MAVID G. HARTWELL NETCUUN, ill STEPHEN KING RUSSELLKIRK PMATe aI SHIRLEY JACKSON AS NGG“For a sample of the current excellence and variety of horror, one could do no better.’” —Newsday “Undoubtedly the most important anthology of the year, if not the decade. An incredible book, which attempts to detail ‘the history of horror literature in its short story form . . » [and] succeeds brilliantly. “The finest [short stories] ever written. Truly an enormous feast of fear. ‘‘Hartwell is a man who knows where the richest blood lies and has skillfully tapped that vein for our own gruesome pleasures.”” —Fangoria ‘‘A must-read for all readers [of] horror. It provides an overview of past and contemporary horror that’s unmatched in any other collection.’” —Weird Tales ‘This is undoubtedly the definitive anthology of short hor- Tor fiction.’’ —Science Fiction ChronicleTHe DarK DESCENT edited by David G. Hartwell The Color of Evil The Medusa in the Shield A Fabulous Formless DarknessThe Dark Descent Vol. 1 edited by David G. Hartwell Tor HORROR A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORKNOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as ‘‘unsold and destroyed’’ to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this ‘‘stripped book."’ This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. THE COLOR OF EVIL Copyright © 1987 by David G. Hartwell This book first appeared as part of the Tor hardcover, THE Dark DescENT. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24th Street New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN: 0-812-51898-5 First printing: September 1991 Printed in the United States of America 0987654321DEDICATION To Tom Doherty and Harriet P. McDougal and the Tor Books Horror imprint, and especially Melissa Ann Singer, editor, for support and patience. To Kathryn Cramer and Peter D. Pautz for their hard work and enthusiasm, as well as provocative discussion. To Patricia W. Hartwell for letting the books pile up and the piles of paper fall over throughout the house and still loving me.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This anthology grew out of three years of weekly discussions with Peter D. Pautz and Kathryn Cramer on the nature and virtues of horror literature, and its evolution. Peter’s knowl- edge of the contemporary field and Kathryn’s theoretical bent were seminal in the genesis of my own thoughts on what horror literature is and has become. Jack Sullivan, Kirby McCauley and Peter Straub were -particularly helpful in dis- cussing aspects of horror, and Samuel R. Delany contributed valuable insights, as well as the title for Part III. And I owe an incalculable debt to the great anthologists—from M. R. James and Dashiell Hammett, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Sayers through Wise and Fraser, Boris Karloff and August Derleth to Kirby McCauley, Ramsey Campbell and Jack Sul- livan—whose research and scholarship and taste guided my reading over the decades. Robert Hadji and Jessica Salmon- son gave valuable support in late-night convention discus- sions, and the World Fantasy Convention provided an annual environment for advancing ideas in the context of the fine working writers and experts who make horror literature a vigorous and growing form in our time. Finally, my sincere thanks to Stephen King for Danse Macabre.CopyYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful acknowledgment is extended for permission to re- print the following: “*The Reach’’ by Stephen King. Copyright © 1981 by Stephen King. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd. ‘*Evening Primrose”’ by John Collier. Copyright © 1941, 1968 by John Collier. Reprinted by permission of Harold Mat- son Company, Inc. ““There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding’’ by Russell Kirk. Copyright © 1974 by Kirby McCauley for Frights. Re- printed by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby Mc- Cauley, Ltd. ‘*The Call of Cthuthu’’ by H. P. Lovecraft. Copyright © 1963 by August Derleth. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022 “‘The Summer People’’ by Shirley Jackson. ‘‘The Summer People’’ from Come Along With Me by Shirley Jackson. Copyright © 1950 by Shirley Jackson. Copyright renewed © 1977 by Laurence Hyman, Barry Hyman, Mrs. Sarah Webster and Mrs. Joanne Schnurer. Reprinted by permis- sion of Viking Penguin, Inc. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’’ by Harlan Ellison. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’’ by Harlan Ellison appeared in the author’s collection, Deathbird Stories; copyright © 1963 by Harlan Ellison. Reprinted by arrangement with and permission of the author and the author’s agent, Rich- ard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. Alt rights reserved. ““The Crowd’’ by Ray Bradbury. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. Copyright © 1943 by Weird Tales, Inc.; renewed 1970 by Ray Bradbury.“The Autopsy’’ by Michael Shea. Copyright © 1984 by Mi- chael Shea; reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Owlswick Literary Agency. **Sticks’’ by Karl Edward Wagner. Copyright © 1974 by Stu- art David Schiff. Reprinted by permission of the author's agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd. “Larger Than Oneself’? by Robert Aickman. Copyright © 1966 by Robert Aickman. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd. “‘Belsen Express’’ by Fritz Leiber. Copyright © 1975 by Fritz Leiber, in The Second Book of Fritz Leiber. “*Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’’ by Robert Bloch. Copyright © 1984 by Robert Bloch. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd. “‘If Damon Comes’’ by Charles L. Grant. Copyright © 1978 by Charles L. Grant. “Vandy, Vandy’’ by Manly Wade Wellman. Copyright © 1953 by Fantasy House, Inc.; renewed 1981 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd.CONTENTS Introduction to The Dark Descent Stephen King The Reach John Collier Evening Primrose M. R. James _ The Ash-Tree Lucy Clifford The New Mother Russell Kirk There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu Shirley Jackson The Summer People Harlan Ellison The Whimper of Whipped Dogs Nathaniel Hawthorne Young Goodman Brown J. Sheridan Le Fanu Mr. Justice Harbottle Ray Bradbury The Crowd Michael Shea The Autopsy E. Nesbit John Charrington’s Wedding Karl Edward Wagner _ Sticks Robert Aickman Larger Than Oneself Fritz Leiber Belsen Express Robert Bloch Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper Charles L. Grant If Damon Comes Manly Wade Wellman Vandy, Vandy 308 422INTRODUCTION TO THE DARK DESCENT To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring an orderly mind to them, you must have a reasonable amount of confidence, if not in what used to be called the laws of nature, at least in the currently suspected habits of nature. ... To the truly superstitious the ‘‘weird’’ has only its Scotch meaning: ‘‘Something which actually takes place.’’ —Dashiell Hammett, Creeps by Night The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally nar- row because it demands from the reader a certain de- gree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of daily routine to respond... . —H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature na July Sunday morning, I was moderating a panel discussion at Necon, a small New England convention devoted to dark fantasy. The panelists included Alan Ryan, Whitley Strieber, Peter Straub, Charles L. Grant and, I be- lieve, Les Daniels, all of them horror novelists. The theme of the discussion was literary influences, with each partici- pant naming the horror writers he felt significant in the gen- esis of his career. As the minutes rolled by and the litany of names, Poe and Bradbury and Leiber and Lovecraft and Kafka and others, was uttered, I realized that except for a ritual bow to Stephen King, every single influential writer 12 The Dark Descent named had been a short story writer. So I interrupted the panel and asked them all to spend the last few minutes com- menting on my observation. What they said amounted to this: the good stuff is pretty much all short fiction. After a few months of thought, I spent a late Halloween night with Peter Straub at the World Fantasy Convention, getting his response to my developing ideas on the recent evolution of horror from a short story to a novel genre. My belief that the long-form horror story is avant-garde and ex- perimental, an unsolved aesthetic problem being attacked with energy and determination by Straub and King and others in our time, solidified as a result of that conversation. But it seemed to me too early to generalize as to the nature of the new horror novel form. What, then, I asked myself, has happened to the short story? The horror story has cer- tainly not up and vanished after 160 years of development and popularity; far from it. As an administrator of the annual World Fantasy Awards since 1975, I was aware of significant growth in short fiction in the past decade. And so the idea of this book was conceived, to conclude the era of the domi- nance of short-form horror with a definitive anthology that attempts to represent the entire evolution of the form to date and to describe and point out the boundaries of horror as it has been redefined in our contemporary field. For it seemed apparent to me that the conventional approach to horror cod- ified by the great anthologies of the 1940s is obsolete, was indeed becoming obsolete as those books were published, and has persisted to the detriment of a clearer understanding of the literature to the present. It has persisted to the point where fans of horror fiction most often restrict their reading to books and stories given the imprimateur of a horror cate- gory label, thus missing some of the finest pleasures of this century in that fictional mode. I have gathered as many as could be confined within one huge volume here in The Dark Descent, with the intent of clearing the air and broadening future considerations of horror.Introduction 3 Fear has its own aesthetic—as Le Fanu, Henry James, Montagu James and Walter de la Mare have repeatedly shown—and also its own propriety. A story dealing in fear ought, ideally, to be kept at a certain pitch. And that austere other world, the world of the ghost, should inspire, when it impacts on our own, not so much re- vulsion or shock as a sort of awe. —Elizabeth Bowen, The Second Ghost Book The one test of the really weird is simply this— whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers. —H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature Il The Evolution of Horror Fiction For more than 150 years horror fiction has been a vital component of English and American literature, invented with the short story form itself and contributing intimately to the evolution of the short story. Until the last decade, the domi- nant literary form of horror fiction was the short story and novella. This is simply no longer the case. Shortly after the beginning of the 1970s, within a very few years, the novel form assumed the position of leadership. First came a scat- tering of exceptionally popular novels—Rosemary’s Baby, The Other, The Exorcist, The Mephisto Waltz, with attendant film successes—then, in 1973, the deluge, with Stephen King on the crest of the wave, altering the nature of horror fiction for the foreseeable future and sweeping along with it all the liv- ing generations of short fiction writers. Very few writers of horror fiction, young or old, resisted the commercial or aes- thetic temptation to expand into the novel form, leading to the creation of some of the best horror novels of all time as4 The Dark Descent well as a large amount of popular trash rushed into print. The models for these works were the previous bestsellers, popular films and the short fiction masterpieces of previous decades. When the tide ebbed in the 1980s, much of the trash was left dead in the backlists of paperback publishers, but the horror novel had become firmly established. This is signifi- cant from a number of perspectives. Rapid evolution and ex- perimentation were encouraged. All kinds of horror literature benefited from the incorporation of every conceivable ele- ment of horrific effect and technique from other literature and film and video and comics. The most useful and provocative view we can take on the horror novel in recent years is that it constitutes an avant- garde and experimental literary form which attempts to trans- late the horrific effects previously thought to be the nearly exclusive domain of the short forms into newly conceived long forms that maintain the proper atmosphere and effects. Certainly isolated examples of more or less successful novel- length horror fiction exist, from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Haunting of Hill House, but they are comparatively in- frequent next to the constant, rich proliferation and devel- opment of horror in shorter forms in every decade from Poe to the present. The horror novels of the past do not in aggre- gate form a body of traditional literature and technique from which the present novels spring and upon which they depend. It is evident both from the recent novels themselves and from the public statements of many of the writers that Ste- phen King, Peter Straub and Ramsey Campbell, and a num- ber of other leading novelists, have been discussing among themselves—and trying to solve in their works—the perceived problems of developing the horror novel into a sophisticated and effective form. In so doing, they have highlighted the desirability of a volume such as The Dark Descent, which Tepresents the context from which the literature springs and attempts to elucidate the whole surround of horror today. Horror novels grow to a very large extent out of the variedIntroduction §5 and highly evolved novellas and short stories exemplified in this book. Our perceptions of the nature of horror literature have been changing and evolving rapidly in recent decades, to the point where a compilation of the horror story, orga- nized according to new principles, is needed to manifest the broadened nature of the literature. Before proceeding in the next section to begin an anatomy of horror, it is interesting to note that there has been a re- newed fashion for horror in every decade since the First World War, but this is the first such ‘‘revival’’ that has produced numerous novels. There was a general increase in horror, particularly the ghost story, in the 1920s under the influence of M. R. James, both a prominent writer and anthologist, and such masters as Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, Edith Wharton and others. At that time the great horror magazine, Weird Tales, was founded in the U.S. In the 1930s, the dark fantasy story or weird tale became prominent, influenced by the magazine mentioned above, the growth of the H. P. Lovecraft circle of writers, and a proliferation of anthologies, either in series or as huge compendiums celebrating the first century of horror fiction. After the films and books of the 1930s, the early 1940s produced the finest ‘‘great works’’ collections, epito- mized by And the Darkness Falls, edited by Boris Karloff, and Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser; and Arkham House, the great specialty publisher devoted to this day to bringing into print collections by great horror authors, was founded by writer Donald Wandrei to print the collected works of H. P. Lovecraft. After the war came the science fiction horrors of the 1950s, in all those monster films and in the works of Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury. In the early sixties we had the craze for ‘‘junk food’’ paperback horror anthologies and collections, under the advent of the midnight horror movie boom on TV. But as we remarked above, short fiction always remained at the6 The Dark Descent forefront. Even the novelists were famous for their short sto- Ties. A lot has changed. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final cri- terion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. —H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature Much as we ask for it, the frisson of horror, among the many oddities of our emotional life, is one of the oddest. For one thing, it is usually a response to some- thing that is not there. Under normal circumstances, that is, it attends only such things as nightmares, pho- bias and literature. In that respect it is unlike terror, which is extreme and sudden fear in the face of a ma- terial threat... . The terror can be dissipated by a round of buckshot. Horror, on the other hand, is fas- cinated dread in the presence of an immaterial cause. The frights of nightmares cannot be dissipated by a round of buckshot; to flee them is to run into them at every turn. —Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny Ill_ What It Is Sigmund Freud remarked that we immediately recognize scenes that are supposed to provoke horror, ‘‘even if they actually provoke titters.’’ It seems to me, however, that hor- ror fiction has usually been linked to or categorized by man- ifest signs in texts, and this has caused more than a little confusion among commentators over the years. Names suchIntroduction 7 as weird tales, gothic tales, terror tales, ghost stories, super- natural tales, macabre stories—all clustered around the prin- ciple of a real or implied or fake intrusion of the supernatural into the natural world, an intrusion which arouses fear—have been used as appellations for the whole body of literature, sometimes interchangeably by the same writer. So often, and in so many of the best works, has the intrusion been a ghost, that nearly half the time you will find ‘‘horror story’’ and “‘shost story’’ used interchangeably. And this is so in spite of the acknowledged fact that supernatural horror in literature embodies many manifestations (from demons to vampires to werewolves to pagan gods and more) and, further, that ghosts are recognizably not supposed to horrify in a fair number of ghost stories. J. A. Cuddon, a thorough scholar, has traced the early connections between ghost and horror stories from the 1820s to the 1870s, viewing them as originally separable: ‘‘The growth of the ghost story and the horror story in this mid- century period tended to coalesce; indeed, it is difficult to establish objective criteria by which to distinguish between the two. A taxonomical approach invariably begins to break down at an early stage. . . . On balance, it is probable that a ghost story will contain an element of horror.’’ Jack Sullivan, another distinguished scholar and anthologist, sums up the problems of definition and terminology thusly: ‘‘We find our- selves in a tangled morass of definitions and permutations that grows as relentlessly as the fungus in the House of Usher.’’ Sullivan chooses ‘‘ghost story’’ as generic, presum- ably to have one leg to stand on facing in each direction. We choose ‘‘horror’’ as our term, both in accordance with the usage of the marketplace (Tor Books has a Tor Horror line; horror is a label for the marketing category under which novels and collections appear), and because it points toward a transaction between the reader and the text that is the es- sence of the experience of reading horror fiction, and not any thing contained within that text (such as a ghost, literal or implied). And moreover, H. P. Lovecraft, the theoretician8 The Dark Descent and critic who most carefully described the literature in his Supernatural Horror in Literature, who was certainly the most important American writer of horror fiction in the first half of this century, has to the best of my memory not a single conventional ghost story in the corpus of his works. It is Lovecraft’s essay that provides the keystone upon which any architecture of horror must be built: atmosphere. And it seems to me that Freud is in accord. What this means is that you can experience true horror in, potentially, any work of fiction, be it a western, a contemporary gothic, sci- ence fiction, mystery, whatever category of content the writer may choose. A work may be a horror story (and indeed in- cluded in this anthology) no matter what, as long as the at- mosphere allows. This means that horror is set free from the supernatural, that it is unnecessary for the story to contain any overt or implied device or manifestation whatsoever. The emotional transaction is paramount and definitive, and we Tecognize its presence even when it doesn’t work as it is supposed to. To them [people who don’t read horror] it is a kind of pornography, inducing horripilation instead of erection. And the reader who appears to relish such sensations— why he’s an emotional masochist, the slave of an un- holy drug, a decadent psychotic beast. —David Aylward, Revenge of the Past First, the longing for mystic experience which seems always to manifest itself in periods of social confusion, when political progress is blocked: as soon as we feel that our own world has failed us, we try to find evi- dence for another world; second, the instinct to inocu- late ourselves against panic at the real horrors loose on the earth . . . by injections of imagery horror, which soothe us with the momentary illusion that the forcesIntroduction 9 of madness and murder may be tamed and compelled to provide us with a mere dramatic entertainment. —Edmund Wilson, A Literary Chronicle I used to read horror when I was depressed to jump- start my emotions—but it only gave me temporary re- lief. —Kathryn Cramer (personal correspondence) It proves that the tale of horror and/or the supernat- ural is serious, is important, is necessary . . . not only to those human beings who read to think, but to those who read to feel; the volume may even go a certain distance toward proving the idea that, as this mad cen- tury races toward its conclusion—a conclusion which seems ever more ominous and ever more absurd—it may be the most important and useful form of fiction which the moral writer may command. —Stephen King, Introduction to The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural IV The Death of Horror The death of the novel and the death of the short story are literary topics we joke about, so it should come as no partic- ular surprise that a recent, and otherwise excellent, collection of essays on supernatural fiction in America from 1820-1920 States that supernatural fiction died around 1920 (‘‘demate- Tialized’’), to be replaced by psychoanalysis, which took over its function. Now it seems to me surprising to maintain that fiction that embodies psychological truth in metaphor is re- Placeable by science—it sounds rather too much like replac- ing painting with photography. Yet this is only a recent example of the obituary approach, an effective gambit when10 The Dark Descent dealing with material you wish to exterminate, and often used by self-appointed arbiters of taste. Let’s resurrect the great Modemist critic, Edmund Wilson, for a few minutes. Wilson wrote an essay on horror in the early 1940s that challenged the whole canon of significant works established by the anthologists of the 1930s and ’40s, from Dorothy Sayers and M. R. James and Hugh Walpole and Marjorie Bowen to Wise and Fraser, and Karloff. Wilson proposed his own list of masterpieces, from Poe and Gogol (‘‘the greatest master’) and Melville and Turgenev through Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw to Walter de la Mare and, ultimately, Kafka (‘‘he went straight for the morbidities of the psyche’’). He, Wilson, seems to be reaching toward a redefinition of horror literature, but unfortunately his essay vibrates with the discomfort of the humanist and rationalist confronting the supernatural. He rejects nearly every classic story in the horror canon and every single writer principally known for work in the field, reserving particular antipathy for H. P. Lovecraft, the anti-Modernist (to whom he devoted a whole separate essay of demolition). Wilson’s comments on Kafka are instructive. Kafka’s ‘“‘vi- sions of moral horror’ are ‘‘narratives that compel our atten- tion, and fantasies that generate more shudders than the whole of Algernon Blackwood or M. R. James combined.”’ Kafka’s characters ‘‘have turned into the enchanted denizens of a world in which, prosaic though it is, we can find no firm foothold in Teality and in which we can never even be certain whether souls are being saved or damned . . . he went straight for the mor- bidities of the psyche with none of the puppetry of specters and devils that earlier writers still carried with them.’’ Wilson’s view of the evolution of horror is implicit in these comments. He sees the literature as evolving in a linear fashion into fantasies of the psyche removed entirely from supernatural trappings. Any au- dience interested in these trappings is regressive. He sees no value to a modern reader in obsolete fiction. Since Wilson’s presupposition is that the evolution of hor-Introduction 11 ror ended with Kafka, his theory of horror reading among his contemporaries—that they are indulging in a ‘‘revived’’ taste for an obsolete form—allows him to start from the prem- ise that the ghost story is dead, that it died with the advent of the electric light, and to conclude immediately that con- temporary versions are doomed attempts to revive the corpse of the form. Sound familiar? It’s the familiar ‘‘death of lit- erature’ obituary approach. Well, back to the grave, Ed- mund. You’ré dead, and horror literature is alive and well, happily evolving and diversifying. But Wilson’s approach to the horror canon was and remains generally stimulating. For it appears that as horror has evolved in this century it has grown significantly in the areas of ‘‘the morbidities of the psyche’’ and fantasies of ‘‘a world in which, prosaic though it is, we can find no firm foothold in reality.’’ In order to achieve the fantastic, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to portray extraordinary things. The strang- est event will enter into the order of the universe if it is alone in a world governed by laws. . . . You cannot im- pose limits on the fantastic; either it does not exist at all, or else it extends throughout the universe. It is an entire world in which things manifest a captive, tormented thought, a thought both whimsical and enchained, that gnaws away from below at the mechanism’s links without ever managing to express itself. In this world, matter is never entirely matter, since it offers only a constantly frus- trated attempt at determinism, and mind is never com- pletely mind, because it has fallen into slavery and has been impregnated and dulled by matter. All is woe. Things suffer and tend towards inertia, without ever attaining it; the debased, enslaved mind unsuccessfully strives toward consciousness and freedom. —Jean-Paul Sartre, AMINADAB or The Fantastic Considered as a Language12. The Dark Descent V_ The Three Streams We return to the life and state of horror fiction in the pres- ent. Contemporary horror fiction occurs in three streams, in three principal modes or clusters of emphasis: 1. moral al- legorical 2. psychological metaphor 3. fantastic. The stories in this anthology are separated according to these categories. These modes are not mutually exclusive, but usually a matter of emphasis along a spectrum from the overtly moral at one extreme to the nearly totally ambiguous at the other, with human psychology always a significant factor but only some- times the principal focus. Perhaps we might usefully imagine them as three currents in the same ocean. Stories that cluster at the first pole are characteristically supernatural fiction, most usually about the intrusion of su- pemnatural evil into consensus reality, most often about the horrid and colorful special effects of evil. These are the sto- ries of children possessed by demons, of hauntings by evil ghosts from the past (most ghost stories), stories of bad places (where evil persists from past times), of witchcraft and sa- tanism. In our day they are often written and read by lapsed Christians, who have lost their firm belief in good but still have a discomforting belief in evil. Stories in this stream imply or state the Manichean universe that is so difficult to perceive in everyday life, wherein evil is so evident, horror so common that we are left with our sensitivities partly or fully deadened to it in our post-Holocaust, post-Vietnam, six- o’clock news era. A strong extra-literary appeal of such fic- tion, it seems to me, is to jump-start the readers’ deadened emotional sensitivities. And the moral allegory has its significant extra-literary ap- peal in itself to that large audience that desires the attribution of a moral calculus (usually teleological) deriving from ulti- mate and metaphysical forms of good and evil behind events in an everyday reality. Ginjer Buchanan says that ‘‘all the best horror is written by lapsed Catholics.’’Introduction 13 In speaking of stories and novels in this first stream, we are speaking of the most popular form of horror fiction today, the commercial bestseller lineage of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, and a majority of the works of Stephen King. These stories are taken to the heart of the commercial- category audience that is characteristically style-deaf (regard- less of the excellence of some of the works), the audience that requires repeated doses of such fiction for its emotional effect to persist. This stream is the center of category horror publishing. The second group of horror stories, stories of aberrant hu- man psychology embodied metaphorically, may be either purely supernatural, such as Dracula, or purely psychologi- cal, such as Robert Bloch’s Psycho. What characterizes them as a group is the monster at the center, from the monster of Frankenstein, to Carmilla, to the chain-saw murderer—an overtly abnormal human or creature, from whose acts and on account of whose being the horror arises. D. H. Lawrence’s little boy, Faulkner’s Emily, and, more subtly, the New Yorker of Henry James’ ‘‘The Jolly Corner’’ show the extent to which this stream interpenetrates and blends with the main- stream of psychological fiction in this century. Both Love- craft and Edmund Wilson, from differing perspectives, see Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness as essentially horror fiction. There has been strong resistance on the part of crit- ics, from Wilson to the present, to admitting nonsupernatural psychological horror into consideration of the field, allowing many to declare the field a dead issue for contemporary lit- erature, of antiquarian interest only since the 1930s. This trend was probably aided by the superficial examination of the antiquarianism of both M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft. But by 1939 an extremely significant transition is apparent, Particularly in the U.S. Weird Tales and the Lovecraft circle of writers, as well as the popular films, had made horror a vigorous part of popular culture, had built a large audience among the generally nonliterary readership for pulp fiction, a ‘lower-class’’ audience. And in 1939 John W. Campbell,14 =‘ The Dark Descent the famous science fiction editor, founded the revolutionary pulp fantasy magazine, Unknown. From 1923 to 1939, the leading source of horror and supernatural fiction in the En- glish language was Weird Tales, publishing all traditional styles but tending toward the florid and antiquarian. Unknown was an aesthetic break with traditional horror fiction. Camp- bell demanded stories with contemporary, particularly urban, settings, told in clear, unornamented prose style. Unknown featured stories by all the young science fiction writers whose work was changing that genre in Campbell’s Astounding. Al- fred Bester, Eric Frank Russell, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard and others, particularly such fan- tasists as Theodore Sturgeon, Jane Rice, Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown and Fritz Leiber. The stories tended to focus equally on the supernatural and the psychological. Psychology was often quite overtly the un- derpinning for horror, as in, for example, Hubbard’s ‘“‘He Didn’t Like Cats,’’ in which there is an extended discussion between the two supporting characters as to whether the cen- tral character’s problem is supernatural or psychological . . . and we never know, for either way he’s doomed. Unknown broke the dominance of Weird Tales and influenced such sig- nificant young talents as Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson. The magazine encouraged the genrification of certain types of psychological fiction and, at the same time, crossbred a good bit of horror into the growing science fiction field. This reinforced a cultural trend apparent in the monster and mad scientist films of the 1930s, giving us the enormous spawn of SF/horror films of the 1950s and beyond. It is interesting to note that as our perceptions of horror fiction and what the term includes change over the decades, differing works seem to fall naturally into or out of the cate- gory. The possibilities of psychological horror seem in the end to blur distinctions, and there is no question that horror is becoming ever more inclusive. Stories of the third stream have at their center ambiguity as to the nature of reality, and it is this very ambiguity thatIntroduction 15 generates the horrific effects. Often there is an overtly super- natural (or certainly abnormal) occurrence, but we know of it only by allusion. Often, essential elements are left unde- scribed so that, for instance, we do not know whether there was really a ghost or not. But the difference is not merely supernatural versus psychological explanation: third stream stories lack any explanation that makes sense in everyday reality—we don’t know, and that doubt disturbs us, horrifies us. This is the fiction to which Sartre’s analysis alludes, the fantastic. At its extreme, from Kafka to the present, it blends indistinguishably with magic realism, the surreal, the absurd, all the fictions that confront reality through paradoxical dis- tance. It is the fiction of radical doubt. Thomas M. Disch once remarked that Poe can profitably be considered as a contemporary of Kierkegaard, and it is evident that this stream develops from the beginnings of horror fiction in the short story. In the contemporary field it is a major current. Third stream stories tend to cross all category lines but usually they do not use the conventional supernatural as a distancing device. While most horror fiction declares itself at some point as violating the laws of nature, the fantastic worlds of third stream fiction use as a principal device what Sartre has called the language of the fantastic. At the end of a horror story, the reader is left with a new perception of the nature of reality. In the moral allegory strain, the point seems to be that this is what reality was and has been all along (i.e., literally a world in which supernat- ural forces are at work) only you couldn’t or wouldn’t rec- ognize it. Psychological metaphor stories basically use the intrusion of abnormality to release repressed or unarticulated psychological states. In her book, Powers of Horror, critic Julia Kristeva says that horror deals with material just on the edge of repression but not entirely repressed and inaccessi- ble. Stories from our second stream use the heightening effect of the monstrously abnormal to achieve this release. Third stream stories maintain the pretense of everyday reality only to annihilate it, leaving us with another world entirely, one