Horror: The 100 Best Books (8 page)

". . . Nay, not in Kor, but in whatever spot In town or field, or by the insatiate sea, Men brood o'er buried loves and unforgot, Or break themselves on some divine decree, Or would o'er leap the limits of their lot -- There, in the tombs and deathless, dwelleth
SHE
."

That's if immortals need epitaphs. -- TIM STOUT

The King in Yellow
collects two sets of linked stories. The second half of the book consists of a batch of sentimental novelettes with titles like "The Street of the Four Winds" and "The Street of the First Shell", dealing with the lives and loves of the Bohemian set in Paris. The first series, however, which comprises "The Repairer of Reputations", "The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon" and "The Yellow Sign", has as a continuing thread a play called
The King in Yellow
, which seems to call down a strange doom on anyone who reads it. The stories involve a fascist-run New York of 1925, prophetic dreams and a solution which will turn living flesh into marble. Several of the names -- Carcosa, the Lake of Hali, Hastur -- were later re-used by Lovecraft to add sinister hints of a continuity between
his
stories, which also have an evil book as one of their key elements; interestingly, Chambers took a few of these names from the works of his contemporary, Ambrose Bierce. A single tale, "The Demoiselle D'Ys", links the two halves of the collection: it is a romantic ghost story with a French setting. Besides influencing Lovecraft and -- through him -- the
Weird Tales
generation, Chambers' book was read by Raymond Chandler, who had Philip Marlowe solve a vaguely related case in his short story of the same title. Chambers wrote a handful of other horror stories, but spent the rest of his successful career producing slick society romances.

***

Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a
very
different quality.
The King in Yellow
, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's
Trilby
. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is "The Yellow Sign", in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail. "Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I "it "im "e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted "is soft, mushy fist one of "is fingers come off in me "and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head "like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay." What he mumbles is merely this: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?" A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up on the street by the sharer of his dream, is shortly given the artist, and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur -- from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which seeks to lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of the black-plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the night-shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor -- two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, "That man must have been dead for months." It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outre and macabre element are
The Maker of Moons
and
In Search of the Unknown
. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognized master. -- H. P. LOVECRAFT

Edward Prendick, a shipwreck victim, is picked up in the South Seas by a boat carrying a cargo of animals to a nameless island. He strikes an acquaintance with Montgomery, who is overseeing the animals, and is put ashore with him. The island is home to Dr. Moreau, a scientist intent on proving his evolutionary theories by raising animals through surgery to the status of human beings. Prendick gradually finds out what is going on and realizes that the strange-looking "natives" are all former animals, very shakily kept in line by an absurd set of jungle laws. Moreau's experiments have been failing because, although he can turn beasts into approximate humans he cannot prevent them reverting to their former state. The Beast Men revolt and destroy Moreau and Montgomery, leaving Prendick alone on the island with creatures who gradually revert to their animal selves. A mix of Swiftian satire,
Grand Guignol
horror, Darwinian theory and high adventure,
The Island of Dr. Moreau
is one of the young Wells' most spirited books. It has been much imitated in pulp fiction and cinema, and been officially filmed twice, most notably as
The Island of Lost Souls
(1932) with Charles Laughton as the mad doctor. Gene Wolfe has written three loosely connected novellas remotely inspired by the book,
The Island of Dr. Death
,
The Doctor of Death Island
and
The Death of Dr. Island
.

***

H. G. Wells was still my father's idol, and for just that reason nothing short of a miracle could have impelled me to read him; but the miracle occurred. I should explain that in those faraway and lost days there nourished a truly wondrous breed of magazines called pulps. (We are still living on the capital they left us; but that is another story.) All were at least as magical as a white rabbit pulled from a hat; but a few, such as
Weird Tales
,
Planet Stories
, and
Astounding Science Fiction
, were easily as magical as any enchanted castle upon a mountain of glass. Yet there was one that surpassed them all, that was, in any average issue, fully as magical as Aladdin's lamp. Its name was
Famous Fantastic Mysteries
. I don't think anybody ever told me that it reprinted the best, the least tamed and most venomous, science fiction, fantasy, and horror from the past. If somebody had, I would not have believed it, each issue was brand new to me, utterly wild and marvelous, more disturbing and more exotic than -- well, for years I sincerely believed that the rest did not run those stories because they were afraid to. And at last the month arrived in which
FFM
reprinted
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. I did not notice that its author was the very one who made my father's eyes shine in that strange way. I plunged straight into the story, as you should, finishing it in a single stifling tropical afternoon. I re-read most of it that night after dinner, and afterward stretched terrified on my bed with the abominable voices of beastmen whining and chattering in my ears. I re-read it again the next day, then set it aside lest eventually it grow stale. (For I am an invariable putter-off of pleasures, one who will at last dance and flirt, I am sure, upon the lid of his own coffin.) I do not think I read it again until I began preparing to write this brief piece. Nor did I need to. I remembered
it
, and indeed have been haunted by it. Years later, when I wrote
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories
, and wanted a book that would thrill poor little Tackie while shaking him to his core, I put a vapid imitation of
The Island of Dr. Moreau
into his hands. It is the ultimate science-fiction novel, and it is the ultimate horror story. It shows us where we are going, and it shows us that we are already there: that we are worse than beasts, and that when we create our final monster, we will find it a fiend nearly as evil as ourselves. Are you religious? Here is what happened in Eden after Adam and Eve had gone. Are you scientific? Peep into this telescope, this microscope, and behold the emptiness and horror of the universe in your own reflected face. Enough, I read
The Island of Dr. Moreau
a fourth time to write this. I did not remember the first line, and indeed it is not memorable. Then: ". . .
she collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao
." Dr. Moreau was back, and I could wind my own fear. Note, please, that Prendick never troubles to learn the name of one of the two men who share the boat with him; and permit me one more brief quotation, this too from an early page: "
'Have some of this,' said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff, iced. It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.
" By now you have decided I am mad, and that this book cannot have been to anyone else what it has been to me; so let me close by describing the cover of the used copy I got. You have seen a thousand in which a hero with a broadsword battles some monster. This shows a youngish man, not quite muscular enough to be that sort of hero, but decent-looking and intelligent. Behind him stands an ogre, dark and bullet-headed, with glowing eyes -- the brute refuse of nighmare. One of its hands is upon the man's shoulder, in the most friendly, comradely way. The artist is Douglas Rosa; I know nothing about him except that he painted this picture. -- GENE WOLFE

Jonathan Harker, a solicitor's clerk, arrives at the Transylvanian castle of Count Dracula in order to settle some business about the Count's impending move to England. Harker discovers that the Count is a vampire and undergoes many horrors in the castle, while Dracula sets sail for his new home. In England, Mina, Harker's fiance and her best friend Lucy are visited nocturnally by the Count, who turns Lucy into a vampire. Jonathan returns, shattered by his ordeal, and joins Dr. Van Helsing's group of fearless vampire hunters, which includes Lucy's three suitors. The heroes destroy the undead Lucy and drive the Count from the country, but he retains his hold over Mina. They pursue the vampire back to his castle and there destroy him, thus reuniting Jonathan and Mina. Although told in the now-archaic Wilkie Collins manner -- as a succession of interlocking accounts, journals, newspaper clippings and documents --
Dracula
is probably the first modern horror novel. In its conflict between an ancient evil and the modern world, it sets the precedent for the entire 20th-century development of the form. It has been adapted for stage, film, television, comic books and radio countless times, and several hands -- including those of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Peter Tremayne, Fred Saberhagen, Manly Wade Wellman, Woody Allen, and Ramsey Campbell -- have produced sequels.

***

Dracula
is a paradoxical masterpiece, a work that, in a sense, has no right to exist. Stoker's other fantasy novels --
The Lady of the Shroud
,
The Lair of the White Worm
and
The Jewel of Seven Stars
-- reveal a depressing lack of literary talent; they are crude and obvious. Yet
Dracula
is one of the most remarkable classics in the whole realm of horror fiction. When I reviewed Harry Ludlum's biography of Bram Stoker in 1962, I received a long letter from a highly literate old gentleman who told me that I had done less than justice to
Dracula
; he had read it a dozen times, and felt that, as a novel, it had quite simply everything: excitement, romance, sympathy, warmth, horror, adventure . . . And when I re-read the novel in the light of the old gentleman's letter, I saw he was right. From those opening words in Jonathan Harker's journal: "3 May. Bistritz. -- Left Munich at 8.35p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning . . .", it grips the attention. You feel you are in the hands of a man who knows what he is talking about. And the talk about the British Museum, the study of maps of Transylvania, the slightly pedantic description of the races of this part of central Europe, impart a richness of texture that fills the reader with the feeling a child experiences when someone says "Once upon a time . . ." Harry Ludlum's biography reveals that Abraham Stoker himself was hardly the sort of person one might expect to produce a masterpiece. The son of a Dublin clerk, he seemed in his twenties destined for a career in the Civil Service. In childhood he had been sickly and introverted, and dreamed of becoming a writer. At the age of twenty he discovered the works of Walt Whitman, and went to the other extreme, becoming a muscular, healthy and apparently completely normal young man. Deeply impressed by the actor Henry Irving when the latter came to Dublin, Stoker became an unpaid theatre critic simply for the satisfaction of praising his idol; as a result, he and Irving became friends, and in 1878, Irving asked him to become his general manager. Stoker accepted immediately, and neither ever had reason to regret the decision. Stoker worked like a dray horse for his brilliant but slightly crazy employer, answering fifty letters a day, reading plays and engaging actors. But he made no attempt to use his new position to lead a Bohemian life; he remained a stodgily married man, one of those bearded late Victorians who always looks at life from a loftily moral viewpoint -- in one of his articles, Stoker even advocated the censorship of fiction. Considering the mad pace of his daily life -- his death certificate gave the cause of death as "exhaustion" [an Edwardian doctor's euphamism for syphilis (ed.)] -- it is a mystery how he found time to write books, let alone a masterpiece like
Dracula
. The novel emphasizes the importance of allowing oneself to be totally gripped by a subject before starting to write about it. One evening in 1890, at a midnight supper, he met a remarkable man named Arminus Vambery, a professor of Oriental languages from Budapest, who knew twenty languages and was a student of the occult. Vambery told him about the 15th-century ruler of Wallachia, Vlad the Impaler, so named because he enjoyed having people he disliked impaled alive on pointed poles in his dining room. (Any guests who looked sick were in danger of being impaled on another pole.) It may have been after that first meeting with Vambery that Stoker had a horrifying nightmare of a vampire king rising from the tomb. In due course, Vlad became Dracula (dracul means dragon or demon) and Vambery became Van Helsing. It is obvious to any reader that without Van Helsing, the all-knowing expert on the supernatural, the book would be a failure. (Conan Doyle showed the same artistic insight when he created Professor Moriarty as a foil to Holmes.) What seems so extraordinary is that Stoker failed to learn the lesson of
Dracula
, and that his other books are so oddly flaccid and feeble. When
Dracula
appeared in 1897 it was immediately recognized as the most powerful novel of the supernatural written so far; it has remained in print ever since, and intrigued generations of psychologists, who have speculated how anyone as "square" as Bram Stoker could create such a horrific rape fantasy. For that is quite obviously what it is all about. These women whose blood Dracula drinks are archetypal symbols of the helpless and violated female. On stage in the Lyceum Theatre, Stoker saw an endless series of Victorian heroines, "womanly women" who yielded sweetly to manly men at the end of the last act. But in
Dracula
, the gentle Lucy Westenra is not only destroyed by the long-dead Count; she herself becomes a vampire, who has to be destroyed by having a stake hammered into her heart. It seems obvious that strange fires smouldered below the dependable and trustworthy surface of this upright Victorian gentleman. It is because of this touch of paradox -- one might almost say this whiff of sulphur -- that
Dracula
remains one of the most oddly disturbing novels ever written. -- COLIN WILSON