Horror: The 100 Best Books Read online

  20: [1896] H. G. WELLS - The Island of Dr. Moreau

  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

  21: [1897] BRAM STOKER - Dracula

  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

  22: [1898] HENRY JAMES - The Turn of the Screw

  At Christmas, a group of friends are telling ghost stories. One of the company reads from a manuscript penned by a governess. The anonymous narrator arrives at an isolated house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. She learns that the children have recently been under the unwholesome influence of Miss Jessell, their former governess, and of Peter Quint, a sinister servant. Both Jessell and Quint are mysteriously dead, and both seem to be extending their influence from beyond the grave, perhaps to take possession of the children. While struggling with Quint’s spirit for the soul of Miles, the governess accidentally causes the death of her charge. A classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw has been adapted into an opera by Benjamin Britten, into a play, The Innocents, by Dalton Trumbo (filmed in 1961 by Jack Clayton) and spuriously “prequelized” by screenwriter Michael Hastings and director Michael Winner with The Nightcomers (1971). It is the most outstanding of James’ handful of ghostly stories. The eponymous “turn of the screw”, the involvement of children in the supernatural, might be seen to be at the root of a whole flood of post-Exorcist horrors unleashed in the 1970s.

  ***

  Courage — real courage — is the ability to see horror on the far side of a crowded room and still have the presence of mind to ask for another cup of tea. The governess in Henry James’s fantasy tale saw the shade of the defunct valet looking down from a tower and was still able to detect that he was not a gentleman. He gave her the sense of looking like an actor — but never — but no never! a gentleman. I find that after reading this story many times over the years it is extremely difficult to take a firm stand. Did the ghosts of the handsome but base-born valet Peter Quint and the beautiful lady governess Miss Jessel really exist, or were they merely figments created by the unnamed narrator’s imagination? It would appear that James intended them to be accepted as evil entities for he wrote to F. W. H. Myers, his brother’s fellow researcher into spiritualism, that he had wanted to create the impression of “the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger — the condition on their part being as exposed as we can humanly conceive children to be.” But exposed to whom? The ghosts? The governess? All communication seems to come from her. She is the only one to see the ghosts; it is she who builds up a most fantastic interpretation of what she has been told by the illiterate housekeeper Mrs. Grose. It was assumed that Quint was evil and Miss Jessel infamous. But were they? The valet certainly seems to have been a lad for the ladies and to have been perhaps a little over partial for a drink at the local. Hence his untimely end. A wrong turning when leaving the pub resulting in a fatal head wound. (A wronged husband taking revenge?) Poor Miss Jessel may have found it hard to say no and Quint would not be the first man to take advantage of an available situation. Naughty perhaps. But evil? And the children? Miles is sent home from school with the polite request that he does not go back. The reason we are told: That he’s an injury to others. What a pity the governess did not demand a detailed explanation of that ambiguous statement. But she assumes it to be some kind of sexual offence — that he was indeed corrupting his school fellows. Why? He may have organized a midnight raid on the kitchen; a very worthwhile, even necessary operation if my memory of school meals is anything to go by. But not one to find favour in the eyes of any self-respecting headmaster. Right — wandering around at night clad only in his nightgown suggests an unconventional turn of mind, but could that not have been a boyish prank? An effort to confuse their decidely odd governess? In fact that seems to me more than a possibility. The children leading the governess on — in modern parlance — taking the mickey, and unconsciously bringing her paranoia up to a dangerous level. This is borne out when Flora refuses to see a perfectly visible woman standing on the other side of the lake. And the governess? The unnamed narrator? Here sex insists on raising its ugly head. She must have been in a rare old state to be so bowled over by the uncle who comes to life as a self-centered, don’t-bother-me-I-leave-it-all-to-you monster. Still women do fall for these egoistic brutes, but the governess does seem to have fallen harder than most. Then — in her scene with ten years old Miles she thinks of him and herself as honeymooners at an inn … Conjecture begins to slide down a very steep, slippery hill and finishes up in a mud-filled ditch. Now — if only Mrs. Grose had also seen those ghosts, then just maybe Miles would not have been frightened to death — for then there would not have been anything for him to be frightened of — being quite accustomed to seeing ghosts — if you get my meaning. Also there would have been no mystery. — R. CHETWYND-HAYES

  23: [1902] JOSEPH CONRAD - Heart of Darkness

  Marlow, Conrad’s favoured narrator, forsakes his usual shipping lanes and takes a trip byriverboat up the Congo into the dark heart of Africa in search of Kurtz, a near-mythical entrepreneur who has somehow become possessed by the sinister magic of the continent and become the victim of the mini-empire he has carved out in the uncharted jungle. First published as one of the three stories in Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, Heart of Darkness is one of the most substantial thin novels ever written. It takes as its theme the duality of man, as elaborated upon by a variety of dark stories from The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Lord of the Flies, and uses the remote setting to create a powerful vision of the quest upriver as a voyage into the soul of humanity. Conrad, born Josef Korzeniowski, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, and was frequently drawn to bizarre and grotesque subjects.

  ***

  I first read Heart of Darkness at age fifteen, introduced to its dense and thickly shadowed prose, like almost every other modern reader, via a school assignment. It seemed less a story than a curious travelogue, a river voyage through colonial Africa that was cloaked in an oppressively gloomy atmosphere. There was no telling what it meant (in those innocent days before the massacre at My Lai, my teacher talked about style rather than substance); but its feeling was certain: no other fiction before or since has instilled in me such relentless dread. I returned to Heart of Darkness a few years later, this time by choice drawn back by memories of that emotional power — and a sense of unresolved mystery. Now colored by thoughts of schoolmates maimed and dead, by the daily news from the war in Vietnam, the story, and a very dark truth, seemed to burn from its pages. Conrad captured me forever; I have since read Heart of Darkness more times than any other fiction, and it has never failed to challenge, to terrify, and, indeed, to surprise me. I am not alone. This timeless story has inspired artists as diverse as J. G. Ballard (The Crystal World and The Day of Creation), Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now), and Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato); and it is rightfully considered one of the greatest horror novels ever written.

  “Before the Congo,” Joseph Conrad once told a friend, “I was a mere animal.” In 1889, when he was thirty-one, Conrad resigned the command of the Otago in Australia and returned to England for reasons that never have been made clear. A few months later, lacking money and a job, he fulfilled a lifelong dream of journeying deep into Africa by agreeing to captain a riverboat for the Belgian Company for Commerce. He spent six months in the Congo, traveling as far as the end of navigation at Stanley Falls; but he soon succumbed to illness — and to the sight of the baseness and degradation of the European intrusion into Africa. He departed for London, never to return … except in his fiction. Heart of Darkness, written nearly a decade later, recounts Conrad’s experiences in the Congo “pushed a little (and very little) beyond the facts of the case.” Narrated by Conrad’s fictional double, Marlow (the protagonist of Youth and narrator of Lord Jim, Chance, and The Secret Sharer), safe in harbor at the mouth of the Thames, its story is deceptively simple. “I don’t want to bother you much with what happened to me personally,” Marlow begins; but his tale is about little else. Hired by “the Company” to replace a riverboat captain who had been killed by natives, Marlow departs the “whited sepulchre” of Europe and sails deep into the interior of the dark continent. At the end of his journey awaits a near-legendary agent, Mr. Kurtz, the “Chief of the Inner Station.” From all accounts, Kurtz is the embodiment of enlightened European traditions, a journalist and statesman — indeed, a missionary — who has ventured into the deepest jungle armed only with “the gift of expression”. Marlow, steaming upriver in his wake, learns that the great man is “an emissary of pity, of science, of progress, and devil knows what else.” Devil knows, indeed; for as Marlow follows Kurtz’s path deeper and deeper into darkness, the evidence mounts that something has gone wrong. Kurtz, like the ever-darkening jungle, soon takes on the proportions of a terrifying, almost supernatural monster — a violence-breathing icon of the degradation and horror that “progress” has visited upon Africa: slavery, brutality, exploitation, despoliation, the “merry dance of death and trade”. When Marlow reaches the Inner Station, he finds an obscene encampment of war-ready natives, guarded with row upon row of poles that have been topped with severed heads. Inside, Kurtz awaits, grievously ill but with a single regret: the ivory trade has been closed, and Kurtz fears that his method may have failed because it was unsound. Marlow sees no method at all; Kurtz is “hollow to the core”, given over entirely to darkness — living, and now dying, without moral code or stricture. His final words, whether uttered merely in observation or in judgment, come in “a cry that was no more than a breath: ‘The horror! The horror!’” Throughout Heart of Darkness, and particularly in its closing section, Marlow’s narrative circles around the unexpressed (and perhaps inexpressible) mystery that has left readers and scholars guessing for nearly a century: What horror has seized the Inner Station? Some have suggested cannibalism; but Marlow’s own steamer is manned with cannibal tribesmen, whom he lauds for their relatively “civilized” restraint. No, it is something more — something that renders even the sight of severed heads mundane: “After all,” Marlow reminds us, “that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being something that had a right to exist — obviously — in the sunshine.” But that is only Marlow’s word. The genius of Heart of Darkness lies not only in its insistent atmospherics, deft symbolism, and almost infuriating vagary, but also in the inherent untrustworthiness of its narrative. The story is a labyrinth of unanswered questions: Is Marlow’s tale colored with guilt — or, indeed, his own insanity? Was Kurtz in fact real, or merely a projection of Marlow’s inner self, confronted at a lonely outpost beyond the purview of society? Critics of its time, like those in recent years, read Heart of Darkness as an indictment of imperialism, a common theme of more explicitly supernatural fiction of the end of the Nineteenth Century. Those were the years of the “yellow Gothic”, whose key novels — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and Dracula (1897) all echoed the fears of an era of imperial decline. Like those novels, Heart of Darkness speaks profoundly about the thin line between humanity and savagery, the slippery path from enlightenment to primitivism; but Conrad’s outraged humanism pushes further, suggesting that there is no line, no demarcation point that separates “us” from “them”: there is only pretense. The lessons of Heart of Darkness are as real today as they were a century ago, but it is Conrad’s singular style of confronting these horrors that has given his story its lasting power. Marlow’s journey is a travelogue indeed, not of Africa but of the human soul; and it is for this reason that Heart of Darkness is renowned as a symbolist masterpiece, and perhaps the finest depiction of the “night journey” in all of literature. Marlow’s voyage into and out of Africa enacts the mythical descent into the underworld and the return to light, an allegory of death and spiritual rebirth. Marlow has been brought — indeed, he has allowed himself to be brought — to the very face of horror, and has witnessed its bleak nothingness: “I have wrestled with death,” he tells us; and he has survived, emerging whole … and human. Like Conrad after the Congo, he is no longer a mere animal, but (for better or worse) a man, nervously alive with a knowledge both terrifying and cleansing. In his famous preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Conrad wrote that “Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.” Heart of Darkness brings to light a dark and unwelcome truth — the evil innate in all mankind. There is no greater purpose in the fiction of horror. — DOUGLAS E. WINTER