Horror: The 100 Best Books (7 page)

Austin Ruthyn, father of the seventeen-year-old narrator Maud, firmly believes that his disgraced brother Silas is innocent of the crimes everyone else attributes to him. On Silas' recommendation, he takes into his house Madame de la Rougierre, a sinister governess who terrorizes Maud and is expelled when Austin finds her prying into his private papers. Austin realizes that Silas is plotting to gain the fortune he intends to leave to Maud, but succumbs to a stroke just as he is about to strike out of his will the clause that gives Maud over into her uncle's care until she reaches her majority. Maud goes to live at Bertram-Hough, Silas' gloomy pile, and soon realizes that Silas, his reprobate son Dudley and the wicked governess are scheming against her. Although not one of the ghost stories for which its author was famous,
Uncle Silas
is a prime example of mid-Victorian post-Gothic melodrama. Unlike
Jane Eyre
, with which it shares many elements, it does not finally resolve into a romance between the put-upon heroine and the saturnine master of the crumbling house but piles on the horrors and reveals Silas to be a villain considerably worse than the world thinks him. In 1947, it was filmed twice, in England as
Uncle Silas
(a.k.a.
The Inheritance
) with Jean Simmons as the heroine, and in Argentina by Carlos Schliepper as
El Mysterioso Tio Silas
. A BBC-TV serial,
The Dark Angel
, starring Peter O'Toole, faithfully retold the story in 1989.

***

This masterpiece of its kind first appeared in its present form in the
Dublin University Magazine
in 1864 under the title of
Uncle Silas and Maud Ruthyn
. This serial publication was followed by a three-volume edition by Bentley, and one-volume issues since then have been frequent. When he wrote
Uncle Silas
Le Fanu had already produced four long stories. Two of these, "The Cock and Anchor" and "Torlogh O'Brien", were early works, separated by an interval of fourteen or fifteen years from the long series which he began in 1861. In that year he brought out
The House by the Churchyard
, and in 1863
Wylder's Hand
. I have always thought that in some ways
The House by the Churchyard
is the best of all his books: but it cannot be denied that
Uncle Silas
is the better known and has elisted more suffrages. It is indeed more compact and clearer in plot; its population is more easily grasped; there is not the multiplicity of threads which make the earlier book -- some would say confusing, I say rich and attractive. And it does possess very great excellences. Let me reckon up some of the features which I remember to have caught my fancy when I first read the book, some time in the early eighties, I suppose. There was Maud Ruthyn herself. Surely that character is well kept up throughout? Of course there is always the improbability of the recollection of long dialogues spoken many years before they were written down, but that is a convention in which one can very easily acquiesce. What matters is that the girl should write as a sensible pleasant woman would write in later years, when she was able to detach herself enough from her girlish self to be amused at it and critical of it. That I think Le Fanu has made her do, and he has made her sensible and pleasant. It was a role, by the way, which he rather liked: in his last novel,
Willing to Die
, the pen is held by a lady very like Maud Ruthyn, and so it is in the admirable story of "Carmilla". Monica Knollys: I do not know if the wise sharp-tongued humorous lady of mature age has often been better drawn. What good language she uses! How well she tells the story of Charke's murder! For Dr. Bryerly too I have a particular respect. His talk to the housekeeper when he comes at dead of night to watch by Austin Ruthyn's body is one of those outbursts in which I think Le Fanu reaches a great height of eloquence, and shows the poet that was in him. But naturally, among the characters, my chief admiration was centred on Uncle Silas himself and yet more on Madame de la Rougierre. The horrid veneer of French culture combined with pietism that appears in Silas's talk and letters is inimitable: "Chaulieu and the evangelists" as Lady Knollys puts it. It is she too who drops a hint about Silas which I think was, in the back of Le Fanu's mind, the key to the situation, though, true to his artistic instinct, he does not dwell on it. "Perhaps," she says, "Other souls than human are sometimes born into the world and clothed in flesh." "Venerable, bloodless, fiery-eyed," Uncle Silas is a figure who stamps himself on the memory. "On a sudden, on the grass before me, stood an odd figure -- a very tall woman in grey draperies, nearly white under the moon, courtesying extraordinarily low, and rather fantastically." That is the way in which Madame de la Rougierre is introduced, and from that moment whenever she is on the scene she rivets the attention. It is a most careful study; the language she speaks is but one of many successes in the portrait. What a hideous atmosphere she carries with her! The hints of a dreadful past, the growing certainty that she is an accomplice in an obscure plot, the relief when she vanishes from Knowl, the ghastly shock when she is discovered in the attic at Bertram-Haugh -- to me all these episodes seem to be really masterly in the working out. Throughout the story many little scenes are managed which serve to put us in the right frame of mind, expectant of tragedy. There is the talk of the Swedenborgian in the third chapter, there is the account of the family ghosts of Knowl, the fortune-telling gipsy, the mysterious "Fly the fangs of Belsarius": but of course it is the march of the main story with its short glimpses of light followed by increasing darkness, the gradual withdrawal of friends and closing up of avenues of escape, that ought to enlist and does enlist our terrified interest. The climax, I have always thought, is in every way worthy of what has gone before, and the swift ending of the book is artistically right, I am sure. Vulgar Victorian curiosity, I confess, always makes me wish to know exactly what Uncle Silas and Dudley said to each other when they discovered their mistake: but this is more than we could reasonably expect to be told; even if Dickon Hawkes heard it and repeated it, years after, Lady Ilbury might well have hesitated to write it down. There are not many stories which succeed in creating and in sustaining with the right intensity the atmosphere of mystery and the
crescendo
of impending doom, and whose dramatis personae are at the same time so unremote and so easily realized. I wish the book many readers, and I wish that all of them may find in it the same delight that it has often brought to me. -- M. R. JAMES

The friends of Dr. Henry Jekyll, a respected chemist, are perturbed and mystified by his association with Edward Hyde, a sinister brute. Mr. Utterson, Jekyll's lawyer, witnesses an incident in the street in which Hyde tramples a little girl. Later, Jekyll makes a will leaving his money to Hyde "in the event of my death or disappearance". Hyde's crimes descend to murder, and Jekyll becomes more and more tormented. Finally, Hyde is tracked to Jekyll's laboratory and found dead, a suicide. Jekyll's posthumous confession reveals that he is Hyde, thanks to a potion which liberates the baser aspects of the human soul. An instant classic on its first appearance,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
has been dramatized and filmed endlessly. Among the many actors to attempt the dual role were Charles Mansfield, John Barrymore, FredricMarch, Spencer Tracy, Christopher Lee, Kirk Douglas, David Hemmings, Michael Caine, Anthony Perkins and Boris Karloff. Stevenson's original draft was apparently more gruesome and sensationalist than the book is as it stands; he was persuaded -- perhaps unfortunately -- by his wife to re-write it, emphasizing the moral lesson of the tale.

***

The chilling idea for
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, so Stevenson wrote, came to him in a terrifying dream. First published in 1886, the story did more than any other work to earn his fame. When I discovered it, some forty years later, it shook me with an impact I will never forget. Such bits of fantasy or science fiction were still rare then, hard to find and precious when you found them.
Weird Tales
, the first magazine devoted to fantasy, did not begin its hard struggle for survival until 1923.
Amazing Stories
, the first science fiction magazine, began publication only in 1926; Hugo Gernsback did not invent the term "science fiction" until 1929. Popular tastes have vastly changed since then. The book racks are loaded now with bumper crops of fantasy, science fiction, and horror; Asimov and Heinlein and Stephen King are best-selling authors. Yet
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
still commands attention and builds suspense as it always did, with its atmosphere of long-ago London, its vivid images of Utterson and Lanyon, and the riveting mystery of the good doctor and the sinister Mr. Hyde. Those are merely devices, however, for what Stevenson had to say. His theme, like Poe's in "William Wilson" and Conrad's in "The Secret Sharer", is the double self, a symbol as I see it for the universal conflict between the individual and society. We are all born naked, selfish individualists. At the moment of birth however, we are tossed into warfare with all the institutions that try to socialize us: family, school, religion, law. So long as we live, however we rebel or submit, compromise or conquer, that tension never ends. Dr. Jekyll, as I see him, is the social man, Mr. Hyde the rebel soul. I think they reflect the division in Stevenson himself. Witness his long history of conflict and compromise with his father, who was a sternly pious Calvinist and a prosperous civil engineer. Stevenson was a sickly child, and sickness can be a strategy of unconscious rebellion. Frequent illness interrupted his schooling. He disappointed his father by failing to follow into the family profession of lighthouse engineering, reading law instead; disappointed him again by rejecting religion and choosing a literary career over the practice of law; hurt him a third time with his pursuit of Fanny Osborne, a married women not yet divorced when his courtship began. His father was kind and tolerant enough in the end, forgiving the marriage, supporting him when he needed support, but the pattern of social rebellion remains a constant in Stevenson's whole career. It appears in such great novels of adventure as
Treasure Island
, in the romantic wandering through the South Seas that ended with his too-early death on Samoa in 1894, and most clearly, I think, in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. When we thrill to the shock and horror of the story, I think it is because we all, at least to some degree, have been torn by that same internal conflict. When we recoil in terror from the selfish savagery of Mr. Hyde, I think it is because we fear our own secret selves. -- JACK WILLIAMSON

Adventurous scholar Horace Holly and his young friend Leo Vincey, exploring in the African jungle, discover the fabled lost city of Kor, which is ruled by Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, an immortal white queen. Ayesha believes that Leo is the reincarnation of her lost love, Kalikrates, and invites him to join her in bathing in the blue flame, the source of her immortality. However, a second exposure robs her of the gift bestowed by the first, and she reverts horribly to her true age. Haggard capitalized on the sensational success of
She
with several sequels,
Ayesha
(1905), a direct follow-up,
She and Allan
(1921), in which Ayesha meets his series hero Allan Quatermain (of
King Solomon's Mines
(1885), and many others), and
Wisdom's Daughter
(1923), a romance of the ancient world which goes into Ayesha's origins.
She
was first filmed in 1899, by George Melies, as
La Danse de Feu
, and has been remade many times, most memorably by Irving Pichel in 1935 with Helen Gahaghan and Randolph Scott, and by Hammer in 1965 with Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

***

There's a moment in the 1965 film version of
She
when a map showing the way to a legendary lost city is produced, and the would-be young explorer urges his hesitant friend to accompany him with the appeal "Do you think you'd ever enjoy another good night's sleep, wondering what might have been at the end of it all?" Thus begins their trek through swamp and mountain, leading at last to the hidden city and a meeting with the eerie sorceress of blinding beauty who dwells there. The quest theme, that "beyond the ranges" notion of a great, undiscovered secret, lies at the very heart of Rider Haggard's haunting 1887 romance of the deathless Ayesha, who has waited two thousand years for the reincarnation of her lost love. Where are they now, those magnificent Victorian yarns of far-off jungles and plateaux tingling with magic and mystery? Today the horrors all seem to be coming to us -- loping through the subway, festering in the creepy old house next door, escaping from the local hospital, even squirming up the plug-hole into the bath Back in 1887, though, the world was a bigger place. In those intrepid days, travellers' tales -- marvellous phrase! -- offered entertainment rather more enlivening than a moan about the water in Majorca. Zanzibar: the cliff of the Ethiopian's Head: the caves of Kor . . . Thumb through an atlas for the settings Haggard selected for
She
and they're just another part of the hopeless battleground that makes up modern Africa. But read the story and it takes you back a century and more to a time when the ends of the earth were exactly that -- realms created by God for the specific use of authors and their imaginations. And what a tale it is. A broken potsherd with an ancient inscription lures Cambridge scholar Horace Holly and his handsome young ward Leo Vincey to the East African hinterland, home of the savage Amahagger tribe and their all-powerful queen, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Long ago, in the days of the pharaohs, She had bathed in the Flame of Life and made herself immortal. Now she leads a lonely hermit-like existence, living out the weary centuries in the belief that ultimately the lover whom she murdered will be restored to her. Ayesha -- so lovely she must veil her face from those around her. So old that her feet have worn away the stone steps of her mountain palace. So powerful in jealousy that the mere brush of her hand can blast a native girl dead. As the plot takes hold one has the fancy that she had always existed, in some dark dimension of the imagination, and that Haggard was the fortunate author to whom she chose to reveal herself. He was later to write of the novel: "It came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down." After six weeks of sustained, white-hot scribbling he dumped the manuscript on his agent's desk, announcing "There is what I shall be remembered by". Prophetic words.
She
is far and away the best of his many stirring tales of fantasy and high adventure, which include the classic
King Solomon's Mines
. I read it first at the impressionable age of thirteen, when the description of Ayesha's terrible, disintegrating end filled my schoolboy's heart with an overpowering sense of loss. At forty-one, it still does: even though I know I have only to pick up the sequels,
Ayesha
and
She and Allan
, to meet her again. A horror story? Not really. Say rather, a romance in its truest sense -- a narrative which passes beyond the limits of ordinary life. Fantasy authors shouldn't have to work down among the dead men all the time. If
She
were written today it would probably emerge as a sado-sexual romp, with its heroine bedding half the Amahagger before lustfully scorching her reincarnated lover Leo to a crisp. It's a measure of Rider Haggard's skill that, without allowing Ayesha any intimacies beyond the endearments "thee" and "thou", he nevertheless conjures up the most vivid female character in supernatural fiction, creating an unattainable feminine ideal against which men dash themselves as moths against a flame. Unattainable. Isn't that the secret of fantasy's appeal? A longing for the infinite. And Haggard gives us the perfect image -- "as the fishes see the stars, but dimly". It was his friend Andrew Lang, the Scottish mythographer and poet, who provided the sonnet which might serve as an epitaph for both
She
and Haggard --