So just as the outwardly respectable Henry Jekyll housed within him the murderous Edward Hyde, it now entered the realms of possibility that Jack the Ripper might be a man of some sophistication and breeding. This has given rise to an entire industry devoted to speculation about suspects as diverse as Sir John Williams, Queen Victoria’s surgeon, named as the killer as recently as 2013 by an author claiming to be the descendant of his final victim, Mary Kelly; and, perhaps most spectacularly and wrongheadedly, the artist Walter Sickert, who, in 2001, was fingered by the mystery writer Patricia Cornwell as the culprit largely on the basis that his paintings were kind of sleazy. Cornwell was duly accused of “monstrous stupidity” for tearing apart a Sickert canvas in order to prove her theory, although not being much of a fan of Sickert’s work myself—I know what I like, wouldn’t have it on the wall at home, etc.—the only good thing that can be said to have come out of Cornwell’s efforts is that there is one less Sickert painting in the world.
And thus it is that from the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—and the image of the Ripper as a savage hiding behind the facade of a gentleman—we can trace a slightly wavy line to Thomas Harris, and the creation of the cannibal psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, he of Silence of the Lambs and making-this-author-cry fame. As it happens, Anthony Hopkins was the first actor to win the Best Actor Oscar for a horror film since Fredric March, who won the award in 1932 for the lead role in—yes, you guessed it—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Tales of Mystery & Imagination (1908), by Edgar Allan Poe
Sorry, that was rather a long digression, and we’re now back at my childhood bookshelves. The Poe anthology is, I think, one of only two books that I salvaged from my grandmother’s house in Kerry before it was sold and demolished after her death. The other is a paperback copy of Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man (1972), the first Ed McBain book I ever encountered and also, I believe, the first mystery novel I ever read.9 I have a strong suspicion that Poe may have been my introduction to more grown-up supernatural storytelling, as I have a memory of struggling as a child with his prose style. My grandmother’s library thus provided the genesis of my literary career, as right from my first novel, Every Dead Thing, I was fascinated by the possibility of combining the rationalist traditions of the mystery novel with the antirationalist underpinnings of supernatural fiction.
Of course, this didn’t entirely meet with the favor of mystery fiction’s more conservative rump. The mystery community—readers, writers, critics—has its own equivalent of those people who instinctively file objections to planning permission on the grounds that they would very much prefer things in general to remain the same, regardless of whether or not the proposed changes might actually be for the better. It’s not even true to say that they have a definition of what mystery fiction is; instead, they simply know what it isn’t. They have always had a particular hatred for the mixing of genres, to the extent that a mystery novel set, say, in the Old West, will automatically be categorized as a Western, while a mystery set in the future is science fiction. English historical settings seem to be okay, presumably on the grounds that the glories of the Empire appeal to their natural conservatism.
These self-appointed guardians of the mystery genre’s past, present, and future reserve a particular hatred for any hint of the supernatural, a hostility that finds its most famous expression in the set of ten rules of detective fiction formulated by Father Ronald Knox in 1929, the second of which reads, “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.”10
Now I wasn’t writing novels in which “the ghost did it,” but was merely trying to explore some of the possibilities inherent in William Gaddis’s suggestion that “you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law” (A Frolic of His Own, 1994). I was curious about that disparity between law and justice, the difference between our imperfect human system of justice and the possibility of a divine justice, and the implications that the existence of the latter might have for the origins of evil. I was also interested in creating new forms, hybrids of existing traditions, because I believed that in experimentation lay progress.
I was reminded, too, that the little collection of Poe salvaged from my grandmother’s house contained stories of both mystery and the supernatural, for Tales of Mystery & Imagination housed, in addition to narratives of outright horror, two of the three Dupin mysteries, in which a French amateur detective investigates a number of baffling crimes. The most famous of these remains “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which the solution to a brutal double murder involves—and I’m giving a little away here, but not much—an orangutan, which suggests that even Poe recognized the absurdity of the purely rationalist approach.11
When I was putting together Nocturnes, my first collection of supernatural prose, I tried to write a Poe-esque tale entitled “The Bridal Bed,” but I left it out of the main volume because I discovered that it’s a lot harder than it first appears to write like Poe. As with Raymond Chandler, his mood and style are so distinctive that to imitate him risks descending into pastiche. I later relented and included it in the paperback edition, but I think I had the decency to apologize for it.
Poe stood beside a volume of H. P. Lovecraft stories on my grandmother’s shelf. I still have no idea how the Lovecraft got there. Poe’s presence I could almost understand, as he came in the form of an old hardback and so fit in with the general look of her library, but the Lovecraft was a relatively new Panther paperback edition, possibly of The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, although I can’t swear to it. I could only assume that one of my older cousins had left it, but I had just two older cousins, neither of whom struck me as the type to bother with Lovecraft. It was, in its way, all very Lovecraftian—or perhaps, more correctly, M. R. Jamesian (of whom more later).
Whatever its origins, I struggled with the Lovecraft even more than I did with the Poe, and I remain a Lovecraft agnostic. It has always seemed to me that Lovecraft’s imaginative reach typically exceeds his literary grasp by some distance. Even his most famous novella, At the Mountains of Madness, falls down when it comes to putting words to his odd vision of the universe, plagued by gibbering horrors from the beyond. There’s far too much “I cannot bring myself to describe the terrible vision that met my eyes . . .” followed by “Oh, all right, I’ll have a go” for my liking. As the story’s narrator puts it at one point, “I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct,” ignoring the fact that frankness without directness is like an arrow without a point on the end. I’ll grant that his best tales manage to exceed the sum of their parts, although Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (2005), an attempt at reassessment and rehabilitation, left me distinctly cold. Then again, that may just be a natural—and, to my mind, eminently understandable—response to anything Houellebecq writes. Remember: it’s not bias if you’re right.
• • •
As it happens, I’m quite gratified that I took the writing of this piece as an opportunity to return to my childhood home. (My mother is gratified, too, as I’m leaving with a couple of boxes of books, my old teddy bear, and some model cars. Not only is her ceiling now in less danger of collapsing on top of her, but she may also be optimistic about the possibility of my severing the apron strings entirely, and wholeheartedly embracing adult life, bless her.) I was a child who loved books, and I am an adult who is the product of books. There, in my old bedroom, the history of my childhood reading remains in dusty limbo. I really must encourage my mum to think about putting a plaque up on the wall of the house and charging people to visit.
Strangely absent from those shelves, though, was M. R. James, and it is James who remains my favorite writer of supernatural fiction—
But perhaps I should qualify that statement before we go any further.
My first explorations of longer supernatural fiction came in the form of the novels of Stephen King. I started with the aforementioned Salem’s
Lot (1975), followed by The Shining (1977), which was given to me by Eamonn Sweeney, the boy I sat next to for one year in primary school, so we’re talking about 1979 at the latest. Eamonn Sweeney thought that The Shining was the most frightening book ever written. He was wrong, of course: that honor went to Salem’s Lot, but The Shining certainly was interesting, if a little lengthy.12 When I reviewed Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining, for The Irish Times, I calculated that I had read more than fifty of King’s books, which is an awful lot of one writer’s work to have consumed.13
I should confess that King and I had a slight parting of the ways around 1986’s It. It wasn’t anything that he had done, and the split wasn’t final. I just wanted to see other writers. I would still read the books as soon as they came out, but I did so at one remove. Some point of connection had been lost, and I couldn’t understand why.
I think that I may have an answer now. In 1986 I had just turned eighteen, and my relationship with horror as a genre was changing. Horror fiction, when read in adolescence, offers a means of exploring the darkness and complexity of the adult world. It’s only superficially about vampires, or werewolves, or ghosts. What it does is enable young people to ascribe a name—zombie, ghoul, monster—to the unnameable, to give form to formless terrors, and in that way come to terms with them.14 King’s fictions are particularly suited to these explorations, in part because he writes so well about childhood and adolescence (which is not to say that the books themselves are childish or adolescent, not at all.) But once we enter young adulthood, the need for such tools is less pressing. We begin dealing with the reality of sexuality, relationships, compromise, work, responsibility and, far in the distance, the shadow of mortality. As a consequence, horror fiction loses some of its immediacy.
But, in my midforties, I have new terrors to confront: the ageing of my body, concerns for my children, the reality of my own death. I was immortal when I first read King; I feel absurdly vulnerable now. With all that in mind, I find myself affected anew by King’s later works. They are the writings of a man who has suffered grievously himself. In 1999, King was struck by a minivan while walking in Lovell, Maine. He endured life-threatening injuries that left him with an addiction to pain medication, which he has since overcome, and caused him to consider giving up writing entirely. (As for the driver of the minivan, one Bryan Edwin Smith, he died one year after the incident, on September 21, 2000, the date of Stephen King’s fifty-third birthday, which is the kind of thing that usually only happens to people in Stephen King novels.)
I was careful to use the term “horror fiction” earlier in order to distinguish it from general supernatural fiction. There is a lazy tendency to assume that horror, ghost, and supernatural stories are all one and the same, but a tale of ghosts or the supernatural may not necessarily be horrific. The horror genre is the only one to be named after an intense feeling with largely negative connotations: to be horrified is to be disgusted, even repelled. This is why supermarkets avoided stocking horror fiction on their shelves for many years, and booksellers hid their horror sections away at the back of stores, there to be discovered by largely amiable young men and women with only mildly concerned parents. The horror genre had a hint of the illicit and the shameful about it, but that was the whole point. As Woody Allen once said about sex, it’s only dirty when it’s done right. The clean, glittering vampires of the Twilight novels are the stuff of romance, but Stoker’s Dracula—a child-killer, a pollutant, a thing of dirt and rats—is a true creature of horror.
The effectiveness of a piece of horror, though, is dependent on revelation, on what is seen and felt. As King admits in Danse Macabre, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion . . . and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”
I was once asked to offer a definition of a tasteful horror story. The only answer I could come up with is that a tasteful horror story is one nobody would want to read. Taste really has no part to play in horror. Rather, like physical pain, it’s a question of what one is capable of enduring, and it’s no coincidence that horror fiction frequently explores John Donne’s assertion that “The concavities of my body are like another Hell for their capacity,” a quotation I used at the start of Every Dead Thing. At its most effective, horror fiction is tied up with the fragility of the human form, with injury, pain, and, ultimately, death. In that sense, all great horror is body horror; it’s why Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, with its details of mutilation and cannibalism, is not a thriller but a horror story. The body, horror fiction warns us, is a frail construct, and will betray us all in the end.
Since I’ve admitted to unforgivable gaps in my reading of King’s output, I should also confess that I actually read very few modern supernatural novelists, King and a handful of others apart, so I can’t but have been influenced by him. I even write about Maine, just as King does, although that’s because I worked in the state when I was younger and now have a house there. I also still think of myself primarily as a writer of mysteries, while King is at heart a horror writer, although I know that the question of genre hasn’t really troubled him in a long time. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not some kind of insane stalker of King who has moved to Maine to be closer to my idol. I’ve simply read most of his books and have therefore contributed something to his mortgage payments. (See the piece of guttering on the right of his house? I own that.)
So why don’t I read many longer works of supernatural fiction? Well, I suspect it’s because I feel that the short story is the ideal form for explorations of the supernatural. A short horror story can give us a glimpse behind the curtain, a brief hint of whatever lurks in the shadows, but it’s under no particular obligation to provide an explanation, which renders the aftereffect of the sighting all the more unsettling. On the other hand, if someone writes a novel that clocks in around the thousand-page mark, then some kind of explanation or conclusion is pretty much obligatory. The problem is that the explanation is generally going to be less interesting than the initial mystery. To put it simply, the question is more intriguing than the answer.
King’s massive 2009 novel Under the Dome (1,074 pages, since you ask), the tale of a small Maine town sealed off from the rest of the world by a massive force field of unknown origin, is a master class in tension, a gripping depiction of an enclosed community gradually succumbing to violence and anarchy. King doesn’t put a foot wrong until the very end, when he decides that some kind of revelation about the origin of the titular dome is required. Oddly enough, in this case it isn’t: the dome is merely a catalyst for an investigation of the society trapped beneath it, and the variety of responses provoked by the town’s containment. It doesn’t really matter how the dome came to be there: it is the people scurrying around under it—fighting, fleeing, and killing—who are interesting. The explanation for the dome’s presence, when it comes, smacks of an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s too flimsy to support the massive edifice above, and the novel almost collapses as a consequence.15
The fault, I would argue, isn’t entirely King’s, but lies with the genre. If I were a more vain man, I might formulate a rule entitled Connolly’s Law: the effectiveness of a piece of supernatural fiction is inversely proportional to its length.
This is not to say that there are no great horror novels—King’s output alone disproves this—but there are far fewer than one might expect, and many are relatively slight, to the extent that some might more correctly be termed novellas: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (200 pages, in my edition); Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (221 pages); I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (170 pages); The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (128 pages); and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (65 pages). On the other hand, freed from the constrictions of copyright—which, to be fair, bedeviled the efforts of our old friend Herbert van Thal—one could create many volume
s of fine short supernatural fiction, and it is interesting just how many lists of great horror novels have to be plumped up with anthologies of stories.16
I wonder, too, how much of my affection for short fiction in the genre is tied up with my exposure to compact installments of supernaturally themed television shows, which formed much of my youthful viewing, even more than old horror movies on the BBC. I grew up with Tales of the Unexpected and Hammer House of Horror, episodes of which lasted thirty minutes and an hour respectively. Even adaptations of longer novels were frequently doled out in small doses: I can still remember being terrified by the 1978 Armchair Thriller dramatization of Antonia Fraser’s Quiet as a Nun which, although a thriller rather than a supernatural novel, owed a strong debt to the gothic tradition, and might have drawn an approving nod from Matthew Lewis, author of The Monk (1796), another work infused with a deep awareness of the potential eeriness of nuns.
Then there was ITV’s Sapphire & Steel (1979–1982), a science fiction/fantasy hybrid so strange that it’s almost impossible to conceive of how it came to be green-lit in the first place. To be fair, the show itself is almost impossible to understand, so at least a degree of consistency runs through the whole process. It featured Joanna Lumley, late of The New Avengers, and David McCallum, star of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as—well, this is where it all gets a bit difficult, as it’s not entirely apparent what they are. They seem to be trans-dimensional agents of some sort, possibly in the employ of Time itself, but—and stay with me here—they’re also elements, as in the periodic table of the elements. We know this because, at the start of each show, a male voice informs us that “Transuranic elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver, and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned . . .”