FEAR FACTOR
From King to Lovecraft, the best horror fiction creates an uneasy sense of primitive dread,
From Andrew Michael Hurley — to H.P. Lovecraft and other literary creepies and zombies
Horror is unique amongst literary genres in that its ultimate purpose is to generate an emotional state: fear. If the reader of a horror story does not feel some combination of terror, revulsion, anxiety, and horror, then the story has either failed or needs reclassifying.
In his oft-quoted essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the great H.P. Lovecraft argued that the best horror fiction, besides generating an atmosphere of primitive fear, calls forth a feeling of “contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the universe’s utmost rim.”
The genre’s modern master, Stephen King, offered a less erudite definition: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out.”
The wise and the learned trace the horror tale’s origins to traditional oral folk tales and ballads, which were shared around campfires and kitchen hearths to entertain, explain supernatural phenomena, and to warn listeners of illicit passions and the dangers of venturing too deeply into the unknown.
Horror would not begin its emergence as a literary genre until the late 18th century, when amateur antiquarian Horace Walpole published The Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic Tale, what is today recognized as the first Gothic horror novel. The story of an Italian prince who imprisons his late son’s fiancé in his Medieval Castle, The Castle of Otranto laid the foundational tropes of horror fiction: the family curse, the damsel in distress, the eruption of supernatural phenomena, religious and occult conspiracies, and an atmosphere of sexual depravity and bloodlust.
It also provided the budding genre with many of its stock locations, including the haunted castle, the dungeon (or any claustrophobically enclosed space), the crypt, and the inhospitable landscape, be it looming mountains, gloomy moors, or storm-wracked seashores.
Walpole’s novel touched a nerve with a primarily middle-class, Protestant (and female) readership still haunted by the seemingly endless wars, religious upheavals and feudal tyrannies of pre-Enlightenment Europe. The Gothic tale played those fears like a polished conductor, delivering lurid stories of Catholic monks, priests and cursed aristocrats praying on virginal heroines in haunted castles, churches and abbeys.
Over the next half-century, hundreds of novels and stories were published to feed the craze for the Gothic. Even Jane Austen ( Northanger Abby) and Charlotte Bronte ( Jane Eyre) explored the Gothic landscape, and the genre would continue to live on in countless stories and novels, including Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
The horror genre took a monstrous leap forward in 1816, when eighteenyear-old Mary Shelley accompanied her poet husband Percy Shelley and travelled to Lake Geneva for a summer vacation. There, after an evening of exchanging ghost stories with friends, Mary was inspired to write what is still one of the greatest horror novels, Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus.
Although the novel plays with many standard Gothic themes and settings,
Frankenstein introduced readers to horror fiction’s first proper monster: the child-like but murderously violent beast that Doctor Frankenstein constructs from the body parts of multiple corpses. Those ghost-story sessions also inspired one of the guests, John Polidari, to write “The Vampyre,” the first vampire story, giving horror its most enduring and beloved monster.
During the Victorian era, the Gothic tale shed many of its Medieval trappings and relocated to contemporary England (and America), where it became the classic ghost story. Dungeons were replaced by attics and basements, and the ancestral castle and manor, while still choice locations, were largely replaced by more mundane dwellings — the family home, the boarding house and the hotel. The ghost story remains the undisputed king of horror, inspiring many of the genre’s best offerings, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to Stephen King’s The Shining to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.
The anxieties brought about by the massive social, technological and political changes of the twentieth and twentyfirst century have spawned several fecund horror sub-genres. What they all have in common is the ability to bring to life our deepest fears, and by giving those fears form, allow us to creatively wrestle with them.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the increasingly secular nature of modern life, tales of the occult and the demonic continue to entrance readers. The best of these — William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, T.E.D. Klein’s Ceremonies — challenge the claims of rationalism and technology to solve our existential needs.
Andrew Michael Hurley’s surprise 2014 bestseller The Loney introduced many readers to a subgenre much beloved by devotees: folk horror. Broadly speaking, folk horror plays on our fears of nature and those remaining communities that still live by pagan beliefs — think of modern urbanites stranded in a remote village and you’ll get an idea of folk horror’s appeal. Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, Harvest Homeby Thomas Tryon, and Gemma Files’ We Will All Go Down Together are a great starting point for initiates.
The suspense (or serial killer) novel is the mutant offspring of the horror and mystery genres. Although generally stripped of horror’s supernatural trappings, the suspense novel’s all-too-human monsters offer the same potential for terror and catharsis.
And finally, perhaps no monster best captures our collective fear of a global apocalypse than the zombie, that grunting, gut-munching cannibal of books, comics, movies and TV. The origin of this popular subgenre can be traced to a single source: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, a compact, nightmarish novel that hasn’t been bested. James Grainger is the author of Harmless.