Horror: The 100 Best Books (11 page)

Bibliographical note
: Machen had no love for technology, the modern world, or scientific logic; appropriately, his bibliography is somewhat illogical. English and American editions of various collections are at times dissimilar; two American collections entitled
The Shining Pyramid
have different publishers and largely different contents. Before their appearance in the 1906
House of Souls
, "The Great God Pan" and its thematic sequel, "The Inmost Light" -- another tale of inhuman evil, similarly fragmented in form, albeit with a huge opalescent jewel as the source of the horror -- had originally been published in 1894 in a separate edition.
The Three Impostors
, containing within it a number of loosely connected stories, had also appeared separately in 1895. It reappeared in the 1906
Souls
minus one of its chapters, and, in the more commonly seen 1922 Knopf edition, it and "The Red Hand" were omitted entirely, appearing in a volume of their own. -- T. E. D. KLEIN

This collection features a Sherlockian detective who happens also to be a medical doctor with an interest in the supernatural. His cases -- in some of which he plays a relatively minor role -- deal with standard ghostliness ("A Psychical Invasion"), a townful of Devil-worshipping shapeshifters ("Ancient Sorceries"), an elemental attracted to violence and blood ("The Nemesis of Fire"), Satanic rites in a secluded German monastery ("Secret Worship"), and lycanthropy in the woods ("The Camp of the Dog"). The last tale features a novel frill on the werewolf legend whereby the fiend can be identified in his human form if the observer has been smoking hashish. Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur started to adapt "Ancient Sorceries" when ordered by RKO Pictures to make a film called
Cat People
in 1942, but the story was largely abandoned when the team decided to make up their own werecat myth. Although J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Martin Hesselius, the linking character of
In a Glass Darkly
(1872), was a psychic sleuth before John Silence took up the profession, it was Blackwood's character who set the tone for such followers as William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost Finder, Manly Wade Wellman's John Thunstone and Joseph Payne Brennan's Lucius Leffing.

***

It is the penalty of true literary success that a man who has achieved it shall be seriously criticized. Mr. Blackwood's book
The Empty House
, a book of ghost stories, was reviewed in these columns with a praise due to a work of the greatest merit. It was much more worthy of the term "genius" than are nineteen out of twenty of the books to which this term is applied in a decade of reviewing. It had the quality, inseparable from genius, of conviction; it had the second quality, inseparable from genius, of creation; it had the third quality, inseparable from genius, of art. It was remarked in that former review that if the English people possess one quality more than another remarkable in European letters that quality is the quality of the romantic and the mysterious; and certainly Mr. Blackwood presented the English ghost story to his readers in a way that reminded them of the triumphs of the past in this region of literature and which was yet startlingly modern in its methods and in the scientific basis upon which that method reposed. So excellent was the work that some were tempted to see in it the disguise of an older and better known hand. The present writer has heard it suggested (he discarded the suggestion) that Ambrose Bierce, the master of Bret Harte and of all the Californians, was the true author of the work. Indeed,
The Empty House
was so widely and justly discussed that the mere discussion was a true compliment to its powers. Mr. Blackwood has followed that book up by this volume called
John Silence
. It must first be described in what way
John Silence
differs from
The Empty House
.
John Silence
is a collection of stories dealing with the supernatural.
The Empty House
was a considerable series of short stories, quite a number of them. In
John Silence
the most important stories are lengthy; no story of this description appears in
The Empty House
. In
The Empty House
, therefore, Mr. Blackwood was attempting the easier task; the task easier to anyone who desires to be poignant, and especially to be poignant in the sphere of awe. In
John Silence
there is more of the underlying philosophy which has produced this marvellous talent; for, when one says that Mr. Blackwood's work approaches genius the phrase is used in no light connection, and when one says that genius connotes conviction one is asserting something which the breakdown of modern dilettante writing amply proves. There is no doubt that the writer of these arresting and seizing fictions most profoundly believes the dogmas upon which they repose; in all there is the supposition (universal before the advent of Christian philosophy) that Evil can capture the soul of a man whether that soul be deserving or undeserving, and in all there is the presupposition that (in the words of St. Thomas) "All things save God have extension," that spiritual essences can take on, or rather must take on, corporeal form. What has hitherto been said of this very remarkable book tells the reader little of its intimate character or of its subjects. Its subjects are a case of Possession, a case of Transmutation into another and more evil World, a case of Devil Worship, a case of an old Fire-Curse that went down the ages from Egypt and ended in an English country house, and a case of Lycanthropy. Through all of these runs the personality of a man who has given ample means and leisure to the study of occult things and who has graduated in medicine for the purpose of healing psychic disorders. But this personality, which is that of John Silence, connects rather than dominates the book; what dominates the book is its method. And that method consists in presenting human life (and animal life too, for that matter) as being a close part of one whole, and but a small part of that whole, in which vast Intelligences and vaster Wills stand towards the boundary and control everything within. It is the scheme of the Mystic, but of the Mystic absolute. It is not a mysticism in which the dual solution of Right and Wrong is afforded: it is a sort of Monist Mysticism in which, while Evil and Good are recognized, each is regarded as but one out of two poles attaching to a common substance. All this would mean very little but for the art in which all of it is involved. Mr. Blackwood's writing is of that kind which takes the reader precisely as music takes the listener. It creates a different mood. A man in the middle of one of these stories does not leave it. If he is interrupted he takes it up again where he put it down. It dominates his thought while he is concerned with it; it remains in his mind after he has completed it. In a word, the whole work is a work of successful literary achievement in the most difficult of literary provinces. It is, as its writer must by this time know, a considerable and lasting addition to the literature of our time and let it be remembered that, tedious and paltry as the literature of our time may be, excellent writing stands in exactly the same place whether it appear among a few, and an elect few, under conditions of high taste, or in a time like ours, when everyone writes, and when most of the best of those who write are less than the worst of other and more worthy generations. -- HILAIRE BELLOC

After a discussion about anarchy, Lucian Gregory finally convinces his fellow poet Gabriel Syme of his seriousness by taking him to a meeting of the Central Anarchist Council. The members of the Council are named after days of the week, and Syme is persuaded to join in the place of the recently-deceased Thursday. Syme, however, is not the poet he seems to be, but a Scotland Yard man assigned to penetrate the Council. But each member of the Council has his secrets, and it gradually emerges that there are at least as many, if not more, infiltrating detectives as there are genuine Anarchists. Above all, there remains the mysterious, perhaps Satanic, perhaps Divine, secret of Sunday, the almost inhuman President of the Council. G. K. Chesterton was a prolific author whose detective stories, prophetic fantasies and humorous tales often contain bizarre, horrific or supernatural elements. He is best known for the "Father Brown" mysteries.

***

We all know some wonder-book that bowled us over in youth and miraculously seems as good or better now. For me it was Methuen's chunky G. K. Chesterton omnibus, comprising
The Napoleon of Netting Hill
,
The Man Wno Was Thursday
and
The Flying Inn
. I approached this with the suspicion appropriate to Literature with the capital L, opened it at random, and found myself falling upward through a glittering realm of energy and wit. Over several years and re-readings, I came to see that for all its grotesque exuberance,
The Man Who Was Thursday
merits the subtitle "A Nightmare". Chesterton walked some dark paths before attaining his colossal optimism, and
Thursday's
epigraph to E. C. Bentley observes that "This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells, And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells." I certainly didn't: the dazzle of the writing, the narrative antics of poetic police, rhetorical anarchists and farcical unmaskings, kept me skating at high speed over some very thin ice. Underneath,
Thursday
is a metaphysical chiller in which Chesterton, always adept at seeing wonder and comedy in everyday things, now evokes their terror as well. A staircase, a wood, a running man, a smile: each becomes an image of fear. Nihilism first appears as a caricature, but its philosophy is soon defined with horrible precision. "The innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed the king; but the high-priesthood are happy because it has killed somebody." Horror and hilarity mingle in the figure of Sunday, the huge leader who makes jolly little jokes while our approaching hero Syme is "gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud." A sulphurous reek hangs over the members of the Central Anarchist Council with their weekday codenames. From the moment when the vast stones of the Embankment loom like Egyptian architecture over him, Syme in his spying role of Thursday walks all too close to hell. The hideously aged and decaying Friday pursues him with impossible speed through a London snowstorm; blank-eyed Saturday chills him with a mechanistic vision of scientism ("He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself); in his sword-duel with Wednesday he meets a demonic opponent who refuses to bleed; eventually the whole earth rises up against his lonely spark of sanity. "The human being will soon be extinct. We are the last of mankind." There are further unmaskings to come:
Thursday
is not only a nightmare but a joke, and Chesterton knew that some of the most breathtakingly effective surprises are happy ones. But when the last mask is stripped away from Sunday (a symbol so vast as to be pictured only in terms of the universe itself), the thing behind is not a joke, and nobody familiar with Chesterton's faith will mistake it.
The Man Who Was Thursday
is an extraordinary metaphysical melodrama, an intellectual shocker; its chillier passages have the rare quality of growing more chilly with familiarity. Few horror novels of the raw-liver persuasion have the durability of this 1908 nightmare. -- DAVID LANGFORD

In the ruins of a huge old Irish house, two fishermen discover a ragged manuscript that purports to be the journal of an old recluse who lived there with his sister. The old man describes his discovery of a huge cavern that has appeared beneath the house and the strange distortions of time and space which he subsequently experiences. He is projected into a future when the earth is dying, and to an other-dimensional blasted plain where he finds a replica of his own house standing amid the desolation. Throughout, he has to fight off a terrifying horde of porcine demons; finally, the creatures overwhelm him in mid-word. A vital influence on the works of H. P. Lovecraft,
The House on the Borderland
is the most concise and effective of Hodgson's similarly themed novels, which include the interesting
The Boats of the "Glen Carrig"
(1907),
The Ghost Pirates
(1909) and the unreadable
The Night Land
(1912). In his obsession with entropy and the infinite, Hodgson here seems to be elaborating mystically on the themes presented rationally in H. G. Wells'
The Time Machine
(1895).

***

If I had known, that fateful day in the summer of 195--, what terrors lay beyond the undistinguished blue cloth binder under my unsuspecting fingers . . . My granny thought that occasional doses of mindless terror were just what a healthy, growing boy needed. She let me work my way along the Conan Doyles and the Vernes. Just when I thought it was all going well, she hit me with Hodgson. A vast cavern under the house, just under the floor, held the unimaginable horror of the Pit; no wonder I used to go around the place holding on to the walls. But it turned out that the walls weren't safe either, because outside the shadow-thin walls of the world itself there were dreadful things, looking in and biding their time. I wore my terror like a medal. My contemporaries watched
Torchy the Battery Boy
in his sparkler-powered rocket ship, but that was kids' stuff to me, who had flown on the cinder of the Earth over the interstellar gulf. Other children hid behind sofas from
Quatermass and the Pit
. I had grown up. I knew there were no sofas, anywhere. And yet, and yet, how trite it sounds. Man buys House. House attacked Nightly by Horrible Swine Things from Hole in Garden. Man Fights Back with Determination and Lack of Imagination of Political Proportions (
halfway
through the plot he wonders "whether I am doing wisely in staying here"; there's the Pit in his garden, ghastly things trying to smash the door in at night -- this man is perceptive). Estate agent had not mentioned House is on weak spot in the fabric of reality with hot and cold running sweat in all rooms. Then there is the sister, apparently several coupons short of a toaster. She drifts around the house like a small frightened rodent, and for perhaps the first third of the book the modern reader excusably takes the view that this is because she's got a brother who sits up all night shooting invisible luminous pigs. And finally, just before the things break through and claim the House, Hodgson hands us the whole of Time and Space in a couple of chapters. The journey to the Central Suns sold me infinity. Other people's infinities seem minuscule by comparison. The language is that stilted, laboured form that makes most elderly horror writing such a tedious business to read. The tiny Tennysonian touches of romance are nauseous. It doesn't matter. These are just scabs on the wound, ignore them. For a day in the summer of 195--, it made me believe that Space was big and Time was endless and that what I thought of as normality was a 30W lightbulb with only fivepence left in the meter
and there was nothing anyone could do about it
. Forget vampires and gore, it said, this is where the screaming really starts, out in the void, with no-one left to hear. It was the Big Bang in my private universe as SF/fantasy reader and, later, writer; I can still detect its 2cm radiation after thirty years. We live in a cottage on the cave-haunted Mendips. Recently I tried to open up the old inglenook fireplace and found that, after I'd cleaned up the floor, there was a draught blowing up
from between the flagstones
. Excuse the sloppy typing. I'm holding onto the wall. Thanks, granny. -- TERRY PRATCHETT