Horror: The 100 Best Books (10 page)

***

The Jewel of Seven Stars
is Bram Stoker's best-constructed novel after
Dracula
, and revives his themes of immortality through supernatural, and horrific, means. The single-narrator technique is equally as effective and direct in
Jewel
as the multi-narrator, journal/letters format used in
Dracula
, while the degrees of compelling suspense and uncanny complexity are maintained excellently throughout the length of the novel. A feeling of credulity is retained by the liberal descriptions of Egyptian objects and metaphysics in full detail. The jewel of the title is an enormous ruby carved like a scarab (illustrated on the cover and title-page of the first edition), embellished by hieroglyphics and a clear design of seven stars in the exact contemporary position of the stars in the Plough constellation. Among the more ghastly artefacts to be found in the London house of Trelawny and his daughter Margaret (where most of the action takes place) are the mummy of a mysterious great Egyptian queen, and her severed, perfectly preserved hand with seven digits. This mummy, found hidden in the remote "Valley of the Sorcerers", is of a remarkable "historical" figure adept in magic and ritual, and all the occult Egyptian sciences: "Tera, Queen of the Egypts, daughter of Antef. Monarch of the North and South. Daughter of the Sun. Queen of the Diadems". She has suspended herself in time, making all the preparations necessary for her resurrection over forty centuries later; and this is the incredible experiment in which Trelawny is engaged. Much has been written in recent years about the "Dracula notes" (sold at auction in 1913, and now housed in Philadelphia), which detail the lengthy research made by Bram Stoker into the occult, historical and geographical background of his great vampire novel. It is very likely that Stoker undertook similar extended research during 1897-1902 for
The Jewel of Seven Stars
, although these notes have never been discovered or annotated. The life and times of Vlad the Impaler and his bloodthirsty contemporaries have been very fully documented in various books, whereas the "original" of Queen Tera has attracted virtually no interest at all. The only historical character who comes reasonably close to the description of Stoker's Queen Tera is Sebekneferu, also known as Sobknofru, daughter of the great Pharaoh Amenemhat III. She became Queen, and sole monarch, of Egypt after the death of her brother in the closing years of the Twelfth Dynasty. Cryptically, Stoker describes Queen Tera as a ruler in the Eleventh Dynasty, and her shortened name may have been derived from "Nebtauira" who (according to Flinders Petrie) followed Antef III in the Eleventh Dynasty. Although described as "daughter of Antef, there were several pharaohs of this name in quick succession during the same dynasty; but in Stoker's time, Egyptologists were still arguing about the correct dates, sequence and chronology of the earlier dynasties. There were still many "blank on the map" areas, and Stoker was free to mix fact and fiction to his heart's content. Some of the leading Egyptologists and archaeologists of the day were among the regular guests entertained by Sir Henry Irving and Bram Stoker at the Lyceum Theatre and the Beefsteak Club in London. Stoker would have had plenty of opportunities to discuss the occult and arcane lore of Ancient Egypt with these men, and numerous acquaintances like his fellow Irish-born writer F. Frankfort Moore (brother-in-law of Mrs. Bram Stoker) who had published a weird fantasy novel
The Secret of the Court
in 1895; and Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar) was among those who loved to retell stories of Egypt and Egyptology. Scarcely a year went by without new discoveries of pharaohs' tombs near Luxor and Thebes, and in remote valleys. By 1902, E. A. Wallis Budge (acknowledged in the novel) had already published an impressive array of books on
The Mummy, Egyptian Magic, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life
, and related subjects. The scholar J. W. Brodie-Innes (Imperator of the Amen-Ra Temple, founded at Edinburgh in 1893), who studied witchcraft and occult Egyptian rituals, wrote to Bram Stoker in 1903 as soon as he had read
The Jewel of Seven Stars
: "It is not only a good book, it is a
great
book . . . It seems to me in some ways you have got clearer light on some problems which some of us have been fumbling after in the dark long enough . . ." Few could have appreciated the hermetic and metaphysical insights more than Brodie-Innes. With the compelling and horrific sequence of events related throughout this memorable novel, only a climax of unrelieved tension and finality is possible, and Stoker achieved this perfectly. However, apocalyptic and decidely "unhappy" endings were entirely out of favour in Edwardian literature, so most of the contemporary criticism was aimed at the horrific nature of the finale, where only the narrator (Malcolm Ross) survives to tell the tale. When the time came to reprint the book in a cheap or "popular" edition, the publisher insisted on an entirely different ending, with the survival of the company, complete with wedding bells. (It is not clear whether the new "bland" ending was written by Stoker himself, or by a publisher's editor -- I suspect the latter.) A complete chapter (XVI), "Powers -- Old and New", was also deleted. This revised edition is the one which most readers of the book have sampled in the intervening eighty years; and the revamped somewhat lame ending has always been regarded as weak, a hurried anticlimax, especially when compared to the success of the rest of the novel. Several more changes were made in the two cinematic versions,
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb
(1971), with Andrew Keir and Valerie Leon, and
The Awakening
(1980), with Charlton Heston and Stephanie Zimbalist, but the modern reader is well advised to go back to the complete, unadulterated text of
The Jewel of Seven Stars
to appreciate the original novel fully. Not only did Bram Stoker write the greatest vampire novel of all time, he also created one of the best (if not
the
best) horror novels dealing with Ancient Egypt and the mummy's resurrection. -- RICHARD DALBY

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
was James' first collection. It consists of two previously published pieces and several others "which were read to friends at Christmastime at King's College, Cambridge". Most feature scholarly protagonists, and many focus on antique items (the whistle of "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad", the eponymous objects of "The Mezzotint" and "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook"). Although frequently hailed as a master of the suggestive rather than explicit school of horror, James' stories actually contain a surprising amount of physical nastiness -- the face sucked off in "Count Magnus", the heart-ripping of "Lost Hearts", the spider monsters of "The Ash-tree".
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
was followed by
More Stories of an Antiquary
(1911),
A Thin Ghost and Others
(1919),
A Warning to the Curious
(1926) and
The Collected Ghost Stories
(1931). James' stories have been adapted for television and (especially) radio many times: Jonathan Miller made a controversial
Whistle and I'll Come to You
for the BBC in 1967, and the Corporation later annually adapted several other James stories more faithfully under the collective title
A Ghost Story for Christmas
. When we asked more than a hundred modern writers to contribute to this book, M.R. James was named far more times than any other author as the most important and influential figure in the horror field.

***

M. R. James is one of horror fiction's few class acts. Like Stephen King, he can write about the vile and horrific without seeming to smear it all over himself or you. His stories are rich in atmosphere, inexorable in construction -- and describe a world as circumscribed as Jane Austen's. James's first collection, published in 1904, was called
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
. The title sums up the balance of elements in the stories. James was a brilliant medievalist and biblical scholar, provost of both King's College Cambridge and, later, Eton. The main characters are almost always scholars, and almost always bachelors. The world is seen through their eyes. In "Lost Hearts", the description of a Queen Anne House takes up about 140 words, while a description of the owner's library and published articles takes up another hundred -- in a 4,300 word story about a little boy. The narrators in James' stories usually take no part in the action. They piece their stories together as historians would, through old documents or the evidence of friends. The scholarly, slightly fusty tone of voice; the professional characters; and the narrative technique all work together to produce what could be called an air of Cambridge verisimilitude. This air lends credence and charm to the tales, and defines their limits. The stories are full of unlikely discoveries of old manuscripts or relics, fantasy thrills for historians. In "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook", for example, a researcher comes across a 16th century collection of pages plundered from illuminated manuscripts. "Such a collection Dennistoun had hardly dreamed of in his wildest moments." But the very last page is a drawing of a demon. Here the narrator of the tale intervenes, making a sudden appearance. He describes, not the drawing which has been destroyed, but a photograph of it. "I entirely despair of conveying by any words the impression this figure makes upon anyone who looks at it," says the narrator and then describes the figure in great detail:

"At first you saw only a mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long coarse hairs and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils . . . Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form and endowed with intelligence just less than human . . ."

M. R. James is thought of as a master of subtle suggestion. He almost never describes physical injury. But his terrors are described in great and very physical detail, and are the focus of the tales. The writing grows more specific when they appear -- and there would be no story without them. The monsters are seldom ghosts. They are curses -- spirits of revenge or spite or unrequited longing. They erupt into our world because a scholar has dug them up. James seems to have little interest in the wider implications of his tales either moral or metaphysical. In his fictional world, witches used to be real, as in "The Ash Tree", until they were all burnt at the stake. The justice of burning witches alive is not questioned. What is of interest is their ability to come back as a crop of large, poisonous spiders. The aims of the stories are modest -- to tell a creepy story convincingly and with a measure of elegance. In this aim, he succeeds time after time, but for a historian, he shows little feeling for being haunted by the past, or little interest in what history could really teach us. Like many scholars, his attention is not held by great and central questions. The stories have the power to unsettle because we are still not sure that our elders were wrong about witches or curses or demons. We don't really believe in electric lights. These are conservative stories, in their means and in their ends, which they do not go beyond. Their aim is to produce a
frisson
of fear, untainted by disgust or broader concerns. In so limiting his aims and his subject matter, in so restricting the kinds of characters he writes about and the kinds of terrors he describes, it is sometimes as if James is shutting out many other kinds of terror, terrors which his stories sometimes begin to hint at -- the terror of loneliness, the terror of the smallness of one's own work, and most of the 20th century, with its wars and more mechanical horrors. It is sometimes difficult to remember that James is a writer of the 20th century. It comes as a surprise to find that his houses even have electric lights. His prose style, his narrators with their letters and documents, even the kinds of people he writes about all seem to belong to a previous era. It is as if James is using old terrors to drive out new ones. In any event it was a very specific kind of engine that drove James's writing. He produced no other fiction than ghost stories -- and those of an antiquary at that. -- GEOFF RYMAN

The House of Souls
assembles most of the best of Arthur Machen's occult, ghost and horror fiction. It reprints two-thirds of his linked collection,
The Three Impostors
(1895); "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "The Novel of the White Powder." The book also includes Machen's best-known, most widely-reprinted stories, "The White People" and "The Great God Pan", and several other fine pieces, "A Fragment of Life", "The Inmost Light", and "The Red Hand". Much of Machen's output draws on folklore and legends, particularly the pre-Christian beliefs found in parts of his native Wales. A teacher, translator, actor, journalist, and genuine occult devotee, Machen (1863-1947) also wrote
The Hill of Dreams
(1907),
The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
(1915),
The Terror: A Fantasy
(1917), and
The Children of the Pool and Other Stories
(1936).

***

One of my longest-held ambitions -- not a particularly lofty one, but the sort that all too easily gets put off, decade after decade, until one suddenly discovers it's too late -- is to spend a year or so motoring around the British Isles, from Penzance to John o' Groats, stopping wherever I please. The back seat of my car would of course be filled with books: with the dozens of travel guides, highway atlases, and gazetteers of haunted houses, prehistoric sites, battlefields, and castles that I've been collecting all my life. But in addition to the carload of reference works, I'd want to take three volumes of memoirs and a book of supernatural tales. The memoirs are those of Arthur Machen and, together, they constitute a rambling autobiography:
Far Off Things
,
Things Near and Far
, and
The London Adventure
. The story book is Machen's
The House of Souls
. Machen (rhymes with "blacken") was a Welsh clergyman's son who, as a young man, left the countryside behind and moved to London in the hope of becoming a writer, nearly starving in the attempt; later he toured with a company of Shakespearean actors, but for most of his eighty-four years he made his living as a journalist. He was born in Caerleon-on-Usk on March 3, 1863, and died in Amersham, near London, on December 15, 1947. I was privileged to share the earth with him for precisely five months. Machen is, to my mind, fantasy's preeminent stylist. What makes his work so special is the rhythmic quality of his prose: one hears in it the short, seductive cadences of a fairy tale or the Bible. With the eye of a visionary and a language that is, for all its simplicity, at times truly incantatory, he reveals the wonder -- and frequently the terror -- that lies hidden behind everyday scenes. No other writer's work so perfectly blends the two elements of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's phrase "the ecstasy and the dread". (Indeed, Machen's longest foray into literary criticism,
Hieroglyphics
, sees the key attribute of great literature as "the master word -- Ecstasy".) Jack Sullivan has noted that in Machen's best tales "beauty and horror ring out at exactly the same moment", and praises Machen for "his ability to make landscapes come alive with singing prose". Philip Van Doren Stern saw Machen's imagery as "rich with the glowing color that is to be found in medieval church glass". No one is better at evoking the enchantment of the Welsh hills, or the sinister allure of dark woods; no one makes London a more terrifying or magical place, a latter-day Baghdad filled with exotic dangers and infinite possibilities. Wherever he looked, he saw a world filled with mystery. Every word he wrote, from youth to old age, reflects his lifelong preoccupation with "the secret of things; the real truth that is everywhere hidden under outward appearances". But perhaps this "secret of things" is too shocking for the human mind to accept. That, at least, is the premise of
The House of Souls
' best-known story. "The Great God Pan", in which a ruthless scientist seeks to rend the "veil" of everyday reality. ("I tell you that all these things -- yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet -- I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes.") In a laboratory set amid "the lonely hills", he performs a delicate operation on the brain of a young girl, reawakening atavistic powers and enabling her to glimpse that real world -- a process he calls "seeing the god Pan". The result is not enlightenment but horror: the child goes mad from what she's encountered and dies "a hopeless idiot", but not before giving birth to a daughter, a malign being who, decades later, in the form of a seductive woman, causes an epidemic of sin and suicide in Victorian London. Today, for all its power, the tale's decadent
frissons
may seem rather dated, but at the time, "Pan" outraged the more prudish English critics. Machen, who took a perverse pleasure in his bad reviews (he even collected them all in a book,
Precious Balms
), relished "the remark of a literary agent whom I met one day in Fleet Street. He looked at me impressively, morally, disapprovingly, and said: 'Do you know, I was having tea with some ladies at Hampstead the other day, and their opinion seemed to be that . . . "The Great God Pan" should never have been written.'" Two other stories in the book, "The Novel of the Black Seal" (part of a longer work,
The Three Impostors
) and "The Red Hand", can still provoke a shudder, even today. They theorize -- as do later Machen tales -- that the so-called "Little People" of British legend, the fairy folk, were in fact the land's original inhabitants, a dark, squat, malevolent pre-Celtic race now driven underground by encroaching civilization, yet living on in caves beneath the "barren and savage hills" and still practising their unsavoury rites, occasionally sacrificing a young woman or some other luckless wanderer they can catch alone outdoors at night. Writers such as John Buchan have also made use of this theme, but none so chillingly. The book's most remarkable story is "The White People". (It was the direct inspiration, incidentally, for my own novel
The Ceremonies
, which quotes from it at length.) Most of it purports to be the notebook of a young girl who, introduced by her nurse to strange old rhymes and rituals, has a series of nearly indescribable mystical visions involving supernatural presences in the woods. We learn, at the end, that she has killed herself. The girl's stream-of-consciousness style, at once hallucinatory and naive, lends a spellbinding immediacy to the narrative, and for all its confusion and repetitiveness, it remains the purest and most powerful expression of what Jack Sullivan has called the "transcendental" or "visionary" supernatural tradition. Most other tales of this sort, such as Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo", E. F. Benson's "The Man Who Went Too Far", and Machen's own "Black Seal" and "Pan", merely
describe
encounters with dark primeval forces inimical to man, "The White People" seems
an actual product
of such an encounter, an authentic pagan artifact, as different from the rest as the art of Richard Dadd is different from the art of Richard Doyle. Lovecraft, who regarded Machen as "a Titan -- perhaps the greatest living author" of weird fiction, ranked "The White People" beside Blackwood's "The Willows" as one of the best horror tales ever written. Machen, who often denigrated his own efforts, and who once wrote "I dreamed in fire, but I worked in clay", himself termed the tale merely "a fragment" of the one he'd intended to write, "a single stone instead of a whole house", but acknowledged that "it contains some of the most curious work that I have ever done, or ever will do. It goes, if I may say so, into very strange psychological regions". E. F. Bleiler's assessment strikes me as more accurate: "This document is probably the finest single supernatural story of the century, perhaps in the literature."