Horror: The 100 Best Books Read online

  17: [1886] ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  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 bestselling 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

  18: [1887] H. RIDER HAGGARD - She

  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, t
o 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 —

  “… 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

  19: [1895] ROBERT W. CHAMBERS - The King in Yellow

  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