Horror: The 100 Best Books (4 page)

Catherine Morland, a sensitive young girl much given to devouring sentimental Gothic romances of the type popularized by Mrs. Radcliffe, comes to Bath to stay with family friends. In the whirl of society, she meets two sets of duplicitous people -- the
parvenu
fortune-hunting Thorpes and the more mysterious, romantic Tilneys. Although she soon sees through the Thorpes, she is lured by her fanciful notions of the romantic life to spend some time at Northanger Abbey, the gloomy ancestral home of the Tilneys. Misled by the likes of
Necromancer of the Black Forest
(1794) and
Horrid Mysteries
(1796), Catherine comes to see General Tilney as a villain in the Radcliffian sense and suspect that he has murdered his wife, but eventually a more prosaic -- if still ignoble -- motive emerges for his attentions. However, the General's son Henry proves a suitable romantic hero and does finally win Catherine's hand. Written sometime in the 1790s under the title
Susan
and sold in 1803 (for 10) to a publisher who didn't bother to issue it,
Northanger Abbey
did not appear in print until a few months after the author's death. It has been adapted for the stage, radio and television several times, most notably as a BBC-TV film with Robert Hardy and Katherine Schlesinger in 1987.

***

At the end of the 1970s, when I was struggling to write the novel that would get me into screenwriting, I scrawled in a notebook in huge capitals: NORMALITY FOR HORROR! DETAIL, RESEARCH, CHARACTER, BACKGROUND. THE ABNORMAL ONLY HAS MEANING WITHIN THE CONTEXT (DETAILED, PROLONGED) OF THE NORMAL. I still believe it. I was reading
'Salem's Lot
at the time and it amazed me how Stephen King's astonishing capacity for endless ordinary details enabled him to make such a huge success out of what was an almost indecently ancient vampire plot. It was obvious that when the man adapted the technique to a really good plot he would produce a classic and he did it with
The Shining
. Almost by definition horror needs rules, because it thrives on the breaking of rules. It needs a sharp sense of everyday reality so that when the lights go off you really take notice. This is why so many of the greatest horror writers have made a detour into the genre from other kinds of writing and perhaps the most distinguished recruit of all was Jane Austen. No writer in literary history observed the rules and regulations of polite society as acutely as Austen, so it's not surprising that she was also the first writer to see the subversive potential in horror fiction. She deliberately plotted
Northanger Abbey
so that the notions of Gothic horror fiction and of civilized society come into direct collision. Her heroine Catherine Morland is a horror fan whose imagination keeps running away with her. She sees the most innocuous Sunday afternoon walk as a potential abduction, laundry lists become secret manuscripts, country houses turn into Gothic castles. Austen milks the suspense and the humour to superb effect, but then steers the book to a point where Catherine's horrific perception is truer than anyone else's. "In suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife", she concludes, "Catherine had scarcely sinned against his character or magnified his cruelty."
Northanger Abbey
is often portrayed wrongly as a spoof. It obviously gave Austen a lot of fun but it was nothing of the kind. Not only does the author step out of the novel to deliver a ringing endorsement of Gothic fiction, but all the book's humour, all its thrills, all its truth comes from the Gothic world's conquest of the everyday. Women may not regularly be abducted to ruined abbeys by villains in black cowls but Austen is intent on showing us just how well that metaphor conveys the emotional cruelty of polite society. The Gothic perception wins. -- DAVID PIRIE

In the Arctic, Captain Walton, an English explorer, takes aboard ship a manic young man, Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the circumstances that have brought him to the ends of the earth. Frankenstein tells of his experiments with the creation of life, and his construction of a huge, manlike creature whose repulsive aspect leads his creator to reject him. The Monster later returns to Frankenstein and tells of his sufferings at the hands of humanity and begs the scientist to make him a mate to ease his loneliness. Frankenstein agrees but abandons the project in horror, and the Monster retaliates by murdering his maker's friends and family. Frankenstein pursues the Monster north, but dies on the ship after his story is finished. The Monster pays his last respects and then vanishes into the wastes.
Frankenstein
is at once a Gothic horror tale and the first important science fiction novel. Its sustained popularity and place in modern myth is probably as much due to the innumerable stage, film, television, comic book and radio adaptations of it -- most of which depart completely from the text -- as to the strengths of the work itself.

***

Subtitled
The Modern Prometheus
, Mary Shelley's masterwork is a remarkable book. Blending as it does allegory with Gothic elements, storytelling with philosophy, it is all the more remarkable because Mary Shelley completed it before her 20th birthday. Stated bluntly, this "pseudoscientific novel", as it has been called, is about a scientist usurping nature and God's creative powers, and the terrible consequences that follow that act. Written as a gloss on or as a rejoinder to Milton's
Paradise Lost
, the book is full of grotesque, dreamlike imagery, and the wild chase across the Arctic that ends the novel is a phantasmagoric journey of the lost soul. Mary Shelley, desiring to create a ghost story, wrote instead what Brian Aldiss calls "the first . . . science fiction", a novel which Shelley herself wanted to "speak to the mysterious fears of our nature". The novel was conceived in a dream in which she saw "the hideous phantasm, of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion . . ." That dream followed long late night conversations with her husband, the poet Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Byron's doctor. The conversations ranged through vampires, Darwin, and the supernatural and, at Byron's suggestion, they were to have a contest with the four of them writing ghost stories. Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
is an epistolary novel with overtones of the Gothic and the Romantic. While the implication is that the hero of the piece (or the anti-hero) is the young doctor Frankenstein, it is to the monster the modern reader more naturally turns. He has the most compelling speeches, is the wiser of the characters, and is the most noble in his own strange way. As Joyce Carol Oates has written of him, "Surely one of the secrets of
Frankenstein
, which helps account for its abiding appeal, is the demon's patient, unquestioning, utterly faithful, and utterly
human
love for his irresponsible creator." Together Frankenstein the creator and the monster, his creation, are a whole: shadow selves. One does not exist without the other. It is why neither the monster nor Frankenstein's bride can last. The two -- man and giant -- need, deserve, and find one another. "
I shall be with you on your wedding night
," the monster cries. It is a promise, horrendous in its outcome, but tauntingly sexual in its undertones.
Frankenstein
was published anonymously in 1818 and republished -- with some changes -- under Mary Shelley's name and with an introduction in 1831. Movies, musicals, comic book versions, bowdlerized editions, have all made their mark on the
Frankenstein
story. In 1984, Barry Moser, America's premier wood engraver, created a limited illustrated version for his Pennyroyal Press based on the first edition. The book was later reprinted for the ordinary buyer by the University of California Press. The pictures provide an intelligent, handsome, and powerful gloss on the book. (There is also a fine if academic afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.) The strong black and whites of the main text are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster -- who owes nothing to the overused movie image of the creature with zipper scars and an oversized blocky head but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite -- is where Moser's illustrations show their greatest power. We see a skull with skin stretched over old bones, wisps of hair, protruding teeth. Taken together, the pictures give the impression of a monologue (which in fact is what that section of the book is). The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books. -- JANE YOLEN

Young John Melmoth attends the deathbed of his miserly uncle and is informed that a member of the family, also called John Melmoth, has been alive since the 16th century, wandering the Earth in search of someone willing to lay down their soul for him. This Melmoth has made a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for immortality, but can get out of it if he finds someone miserable enough to sell Melmoth his/her own soul. Young John examines manuscripts and seeks out old stories, and the novel presents several episodes in which Melmoth appears to those in need of aid and is rebuffed. During his quest, Melmoth encounters a sane man imprisoned in a vile insane asylum, a Spaniard entrapped by the Inquisition, an Indian maid marooned on a desert island, a young girl forced to marry against her will, a German couple reduced to poverty and a pair of lovers dominated by a greedy mother. Finally, Melmoth returns to his estate and the Devil comes to collect his due. Maturin also wrote
The Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio
(1807) and
Albigenses
(1824).

***

I was fourteen years old when I first discovered a copy of
Melmoth the Wanderer
in my father's library and tried to read it. "Tried" because I was obviously not sufficiently mature to understand the complexities of that masterpiece of Gothic horror. I merely skipped a lot of pages to get down to the "spooky bits"! However, since then I have read and re-read
Melmoth
many times and each time extracted nuggets of pure literary gold from what I have come to regard, with many others, as one of the great works of the horror genre of any generation.
Melmoth the Wanderer
was published in 1820 when its author, Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish clergyman living in Dublin, was 40 years old. Maturin, who was to die four years later, had already established his reputation with several novels and plays which had brought him praise from literary luminaries such as Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.
Melmoth
was initially seen by its publisher Archibald Constable, as a competitor to Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
, published two years earlier. However, the literary world soon realized that here was a work that needed no comparison with any other.
Melmoth
combines all the Gothic terrors. It is replete with dungeons, castles, ghosts, cannibalism, monsters (both real and imaginary) and some truly monumental instances of terror. Walter Scott, Thackeray, Baudelaire, Rossetti and Honore de Balzac were quick to hail it as a milestone of literature in any genre. Balzac, in those days before copyright, immediately wrote a sequel to the novel entitled
Melmoth Reconciled
, which was a little too whimsical to stand comparison with its progenitor. The book was an instant success. Numerous editions, translations and a long-running dramatization quickly followed the initial publication. H. P. Lovecraft, in acknowledging it as a masterpiece, has said that it made "the Gothic tale climb to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before". Professor Leonard Wolf has written that it has "the most sustained and certainly the most complex vision of any Gothic fiction -- not excepting
Dracula
." The Irish literary critic, Aodh De Blacam, in his
First Book of Irish Literature
, sees Maturin as "manifestly in the tradition of Swift", another Dubliner. He goes on to say "in works like this we see a definite vein of Irish genius, a horrific imagination which dramatizes the insane universe of the sceptic". De Blacam went further and saw Maturin as the founder of the Irish school of horror fantasy writing in which he included later horror writers such as Fitzjames O'Brien, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and, much later, Dorothy Macardle (author of the classic
The Uninvited
). He argues that were it not for Maturin, then there might not have been such classics as "Carmilla", or
Dracula
. To this I would argue that were it not for
Melmoth the Wanderer
, there might not have been the classic
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891). Oscar Wilde, yet another Dubliner, was a great admirer of Maturin's work. In
Melmoth
there is reference to a portrait of "J. Melmoth, 1648" hanging in an obscure closet in the ancient Melmoth mansion in Co. Wicklow. The portrait is the hidden reminder that Melmoth has lived nearly two centuries. Wilde took this theme and imbued it with his own genius to write his own vivid contribution to weird literature. Indeed, Wilde paid Maturin an unusual tribute in the fact that, during his last sad days in exile in Paris, he chose the name "Sebastian Melmoth" as a pseudonym.
Melmoth
is only fitfully in print. Critics and literary morticians often pay tribute to it but it seems that it is hardly ever read nowadays except by ardent fans of the genre. That is exceedingly sad. Even in my re-readings of it, there are passages which never fail to make my scalp itch, make a cold tingle send shivers down my back, make me peer nervously at the rattling windows and door of my room and make me edge nearer the cold circle of light from my reading lamp.
Melmoth
, even with the passage of time, remains an enduring masterpiece. It is a book which ought to be read by every aspiring writer in the genre, particularly today when so many are substituting Technicolor gore for more literary qualities, such as the slow build up of tension and psychological fear, which seem so lacking in the genre today. -- PETER TREMAYNE