Horror: The 100 Best Books (21 page)

While digging the foundations for an office block, London workmen discover a five-million-year-old spacecraft, complete with mummified Martians. Professor Bernard Quatermass, of the British Experimental Rocket Group, and archaeologist Dr. Matthew Roney are among the boffins called in. Their investigations uncover a history of demonic manifestation and lead them to make some frightening conclusions about the nature of humanity. The third of Kneale's four Quatermass television serials was transmitted by the BBC in six episodes in 1959, with Andre Morrell in the lead role, first published as a book in 1960, and adapted for the cinema by Hammer Films in 1967 (US title:
Five Million Years to Earth
), with Andrew Kier. In its various incarnations, it remains one of the most influential works of modern horror, leaving trace effects in movies like Tobe Hooper's
Lifeforce
and John Carpenter's
Prince of Darkness
and books like Stephen King's
The Tommyknockers
. The other Quatermass serials are
The Quatermass Experiment
, 1953 (filmed 1955, US title:
The Creeping Unknown
; script published 1959),
Quatermass II
, 1955 (filmed 1957, US title:
Enemy from Space
; script published 1960) and
Quatermass
, 1980 (theatrical title:
The Quatermass Conclusion
; novel published 1979).

***

When is a book not a book? Answer: when it's a screenplay. More specifically, a television series in six parts entitled
Quatermass and The Pit
, written by Nigel Kneale and broadcast to genuinely alarmed and enthralled English viewers in 1959. When asked to cite a favourite or influential "book", it may seem to be an anomaly to opt for a screenplay. But there are a number of reasons: ultimately the skill of Kneale's writing and his ability to play on subconscious dreads. Analysis of his writing nearly thirty years later still gives clues to any writer wishing to tap into the vein of "supernatural terror" with any effect. As a seven-year-old back in 1959 I begged my father for the privilege of staying up late to watch
Quatermass and the Pit
. Under extreme pressure and with reservations, I was allowed to do so. Unfortunately, I was often despatched to bed after becoming too spooked. (Hell, even Trevor Duncan's background music was enough to make me hide behind the settee.) So my initial viewing was very fragmentary. Later, my childhood frustration at not really understanding why the series was so frightening drove me to the public library where I discovered to my delight that Penguin Books had published all of the
Quatermass
screenplays by Kneale. I devoured
The Pit
, reading it inside-out until the bizarre and fascinating premise -- that the Martians were on Earth five million years ago and left their consciousness subconsciously implanted in mankind -- was crystal clear. Fantastic in the true sense of the word? Yes, of course. But written in such a down to earth way as to be extraordinarily convincing, with incident building upon incident, clue upon clue. The most original aspect of Kneale's story is the fact that the hobgoblin-like Martians of antiquity are in actuality the hobgoblins, and demons from the race memory of
our
mythical, superstitious past. As Quatermass says, "Could it be that ghosts and the like were simply phenomena wrongly observed?" Quatermass' investigation ensues, resulting in the most effective buildup of unease and eeriness, until the climactic sequence where the Devil himself towers over the city in a glowing protoplasm of unearthly light. Only gradually does the full import of Kneale's title make its mark.
Quatermass and the Pit
not only refers to the clay pit in which the cylinder is found, but more specifically to The Pit of Hell itself. One of the key elements behind the success of Kneale's premise is his depiction of a British no-nonsense sense of propriety. The characters themselves have difficulty in accepting the situation. But as traditional eerie goings-on are introduced into this modem (1959) situation and the characters are forced by the weight of evidence to accept the terrifying implications, so does the reader/viewer (subject to a slight mental wavelength adjustment from 1988 to 1959) accept them. Reader/viewer empathy with these realistic characters is strong, with a resultant "suspension of disbelief.
The Pit
had a profound effect on me. The echo of its cosmic terror, I'm sure, was one of the reasons I strove to be a writer in the vein of terror fiction. As a screenplay, the story unfolds via dialogue and action. The mood is created by an escalation of gradual discovery and the growing suspicion that something long dormant and deeply disturbing is on the verge of reawakening. The more Quatermass investigates, the greater the underlying fear that his human probing and "interference" in things perhaps better left alone will resurrect some terrifying threat from the past. By necessity, there is no lavish, descriptive prose; no long and detailed examination of the way people are thinking. This is, after all, a screenplay -- not a novel. Everything stems from the realistic quality of dialogue, the character interaction and the fascinating investigative structure of the story. Reading the screenplay without direct recourse to the visuals makes one aware of just how much the reader's own imagination is being harnessed by Kneale's dark hints. This has been a useful benchmark for me in my own writing. Likewise, the need to establish a realistic setting with believable characters before introducing supernatural elements. Another extremely important aspect to
The Pit
is the fact that it achieves its effects without any reliance on traditional horror motifs or blood"n"splatter (not that this would have been acceptable by the BBC in 1959 anyway). The keynote of Kneale's work here is "terror" in its pure sense, a trademark which also applies to his writing for the
Beasts
TV series and
The Stone Tape
in the 1970s.
Quatermass and the Pit
had a tremendous effect back in the '50s and it's easy to dismiss it now as a product of its time, dated and overtaken within the genre. But in a trend of ever increasingly visceral "horror" in the 1980s, an examination of Kneale's writing and the way he achieves his effects gives some very valuable guidelines on how to weave a story so as to really frighten people. If Kneale's
The Quatermass Experiment
was "man into monster" and
Quatermass II
was "monster into man", then
Quatermass and the Pit
could be summarized as "man was the monster all along". And it's this last theme which surfaces in some of the best horror fiction being written today. As Quatermass discovers, the worst demons are those which hide in the deepest recesses of the human mind. -- STEPHEN LAWS

Previously published by Avon in 1947 as
The Lurking Fear
and retitled for their 1958 reissue, this 1959 WDL edition was one of the first British paperback appearances of Lovecraft's work. Drawing substantially on the pick of the Arkham House collection
The Outsider and Others
("Cool Air", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Color Out of Space"), with a few tales from other sources ("The Moon-Bog", "The Unnamable", "The Hound"),
Cry Horror!
introduced many British fans to the Sage of Providence. Later collections published as
The Lurking Fear
have slightly different contents.

***

I first discovered Lovecraft's work around the age of 10 when I read a 1947 Avon anthology,
Terror by Night
. This had stories by Stoker, M. R. James, Blackwood and Machen, but it was Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark" that sent me scurrying out of the house in search of reassuring crowds. Though I eagerly scoured bookshops and libraries in search of more Lovecraft, it was not until a couple of years later that I came across a copy of
Cry Horror!
, the first HPL collection published in Britain so far as I know. I can still remember the elation of the discovery, and the satisfaction I felt as I read the stories and found them to be every bit as affecting as I had hoped. I've read thousands of horror stories since, but none have ever made quite the same impact as those first Lovecraft stories. This collection, comprising of about one-sixth of HPL's output, offers a good sampling of his recurrent themes, and includes no less than seven of my favourite HPL stories: "The Lurking Fear", "The Color Out of Space", "Pickman's Model", "The Call of Cthulhu", "Cool Air", "The Hound" and "The Shunned House". "The Lurking Fear", in which a Sawney Bean-like community of atavistic humans seeks cannibal nutrition in "the terrible and thunder-crazed house of Martense" shows Lovecraft's talent for building a powerful, dense atmosphere of impending doom. So does "The Color Out of Space", which includes some of HPL's finest visual imagery, shading from expressionism into surrealism. Lovecraft's strength as a writer was primarily in his descriptive power, and one can't help regretting that, unlike his friend Clark Ashton Smith, he was never tempted to extend his visual imagination into other avenues of expression. In "Pickman's Model" he wrote: ". . . only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear -- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fear, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness . . ." An apt summation of Lovecraft's art. "The Call of Cthulhu", written in persuasive documentary style, is the cornerstone of the Cthulhu Mythos, arguably HPL's greatest contribution to supernatural literature. Like all the best Mythos stories it has enough implications to fill six issues of the
Fortean Times
. The reason why Lovecraft towers over his contemporaries and imitators is surely that he writes with such
conviction
. Even today, rereading these stories, I catch myself thinking: "what if he's
right
?" Apparently I'm not alone. The British occultist Kenneth Grant has written several books in which he postulates that Lovecraft didn't invent the Elder Gods or the Great Old Ones -- Cthulhu, Hastur, Yog-Sothoth and the rest -- they're all
real
! Being hypersensitive, Lovecraft simply picked up on their vibrations and transcribed his dreams into works of art -- just like that poor boob Henry Anthony Wilcox, the unfortunate sculptor in "The Call of Cthulhu". This theory is either a tribute to the persuasive power of HPL's stories, or . . . No, the alternative is too awful, too
Lovecraftian
, to contemplate. Writing about the artists he admired, HPL wrote: "There's something these fellows catch -- beyond life -- that they're able to make us catch for a second." That's a talent Lovecraft himself possessed to perfection, as these stories more than adequately demonstrate. -- MICHEL PARRY

Eleanor Vance, a lonely spinster racked with guilt over the recent death of her tyrannical mother, is asked by Dr. John Montague to take part in his investigation of the supposedly haunted Hill House. Joining Eleanor and Montague in the house, which has a long and evil history, are Theodora, an ambiguous young psychic, and Luke, a cynical young man who hopes eventually to inherit the property. Eleanor, who has been selected by Montague because she was as a child the focus of poltergeist phenomena, becomes the target (or the source) of a series of manifestations. She comes to believe that the house wants her, and is finally driven to become one of the ghosts (or perhaps the only ghost) of Hill House.
The Haunting of Hill House
(filmed to great effect in 1963 as simply
The Haunting
) is perhaps the most critically respected genre novel of the last fifty years, and has been widely influential. There are shadows of Hill House in books as different in approach as Robert Marasco's
Burnt Offerings
(1973), Richard Matheson's
Hell House
(1971), Anne Rivers Siddons'
The House Next Door
(1978), Lisa Tuttle's
Familiar Spirit
(1983) and Stephen King's
The Shining
(1977).

***

It was Shirley Jackson's achievement to write
the
great modern novel of supernatural horror. In general, I think, supernatural horror is most successful at shorter lengths. While it is possible to build and sustain a feeling of horror throughout the length of a novel, horror that is specifically supernatural places an additional demand on the modern unbelieving reader. A short story leaves no room for argument; it gets by on style and atmosphere, overwhelming rationality, forcing the reader (if it succeeds) to accept its view of the world in one, shuddering gulp. A novel is a more leisurely affair, and the reader's trust in the writer is crucial. When the author is writing about things we (ostensibly) don't believe in, like vampires and ghosts, the reader agrees to accept a different reality, and to believe in it, for the duration of the novel. This willing suspension of disbelief allows the novel to be enjoyed, but it also blocks a certain intensity of experience: in a sense, we are pretending to believe, and so we are only pretending to be scared. Although she was writing a novel which treats of the supernatural in the modern world, writing for sophisticated, "mainstream" readers in the late 1950s, Shirley Jackson demanded no special suspension of disbelief; no more than that required by any realistic, psychological novel of the day. She postulated no vampires, no ghosts, no hierarchy of malevolent spirits, but only the existence of
something
besides our tangible, material world, and the experience of such psychic phenomena as have actually been reported. She was writing a realistic novel of character -- actually, about the disintegration of character, as the protagonist, Eleanor Vance, goes through an intolerably stressful situation. And yet, this is not "merely" a psychological novel; the fact that it takes place in a haunted house is absolutely essential. The supernatural elements cannot be interpreted as misperceptions or evidence of madness on the part of some "unreliable narrator" --
The Haunting of Hill House
is narrated coolly, elegantly, and utterly sanely in the third person, and the setting is an archetypal evil place, a house which, from the very first paragraph, is attributed a personality, and given the status of antagonist. The idea for the novel came, Jackson said, from her chance reading of a book about the experiences of a group of nineteenth-century ghost-hunters: "I found it so exciting that I wanted more than anything else to set up my own haunted house, and put my own people in it, and see what I could make happen." I know the feeling, having tried it myself; Jackson's starting point strikes me as more suggestive than Jane Austen's favourite "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village", and even more dependent on the author's genius to make of it something worth reading Reading
The Haunting of Hill House
first in my teens, I found it genuinely don't-turn-out-the-lights frightening, and it went immediately into my pantheon of the "really scary" along with certain short stories by M. R. James, Walter de la Mare and L. P. Hartley, Like those other writers, Jackson invokes terror less by what she says than by what she doesn't say; by suggestion rather than explanation; and, rather startlingly, by a noticeable lack of description. Unlike the others named, Jackson was a contemporary writer; there are no Victorian frills or
fin-de-siècle
flourishes to her prose. Re-reading it recently, I was particularly, and favourably, struck by the absence of description, and considered it as an example of what Willa Cather called the "unfurnished novel". Cather thought that the writer who was an artist should renounce cataloguing, explaining and minute descriptions; whatever "furniture" was included should be chosen for its emotional charge and because it was necessary to the story being told. Cather's prescription came at about the same time as the revolt by Hemingway, Stein and other modernist writers against the overstuffed novels of an earlier generation. My increased admiration for Jackson's writing may have something to do with a surfeit of modern blockbusters insisting on a tediously detailed "reality" before allowing their even more lavishly described horrors to intrude. I happen to believe, with Henry James, that the imagination is more terrified by unseen terrors than by anything a writer can describe and Shirley Jackson's
The Haunting of Hill House
is the best argument I can think of for this point of view. This book is a work of art. And it is still one of the scariest stories I've ever read. -- LISA TUTTLE