Horror: The 100 Best Books (3 page)

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There is a sort of domestic tactics, the object of which is to elude curiosity, and keep up the tenor of the conversation, without the disclosure of our feelings or opinions. The friends of justice will have no object more deeply at heart, than the annihilation of this duplicity. . . . It follows, that the promoting the best interests of mankind, eminently depends upon the freedom of social communication . . .
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
William Godwin

During the year he finished writing
Things As They Are; or: The Adventures of Caleb Williams
, many of William Godwin's radical friends and associates were either in jail or awaiting trial for treason. While these radicals advocated democratic equality, aristocratic government deployed its privileged machinery of coercion and law. Radicals believed men found the Truth inside their own classless human heart, but aristocratic government preferred its exterior distinctions of family name, property and station. Radicals sought to unveil the common "nature" of democratic Man, while government sought to veil that nature, if not immure it. For Godwin, as for Caleb, truth does not belong to the world of appearances, but to the world's repressed heart; in order to achieve justice, one must penetrate the corrupt duplicity of government and gaze into the hearts of the men who run it. As Godwin wrote in his
Enquiry
only a few years before completing
Things As They Are
:

One of the most essential ingredients in a virtuous character, is undaunted firmness; and nothing can more powerfully tend to destroy this principle than the spirit of monarchical government. The first lesson of virtue is, Fear no man; the first lesson of such a constitution is, Fear the King.

In Godwin's universe, terror belongs to the surface world of politics, not to the dark primitive world of Man's unconscious. Prisons, disguise, and aristocratic reputation pursue Caleb across a landscape made horrible by the very absence of man's super-natural Reason. Political corruption for Godwin is not, as our modern age might try to argue, a thing of the human heart, but rather of the human heart's confinement; Caleb is never pursued by evil men so much as he conspires with the scheme of his own persecution. By refusing to disclose his knowledge of Falkland's crimes, Caleb commits himself to a prison of silence. By adopting disguise, Caleb makes himself subject to criminals disguised as police and government officials. Like the prison reformer Jeremy Bentham, Godwin believes even prisons should be made accessible to public inspection, just as the secrets of Falkland's padlocked trunk implicitly demand Caleb's compulsive investigation. Godwin's great novel does not designate heroes and villains, but rather widespread political conditions. Repressed by political injustice, individual selves diminish and collapse; in a corrupt world, all men suffer, regardless of class or distinction. "I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character," Caleb concludes. "I have now no character that I wish to vindicate." Caleb cannot "win" his final confrontation with Falkland while the political world which created Falkland endures. Without the freedom of open democratic discourse, individual "character" lacks meaning or definition. When for two hundred years critics reduced
Things As They Are
to a "psychological romance" entitled
Caleb Williams
, they disregarded Godwin's most fundamental belief: that terror is not a product of the human mind, but of political men. -- SCOTT BRADFIELD

Madrid, c. 1600. Ambrosia, the impossibly saintly abbot of the Capuchin order, is visited by a demon in the form of Matilda, a young and lovely woman who enters the monastery disguised as a novice. She seduces Ambrosia, and encourages him to plumb the depths of degradation. He is led unknowingly to rape his sister and murder his mother, and a final confrontation with Lucifer himself leaves Ambrosia's broken and bleeding corpse to the insects. Sub-plots, essential to a Gothic novel, feature the Wandering few and a sad spectre known as the Bleeding Nun. By going beyond the comparatively polite horrors of Mrs. Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, Lewis earned the admiration of such figures as Byron and de Sade, the displeasure of many "respectable" folks, and a nickname, "Monk", that stayed with him to the grave.
The Monk
, his first novel, was written before Lewis' 21st birthday; he followed it with a succession of lesser romances, tales and plays, including
The Castle Spectre
(1797),
Tales of Terror
(1799)
The Bravo of Venice
(1805), and
One O'clock, or The Knight and Wooddemon
(1811).
The Monk
was filmed in 1972 as
La Moine
, with Franco Nero in the title role.

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The Monk
, although it was published almost two hundred years ago, in 1796, may legitimately claim to be the first modern horror novel in the English language. Predecessors like Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe had pioneered the Gothic tale, but the stories they told tended to be distressingly genteel and moralistic. This was not enough for Matthew Gregory Lewis, who, while little more than a boy, produced a work that was outrageous, offensive, and obnoxious, one that still demonstrates its power to dismay. A standard history of English literature claims that it exhibits "the perverted lust of a sadist". Can there be a higher recommendation? Set in the early 17th century,
The Monk
was a period piece even in 1796, yet it contains enough bad attitudes to raise a few hackles even today. Attacked for obscenity and blasphemy, the book was censored in its later editions, in no small measure because it had been revealed that the writer, who penned the novel at the tender age of nineteen, had recently become a Member of Parliament. The author's youth is ultimately more important than his government credentials, for this is a work of enthusiasm and excess, its audacity and adolescence speaking to and for the audience that has always eagerly embraced the horrific.
The Monk
sneers at convention: its episodes include dead babies, mangled nuns, murdered mothers, deflowered virgins, and sex-crazed clergymen. This is the sort of material that 20th-century artists have frequently flaunted to provide their own emblems of emancipation, but Lewis had staked out the territory long before the grandparents of his followers were born. Such calculated bad taste made Lewis a celebrity in his time, yet he also embodied the essential paradox of the horror writer: contemporaries from Lord Byron to Sir Walter Scott describe him as an honorable and kindly man. Literary historians have reduced him to the catalyst whose personal influence inspired Polidori's
The Vampyre
and Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
, but in his lifetime he was recognized for his own achievements, and rightly so. Lewis cut to the bone. In the depraved monk Ambrosio, Lewis created a character that speaks uneasily to readers centuries later. Ambrosio is Faustian, in the traditional mode, but he represents not the lust for power, or the lust for money, or even the lust for knowledge. What he displays, embarrassingly but importantly, is the lust for lust. He is the forefather of a roster of lascivious villains from Dracula through Norman Bates to Freddy Krueger. Despite its overblown language and its overstrained coincidences,
The Monk
is a revolutionary work. It defies polite society, and it also challenges the limits of its genre. The evil in this tale is not exterior, an outside outrage to be subdued by the representatives of civility and good taste. Rather, the evil is within its protagonist, and there is no bland embodiment of virtue to stand in his path. The evil runs its course, consuming itself rather than facing defeat from the forces of conformity. This is not melodrama, but tragedy, and as such it shames most of the popular 20th-century terror tales whose only drive is to enforce the status quo. Lewis wanted to see how far he could go, and he went there. In a time when we are confronted with a flood of reassuring horror stories, each one promising its readers that everything awful exists only in others, the courage that Lewis displayed shines like a bloody beacon. And any book with a character called The Bleeding Nun can't be all bad. -- LES DANIELS

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann never put his name to a collection under the title
Tales of Hoffmann
but since the success of Jacques Offenbach's opera
Les Contes d'Hoffmann
(1881), there have been several competing volumes under variations of the name, including R. J. Hollingdale's
Tales of Hoffmann
(1932), Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight's
Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann
(1972), and Victor Lange's
Tales
(1982). The volume discussed here is E. F. Bleiler's selection,
The Best Tales of Hoffmann
. In Hoffmann's lifetime (1776-1822), his short horror pieces appeared in
Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier
(4 vols, 1814-15) and
Nachtst(1816)
, although several of his best-known works -- "The Golden Flowerpot", "The Sand-Man" -- were not published until after his death. Hoffmann's major horror novels are
Die Elixier des Teufels
(1815-16) and
Lebensansichten des Katers Murr
(1821-22). Offenbach's opera was marvellously filmed in 1951 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Moira Shearer outstanding as Olimpia the Automaton.

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This collection includes "The Sand-Man", the best-known of Hoffmann's stories, as well as "The Golden Flowerpot", a lavish alchemical tale whose passages of vivid fantasy brought grudging praise from Goethe. These and most of the remaining eight tales are unrolled like dreams, with all of the humour, horror, and superreality dreams require. In "Rath Krespin", a man collects rare violins only to dismantle them. A miser meets his doppelganger ("Signer Formica"). A machine whispers prophecies ("Automata"). A divinity student falls under the spell of a blue-eyed snake ("The Golden Flowerpot"). A miner is lured to his death by the glowing face of the Metal Queen ("The Mines of Falun"). In a comic-horrific tale "The King's Betrothed", a woman finds herself engaged to a carrot. But the deepest nightmare here is the "The Sand-Man". This dark tale was written in 1816, two years before Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
, in a similar spirit of horrified fascination with science and its application to artificial life. Hoffmann is concerned with the horror of automata indistinguishable from real people. In "The Sand-Man", the nightmare is relentless. It begins with a child's confusion. A cruel nurse tells young Nathanael that the Sand-man "comes to little children when they won't go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody". He believes the Sand-man is the lawyer Coppelius, who comes to the house nightly to visit his father on some mysterious errand. Later the child realizes the Sand-man is only a story, but he also senses that Coppelius has some unpleasant hold over his parents. The child hides and sees the men engaged in some secret experiment involving a forge and glowing metal. When Nathanael is discovered, Coppelius threatens to put out his eyes. In a later, "last" experiment, the secret forge explodes, killing Nathanael's father. Coppelius disappears. Grown-up Nathanael attends a distant university. One day a peddler comes to his room, selling barometers and thermometers. The peddler looks like the sinister Coppelius and calls himself Coppola. All the old nameless fears are aroused. Nathanael quarrels with his fianceHe soon becomes intrigued by the vision of Olimpia, the rather inert, beautiful daughter of his physics professor, Spalanzani. The professor lives across the street, and Nathanael can see Olimpia through a window. The peddler returns, offering to sell him spectacles, which he calls "eyes, fine eyes". He lays out hundreds of glittering samples -- fiery glass lenses like eyes staring back at the horrified Nathanael. He buys a telescope, which he uses to spy on Olimpia. His interest deepens to obsession. Finally Nathanael meets Olimpia at a ball. She plays piano, sings, and dances well, if soullessly, but she hardly speaks. Others at the ball decide that she is either a wooden doll or simpleminded. Nevertheless, Nathanael pursues his fatal obsession. One night as he is paying a visit to give her a ring, he overhears a quarrel between Spalanzani and Coppelius. He walks in to find them ripping Olimpia apart: Spalanzani reclaims the clockwork he constructed, while Coppelius owns her beautiful glass eyes. After a fight, Coppelius departs with the doll -- leaving its glass eyes on the floor. In frustration, Spalanzani picks up the eyes and throws them at Nathanael. Nathanael goes mad, but his fiancelara nurses him back to health. Later they go up to a clock tower to look at the city. Nathanael puts the accursed telescope to his eye, and goes mad once more. He tries to kill Clara, and finally throws himself from the tower. As in a dream, it is never clear whether Coppelius and Coppola are one man or two; are they split in reality, or only in the divided mind of Nathanael? We are never sure what the mysterious alchemical experiment might be, nor what hold Coppelius had over Nathanael's parents. Facts become lost in Nathanael's mad dream, in which we share. And perhaps that is what is most horrifying about this tale -- we dream it ourselves. Hoffmann's mixture of magic and madness is experienced from inside. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) was the first Late Romantic writer. His tales profoundly influenced European and American literature, and that most literary of medical arts, psychoanalysis. He was also a composer and conductor, an influential music critic (the first to appreciate J. S. Bach), and a judge. Many of his tales were appropriated for operas and ballets, including
Coppelia
,
The Nutcracker
, and
Tales of Hoffmann
.
The Sand-Man
theme of heartless automata appears in the film
Metropolis
and in much modern science fiction. -- JOHN SLADEK