The dead in question, now infesting bookstores in a thousand shopping malls, are the dead tropes of horrific fiction: castles, monasteries, spooky houses, forbidden chambers, mysterious portraits, rotting corpses, walking skeletons, homicidal loonies, pools of blood. And, of course, ghosts and the narrators who rashly refuse to believe in them. These devices died 200 years ago, when every Gothic novel was already like every other Gothic novel. But dead or not, such tropes still speak to us. Stephen King’s books alone regularly sell a million copies-before going into paperback. This is the season for horror’s heavyweights: Anne Rice, for one, always publishes her novels, like last fall’s “The Witching Hour,” on Oct. 31. This fall publishers offer new books by Stephen King and Clive Barker for Halloween, along with the usual scary anthologies, ranging from stolidly traditional-“The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2” (658 pages. Carroll & Graf Paper, $9.95)–to starkly contemporary–“Best New Horror 2” (464 pages. Carroll & Graf $20.95).
Sophisticated browsers, as always, will ignore this stuff. But should they stray into the forbidden horror section, they may find themselves rooted to the spot (like a narrator who’s just lost his skepticism) by a pair of unlikely new collections, their handsome cover designs shyly conspicuous among the dripping knives and glaring eyeballs. The Literary Ghost: Great Contemporary Ghost Stories (369 pages. Atlantic Monthly. $22.95), edited by Larry Dark (whose previous anthology was “Literary Outtakes”), has writers who often haunt highbrow ghost collections-Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Bashevis Singer-but more than a few surprises: Donald Barthelme, Tim O’Brien, new Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (336 pages. Random House. $22), edited by the writers Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath, juxtaposes best-selling horror practitioners-Anne Rice, Peter Straub–with zingy highbrow postmodernists: Martin Amis, John Edgar Wideman, Kathy Acker, Jeannette Winterson.
Finally, one of this fall’s least subtle covers-skulls galore, plus Bela Lugosi plus Elsa Lanchester in “The Bride of Frankenstein”–oversells one of the smartest books, The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment (292 pages. Grove Weidenfeld. $21.95), by Fordham University professor and freelance critic Walter Kendrick. This history of the horrid makes a provocative companion volume to these unusual anthologies. On one hand, Kendrick considers the short story an ideal form for making the reader’s hairs stand up. (The root meaning of the word “horrid,” Kendrick points out, is “bristly.”) “Artificial fear,” he argues, “with its limited lifespan, suited itself well to stories that could be read in one sitting.” On the other hand, he implies that both “new” Gothic fiction and “literary” ghost stories are oxymorons.
Kendrick denies the conventional claim that horror fiction dates from the murks of prehistory, from the underworld of “The Odyssey” to the ghosts and skulls of “Hamlet” to Poe to Stephen King. He claims that entertainment–books, plays or films–specifically contrived to raise gooseflesh goes back only as far as the 18th century. When speedier, more sanitary burial practices removed moldering corpses from most people’s view, “death started to turn strange and the dead became dangerous.”
Horror fiction, says Kendrick, originated in the “graveyard school” of 18th-century poets, whose skulls, worms and coffins were pious reminders of the transience of this world and the permanence of the next. While 18th-century rationalism made the past itself seem scary-castles and abbeys meant oppression and superstition-such novelists as Sterne and Richardson cultivated strong feeling, or “sensibility.” Result: the novel of terror, like Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” (1764), whose architectural obsessions caused them to be labeled “Gothic.” The Victorian age, Kendrick notes, has become for us what the Middle Ages were for Walpole: a “creepily familiar past, studded with crumbling gingerbread mansions instead of Gothic castles.” In other words, today’s scary fiction tells “the same old story, using devices that were hackneyed two hundred years ago.” And while Kendrick doesn’t deny that some tales of terror are masterpieces on their own narrow terms, he still considers them “one-note compositions, reducible to a gimmick apiece.”
So what are all these reputable writers doing in such company? Just what mainstream writers like Flannery O’Connor, even James Joyce, have always done: appropriating the Gothic for their own ends. (Dark shrewdly points out that Joyce’s “The Dead” is a ghost story without a ghost.) Some are dabbling. And some don’t belong: a purist would kick Barthelme’s tragicomic “The Death of Edward Lear” out of “The Literary Ghost” because it has no ghost; Gordimer’s “Letter From His Father,” in which dead Pop Kafka tells off his thankless son, is more essay than story. But Oates’s “The Others,” in which a commuter falls into step with the legions of the dead–maybe–in an underground tunnel is a classic, chilling short-short. And in Anne Sexton’s equally concise “The Ghost,” a capriciously malignant spirit induces psychotic hallucinations in the woman she possesses. “[Her eyes] kept popping open to see the objects of the kitchen multiply, widen, stretch like rubber and their colors changing and becoming ugly and the lemon floated in the multiplying and dividing teacups like something made of neon.”
In their introduction to “The New Gothic,” Morrow and McGrath stipulate only that Gothic fiction “reveal the bleaker facets of the human soul”–which seems to let in everything from Beckett to the Berenstain Bears. Jamaica Kincaid’s “Ovando,” in which a conquistador’s skeleton walks, talks and colonializes, combines traditional Gothic dread of the past with trendy anti-Columbianism. The shockeroo at the end of “A Dead Summer,” Lynne Tillman’s portrait of the alcoholic as a young woman, is achieved not by withholding key information but by sheer good writing. Kathy Acker’s “J” puts Baudelaire and his mistress Jeanne Duval in 1991 New York, gives them AIDS instead of syphilis and revels in rot with her characteristic incantatory abandon. And in Emma Tennant’s “Rigor Beach,” an old-style psycho-killer gross-out (redeeming social value: a hint of childhood incest), a woman makes her lover’s corpse into a toy beach resort. Guess what’s the lighthouse.
As sensible people, we know that fiction like this died of predictability long ago. Some idiot always stays overnight in the spooky house, the forbidden chamber is always opened, the skeptic is always chastened. So why won’t it go away, and why do even serious writers keep messing with it? Because it’s predietable, of course. These are ritualized horrors, horrors we can see coming, brace ourselves for, deal with, move on. That’s why they call it fiction.
Gooseflesh, hairs standing on end-these aren’t mere metaphors. When a willing reader submits to a skillful writer, they really happen. These stories are guaranteed to do the trick.
What Norman Bates did for the shower curtain, poor mangled Herbert did for the front door.
The archetypal Hey-I-must-be-dead story. “Lord, I thought I was in bed.” Wrong. Maybe.
Yes, it’s all a gag. But that’s a bad moment, when those three figures cross the lawn.
A game of hide-and-seek in a rambling country house. Trouble is, they find one too many.
Lots of kids play doctor. But we wish they’d put down that saw.
Hey-I-must-be-dead meets “The Lost Weekend.” Guess why the elevator only goes down to the second floor.
He keeps seeing dead people. Bad omen.
