Reading over the stories, it is easy to wonder, how can anybody even think that way? My response would be, how can I not? The Dr. Panglosses of the world have a Sisyphean task, in the light of history. The last century is a record of mechanized horrors on a scale that has never been seen before. The sad fact is, pluralistic republics like the United States are oddities, not the norm.
There has also been an increasing trend toward moral relativism. The old black and white have fallen out of favor. Horror fiction is moving away from the supernatural, and toward serial killers and the surreal.
Granted, the well of human evil is a deep one to draw from. However, it misses the larger point that we are spiritual as well as physical creatures. At some point, it turns into a game of mental Onanism.
Time for a little personal confession. I am a Missouri Synod Lutheran, and that influences my thoughts and beliefs. I believe in good and evil, right and wrong. Plus, I fancy myself a hopeless romantic.
It has been observed that modern readers will no longer accept all-good or all-evil characters. I am ready to accept the former, at least in stories where the length allows for deeper character study. Sometimes, brevity doesn't allow for a penetrating look at a character. Of course, a pure-hearted hero who turns the thorns in the road to roses by his touch would be as dull as ditch water.
My biggest beef with the literary mandarins would be that a villain has to have some sort of redeeming qualities. That's one way to go about things, but it shouldn't be the only one. Those of Shakespearian badness can be fun.
Think of the Moor from Titus Andronicus. After being buried up to his neck, he looks to the heavens, and cries out, "If I have done anyone a good turn, I do now repent it!" Or a seductive villain, paired with a hard, uncompromising hero. That might leave readers squirming with a message they don't want to face. Literary conventions are made to be broken.
With the rise of psychological horror, the lines of what constitute horror blur further. After all, the same midwife birthed it and science fiction. More on that later.
The appeal of the genre is hard to explain in polite circles. After all, people are paying to have their darkest fears played to. Since nobody has a nice, neat answer, pointy-headed academics have rushed in to fill the void. As the old aphorism goes, 'Fools rush in where angels far to tread.'
Because of horror's dark reputation, it has become a tabula rasa for Neo-Freudians and other assorted nitwits to graffito with their runaway ids. Alas, horror writers have jointed the pop-psychology bandwagon, and can babble with the best of them.
I will seek to avoid what I have just deplored in others (that's for a different essay). Rather, I will offer a brief overview on the history of horror, and draw an answer from that, which will help draw an answer for the why of this essay.
In undertaking such a monumental task, I your narrator understand the limits of what I intend to do. Any shortcomings, omissions, or mistakes are all mine. The reader has been warned, so I shall proceed.
For as long as history has been recorded, and probably back into the mists of time, mankind has lived in terror of the unknown. Mythology is full of incredible and terrifying beasts. Vampires go back at last as far as ancient Greece, but stories of the dead preying on the living is spread throughout the East.
China has numerous stories about its own particular brand of vampires. I have read a Roman ghost story that is over 2,000 years old, and they could go even further back than that.
Where to draw the demarcation line of where modern horror began can be difficult. Grimm's fairy tales, before bowdlerization for children, can be thought of as early horror short stories. Most experts have settled on the Gothic romances of the 1700's, which would be a heritage of about 300 years.
One famous early author, whose name escapes me at the moment (i.e. the reference is buried in my library somewhere) chose to show all the wires. He provided rational explanations in the end, instead of leaving it to the traditional supernatural agency. Though science fiction as we know it began with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, this could be considered an early example of proto-science fiction.
Some time between June 15 -17, 1816, a watershed moment in horror history happened. In a cabin by Lake Geneva, Lord Byron and his party were shut in by bad weather. To pass the time, the read German horror stories translated into French. Some time during that period, he suggested they try writing a ghost story.
Inspired by a nightmare, Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Done in the creaky framework of an epistolatory novel, it is still read long after its contemporaries have become dusty relics.
Her husband, Percy Shelley, had attempted a couple of Gothic novels before, with no success. There is no record of him writing anything. Lord Byron started a vampire novel, a fragment of which still survives.
John Polidori, who ended up quarreling with both men, produced his own vampire sort story three years later. Titled The Vampyre, he admitted in a letter claiming responsibility that it was based on the Byron fragment. The villain Lord Ruthven bears a strong resemblance to the poet.
Also during this time, Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe were writing in America. The former's fame rests almost exclusively on The legend of Sleepy Hollow. While it is pretty much the sum of his contribution to horror fiction, he did a lot of stories about the New York area, including a history about how the canny New Englanders ran the Dutch out of the Hudson valley.
Poe's fame tends to rest on his horror fiction, he also wrote poetry, humor, and several magazine articles, among other things. In fact, his unfinished novel The memoirs of Arthur Gordon Pym was said to have inspired H. P. Lovecraft's Cluthulu mythos. His florid Romantic style of writing could be a little overwrought at times, but a few, like The Black Cat still have the power to grab the reader by the throat.
The Victorian era was a bountiful time for horror, and the tales of terror. With the spread of literacy came a plethora of cheap magazines. This literary glut meant a lot of prospective authors got published.
Also, to lower the barrier to poorer people, as well as create a wider audience for authors, many books were serialized in magazines. In fact, Charles Dickens had to become good at having cliffhanger chapter endings, because most of his novels were serialized.
A few years ago, Stephen King tried reviving the genre with a serialized novel, The Green Mile. Soon after he started that, John Saul came out with his own serialized novel, The Blackstone Chronicles. It was an interesting idea, and a noble experiment, but nobody has picked it up. Maybe cheap books are just a niche instead of mainstream market.
For more lowbrow readers, there was the penny dreadful, and the shilling shocker. Penny dreadfuls were cranked out by the hundredweight by authors capable of prodigious feats of writing. They were as awful as their name suggests.
One famous author was 'Merry Malcolm', James Malcolm Rymer. He often worked on five titles at a time. The most famous is Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood. Predating Dracula by about 50 years, in his time, Varney was the most famous vampire. The story goes on for over 900 closely spaced pages, where it doesn't end so much as collapse in exhaustion.
Another Victorian tradition is the Christmas ghost story. In fact, the Christmas song, 'It's the most wonderful time', has a line in it about telling scary ghost stories. In a time when electric entertainment was nonexistent, and mechanical entertainment was in its infancy, telling stories around the fireplace was a major way to pass the time.
Several Victorian authors have tried their hand at writing horror fiction. J. S. LeFanu, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. This is hardly an exhaustive list.
There are others who were famous in their time, but have slipped into obscurity. Still others were overlooked in their time, and continue to languish in obscurity. A perusal of Victorian tales of terror that aren't part of the usual canon show that they are quite good.
Having brought up Robert Louis Stevenson, I should talk about his famous novella, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Written in the fever of three days, the original was a 'shocker'. However, Mrs. Stevenson didn't approve, so he burnt the manuscript, and rewrote it in another three days to emphasize the psychological aspect.
This is an early example of horror as the darkness within. Some critics have suggested that it is a parable about schizophrenia. Mr. Stevenson referred to the potion as 'so much hugger-mugger.' The story has a basis in a Scottish gentleman who was hanged when his double life as a criminal was revealed. The most remarkable thing about it is its concision. Not a single word is wasted.
A couple of Americans that have book ended this era is Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James. Hawthorne's most famous horror story is Young Goodman Brown. Reading of the Devil's Sabbat in the woods, it is hard not to feel a chill down your spine. Of course, most of his stories and sketches are about New England history. He has a few good stories about ghosts, and portentous pictures.
Henry James was a Boston Brahmin who felt he was born in the wrong country. He left America at an early age, renouncing his citizenship, and becoming a British citizen. Those who have read his work know his writing style tends to be heavy and pendulous. He didn't enjoy a lot of literary success at the time, most of his fame coming after he died. His main contribution to the horror field was The Turn of The Screws.
The Victorian era cannot be left behind without touching on the third leg of the triumvirate edifice of Nineteenth Century horror. That would be Bram Stoker's Dracula. He has been the vampire that has left the deepest imprint on our minds and our pop culture. It was also Mr. Stoker's one brush with greatness. He wrote about half a dozen other works that were described as journeyman works. Beyond historical curios, they have been all but forgotten.
In death, he was given a second brush with fame. It concerned the 1922 vampire film, Nosferatu. The widow Stoker sued, claiming copyright violation. The court ordered all copies of the film destroyed, but a few survived, and it went on to become an underground movie classic.
The next jolt in the arm was H. P. Lovecraft, and the pulp magazines. Weird Tales was the wellspring for many a young author. There was a renewed attempt to revive it again. Whether it succeeds or not remains to be seen. Both author and magazines helped nurse horror and science fiction along, as well as spawning several new genres.
H. P. Lovecraft had a habit of writing in the overwrought style of Poe. He was also a past master of getting under your skin, and staying there. Of course, his most enduring literary mark is until recently, The Necrinomicon existed only in his fevered imagination.
Another pop cultural milepost was EC Comics. In the early Fifties, they served up a potent stew of horror and black humor. They ended up being another casualty of the comics crusades of that time. Another casualty was Batman. Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred had to be eliminated, because eyebrows were raised about three men living in a house together. He was allowed to come back, once the furor died down.
Tales from The Crypt had been torpedoed. However, the seed had been planted. In the Sixties, the first buds began to appear. Robert Bloch was catapulted to fame by Alfred Hitchcock's movie adaptation of his book, Psycho. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone brought the bizarre into the average American's home.
John Romero's 1968 Night of The Living Dead paved the way for John Carpenter and Wes Craven. Britain's Hammer films were making good low-budget films, but the genre had been in free-fall in the American studios since the Thirties.
The horror classics of the early part of the decade had become farce by using the monsters as props for Abbot and Costello vehicles. By the early Sixties, Peter Lorre was parodying himself with Boris Karloff and Vincent Price. The scripts were loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe stories.
The literary field showed a similar schizophrenia. The up-and-coming writers of the time were Robert Bloch, Henry Sleasar, Harlan Ellison, and Richard Matheson. Yet, beyond Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, a lot of the collections of the time tend to use a couple of classics to sell a lot of second-rate stories. Sometimes, there would be a literary one, like Graham Greene, but there is a sense that the editors didn't necessarily understand the genre.
The next major step was taken by Stephen King. He was warned at an early stage in his career that he was risking typecasting himself. His response was to laugh, and point out that nobody had spent their entire career writing horror. Over thirty years later, he has rewritten the rules of the genre.
In the late Seventies, there was a series of horror books that ran the gamut from tacky to terrible. A couple of examples are the serials The Amityville Horrorand The Omen. In the mid-Eighties, the literary mandarins decided that horror was the new big thing. A lot of lower quality books were rushed to market, to fill the perceived need. After glutting the market, they proclaimed horror dead.
Meanwhile, horror cinema was being smothered under Friday The Thirteenth,Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, and other tasteless slasher wannabes. Scream, and the online distribution of Riding The Bullet showed the genre was very much alive, if somewhat somnolescent. Such films as 28 Days Later shows there are still roses in the dung heap, and there are some talented people out there writing in the horror genre.
What's the take-away from this? Though people don't want to talk about it, there is something elemental that draws us to horror fiction. It is part of the warp and woof of our culture. think of Alice Cooper. Minus the post-modernist trimmings, he would fit in as a Shakespearian villain. Whether that was accidental is for Mr. Furnier, not me, to answer.
Humans have always had a strange attraction/avoidance reaction to the unknown. Gargoyles are holdovers from monsters feared in the Middle Ages. The hope was those fearsome creatures would scare away the demons. The paintings of Albert Durer and Heironymous Bosch reflected a fear of eternal torment. Every human medium of expression has a dark side to it somewhere.
The advantage of horror fiction is we can indulge our taste for darkness at a safe remove. Good may not always win, but evil is held in sufficient check that we aren't consumed by the dark night of hopelessness. This is why we are hypocrites about moral relativism. If we were to face the true implications of our nihilism, we would cringe away in horror. We don't want for there to be a God, because we don't want a thousand little petty failings to be revealed.
The problem is a Godless universe would be absurd. There would be no moral sanction to stop Orwell's nightmare of the jackboot tromping on the face. Horror confronts that existential dilemma whenever the author considers the problem of evil, and any limits that might circumscribe it.
That's why my chosen genre is horror fiction. Sometimes, the protagonist is helpless to stop the march of events. Sometimes the horror will be visited upon him for no discernable reason. However, the theme of lex talonis punishment for wrongdoers, and decent people being rewarded is a consistent theme for me.
Another consistent element in my stories is the supernatural element. Sometimes, this leads to genre crossing, or slipping out of horror fiction entirely. There are a couple of stories where it hasn't appeared, but the reason for doing it involves a larger point. We are spiritual as well as physical creatures. Science has discovered that humans are hard-wired to believe, so even atheism becomes a religion.
Using consumerism has become the whipping boy for all the world's ills has become very popular. Of course, anti-materialistic materialism ought to cause cognitive dissonance, if not outright laughter. Consumerism is a symptom of spiritual atrophy. We must have more, to fill the void in our lives. The idea that there are beasts and forces beyond the comprehension of our logic, and that evil is a credible threat, is just the tonic we need.
So why do I write what I do? Because there is a need. A need to face the darkness of this world, and in ourselves. There is a terminus between logic and the unknown, called horror. It is good to visit it, and remind ourselves of what we are in the privacy of our mind. And maybe, just maybe, give us reason for hope.
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