Horror: The 100 Best Books (17 page)

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It is hard to decide on a single word to describe Fritz Leiber; certainly "technician" and "professional" spring to mind. But so does "versatile". Even that seems a pallid description of what he has accomplished, writing hard science fiction, sociological SF, heroic fantasy, dark fantasy, satire, essays and criticism. Other writers have matched his range, but no other writer seems to have established himself as the best or near-best in so many areas. Consider. In the early fifties he produced a number of stories ("Coming Attractions", "The Night He Cried") that, in retrospect, seem to characterize the way SF changed in those volatile years. His "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series is certainly the most critically successful writing in the heroic fantasy field. And probably no one did more to bring the art of M. R. James and Oliver Onions into the urban sprawl of this century's midsection than Leiber in stories such as "Smoke Ghost", "Black Gondolier", "Four Ghosts in Hamlet", "The Belsen Express" and, of course,
Conjure Wife
. While John Campbell was changing science fiction from a principally romantic form of fiction to a principally realistic one in
Astounding
, he was attempting to do the same thing to fantasy in
Unknown
. It stressed a logical, extrapolative approach to the central themes of fantasy, which resulted in some of the strongest stories the field had yet produced. The magazine generated an excitement comparable, yet not identical, to that which
Astounding
was creating. It featured some of the best work by many of Campbell's best
ASF
writers, as well as fantasy writers such as Frank Belknap Long and Robert Bloch, and a number who never appeared in the field otherwise, such as Raymond Chandler. The magazine's success was based on two concepts: first, that fantasy is primarily a source of good, grown-up fun; and, second, that the premise of a fantasy needs to be extrapolated with the same rigor as the premise of a science fiction story.
Conjure Wife
, the first of Leiber's novels to see print, appeared in
Unknown
a month before
Gather Darkness!
, a novel that treated the same subject in science fictional terms, was serialized in
Astounding
. It was printed in its current version in the Twayne collection
Witches Three
in 1953 but its first solo publication was a paperback edition from the small but adventurous Lion Books, the following year. Leiber's central idea is that all women practise witchcraft and men are unaware of it. Leiber's protagonist, Norman Saylor, innocently spies on his wife and discovers her secret, which he of course regards as superstitious and foolish. He proceeds to attack her supposed weakness until she agrees to abandon the practice and he smugly goes on with his life, or so he thinks. His life quickly begins to collapse about his ears. We are told by Leiber that Saylor is not the sort of man who ordinarily spies on his wife, but he is certainly fond of busting icons. After he has forced his wife to give up her conjuring, we are treated to a classroom lecture where he demonstrates the primitive origins of fraternity practices to his students, especially one who happens to be the president of a fraternity. But already Leiber has begun the process of smashing some of Saylor's own icons. The way in which Saylor's life begins to crumble around him and he slowly finds himself accepting the possibility that his wife's beliefs may be justified is one of the main delights of the novel. Although the novel breaks structurally into two parts, it is very well unified. In the first part (three-fifths of the book's wordage), the world Leiber postulates is depicted with the detail and love Jack Vance brings to his alien societies, and the brilliance Alfred Bester brings to his future ones. This build-up is so careful that when Leiber's concern turns from the story's concepts to the requirements of its plot, the reader is propelled along by the suspense in a way that is nothing but daunting to any lesser writer who's ever tried to do the same thing. And this was, remember, Leiber's first novel. Leiber's main contribution as a horror novelist has been the skill and ease with which he has been able to express the traditional concerns of the classic horror writer using themes and settings contemporary to him.
Conjure Wife
takes place on the campus of a small, conservative university, a fairly common setting for popular novels (especially mysteries) in the early forties, possibly because the combination of small-town dynamics and urban sophistication represented the changes American society was undergoing at the time. Leiber combines the ability to find horror in commonplace things with a talent for writing intelligently and clearly, and it is this that has made him one of the best horror writers of the 20th century. If there is one unresolved question about Leiber it is whether the secret of his talent lies in his sheer ability as a writing technician, or in the intelligence of his approach to his material. Both are aptly demonstrated in his horror stories, and both serve to explain why
Conjure Wife
is a triumph. -- GERALD W. PAGE

Tom Shawn, a detective, saves Jean Reid from suicide, and listens to the story of the strange events that have led her into despair. Harlan Reid, Jean's wealthy father, has been consulting Tompkins, a melancholy psychic, and is convinced that the man has genuine powers of prophecy. Tompkins has just predicted that Reid will be killed by a lion, and Reid has been reduced to a state of panic by the announcement. Shawn agrees to look into the affair, although no actual crime seems to have been committed, and sets his men on to the case from several angles, trying to find out how Tompkins has been making his predictions, whether anyone could be using the psychic as part of an extortion scheme, and if it's possible to prevent the prophecy from coming to pass. It seems as if a rational explanation is possible, but the brilliantly sustained finale plunges back into the supernatural as Shawn tries, on the preordained night, to keep Reid away from lions and is a helpless witness to the man's ironic fate. Many of Cornell Woolrich's masterly
romans noirs
contain horrific or fatalistic elements, but only
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
actually involves the supernatural. John Farrow's 1948 film, scripted by Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, is unfaithful to Woolrich's plot, but catches his mood successfully.

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Night Has a Thousand Eyes
is surely the only horror classic to have inspired not only a movie but also a hit pop single (for Bobby Vee in 1963). But then, Cornell Woolrich's evocative, image-laden prose has inspired scores of adaptations in all media (film, TV, theatre, radio) because of the sheer power of its imagery. Isaac Asimov called him "THE Master of Suspense"; his biographer and literary executor Francis M. Nevins Jr described him as "The Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century". Cornell Woolrich is indeed a unique writer whose approach to horror was never blatant. Not for him the hyperbolic monsters of Lovecraft or the Jungian archetypes of slime of so many other practitioners of the genre. Better known as a writer of crime stories and novels on the edge of darkness, Woolrich tackles horror through a relentless accumulation of despair, troubling coincidences and all-too-human characterization. The horror and fantasy element never becomes explicit, and gains in credible terror by confronting everyday people with whom the reader can easily identify. Indeed, what you only guess at, what you never see, is psychologically all the more frightening; a lesson that few horror film-makers since Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur have learned well. Written in 1945 under the byline George Hopley (Woolrich's two middle names),
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
was based on an earlier novelette,
Speak To Me of Death
, published in the February 1937
Argosy
. It was seen as a breakthrough novel by his publishers, hoping for a larger audience following the first five of his brilliant "Black" series (
The Bride Wore Black
,
The Black Curtain
,
Black Alibi
,
The Black Angel
,
The Black Path of Fear
). But, like all great writers who trawl the same wonderful obsessions from book to book, Woolrich, writing as himself, William Irish or Hopley, could only explore again in
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
with his customary intensity the genteel nobility of his cipher-like characters in uncommon distress. It all had a sense of existential
deja vu
. Set in his familiar urban landscape of an unnamed city at night-time, in bleak anonymous diners and grey apartments,
Night's
slow, claustrophobic first half sets up a simple but inevitable scenario which soon metamorphoses into a relentless chase against time and irrationality, a clockwork tension that never lets up as the hour of doom approaches. And horror,
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
certainly reaches in its shocking conclusion. The worst has happened, despite the police's intervention and a set of simple explanations and coincidences that cancel out (or do they?) the need for supernatural explanations. Some of the main characters are inevitably dead, but the worse horror remains for the sad survivors, for whom love will now not be enough. They have discovered the sheer horror of inevitability, the fact they have no free will or choice. The bleakness and despair of Woolrich's "happy ends" was reflected in his own life and he mined this sad vein with consummate obstinacy in his prolific writing career. Time, or simple sentimentality, might, in some works, have taken its toll of his style, but his manipulation of suspense, the effective modern minimalism of his characters and the emotional impact of his tales remain as strong as ever. Ray Bradbury writes "Cornell Woolrich deserves to be discovered and rediscovered by each generation". I am not ready to contradict him. -- MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

Ambrose Dewart inherits Billington House, a shunned old pile in the woods to the north of haunted Arkham, and learns of its evil history and reputation. He is cautioned by an ancient document to ensure that a river keeps flowing around an abandoned tower, and gradually realizes that the tower, the house and a strange window of coloured glass are gateways to another dimension, in which fester indescribable monstrosities who lust to emerge into our world and cause chaos. The longest of August Derleth's posthumous "collaborations" with H. P. Lovecraft,
The Lurker at the Threshold
is, apart from two fragments totalling about 1200 words, wholly Derleth's work. Aside from pastiching his mentor's style, complete with italicized horrible bits, Derleth systematizes Lovecraft's collection of hints and references into what has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos, thus opening the way for many subsequent tales by other hands. Derleth proceeded to expand some more Lovecraft fragments into the stories collected in
The Shuttered Room
(1959) and
The Watchers Out of Time and Others
(1974), and he made out of whole cloth the Lovecraftian horrors of
The Mask of Cthulhu
(1958) and
The Trail of Cthulhu
(1962).

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Lovecraft's special talent was to create a world that was deeply unsettling in all its aspects. Even the
trees
flourished in Arkham "centuries after time should have taken its toll of them". Yes, we have taken the wrong fork again, folks, and we are back in the Massachusetts of gambreled roofs and retarded offspring and whippoorwhills in the hills.
The Lurker at the Threshold
is a joy because it is so magnificently and unselfconsciously overwritten. The horror novels one reads these days are so often churned out in King-lish: which amounts to reams of unedited stream-of-word-processorese -- pompous, self-regarding, and profane. Here, there is no concern for what the reader thinks of the writers: only an out-and-out devotion to being scary, expressed with a professionalism and a self-mocking elegance that today's horror writers would do well to study. Beyond Dean's Corners, the benighted traveller still hastens by, urged on by a curious dislike for which he has no reasonable explanation; but which we know with a wonderful shudder of anticipation will be some of our favorite Frightful Things From Outside, especially Yog-Sothoth,
who still froths as primal slime somewhere beyond space and time
! Apart from the hideous Great Old Ones, however, there are many other memorably disturbing devices in this book. The window of colored glass in the library at Billington's Wood, through which the terrifying world beyond can be glimpsed; the brilliantly faked-up documents and letters and diaries, recounting the raising of Daemons in No Human Shape. The sinister tower in the wood, which is the threshold at which the lurker lurks. For personal reasons, however, my favorite creation in this novel is Misquamacus, the Indian Wonder-Worker, who became the Manitou in my very first horror novel, and whose ambiguity in his relationship with the Great Old Ones is one of the book's most frightening delights. Long may Yog-Sothoth froth. -- GRAHAM MASTERTON

Mark Allard, a respectable lawyer, marries Eva Craner after a whirlwind courtship, and is taken to Eva's palatial estate home, The Cradle of Light, where he is introduced to her peculiar family. Dr. Craner, Eva's father, is an earless, legless genius who can increase intelligence through the manipulation of the plates of the skull. This treatment has turned Eva's brother Osman into a great concert pianist, and her sister Insa into an epileptic moron. Various atrocities and deaths ensue, culminating in the destruction of The Cradle of Light. A fast-moving, blatantly silly pulp novel, with a touch of forties' "steamy stuff" ("I bent her savagely to me"),
Deliver Me From Eva
has just enough jokes -- quite apart from its punning title -- to suggest that the author wasn't absolutely serious. Paul Bailey, author also of
Sam Brennan and the California Mormons
and
The Gay Saint
, presumably wrote his own jacket copy, which describes how "restlessness and rebellion possessed his soul at an early age . . . He has tasted the bitterness of poverty. He has known that ghastly loneliness where city crowds are thickest. With eager eye, and hungry intellect, he has pried into the leaven of life."