Horror: The 100 Best Books (9 page)

At Christmas, a group of friends are telling ghost stories. One of the company reads from a manuscript penned by a governess. The anonymous narrator arrives at an isolated house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. She learns that the children have recently been under the unwholesome influence of Miss Jessell, their former governess, and of Peter Quint, a sinister servant. Both Jessell and Quint are mysteriously dead, and both seem to be extending their influence from beyond the grave, perhaps to take possession of the children. While struggling with Quint's spirit for the soul of Miles, the governess accidentally causes the death of her charge. A classic ghost story,
The Turn of the Screw
has been adapted into an opera by Benjamin Britten, into a play,
The Innocents
, by Dalton Trumbo (filmed in 1961 by Jack Clayton) and spuriously "prequelized" by screen-writer Michael Hastings and director Michael Winner with
The Nightcomers
(1971). It is the most outstanding of James' handful of ghostly stories. The eponymous "turn of the screw", the involvement of children in the supernatural, might be seen to be at the root of a whole flood of post-
Exorcist
horrors unleashed in the 1970s.

***

Courage -- real courage -- is the ability to see horror on the far side of a crowded room and still have the presence of mind to ask for another cup of tea. The governess in Henry James's fantasy tale saw the shade of the defunct valet looking down from a tower and was still able to detect that he was not a gentleman. He gave her the sense of looking like an actor -- but never -- but no never! a gentleman. I find that after reading this story many times over the years it is extremely difficult to take a firm stand. Did the ghosts of the handsome but base-born valet Peter Quint and the beautiful lady governess Miss Jessel really exist, or were they merely figments created by the unnamed narrator's imagination? It would appear that James intended them to be accepted as evil entities for he wrote to F. W. H. Myers, his brother's fellow researcher into spiritualism, that he had wanted to create the impression of "the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger -- the condition on their part being as
exposed
as we can humanly conceive children to be." But exposed to whom? The ghosts? The governess? All communication seems to come from her. She is the only one to see the ghosts; it is she who builds up a most fantastic interpretation of what she has been told by the illiterate housekeeper Mrs. Grose. It was assumed that Quint was
evil
and Miss Jessel
infamous
. But were they? The valet certainly seems to have been a lad for the ladies and to have been perhaps a little over partial for a drink at the local. Hence his untimely end. A wrong turning when leaving the pub resulting in a fatal head wound. (A wronged husband taking revenge?) Poor Miss Jessel may have found it hard to say no and Quint would not be the first man to take advantage of an available situation. Naughty perhaps. But evil? And the children? Miles is sent home from school with the polite request that he does not go back. The reason we are told: That he's an injury to others. What a pity the governess did not demand a detailed explanation of that ambiguous statement. But she assumes it to be some kind of sexual offence -- that he was indeed corrupting his school fellows. Why? He may have organized a midnight raid on the kitchen; a very worthwhile, even necessary operation if my memory of school meals is anything to go by. But not one to find favour in the eyes of any self-respecting headmaster. Right -- wandering around at night clad only in his nightgown suggests an unconventional turn of mind, but could that not have been a boyish prank? An effort to confuse their decidely odd governess? In fact that seems to me more than a possibility. The children leading the governess on -- in modern parlance -- taking the mickey, and unconsciously bringing her paranoia up to a dangerous level. This is borne out when Flora refuses to see a perfectly visible woman standing on the other side of the lake. And the governess? The unnamed narrator? Here sex insists on raising its ugly head. She must have been in a rare old state to be so bowled over by the uncle who comes to life as a self-centered, don't-bother-me-I-leave-it-all-to-you monster. Still women do fall for these egoistic brutes, but the governess does seem to have fallen harder than most. Then -- in her scene with ten years old Miles she thinks of him and herself as honeymooners at an inn . . . Conjecture begins to slide down a very steep, slippery hill and finishes up in a mud-filled ditch. Now -- if only Mrs. Grose had also seen those ghosts, then just maybe Miles would not have been frightened to death -- for then there would not have been anything for him to be frightened of -- being quite accustomed to seeing ghosts -- if you get my meaning. Also there would have been no mystery. -- R. CHETWYND-HAYES

Marlow, Conrad's favoured narrator, forsakes his usual shipping lanes and takes a trip byriverboat up the Congo into the dark heart of Africa in search of Kurtz, a near-mythical entrepreneur who has somehow become possessed by the sinister magic of the continent and become the victim of the mini-empire he has carved out in the uncharted jungle. First published as one of the three stories in
Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories
,
Heart of Darkness
is one of the most substantial thin novels ever written. It takes as its theme the duality of man, as elaborated upon by a variety of dark stories from
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
to
Lord of the Flies
, and uses the remote setting to create a powerful vision of the quest upriver as a voyage into the soul of humanity. Conrad, born Josef Korzeniowski, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, and was frequently drawn to bizarre and grotesque subjects.

***

I first read
Heart of Darkness
at age fifteen, introduced to its dense and thickly shadowed prose, like almost every other modern reader, via a school assignment. It seemed less a story than a curious travelogue, a river voyage through colonial Africa that was cloaked in an oppressively gloomy atmosphere. There was no telling what it meant (in those innocent days before the massacre at My Lai, my teacher talked about style rather than substance); but its
feeling
was certain: no other fiction before or since has instilled in me such relentless dread. I returned to
Heart of Darkness
a few years later, this time by choice drawn back by memories of that emotional power -- and a sense of unresolved mystery. Now colored by thoughts of schoolmates maimed and dead, by the daily news from the war in Vietnam, the story, and a very dark truth, seemed to burn from its pages. Conrad captured me forever; I have since read
Heart of Darkness
more times than any other fiction, and it has never failed to challenge, to terrify, and, indeed, to surprise me. I am not alone. This timeless story has inspired artists as diverse as J. G. Ballard (
The Crystal World
and
The Day of Creation
), Francis Ford Coppola (
Apocalypse Now
), and Tim O'Brien (
Going After Cacciato
); and it is rightfully considered one of the greatest horror novels ever written.

"Before the Congo," Joseph Conrad once told a friend, "I was a mere animal." In 1889, when he was thirty-one, Conrad resigned the command of the
Otago
in Australia and returned to England for reasons that never have been made clear. A few months later, lacking money and a job, he fulfilled a lifelong dream of journeying deep into Africa by agreeing to captain a riverboat for the Belgian Company for Commerce. He spent six months in the Congo, traveling as far as the end of navigation at Stanley Falls; but he soon succumbed to illness -- and to the sight of the baseness and degradation of the European intrusion into Africa. He departed for London, never to return . . . except in his fiction.
Heart of Darkness
, written nearly a decade later, recounts Conrad's experiences in the Congo "pushed a little (and very little) beyond the facts of the case." Narrated by Conrad's fictional double, Marlow (the protagonist of
Youth
and narrator of
Lord Jim
,
Chance
, and
The Secret Sharer
), safe in harbor at the mouth of the Thames, its story is deceptively simple. "I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally," Marlow begins; but his tale is about little else. Hired by "the Company" to replace a riverboat captain who had been killed by natives, Marlow departs the "whited sepulchre" of Europe and sails deep into the interior of the dark continent. At the end of his journey awaits a near-legendary agent, Mr. Kurtz, the "Chief of the Inner Station." From all accounts, Kurtz is the embodiment of enlightened European traditions, a journalist and statesman -- indeed, a missionary -- who has ventured into the deepest jungle armed only with "the gift of expression". Marlow, steaming upriver in his wake, learns that the great man is "an emissary of pity, of science, of progress, and devil knows what else." Devil knows, indeed; for as Marlow follows Kurtz's path deeper and deeper into darkness, the evidence mounts that something has gone wrong. Kurtz, like the ever-darkening jungle, soon takes on the proportions of a terrifying, almost supernatural monster -- a violence-breathing icon of the degradation and horror that "progress" has visited upon Africa: slavery, brutality, exploitation, despoliation, the "merry dance of death and trade". When Marlow reaches the Inner Station, he finds an obscene encampment of war-ready natives, guarded with row upon row of poles that have been topped with severed heads. Inside, Kurtz awaits, grievously ill but with a single regret: the ivory trade has been closed, and Kurtz fears that his method may have failed because it was unsound. Marlow sees no method at all; Kurtz is "hollow to the core", given over entirely to darkness -- living, and now dying, without moral code or stricture. His final words, whether uttered merely in observation or in judgment, come in "a cry that was no more than a breath: 'The horror! The horror!'" Throughout
Heart of Darkness
, and particularly in its closing section, Marlow's narrative circles around the unexpressed (and perhaps inexpressible) mystery that has left readers and scholars guessing for nearly a century: What horror has seized the Inner Station? Some have suggested cannibalism; but Marlow's own steamer is manned with cannibal tribesmen, whom he lauds for their relatively "civilized" restraint. No, it is something more -- something that renders even the sight of severed heads mundane: "After all," Marlow reminds us, "that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being something that had a right to exist -- obviously -- in the sunshine." But that is only Marlow's word. The genius of
Heart of Darkness
lies not only in its insistent atmospherics, deft symbolism, and almost infuriating vagary, but also in the inherent untrustworthiness of its narrative. The story is a labyrinth of unanswered questions: Is Marlow's tale colored with guilt -- or, indeed, his own insanity? Was Kurtz in fact real, or merely a projection of Marlow's inner self, confronted at a lonely outpost beyond the purview of society? Critics of its time, like those in recent years, read
Heart of Darkness
as an indictment of imperialism, a common theme of more explicitly supernatural fiction of the end of the Nineteenth Century. Those were the years of the "yellow Gothic", whose key novels --
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886),
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891),
The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896), and
Dracula
(1897) all echoed the fears of an era of imperial decline. Like those novels,
Heart of Darkness
speaks profoundly about the thin line between humanity and savagery, the slippery path from enlightenment to primitivism; but Conrad's outraged humanism pushes further, suggesting that there is no line, no demarcation point that separates "us" from "them": there is only pretense. The lessons of
Heart of Darkness
are as real today as they were a century ago, but it is Conrad's singular style of confronting these horrors that has given his story its lasting power. Marlow's journey is a travelogue indeed, not of Africa but of the human soul; and it is for this reason that
Heart of Darkness
is renowned as a symbolist masterpiece, and perhaps the finest depiction of the "night journey" in all of literature. Marlow's voyage into and out of Africa enacts the mythical descent into the underworld and the return to light, an allegory of death and spiritual rebirth. Marlow has been brought -- indeed, he has allowed himself to be brought -- to the very face of horror, and has witnessed its bleak nothingness: "I have wrestled with death," he tells us; and he has
survived
, emerging whole . . . and human. Like Conrad after the Congo, he is no longer a mere animal, but (for better or worse) a man, nervously alive with a knowledge both terrifying and cleansing. In his famous preface to
The Nigger of the "Narcissus"
, Conrad wrote that "Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect."
Heart of Darkness
brings to light a dark and unwelcome truth -- the evil innate in all mankind. There is no greater purpose in the fiction of horror. -- DOUGLAS E. WINTER

After
Dracula
,
The Jewel of Seven Stars
is Bram Stoker's best-known book. Although it has never attained the immense popularity of the earlier novel, it is a much tighter, more controlled work, dealing with the gradual possession of the heroine, Margaret Trelawny, by an ancient Egyptian queen of evil, Tera, whose mummified remains have been brought to an old dark house in London by the girl's archaeologist father. The narrator/hero -- Margaret's suitor -- delves into the peculiar history of the mummy, and is an appalled witness as Tera's influence is increased through a variety of magical rituals which focus on artefacts found in the queen's tomb. It is one of several Victorian and Edwardian works -- Richard Marsh's
The Beetle
(1897), Arthur Conan Doyle's story "Lot No. 249" -- that reflect public interest in Egyptian archaeology. It was first adapted as
Curse of the Mummy
, a 1970 segment of the TV series
Mystery and Imagination
with Isabel Black, and has subsequently been filmed twice: as
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb
(1971), and as
The Awakening
(1980), the latter novelized by R. Chetwynd-Hayes.