The Dark Descent Read online

  In The Dark Descent, hailed as one of the most important anthologies ever to examine horror fiction, editor David G. Hartwell traces the complex history of horror in literature back to the earliest short stories. The Dark Descent, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, showcases the finest of these ever written—from the time-honored classics of Edgar Allan Poe, D. H. Lawrence, and Edith Wharton to the contemporary writing of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Ray Bradbury.

  “A gigantic, superlatively edited historical overview of horror fiction.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “For a sample of the current excellence and variety of horror, one could do no better.”

  —New York Newsday

  “An important work which belongs in every library.”

  —The West Coast Review of Books

  “This should be considered the reference work on horror short fiction, and will probably remain so for many years. Highly recommended.”

  —Locus

  “Undoubtedly the most important anthology of the year, if not the decade. An incredible book.”

  —Fangoria

  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

  THE DARK DESCENT

  Copyright © 1987 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, NY 10010

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

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

  ISBN 0-312-86217-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Tom Doherty and Harriet P. McDougal and Tor Books, and especially Melissa Ann Singer, editor, for support and patience.

  To Kathryn Cramer and Peter D. Pautz for their hard work and enthusiasm, as well as provocative discussion.

  To Patricia W. Hartwell for letting the books pile up and the piles of paper fall over throughout the house.

  Acknowledgments

  This anthology grew out of three years of weekly discussions with Peter D. Pautz and Kathryn Cramer on the nature and virtues of horror literature, and its evolution. Peter’s knowledge of the contemporary field and Kathryn’s theoretical bent were seminal in the genesis of my own thoughts on what horror literature is and has become. Jack Sullivan, Kirby McCauley and Peter Straub were particularly helpful in discussing aspects of horror, and Samuel R. Delany contributed valuable insights, as well as the title for Part III. And I owe an incalculable debt to the great anthologists—from M. R. James and Dashiell Hammett, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Sayers through Wise and Fraser, Boris Karloff and August Derleth to Kirby McCauley, Ramsey Campbell and Jack Sullivan—whose research and scholarship and taste guided my reading over the decades. Robert Hadji and Jessica Salmonson gave valuable support in late-night convention discussions, and the World Fantasy Convention provided an annual environment for advancing ideas in the context of the fine working writers and experts who make horror literature a vigorous and growing form in our time. Finally, my sincere thanks to Stephen King for Danse Macabre.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  PART I: The Color of Evil

  Stephen King - The Reach

  John Collier - Evening Primrose

  M. R. James - The Ash-Tree

  Lucy Clifford - The New Mother

  Russell Kirk - There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding

  H. P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu

  Shirley Jackson - The Summer People

  Harlan Ellison - The Whimper of Whipped Dogs

  Nathaniel Hawthorne - Young Goodman Brown

  J. Sheridan Le Fanu - Mr. Justice Harbottle

  Ray Bradbury - The Crowd

  Michael Shea - The Autopsy

  E. Nesbit - John Charrington’s Wedding

  Karl Edward Wagner - Sticks

  Robert Aickman - Larger Than Oneself

  Fritz Leiber - Belsen Express

  Robert Bloch - Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper

  Charles L. Grant - If Damon Comes

  Manly Wade Wellman - Vandy, Vandy

  PART II: The Medusa in the Shield

  Robert Aickman - The Swords

  Thomas M. Disch - The Roaches

  Theodore Sturgeon - Bright Segment

  Clive Barker - Dread

  Edgar Allan Poe - The Fall of the House of Usher

  Stephen King - The Monkey

  Michael Bishop - Within the Walls of Tyre

  H. P. Lovecraft - The Rats in the Walls

  J. Sheridan Le Fanu - Schalken the Painter

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper

  William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily

  Robert Hichens - How Love Came to Professor Guildea

  Richard Matheson - Born of Man and Woman

  Joanna Russ - My Dear Emily

  Dennis Etchison - You Can Go Now

  D. H. Lawrence - The Rocking-horse Winner

  Tanith Lee - Three Days

  Flannery O’Connor - Good Country People

  Ramsey Campbell - Mackintosh Willy

  Henry James - The Jolly Corner

  PART III: A Fabulous Formless Darkness

  Fritz Leiber - Smoke Ghost

  Gene Wolfe - Seven American Nights

  Charles Dickens - The Signal-Man

  Stephen King - Crouch End

  Joyce Carol Oates - Night-Side

  Walter de la Mare - Seaton’s Aunt

  Ivan Turgenev - Clara Militch

  Robert W. Chambers - The Repairer of Reputations

  Oliver Onions - The Beckoning Fair One

  Fitz-James O’Brien - What Was It?

  Shirley Jackson - The Beautiful Stranger

  Ambrose Bierce - The Damned Thing

  Edith Wharton - Afterward

  Algernon Blackwood - The Willows

  Thomas M. Disch - The Asian Shore

  Robert Aickman - The Hospice

  Philip K. Dick - A Little Something for Us Tempunauts

  Introduction

  To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring an orderly mind to them, you must have a reasonable amount of confidence, if not in what used to be called the laws of nature, at least in the currently suspected habits of nature . . . To the truly superstitious the “weird” has only its Scotch meaning: “Something which actually takes place.”

  —Dashiell Hammett,

  Creeps by Night

  The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of daily routine to respond . . .

  —H. P. Lovecraft,

  Supernatural Horror in Literature

  I

  On a July Sunday morning, I was moderating a panel discussion at Necon, a small New England convention devoted to dark fantasy. The panelists included Alan Ryan, Whitley Strieber, Peter Straub, Charles L. Grant and, I believe, Les Daniels, all of them horror novelists. The theme of the discussion was literary influences, with each participant naming the horror writers he felt significant in the genesis of his career. As the minutes rolled by and the litany of name
s, Poe and Bradbury and Leiber and Lovecraft and Kafka and others, was uttered, I realized that except for a ritual bow to Stephen King, every single influential writer named had been a short story writer. So I interrupted the panel and asked them all to spend the last few minutes commenting on my observation. What they said amounted to this: the good stuff is pretty much all short fiction.

  After a few months of thought, I spent a late Halloween night with Peter Straub at the World Fantasy Convention, getting his response to my developing ideas on the recent evolution of horror from a short story to a novel genre. My belief that the long-form horror story is avant-garde and experimental, an unsolved aesthetic problem being attacked with energy and determination by Straub and King and others in our time, solidified as a result of that conversation.

  But it seemed to me too early to generalize as to the nature of the new horror novel form. What, then, I asked myself, has happened to the short story? The horror story has certainly not up and vanished after 160 years of development and popularity; far from it. As an administrator of the annual World Fantasy Awards since 1975, I was aware of significant growth in short fiction in the past decade. And so the idea of this book was conceived, to conclude the era of the dominance of short-form horror with a definitive anthology that attempts to represent the entire evolution of the form to date and to describe and point out the boundaries of horror as it has been redefined in our contemporary field. For it seemed apparent to me that the conventional approach to horror codified by the great anthologies of the 1940s is obsolete, was indeed becoming obsolete as those books were published, and has persisted to the detriment of a clearer understanding of the literature to the present. It has persisted to the point where fans of horror fiction most often restrict their reading to books and stories given the imprimateur of a horror category label, thus missing some of the finest pleasures of this century in that fictional mode. I have gathered as many as could be confined within one huge volume here in The Dark Descent, with the intent of clearing the air and broadening future considerations of horror.

  Fear has its own aesthetic—as Le Fanu, Henry James, Montagu James and Walter de la Mare have repeatedly shown—and also its own propriety. A story dealing in fear ought, ideally, to be kept at a certain pitch. And that austere other world, the world of the ghost, should inspire, when it impacts on our own, not so much revulsion or shock as a sort of awe.

  —Elizabeth Bowen,

  The Second Ghost Book

  The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers.

  —H. P. Lovecraft,

  Supernatural Horror in Literature

  II The Evolution of Horror Fiction

  For more than 150 years horror fiction has been a vital component of English and American literature, invented with the short story form itself and contributing intimately to the evolution of the short story. Until the last decade, the dominant literary form of horror fiction was the short story and novella. This is simply no longer the case. Shortly after the beginning of the 1970s, within a very few years, the novel form assumed the position of leadership. First came a scattering of exceptionally popular novels—Rosemary’s Baby, The Other, The Exorcist, The Mephisto Waltz, with attendant film successes—then, in 1973, the deluge, with Stephen King on the crest of the wave, altering the nature of horror fiction for the foreseeable future and sweeping along with it all the living generations of short fiction writers. Very few writers of horror fiction, young or old, resisted the commercial or aesthetic temptation to expand into the novel form, leading to the creation of some of the best horror novels of all time as well as a large amount of popular trash rushed into print. The models for these works were the previous bestsellers, popular films and the short fiction masterpieces of previous decades.

  When the tide ebbed in the 1980s, much of the trash was left dead in the backlists of paperback publishers, but the horror novel had become firmly established. This is significant from a number of perspectives. Rapid evolution and experimentation was encouraged. All kinds of horror literature benefited from the incorporation of every conceivable element of horrific effect and technique from other literature and film and video and comics.

  The most useful and provocative view we can take on the horror novel in recent years is that it constitutes an avant-garde and experimental literary form which attempts to translate the horrific effects previously thought to be the nearly exclusive domain of the short forms into newly conceived long forms that maintain the proper atmosphere and effects. Certainly isolated examples of more or less successful novel-length horror fiction exist, from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Haunting of Hill House, but they are comparatively infrequent next to the constant, rich proliferation and development of horror in shorter forms in every decade from Poe to the present. The horror novels of the past do not in aggregate form a body of traditional literature and technique from which the present novels spring and upon which they depend.

  It is evident both from the recent novels themselves and from the public statements of many of the writers that Stephen King, Peter Straub and Ramsey Campbell, and a number of other leading novelists, have been discussing among themselves—and trying to solve in their works—the perceived problems of developing the horror novel into a sophisticated and effective form. In so doing, they have highlighted the desirability of a volume such as The Dark Descent, which represents the context from which the literature springs and attempts to elucidate the whole surround of horror today.

  Horror novels grow to a very large extent out of the varied and highly evolved novellas and short stories exemplified in this book. Our perceptions of the nature of horror literature have been changing and evolving rapidly in recent decades, to the point where a compilation of the horror story, organized according to new principles, is needed to manifest the broadened nature of the literature.

  Before proceeding in the next section to begin an anatomy of horror, it is interesting to note that there has been a renewed fashion for horror in every decade since the First World War, but this is the first such “revival” that has produced numerous novels.

  There was a general increase in horror, particularly the ghost story, in the 1920s under the influence of M. R. James, both a prominent writer and anthologist, and such masters as Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, Edith Wharton and others. At that time the great horror magazine. Weird Tales, was founded in the U.S. In the 1930s, the dark fantasy story or weird tale became prominent, influenced by the magazine mentioned above, the growth of the H. P. Lovecraft circle of writers, and a proliferation of anthologies, either in series or as huge compendiums celebrating the first century of horror fiction. After the films and books of the 1930s, the early 1940s produced the finest “great works” collections, epitomized by And the Darkness Falls, edited by Boris Karloff, and Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser; and Arkham House, the great specialty publisher devoted to this day to bringing into print collections by great horror authors, was founded by writer Donald Wandrei to print the collected works of H. P. Lovecraft. After the war came the science fiction horrors of the 1950s, in all those monster films and in the works of Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury. In the early sixties we had the craze for “junk food” paperback horror anthologies and collections, under the advent of the midnight horror movie boom on TV. But as we remarked above, short fiction always remained at the forefront. Even the novelists were famous for their short stories.

  A lot has changed.

  Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.

  —H. P. Lovecraft,

  Supernatural Horror in Literature

  Much as we ask for it, the frisson of horror, among the many oddities of our emotional life, is one of the oddest. For one thing, it is
usually a response to something that is not there. Under normal circumstances, that is, it attends only such things as nightmares, phobias and literature. In that respect it is unlike terror, which is extreme and sudden fear in the face of a material threat . . . The terror can be dissipated by a round of buckshot. Horror, on the other hand, is fascinated dread in the presence of an immaterial cause. The frights of nightmares cannot be dissipated by a round of buckshot; to flee them is to run into them at every turn.

  —Sigmund Freud,

  The Uncanny

  III What It Is

  Sigmund Freud remarked that we immediately recognize scenes that are supposed to provoke horror, “even if they actually provoke titters.” It seems to me, however, that horror fiction has usually been linked to or categorized by manifest signs in texts, and this has caused more than a little confusion among commentators over the years. Names such as weird tales, gothic tales, terror tales, ghost stories, supernatural tales, macabre stories—all clustered around the principle of a real or implied or fake intrusion of the supernatural into the natural world, an intrusion which arouses fear—have been used as appellations for the whole body of literature, sometimes interchangeably by the same writer. So often, and in so many of the best works, has the intrusion been a ghost, that nearly half the time you will find “horror story” and “ghost story” used interchangeably. And this is so in spite of the acknowledged fact that supernatural horror in literature embodies many manifestations (from demons to vampires to werewolves to pagan gods and more) and, further, that ghosts are recognizably not supposed to horrify in a fair number of ghost stories.

  J. A. Cuddon, a thorough scholar, has traced the early connections between ghost and horror stories from the 1820s to the 1870s, viewing them as originally separable: “The growth of the ghost story and the horror story in this mid-century period tended to coalesce; indeed, it is difficult to establish objective criteria by which to distinguish between the two. A taxonomical approach invariably begins to break down at an early stage . . . On balance, it is probable that a ghost story will contain an element of horror.” Jack Sullivan, another distinguished scholar and anthologist, sums up the problems of definition and terminology thusly: “We find ourselves in a tangled morass of definitions and permutations that grows as relentlessly as the fungus in the House of Usher.” Sullivan chooses “ghost story” as generic, presumably to have one leg to stand on facing in each direction.