the Times.
Jessie, using the pseudonym Tasma, began publishing articles and stories in Australian periodicals in 1877. Her first publication was an article, “A Hint to the Paris Commissioners,” published in the Australasian. Her first short story, “Barren Love,” appeared in 1878. The collection A Sydney Sovereign and Other Tales was published in 1890.
Her first and best-known novel, Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill (1888), was well-received in both Australia and England. A London newspaper described her as the “Australian Jane Austen” and also compared her to Charles Dickens and others. The novel tells the tale of a nouveau riche Melbourne family that gained wealth in the Australian goldfields and lived a life of aristocratic pretension.
Her other novels were In Her Earliest Youth (1890), The Penance of Portia James (1891), A Knight of the White Feather (1894), Not Counting the Cost (1895), and A Fiery Ordeal (1897). She used the trials and tribulations of her first marriage in many of her novels.
Jessie died of a coronary thrombosis in Brussels on October 23, 1897.
B.L. Farjeon (1838-1903)
Benjamin Leopold Farjeon was born in London, England, on May 12, 1838. At age 14, he learned the printing trade while working for the Nonconformist, a Christian journal. Religious differences with his parents prompted his move to Victoria, Australia, in 1854. On board ship, he produced several issues of the ship’s newspaper, the Ocean Record, which earned him an upgrade from steerage to cabin class. When he reached Victoria, he worked as a gold miner for seven years. In 1861, he moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, taking a job at a newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, where he started out as a journalist and later became manager and sub-editor. During this time, he began to write novels and plays.
In 1866, he published Shadows on the Snow: A Christmas Story. He dedicated the book to Charles Dickens, who then wrote him a letter. This encouraged Farjeon to return to England in 1868 to write. He penned over 50 books, including crime, mystery, supernatural, and occult fiction, with some of the books related to Australia. Among his horror works were Devlin the Barber (1888), the title character of which is similar to Sweeney Todd; A Strange Enchantment (1889), the tale of an occult detective; The Last Tenant (1893), about the ghost of a cat; Something Occurred (1893), a somewhat humorous tale of an unholy bargain; and the occult tale The Clairvoyante (1905).
In 1877, he married Margaret Jane Jefferson, and they had four children, including three who were involved in the arts. Eleanor was a well-known children’s author most noted for the often-anthologized ghost story “Faithful Penny Dove.” Herbert was a literary critic and dramatist. Harry become a well-known musician and composer.
Farjeon died in Hampstead, England, on July 23, 1903.
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters Of Horror: Mainstream Writers On The Dark Side
Posted by: | Comments[The following is a reprint of a column which originally appeared in the October 27, 2005, issue of Hellnotes.]
You’re going to a dress-as-your-favorite-horror-writer Halloween party, and you don’t want to go as one of the usuals, such as H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe. You might consider doing yourself up as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Guy de Maupassant. Hawthorne, Maupassant as horror writers? They and several other authors are not generally regarded as horror writers but have penned one or more memorable tales of terror.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist and poet known for his tales of adventure – and for one of the masterpieces of horror, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Stevenson was born in Edinburgh and traveled extensively. He spent years exploring the South Pacific, where he befriended the king of Hawaii and visited the leper colony at Molokai. Stevenson settled in Samoa, where he became a tribal leader, known as Tusitala, which means “storyteller.” His fiction of the islands is important for its record of life in the South Pacific in the late nineteenth century. Jekyll, about a doctor trying to separate good from evil in a personality, was influential in the growth of the study of the subconscious. Stevenson wrote two other weird stories. “The Body Snatcher” tells of corpse theft and murder and appeared in 1885 in the Pall Mall Christmas Extra. “Markheim” (1887) is about a stranger who is thought to be the devil but is actually an angel. Stevenson also wrote a number of dark tales, which, with all his supernatural works, are collected in The Suicide Club & Other Dark Adventures (Tartarus, 2004).
Guy De Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) is considered the greatest French short-story writer. He penned over 300 stories, with about 40 considered horror. He also published six novels, three travel books, and a poetry collection. He drew on his life experiences in his writing. Maupassant was born in Normandy, France, of noble lineage. He entered law school in Paris but left to serve in the Franco-Prussian War for a couple of years, after which he spent eight years in civil service. During this time, he entered the literary circle of Gustave Flaubert, through which he met Emile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. In 1880, he made his publishing debut with the poetry collection Des Vers. Later that year, his first story was published, “Boule de Suif” (“Ball of Fat”). This masterpiece is a morality tale showing you can’t judge people by their appearances. His most famous horror story is “The Horla” (1886), in which the protagonist is vexed by an invisible, vampire-like being, leading him to madness and suicide. “The Inn” (1886) tells of the caretaker of a remote, snow-bound inn, who descends into madness. Maupassant also wrote stories about ghosts, a severed hand coming to life, changing epitaphs on tombstones, and corpses. Mental disorder is the theme of many of Maupassant’s stories, perhaps reflecting his own developing mental illness. On January 2, 1892, he attempted suicide by cutting his throat and was committed to an asylum, where he died the following year.
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters of Horror: Classic Australian Horror Fiction, Part 3
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Francis Adams (1862-1893)
Francis William Lauderdale Adams was born on September 27, 1862, in Malta. He spent some of his childhood in Canada and Ireland and attended schools in England and France. While in France, he drafted his first novel. In the early 1880s, he married Helen Uttley and the couple moved to Australia. After arrival, he became a committed republican. He began writing for the Bulletin, the left-wing The Boomerang, and the Brisbane Courier.
His early works included a volume of poems, Henry and Other Poems (1884); an autobiographical novel, Leicester, An Autobiography (1885); Australian Essays (1886); and a collection of radical poetry, Songs of the Army of the Night (1888). A crime novel, Madeline Brown’s Murderer, appeared in 1887. He also wrote social sketches and journalism.
In 1886, Adams’ wife and infant son died. He later married Edith Goldstone, an Australian. They left for England in 1890, and the following year, he started writing for The Fortnightly Review.
Adams had suffered from various medical problems his entire life, beginning with incurable tuberculosis contracted in childhood and including hemorrhages and throat cancer, which led to depression. On September 4, 1893, at his home in Margate, England, he shot himself after he could no longer live with his health conditions.
Among Adams’ supernatural works is “The Hut by the Tanks” (1892), a ghost story set in the bush, in which the narrator takes shelter in an abandoned hut that he finds isn’t quite as deserted as he had first thought.
William Astley (aka Price Warung) (1855-1911)
William Astley was born in Liverpool, England, on August 13, 1855. His family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, four years later, where Astley received his education. He worked first in a bookstore and then as a journalist. At age 21, he became editor of the Richmond Guardian. In the ensuing years, he worked for many newspapers, for which he traveled around southeast Australia. He finally settled in Sydney in 1891 with his wife, Louisa. In the 1890s, he gained a reputation as a pro-Federation, pro-Labor journalist.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Astley began publishing convict tales in the Bulletin. Many were satires critical of the colonial government. Some of these stories were collected in Tales of the Convict System (1892), Tales of the Early Days (1894), Tales of the Old Regime (1897), and Half-Crown Bob and Tales of the Riverine (1898). He also wrote a novel, Convict Hendy (1898). He was an excellent journalist and was renown for his contributions to the study of early Australian history.
Astley had a nervous breakdown in 1878, following which he had recurrent mental problems. During the latter 1890s, Astley’s health and finances began failing and he became addicted to morphine. He died in the Rookwood Benevolent Asylum in Sydney on October 5, 1911.
Astley’s story “The Pegging-Out of Overseer Franke” (1892) appears in The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction. While not a supernatural story, it is horrific nevertheless in its depiction of convict life and the revenge carried out by the cons on the title character.
Ron Breznay’s The Old Masters Of Horror: Bram Stoker
Posted by: | Comments[The following is a reprint of a column which originally appeared in the March 31, 2005, issue of Hellnotes.]
Bram Stoker is best known for the quintessential vampire novel Dracula, which was published in 1897. He also wrote other horror stories and novels as well as other types of fiction and non-fiction.
Abraham Stoker was born in Clontarf, near Dublin, Ireland, on November 8, 1847. His father was a civil servant at Dublin Castle, and his mother was a crusading feminist. He was bedridden until about age seven due to an unidentified illness. His mother told him stories when he was a child – including horror tales and gruesome true stories, such as anecdotes of a cholera epidemic.
In 1864, Stoker entered Trinity College, where he excelled in soccer and was named University Athlete. He graduated in 1867 with honors in mathematics. While at Trinity, he developed a lifelong passion for the theater after seeing the great English actor Sir Henry Irving in a stage production. Also, he befriended Oscar Wilde, and through that friendship, traveled in the literary and theatrical social circles of Dublin.
From an early age, Stoker had dreamed of becoming a writer, but, in 1870, he followed his father into civil service at Dublin Castle. He became a clerk of the Petty Sessions (the lowest level in the court system) and remained in civil service for eight years. During this time, he wrote Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, but it wasn’t published until 1879.
He also wrote stories during this period. “The Crystal Cup” was published by The London Society in 1872. Three years later, “The Chain of Destiny,” a horror story about a phantom fiend, appeared in The Shamrock as a four-part serial. He worked as an unpaid theatrical critic for Dublin’s Evening Mail and as editor of The Irish Echo. In 1876, Stoker wrote a glowing review of Irving’s performance in Hamlet. Pleased, Irving arranged a backstage meeting with Stoker to thank him for the review, and the two became friends.
Stoker’s life changed dramatically in 1878 when Irving offered him a job managing both his career and his theater, the Lyceum, in London. Stoker quit the civil service, married the actress Florence Balcombe (after competing with Wilde for her hand), and moved to London. Within a year, their only child, Irving Noel, was born. Stoker’s work for Henry Irving took up a great deal of his time and energy, so much so that he and Florence became estranged, and their son grew bitter and dropped his first name.
During this period, Stoker met many luminaries, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and James McNeil Whistler. While touring the United States, he met Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Stoker wrote a book based on his tour: A Glimpse of America (1886). Whitman’s Leaves of Grass had deeply affected Stoker when he was in college, and he and Whitman corresponded extensively.
