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  FOUNDATIONS OF FEAR

  Horror fiction is a special and enduring pleasure, invoking fear and wonder. For centuries, writers have struggled to achieve the sublime through these tales, at times creating works of enduring interest. Horror novels have become one of the major bestselling forms of fiction in recent years, and Hollywood has given us a huge and varied supply of popular films, which has created an audience in the millions for horror.

  But throughout history, many of the finest achievements in horror have been in short fiction. From these masterpieces have been selected the contents of Foundations of Fear.

  This anthology presents an international selection of the strongest work by writers such as Clive Barker, H. P. Lovecraft, and Arthur Machen, who have been identified as category horror writers, and by writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Gerald Durrell, and Daphne Du Maurier, whose literary reputations transcend category.

  For horror in literature cuts across all category boundaries. Thus the reader will find in this volume domestic horror stories by Thomas Hardy, Violet Hunt and Mary Wilkins Freeman; and stories by Robert A. Heinlein and Philip K. Dick, masters of science fiction.

  The Introduction to Foundations of Fear takes particular note of women writers, who have made important contributions to the development of the horrific in literature; in addition to those already mentioned the collection includes works by Madeline Yale Wynne, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Gertrude Atherton, and others.

  Foundations of Fear challenges the notion that the supernatural in fiction has in modern times been supplanted by the psychological, the idea that horror is dead. Horror is one of the dominant literary modes of our time, a vigorous and living body of literature that continues to thrill us with the mystery and wonder of the unknown.

  This book is conceived as a companion volume to The Dark Descent, in which the anatomy of horror and its evolution were chronicled for the first time in the contemporary period. Foundations of Fear includes many stories of novella length, supplying the reader with works rarely anthologized in smaller, shorter books.

  Tor Books by David G. Hartwell

  Editor

  The Ascent of Wonder (with Kathryn Cramer)

  The Dark Descent

  Foundations of Fear

  Christmas Magic

  Christmas Stars

  Christmas Forever

  Northern Stars (with Glenn Grant)

  Spirits of Christmas (with Kathryn Cramer)

  Nonfiction

  Age of Wonders

  FOUNDATIONS OF FEAR

  Copyright © 1992 by David G. Hartwell

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10010

  Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com

  TOR® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  ISBN 0-312-85074-3

  First edition: September 1992

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To the editors and anthologists who first gave the genre a canon in the 1920s–1940s;

  To the publishers who stuck with it and gave the genre an identity for better or worse;

  To the writers who often ignored them all and just wrote powerfully and well;

  And finally, to my children, Alison and Geoffrey, without whom I couldn’t have completed the book during difficult times.

  Acknowledgments

  This book continues the revaluation of horror literature I began in The Dark Descent, and so to the same people and books given credit there I continue my indebtedness. Discussions with Alfred Bendixen (and of course his books) have proven helpful, and with Robert Hadji, whose wide reading in and out of the genre and considered critical judgement have influenced several of my choices for inclusion herein. The support of those who were enthusiastic enough about The Dark Descent to demand that I continue working in this area—particularly Joanna Russ—carried me through a number of rough spots. Certainly the most important acknowledgement is to Kathryn Cramer, not only for discussion, critical commentary, and moral support, but for sharing with me her unfinished writings and researches on horror publishing and the distinctions between category and genre, and on Henry James, as well as her published work surveying influences among horror writers today. At every point her creative insights have been provocative and useful. The critical reconsideration of the evolution of horror in literature begun by Kathryn Cramer, Peter D. Pautz, and myself five years ago has borne a variety of fruits, including all our various anthologies. This is only the most recent.

  No acknowledgement would be complete without proper recognition of the support of my publisher, Tor Books, who took a chance. To Tom Doherty, publisher, and Melissa Singer, editor, for patient enthusiasm, my sincere gratitude.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Daphne Du Maurier - Don’t Look Now

  Robert A. Heinlein - They

  H. P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness

  Madeline Yale Wynne - The Little Room

  Jean Ray - The Shadowy Street

  Robert Silverberg - Passengers

  Harriet Prescott Spofford - The Moonstone Mass

  Peter Straub - The Blue Rose

  George R. R. Martin - Sandkings

  Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan

  Carlos Fuentes - Aura

  Thomas Hardy - Barbara, of the House of Grebe

  Thomas M. Disch - Torturing Mr. Amberwell

  Violet Hunt - The Prayer

  John W. Campbell - Who Goes There?

  Theodore Sturgeon - . . . and my fear is great

  Elizabeth Engstrom - When Darkness Loves Us

  Frederik Pohl - We Purchased People

  Gertrude Atherton - The Striding Place

  Clive Barker - In The Hills, The Cities

  Philip K. Dick - Faith of Our Fathers

  Gertrude Atherton - The Bell in the Fog

  E. T. A. Hoffmann - The Sand-man

  Octavia Butler - Bloodchild

  Richard Matheson - Duel

  Edgar Pangborn - Longtooth

  Mary Wilkins Freeman - Luella Miller

  Gerald Durrell - The Entrance

  Scott Baker - The Lurking Duck

  Thomas Ligotti - Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story

  Introduction

  There is no delight the equal of dread.

  —Clive Barker,

  “Dread”

  . . . if not the highest, certainly the most exacting form of literary art.

  —L. P. Hartley

  on the ghost story

  Taken as a whole, the output . . . stands in need of critical study, not to erect theories upon subterranean surmises, but by using direct observation and following educated taste . . . to enlarge for all readers the repertory of the well-wrought and the enjoyable.

  —Jacques Barzun, Introduction to

  The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

  We dislike to predict the future of the horror story. We believe its powers are not yet exhausted. The advance of science proves this. It will lead us into unexplored labyrinths of terror and the human desire to experience new emotions will always be with us . . . Some of the stories now being published in Weird Tales will live forever.

  —editorial,

  Weird Tales (vol. 4, no. 2; 1924

  I High and Low

  This anthology of horror literature is a companion volume to The Dark Descent, continuing a panorama of examples and an examination of the evolution of horror as a mode of literary expression from its root
s in stories in the early Romantic period to the rich varieties of contemporary fiction. In The Dark Descent, it was observed that the short story has, until the 1970s, been the dominant literary genre of horror throughout its evolution (horror was in at the origination of the short story and has evolved with and through it); and that it is now evident that the horror novel is in a period of rapid development and proliferation, for the first time achieving dominance over the shorter forms. So it is a particularly appropriate historical moment for us to look back over the growth and spread of horror stories.

  Furthermore, a general consideration of literary examples yields several conclusions about the nature of horror. First, that horror is not in the end either a marketing category or a genre, but a literary mode that has been used in every genre and category, the creation of an atmosphere and emotional environment that sparks a transaction between the reader and the text which yields the horrific response. Horrific poems and plays and novels predate the inception of the short story. There can and have been western horror stories, war horror stories, ghost stories, adventure stories, mystery stories, romances—the potential exists in every category.

  But by the early twentieth century, horror began to spread and separate in two directions, in literary fiction and in popular literature, mirroring the Modernist distinction between high art and low, a distinction that is rapidly disintegrating today in the post-Modern period, but remains the foundation of marketing all literature in the twentieth century. For most of the century, horror has been considered narrowly as a marketing category or a popular genre, and dismissed by most serious readers and critics. In many ways, horror is associated with ghosts and the supernatural, which in a way stand for superstition and religion—and one of the great intellectual, cultural and spiritual battles of the past 150 years has been on the part of intellectuals, to rid western civilization of the burdens of Medieval religion and superstition, especially in the wake of the great battles over Darwin and Evolution. The Modernist era, which began in the late nineteenth century, is an era of science.

  The death of horror was widely announced by Modernist critics (particularly Edmund Wilson, who devoted two essays to demolishing it), the specialists such as Lovecraft and Blackwood denounced, and the psychological investigations of Henry James, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence enshrined as the next stage in literary evolution, replacing superstition and the supernatural as the electric light had replaced the flame.

  Yet it was precisely at that moment, in the 1920s and 1930s, that the first magazines devoted to horror began to appear, that the first major collections and anthologies of horror fiction from the previous hundred years were done, and the horror film came into prominence. Significantly, Lovecraft, in his classic study, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1936, revised), in examining the whole history of western literature concluded that over centuries and in a large preponderance of texts, the true sensations of horror occur rarely, and momentarily—in parts of works, not usually whole works. He wrote this during the generation when horror was actually becoming a genre, with an audience and a body of classic texts. A threshold had been reached after a century of literary evolution, in which a parallel evolution of the ghost story and the horror story had created a rich and varied body of tropes, conventions, texts, and passed, and the horror genre was established as a vigorous variety of popular literature, in rich interaction with the main body of the literature of this century ever since. One can speculate that, since the religious and superstitious beliefs had passed from overt currency in the reading public, their transformation into the subtext of horror fiction fulfilled certain desires, if not needs, in the audience and writers. As was noted in The Dark Descent, the most popular current of horror fiction for decades has been moral allegories of the power of evil.

  The giant of the magazines of horror was Weird Tales, founded in 1923 and published until the 1950s (and recently revived). It was there that H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and many others flourished. Davis Grubb, Tennessee Williams, Ray Bradbury, and many other literary writers also published early work in Weird Tales, which was hospitable to all forms of the weird and horrific and supernatural in literature. “Up to the day the first issue of Weird Tales was placed on the stands, stories of the sort you read between these covers each month were taboo in the publishing world . . . Edgar Allan Poe . . . would have searched in vain for a publisher before the advent of this magazine,” said the editorial of the first anniversary issue in 1924.

  One of the conditions that favors genrification is an accessible category market, and Weird Tales provided this, along with a letter column in which the names and addresses of correspondents were published. This allowed readers and writers to get in touch with each other, and they did. The Lovecraft circle was composed of writers, poets and readers, and generated thousands of letters among them over several decades, forming connections that lasted years after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, some at least until the death of August Derleth in the 1960s. Some of the early correspondents were involved, as Lovecraft was, in the amateur journalism movement of the teens and twenties, and they generated amateur magazines and small press publications, which flourished from the 1930s to the 1960s—their descendents exist today. The World Fantasy Awards has a separate category award for excellence in fan publishing each year, and there are many nominees. So Weird Tales was seminal not only in creating a genre, but also in creating a field, a subculture of devotees.

  In the 1940s and 1950s, the development of the popular form continued and, through a series of historical accidents, came under the protective umbrella of the science fiction field, as did the preponderance of fantasy literature. H. P. Lovecraft and many of his circle published in the science fiction magazines of the 1930s. And the letter-writing subcultures generated by the science fiction magazines interpenetrated with the horror field, creating one body, so that by the late 1930s the active fans commonly identified themselves as fans of the fantasy fiction field.

  In 1939, the great science fiction editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., whose magazine, Astounding Stories, dominated science fiction, founded a companion magazine, Unknown, devoted to fantasy and horror, and to modernizing the style and atmosphere of the fiction. Campbell, who had written an influential science fiction horror story in 1938, encouraged his major science fiction writers to work for his new magazine, and in the five years of its existence, Unknown confirmed a bond between horror and science fiction that has not been broken, a bonding that yielded the flowering of SF horror movies in the fifties and encouraged a majority of the important horror writers for the next fifty years. Shirley Jackson once told me in conversation that she had a complete run of Unknown. “It’s the best,” she said. Several of Jackson’s stories first appeared in the 1950s in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (as did, for instance, one of the earliest translations of Jorge Luis Borges). Since the 1930s, a majority of the horror stories in the English language have first appeared in genre magazines.

  In times when censorship or conventions operated to deter authors from dealing specifically with certain human situations, the occult provided a reservoir of images which could be used to convey symbolically what could not be presented literally.

  Glen St John Barclay,

  Anatomy of Horror

  Meanwhile, from the 1890s onward, to a large extent under the influence of Henry James, writers such as Walter de la Mare, Edith Wharton, and others devoted significant portions of their careers to the literary ghost story. “In a certain sense, all of his stories are ghost stories—evocations of a tenuous past; and his most distinguished minor work is quite baldly cast in this rather vulgar, popular form. ‘The “ghost story,” ’ he wrote in one of his prefaces, ‘as we for convenience call it, has ever been for me the most possible form of the fairy tale.’ But at a deeper level than he consciously sought in doing his intended stories of terror (he called, we remember, even ‘The Turn of the Screw’ a ‘potbo
iler’), James was forever closing in on the real subject that haunted him always: the necrophilia that has always so oddly been an essential part of American romance,” says critic Leslie Fiedler.

  At the time of his death, Henry James was writing The Sense of the Past, a supernatural novel in which a character named Ralph becomes obsessed with a portrait and is translated into the past as a ghost from the future. The supernatural and ghosts were major strains in the work of this great and influential writer throughout his career and, under the pressure of his Modernist admirers, have often been ignored or banished from consideration by being considered only as psychological metaphors during most of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf, for example, in defending the ghost stories, says the ghosts “have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange . . . Can it be that we are afraid? . . . We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves.” True, of course, but a defense of the metaphorical level of the text at the expense of the literal surface—which is often intentionally difficult to figure out.

  Since the Modernists considered the supernatural a regressive and outmoded element in fiction, the contemporaries and followers of James who were strongly influenced by the literal level of his supernaturalism have been to a large extent banished from the literary canon. Most of them are women writers. A few, such as Edith Wharton, still have critical support, but not on the whole for their supernatural works. Those whose best work was largely in the supernatural, such as Violet Hunt and Gertrude Atherton, Harriet Prescott Spofford and Mary Wilkins Freeman, have been consigned to literary history and biographical criticism, marginalized. In the recent volume, Horror: 100 Best Books (1988—covering literature from Shakespeare to Ramsey Campbell), five women writers were chosen for the list, omitting novelists such as Anne Radcliffe, Emily Brontë, and Ann Rice, and every short story collection by a woman—except Marjorie Bowen’s and Lisa Tuttle’s.