Horror: The 100 Best Books (6 page)

***

First published in 1842, The Black Spider was largely ignored and forgotten until 1949, when Thomas Mann wrote about it with the highest praise. English translations soon followed and today readers can enjoy it as one of those relatively rare examples of an outstanding horror novel that deservedly ranks among the best of world literature. The author, Albert Bitzius, was a Swiss pastor who chose to use a pseudonym and gained a measure of success with several lengthy novels of regional life written in a realistic manner.
The Black Spider
is quite different, and very special. Although it's a short novel it combines the plague tale, the historical legend and the religious parable with a quirky, personal style. The result is a work of both epic scope and driving immediacy, and even now it reads as a thoroughly modern piece of fiction. That the midwife, motivated only by a desire to help, should be forced to act the mother in a bestial travesty of natural birth is one of the more disturbing ironies in this remarkable story. It is also one of the best early examples in literature of the human body being invaded by alien or demonic forces. The devil is eventually trapped, but it is a stalemate rather than a simple victory. Evil remains at hand, a constant threat and a dangerous temptation, as we are shown when there is a reprise of the terror two hundred years later. There's much more to it than that, of course.
The Black Spider
is actually an artful, highly involved twofold narrative couched in the kind of literary framework that Henry James used more than fifty years later in
The Turn of the Screw
, one that would become routine in countless tales of terror. At times the writing is so casual as to appear slapdash, but any minor infelicities have the cunning effect of heightening tension and atmosphere, and the story never lets up, even though it ranges over a period of nearly six centuries. Gotthelf was not a craftsman but he was a spontaneous, intuitive writer who had a sure sense of what he was doing. When
The Black Spider
first appeared its transparent religious lesson was no doubt taken as the whole point of the novel, and there's no denying it has an almost Biblical quality. That may be the least important side of it, however.
The Black Spider
is a richly suggestive work with clear political and even environmental overtones; it rewards attention at several different levels. But perhaps its greatest strength can be found in its very real, human characters and the emotional intensity of their terrible situation.
The Black Spider
is a macabre, darkly glittering classic. -- THOMAS TESSIER

Marie-Joseph Eugene Sue's
Le Juif Errant
is perhaps the most sustained literary treatment of the legend of the Jew cursed by Jesus Christ to remain alive until the Second Coming. The Wandering Jew has cameo appearances in novels as diverse as Lewis'
The Monk
(1796) and Walter M. Miller Jr's
A Canticle for Leibowitz
(1960). Sue's Jew, influenced perhaps by Maturin's Melmoth, travels a degraded modern world, spreading cholera wherever he goes, and is used by the author to expose various contemporary evils. As in many late Gothics, the perfidious Jesuits come in for a particular bashing. The novel was filmed several times in the early days of the cinema, by French film pioneer Georges Melies in 1904, and by Italian studios in 1913 (as
L'Ebreo errante
) and 1918 (as
Morok
). Later movies under the same title -- including a "lost" 1933 Conrad Veidt vehicle -- are adaptations of a play by E. Temple Thurston. Sue was also the author of the grisly melodramatic novels
Les Mysteres de Paris
(
The Mysteries of Paris
, 1842-3),
Les Septs Peches Capitaux
(
The Seven Cardinal Sins
, 1847-9) and
Les Mysteres du Peuple
(
The Mysteries of the People
, 1849-56).
The Wandering Jew
has recently been brought back into print by UK publisher Dedalus, also responsible for the anthology
Tales of the Wandering Jew
, edited by Brian Stableford, and featuring stories by Stableford, Steve Rasnic Tern, David Longford and Kim Newman, amongst others.

***

Publishers call them blockbusters; critics dismiss them as potboilers; in their own time and place -- Paris of the 1840s -- they were
romans-feuilletons
, or "newspaper-novels" -- and the greatest of them all was Eugene Sue's
The Wandering Jew
(unless that honor belongs to
The Count of Monte Cristo
, which was being serialized at exactly the same time in a rival Paris newspaper).
The Wandering Jew
has got, as the form demands, everything: an heiress falsely accused of madness and incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; a destitute hunchbacked seamstress of the highest moral character hopelessly in love with a blacksmith (who is a patriotic poet on the side); bloodthirsty panthers, telepathic twins, debauchery, murder, suicide, duels, supernatural manifestations, blazing passions, wild mobs, a plague of cholera, scenes in Java and the Arctic, the
two
best Reading-of-the-Will scenes that ever were,
and
towering over all these attractions, the nastiest crew of villains ever brought together in one book, presided over by the fiendish, the insidious, the wholly diabolic Jesuit priest and arch-hypocrite, Pere Rodin, who is hell-bent on becoming the next Pope. My first acquaintance with Sue's genius came at about age 10 when, like stout Cortez upon his peak in Darien, I stared in wild surmize at the Classics Illustrated comicbook of
The Mysteries of Paris
, wherein the hero had been trapped, among frantic rats, in a cellar rapidly being flooded to the rafters. Here was an absolutely Basic Truth about human destiny that no other Classics Illustrated author had ever revealed to me. It was to be another ten years before I found the Modern Library Giant of
The Wandering Jew
(no longer in print, alas) and consumed its 1,337 pages of faded purple prose like so many kilograms of popcorn, since when I have remembered its main outlines and best scenes with the seared after-image recall that some few paintings of the same era achieve -- Gericault's
Raft of the Medusa
or Delacroix's
Liberty Leading the People
, paintings that could be dismissed as cliches if they had not established themselves as archetypes. While that part of the novel-reading public that includes some classics as a staple in their diet can usually enjoy the glorious excesses of painter and composers, they tend to shy away from books that purvey the equivalent pleasures of Too Much and Far Out. Melodrama and an eye peeled for box office success are accounted mortal sins by academics, and it is academia that has been left in charge of which books of the past are to be accounted classics, taught, and kept in print. Yet I doubt the neglect of Sue's novel can be ascribed entirely to highbrow snobbery, since any number of comparable novels by Scott Hugo, Dumas, and Wilkie Collins have managed to stay in print without much assistance from academia. Nor need the book's length tell against it, for in the great pageturners, from
Clarissa
to
The Godfather
, length becomes a positive virtue: no one wants the fun to stop. I suspect that the root of the problem may be that
The Wandering Jew
is a vehemently anticlerical parable ("vituperative", one reference book calls it), while the tenor of the last forty years has been towards that brand of genteel ecumenicism whose first article of faith is that religion and politics should not be discussed -- or if they are, every effort must be made to be fair and impartial. But melodrama is seldom fair: fair isn't fun. Besides, Sue wasn't writing in the age of Bing Crosby but at a time when the Roman church was in the vanguard of political repression. Which is not to say he doesn't stack the deck. Besides the Machiavellian Pere Rodin and his Jesuit minions, the book's crew of Catholic villains includes a venal Mother Superior whose convent is a prison in disguise, a gluttonous bishop who is regaled by an ultramontane (i.e., rich and right wing) dowager with a lenten repast that includes "little Calvaries of apricot tartlets", and "a superb crucifix of angelica with a crown of preserved barbaries", together with such lay assistants as sweat-shop operators, wild animal tamers, and Indian thugees. There is not, this side of
Melmoth the Wanderer
(the most lurid of the Gothic novels and my second choice for an anthology of favorite horror novels; it was one of Sue's prime sources), another work of literature better calculated to drive a Catholic Anti-Defamation League into paroxysms of denunciation. To return such a book to print is obviously asking for trouble. And that's a pity, because despite its glorious excesses (or in addition to them)
The Wandering Jew
represents a considerable literary achievement, especially for the way that Sue is able to weave his many characters into a plot of monolithic unity. To wit: seven descendants of one Marius de Rennespont stand to inherit that gentleman's fortune, which has mounted at 5% interest over 150 years to a sum of 212,175,000 francs (or 8,487,000 pounds sterling). These seven, whom the Jesuits are determined to despoil of this fortune, represent a cross-section of all that is sexy, virtuous, and left-wing: Blanche and Rose Simon, twin daughters of one of Napoleon's marshals, lately escaped from Siberia; a utopian-minded industrialist; the dashing Prince Djalma; an 18-year-old heiress of exquisite refinement; a debauched but good-hearted workman called Couche-tout-Nud; and the saintly young priest Gabriel, whom the Jesuits have tricked into making over his share of the fortune as a deed of gift. For the first half of the novel the bad guys conspire to see that only Gabriel will be present at the reading of the will, thus becoming sole legatee. Just as their scheme seems to have succeeded, the female counterpart of the Wandering Jew of the title appears as
dea ex machina
to uncover a hidden codicil that sets the plot in motion for another 600+ pages. I am sworn not to reveal how it all ends, but take my word, the final tableau is a lulu, and anything but
vivante
. For some readers that synopsis may suggest that the book is no more than a classic of camp humour, and indeed there are chapters when the extravagance of the plot can be discombobulating, especially if they have been bullied by the schoolmarms of Serious Literature into believing that grand gestures and bold colours are necessarily in bad taste. However, anyone who can enjoy Griffith's
Birth of a Nation
or a well-sung
Il Trovatore
should have no trouble achieving total immersion in Sue's story, while readers on friendly terms with Dickens and Balzac will feel a kindred sympathy for Sue. More to the point, perhaps, in terms of resurrecting this book from the limbo of used book stores, readers of such current melodramatists as Stephen King or Anne Rice ought to be highly receptive to Sue's grand excesses (especially if his novel were to appear in a slightly condensed version). With just a bit of spit-and-polish the old warhorse could be a best-seller all over again. -- THOMAS M. DISCH

The Mississippi steamer
Fid
departs from St. Louis for New Orleans, bearing a wide cross-section of mid-19th-century American society. Among the passengers is an individual who appears and reappears in a variety of disguises -- a crippled black, a charity fund-raiser, a stock speculator, an employment agent, a bogus philosopher -- and rooks the venal and gullible of much more than their money. Neither a piece of Mark Twain-style Americana nor a simple tale of a cunning criminal,
The Confidence Man
is a masterpiece of misanthropy, in which Melville takes swipes at a wide variety of Americans, including figures like Emerson, Thoreau and Fenimore Cooper. The Confidence Man himself is a diabolic, perhaps supernatural, being whose methods of disguise are never rationally explained: his
modus operandi
has been reworked in novels as different as Grant Allen's
An African Millionaire
(1898) and Steve Gallagher's
Valley of Lights
(1987). The poor reception of the book convinced the 38-year-old Melville to give up writing and devote the rest of his working life to a solid job as a customs inspector. Many of his works, most famously
Moby Dick
(1851), contain horrific, bizarre or semi-supernatural incidents; his relatively few overt tales of horror -- which touch upon vampirism, robots and ghosts -- appear in
The Piazza Tales
(coll. 1966).

***

The Confidence Man
is not generally regarded as a novel of horror or fantasy, but I say without hesitation that it is the most fundamentally unsettling, powerful, and influential book I have ever opened. Melville's narrative was born of a cynicism so profound and twisted his storytelling makes Kafka seem a bliss ninny in comparison. The book -- what is in it and what I was taught by it -- became then, and remains, the catechism of my irreligion. Perhaps, if I'd never read the book, I'd have become a writer anyway -- but by no means would I be the same writer. I still find it astonishing how many crucial lessons
The Confidence Man
taught me. The instruction was bleak but invaluable. First, I realized that the most potentially dangerous and subversive of fictional characters is the narrator who speaks in a confiding, authoritative, and supposedly neutral third-person voice. It is unsettling enough to read a book written in first-person, where we come to mistrust the truth, the motives, and the candour of the narrator. But what happens when the anonymous third-person narrator of a novel is untrustworthy? It seemed to me, reading in awe, that not Melville, but the God of Lies himself had written the book. A narrator, I understood then, was every bit as much a creation of the writer as were the characters whose stories the narrator told us. This lesson I took to heart. Now I find myself frequently asked how it is possible I write books that seem totally different from one another: Southern Gothic Horror, Historical Thriller, Boy-Girl Romantic Adventure, Gay Detective Novels, Right-Wing Men's Adventure. I'm told it appears as if wholly different people had composed and told stories in the various genres. That is essentially correct -- I don't so much create characters and a story as create a particular narrator who creates characters and a story. My narrators are variously cold, close, indulgent, condescending, admiring, jolly, warm-hearted, caustic, and clinical.
The Confidence Man
bears a sub-title:
His Masquerade
-- but no one in the story wears so many costumes as he who tells the story. The second lesson I got from Melville's book is contained in the three chapters with disconcertingly circular titles: [Ch. 14: "Worth the consideration of those to whom it may prove worth considering"; Ch.33: "Which may pass for whatever it may prove to be worth"; and Ch. 44: "In which the last three words of the last chapter are made the text of the discourse, which will be sure of receiving more or less attention from those readers who do not skip it"]. These ironic discourses -- ironically dedicated to readers -- are coded messages with meaning only to other writers. I write and I work by the observations contained in these cold yet scalding passages. One single dictum propels my typing fingers: ". . . in books of fiction, [readers] look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can show." If there were ever harsher, crueler, more demanding, but finally more comforting words for a novelist, I have never read them. Finally, what
The Confidence Man
gave me was a straight-walled definition for what I had always felt about life and existence. It is my philosophy today, and I mean this in a straightforward plebeian manner -- it is the basis on which I speak, and act, and feel. According to Melville (and now according to me, too), the universe and existence are only a joke but dimly discerned. The punchline is garbled and all we know, while the cosmos' laughter clamours in our fevered brains, is that we are the butt of that joke.
The Confidence Man
is a book about deception, lies, obscure jests, undeserved misery, gratuitous fortune, connivance, philistine victories, and off-the-cuff evil. I felt after reading it that the lids of my eyes had been ripped away. Thereafter I saw existence and humanity and my own life with a galling amused embarrassing clarity, perceiving in dark unambiguous outline its doomed unpitied helplessness. This is the horror -- finally -- which prompts and imbues every tale I have ever put to paper. It is why I always write with humour, because we are the confused victims of this obscure impractical joke we call life. And the laughter will echo when neither we nor those we love are around to hear it. -- MICHAEL MCDOWELL