Horror is everywhere. It is so pervasive that there is little point in dwelling on its real presence in the world. War, disease, famine, and eventually, inevitably, death and decay: the triumph of the “conqueror worm,” as Poe puts it (1982, p. 960). The question, then, is why dwell on it in literary form when there is beauty, joy, and love to explore? The first answer is that these are not mutually exclusive, either in our interest or even in the same text. The second is the self-evident: horror has fascinated human beings from the beginning. It is tempting to say from the first stirrings of our awareness of our own mortality. Suffering is universal, but horror might well be uniquely human.
This handbook aims to bring together a wide range of chapters about the ways in which horror has appeared in literature, seeking to give as comprehensive an account as possible. It is split into three sections: “The Origins and Evolution of Literary Horror,” “Themes of Literary Horror,” and “Approaches to Literary Horror.” The contributors are global, but the book nonetheless shows a leaning toward Anglophone traditions. It is hoped that the case studies offered from other cultural traditions and from innovative global literature will provide stimulating points of convergence and departure. We have aimed, also, to provide a wide account of “literature” that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of the Western understanding of the term. As such, this ventures into folklore (including oral traditions), religion, and mythology. It also, of course, covers a broad range of movements, traditions, and periods within literary history. The themes covered aim to provide an explanation for their effect and enduring potency. Zombies, vampires, and terrifying children all appear, but if the reader’s favorite horror monsters do not, then we can only apologize. Not every possible theoretical approach has been covered, although new readers should come away with a good sense of the kinds of ways in which critics have sought to understand horror in various texts.
Horror has perhaps found its most distilled expression in what has come to be known as the “Gothic.” It is through this lens that the most fruitful literary criticism has been carried out, and the field of Gothic studies continues to dominate the conversation. This is largely due to the immense popularity of the Gothic novel in Europe in the late eighteenth century. In English, authors including Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Ann Radcliffe caused a sensation with their tales of seemingly supernatural occurrences and young women (sometimes men) in danger from nefarious villains. The horror was that of the crushing inescapability of a tyrannical past coming back to haunt the present. This was a theme interwoven with contemporary politics and culture, but one that has continued to resonate and find expression in different contexts. Chris Baldick defines the Gothic as, “a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (1992, p. xix). This has come to serve as somewhat of a standard definition, and the interplay of these two elements continues to appear in Gothic fiction and to be critically useful in a taxonomic definition of genre. The Gothic, from this perspective, does not just entail fear, or horror, but a way of looking at the world, with its own internal logic and assumptions. The reader of Gothic novels will inevitably come to an intuitive understanding, not only of their recurring motifs, but of a tone, mood, and aesthetic. None of this is integral to a broader understanding of “horror,” which can occur independently of the Gothic mode. As Clive Bloom comments, “Just as horror fiction can exploit the supernatural or the scientific, so it need not be confined to the trappings of ancient castles and crumbling abbeys” (1998, pp. 11–12).
Bloom’s reference to buildings is appropriate, as the term “Gothic” as an aesthetic description first emerges in discussions of architecture. Initially, this implied a barbarous lack of taste, with the word alluding to the Germanic tribes who sacked Rome in the fifth century. The feeling of horror creeps in at this point, with the implication that the Gothic is something foreign and threatening, as well as a destroyer of civilized values. As Fred Botting points out, the mood for Gothic as a specific style came about as a result of Enlightenment ideals, when Europe turned its attentions to its classical past as a model for society:
Ruined buildings in the style that would be termed “Gothic” supplied evidence for this outdated value system and would accordingly become a staple feature of Gothic literature, where such settings could act as generic shorthand for this sense of superstition and danger. An enthusiastic audience for the pleasurable terrors conjured up in such novels was an emerging readership of young women; a phenomenon that caused no little consternation among conservative commentators. This is summarized well by Ellen Ledoux, who notes that:Taste, judgement and value were predicated on ideas of cultivation and civilized behavior that were entwined with social mores of public and domestic duty, harmony and propriety. The dominance of classical values produced a national past that was distinct from the cultivation, rationality and maturity of an enlightened age. This past was called “Gothic”, a general and derogatory term for the Middle Ages which conjured up ideas of barbarous customs and practices, of superstition, ignorance, extravagant fancies and natural wildness. (1996, p. 22)
The politics of taste are here used to police women’s leisure time specifically, but the wider implication that fiction can be a dangerous influence on young minds is one that continues to appear in discussions of horror, although now more likely to manifest in tabloid scare stories about the corrupting power of horror films and video games. These attacks on horror predicated on “concern” may be motivated by politics or by the desire to drive newspaper sales, but, nonetheless, indicate something extremely valid: that there is no doubt an inherent appeal in these themes, particularly to young minds in the process of personal and social development. This is not, however, necessarily a bad thing, at least according to horror fans and many of the critics in this volume, who find the potential for positive personal and social transformation through the encounter with horror in fiction.A […] serious debate rages in non-fiction prose about the effect of novel reading on young women, and this debate becomes more urgent once the Gothic novel comes into fashion. In an anonymous column called “Terrorist Novel Writing” published in The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797 the author suggests that Gothic novels do little to instruct and to prepare women for domestic life. The writer asks, “Can a young lady be taught nothing more necessary in life, than to sleep in a dungeon with venomous reptiles, walk through a ward with assassins, and carry bloody daggers in their [sic] pockets, instead of pin-cushions and needle-books?” (Anon., 1797). The author concludes that these narratives “carr[y] the young reader’s imagination into such a confusion of terrors, as must be hurtful” (Anon., 1797). In short, young female readers dissipate their time in a fantasy world of masculine adventure, rather than learning the skills necessary to run a household and to perform femininity. (2017, p. 5)
The anonymous article referred to by Ledoux, entitled “Terrorist Novel Writing” was published in 1797 and despairs of the current trend “to make terror the order of the day” (1802, p. 227). The author repeatedly deploys the term “terror” to indicate the effect of these novels on their readership, here negatively. “Terror,” however, has also been used to indicate a certain respectability that horror does not achieve. Ann Radcliffe distinguishes between the two in an article published as “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826). Here she claims that:
This famous distinction suggests that horror is merely an affect, and an unpleasant one at that, whereas terror has something of the profound in its proper execution. We might think of this as the difference between “showing” and “telling.” This is also a distinction that rests on ideas of taste, and there is something rather genteel in this idea that even terror writing can be redeemed by its capacity to stir the soul and the intellect. True horror, the kind that “freezes” the faculties, is not welcome. This is less relevant to our present purpose, however, than it was to Radcliffe , writing as a practitioner of the style of terror writing that she advocates. It is an aesthetic and a stylistic distinction above all else. Terror, however tastefully it is presented, contains the traces of an implied horror beneath the surface. Horror is “the soul of the plot” (1965, p. 961) to return to Poe’s poem, “The Conqueror Worm” (1843). Accordingly, we use the term “horror” here as a blanket reference that does not exclude writing in the “terror” style described by Radcliffe . Certainly, much of the material under discussion here does not just subtly evoke feelings of fear, but positively revels in the horrific.Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a higher degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreader evil? (2006, p. 315)
What, then, are we afraid of? Why does horror occur so frequently and so powerfully in literature? Perhaps the most influential essay after Radcliffe’s appears a century later in the form of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927). Here, Lovecraft surveys the Gothic tradition as well as developments through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. He writes approvingly of Radcliffe’s novels and her technique of explaining the supernatural by rational means, although he rejects the need for what we can identify as an instructive element in the novels, certainly in terms of the development of “sensibility”—an awareness and appreciation of landscape, art, and the emotions that were considered to be crucial to moral character, but also to be kept rationally in check. This is seen most obviously in Jane Austen’s parody of Gothic novels (and especially Radcliffe ), Northanger Abbey (1817), where the young protagonist Catherine Morland spends so much time devouring “horrid novels” that she embarrasses herself by seeing supernatural occurrences and sinister plots in everyday circumstances. An appreciation of terror in the correct aesthetic way could thus help to cultivate sensibility and moral feeling. Lovecraft denies that there should be a need for “a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism” (2011, p. 423). He but claims that in creating such an effective atmosphere, Radcliffe touches upon something truly terrifying, “despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations” (2011, p. 4...