Horror: The 100 Best Books (15 page)

This huge collection, besides featuring short novels like J. Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" and Henry James'
The Turn of the Screw
, includes many stories that have since become anthology perennials: Wilkie Collins' "Mad Monkton", Ambrose Bierce's "A Watcher By the Dead", Oliver Onions' "The Beckoning Fair One", Guy De Maupassant's "The Horla" and F. Marion Crawford's "The Upper Berth". Besides these Victorian and Edwardian classics, Walpole (who is himself represented by "Tarnhelm") selects pieces from the leading ghost story writers of the day, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood, Marjorie Bowen, Margaret Irwin, and A. M. Burrage. Arthur Machen and M. R. James are included with comparatively unfamiliar stories, "Change" and "Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance".

***

Simply the best anthology ever assembled; I've held this view for over thirty years. Walpole edited the sequel to Hutchinson's
Century of Creepy Stories
in 1937, four years after the first volume. It was a vast improvement on the first as well, that book being merely several collections edited by Cynthia Asquith rather roughly cobbled together. Despite having the appearance of a Walpole old pals' meeting (there is no denying it contains many of his literary chums), the contents alone make it unique. Find me another book that contains "Carmilla", "The Beckoning Fair One", "The Horla" and
The Turn of the Screw
! My interest in ghost stories began with this book (and the collected M. R. James) at a very tender age. I was a precocious reader and my parents' bookshelves contained many discoveries. These two were there, along with Eleanor Scott's
Randall's Round
and Robert W. Chambers'
Slayer of Souls
. I must have read them all by the age of ten, though I can't claim I understood much of them until later. Arthur Machen's "Change", for example, made no sense at all until much later in my life, when I realized he was talking about the little people swapping one of their own for a human baby. In fact, Walpole still seems to be the only editor to have used the story. The first thing about the book to give you the horrors was the spooky drawing on the spine (which you'd dare yourself to look at, then regret bitterly at bedtime that you did). But as the contents came to make more sense, the spine looked quite comforting . . . The rarities include the Ex-Private X story from his impossibly rare collection
Someone in the Room
: an embittered rustic kills his daughter and her lover as the latter is a member of a rich family occupying his old home. The murdered pair return to avenge their death. It contains a line which made me shiver then and still does: "
There's company in the copse at night as you wouldn't like meeting. There's them that can't sleep because they lies hard and damp.
" Other scenes firmly planted in my memory from the first readings of the book are: John Metcalfe's phantom boat chasing the owner's ex-wife; Le Fanu's description of the destruction of the vampire's body (floating in blood in its coffin!); Walpole's Uncle Robert who could change into a dog and smelt of caraway-seed (I still don't know what that smells like); Marjorie Bowen's ghost who said she lived generally in the garden and smelt of earth; the little-known but absolutely creepy Ann Bridge story where two dead climbers come and get two children -- in my ten-year old mind, that struck home with a vengeance; and the pure terror (I can still feel it) of "Browdean Farm", where a broken-necked ghost comes and taps at the window, and once -- horrendously -- starts towards the narrator when he looks out of the front door. The sheer cost of producing books in this size has made such an anthology nigh on commercially impossible today. Even David Hartwell's monster
The Dark Descent
(1987) could only get to 1011 pages compared to Walpole's 1023. Mary Danby's big collections for Marks and Spencer, even backed by such a large retail chain, could only go up to 700 pages. It's a pity. No collection of ghost stories should be without Walpole's book. By size and quality of contributors alone, it is the best anthology I have ever seen. I do not think we will see anything like it again. -- HUGH LAMB

41: [
c
. 1938] C. S. LEWIS -
The Dark Tower

Orfieu, a Cambridge don, reveals to a company that includes the narrator, C. S. Lewis himself, and Ransom, the hero of the author's
Perelandra
(1943) and
That Hideous Strength
(1945), that he has constructed a chronoscope, a device which enables him to look into a parallel world. In this Othertime they observe a horde constructing an exact replica of the Cambridge University Library and a worker caste subjected to a race of hive-mind components who are created by an overlord known as a Unicorn, who has a sting in his forehead. Scudamore, the youngest of the party, discovers that the current Unicorn is his double and is accidentally whisked away to live in his counterpart's body . . . This suggestive fragment, clearly influenced by H. G. Wells but in its parallel world theme also perhaps the dark side of Lewis' "Narnia" books, was composed around 1938. The novel was either abandoned or has not survived complete. In this 1977 edition, with notes by Walter Hooper, it is accompanied by several uncollected science fiction stories and another fragment,
After Ten Years
, about the Trojan War.

***

More years ago than I care to remember -- probably about 1945/50 -- I was listening to an old Valentine Dyall
Man in Black
radio programme. It was the one about the man who was spending a jolly, mind-destroying evening observing a corpse in a glass-panelled coffin; only the corpse wasn't dead, and, when it tapped on the glass, the guy who was keeping his morbid vigil to win a bet apparently blew a fuse. Shortly afterwards the corpse-impersonator blew a fuse as well, and the result was as predictably cheerful as the last scene of
Hamlet
. The point was that the hapless vigil-keeper was philosophizing about the hypothesis of fear: he said that fear consisted of the two words "what if?" and that we entered the state we call fear only because of possibilities. Thinking about it intermittently over the past four decades, I believe there's some mileage in it. The most effective horror and the most spine-tingling fear are frequently centred on the unknown. It follows, for me at any rate, that the extra edge of
unknownness
adds a certain piquancy to a horror story. We are familiar with what happens to Dracula and his minions when they get their xyloid cardiac implants; werewolves respond equally satisfactorily to silver blades or silver bullets; ghouls and poltergeists avoid Holy Water; and a good .44 magnum will put paid to mere physical monstrosities. But how do we deal with unknown horror? What if the author himself left the tale tantalizingly unfinished, and the reader's imagination has to supply the ending? My choice of C. S. Lewis's
Dark Tower
depends not only upon its being a first class horror/mystery story in its own right as far as it goes (and we only have the first sixty-four pages of it) but upon this intriguing element of its missing ending. I'm also fascinated by coincidences, or what we choose to call coincidences, and the real life coincidence attached to
The Dark Tower
is almost a story in itself. Lewis had a gardener named Fred Paxford, who saved the unfinished manuscript of
The Dark Tower
from the flames after Lewis died. From all accounts, Mr. Paxford was a great gardener, but very pessimistic. Predicting all manner of crop failures throughout the year, he nevertheless produced superb results each autumn. Upon him Lewis based the character of Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in
The Silver Chair
, part of the immortal "Narnia" series for children. This Puddleglum was as pessimistic as the Apostle Thomas, and equally loyal and faithful when the chips were down. In the story he saves the other heroes by extinguishing the witch's fire and destroying her evil spell. That the real Fred Paxford saved many of Lewis's manuscripts from the bonfire after his death is an uncanny parallel with the action of his literary
alter ego
in
The Silver Chair
. What makes
The Dark Tower
such an outstandingly good horror/mystery story? Firstly, its intriguing, unknown ending; secondly, its very smooth transition from the ordinary to the horrific and weird: for my money, the best horror stories begin in the here and the now and almost imperceptibly remind us that the fagade of everyday life, behind which we shelter from the Great Unknown, offers as much protection from the real universe as a chocolate fireguard. Thirdly,
The Dark Tower
incorporates one of my favourite horror story ingredients: an alternative universe. When the explorers get their chronoscope working, it dawns on them at last that they are looking neither at the past nor the future but a sinister, alternative
present
. Somehow that seems so much more threatening than a time that has passed or a time that is yet to be -- there is always the danger of being sucked across into that horrendous
other now
. Then, fourthly, there is the eternal conflict element in the story. In the Dark Tower of the title a battle is raging between good and evil: the same battle that vivifies Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings
, or Lewis's
Ransom
trilogy. Perhaps it might be truer and more accurate to talk of
the
battle, or
the
war rather than a battle. Only this one great fight between Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice, Order and Chaos, Truth and Lies -- whatever names we choose to give the Contestants -- is real. All other conflicts are merely symptoms and manifestations of
it
. This, too, is a major attraction of
The Dark Tower
. Lewis has no doubts about the eschatology. However hard the struggle, and however great the suffering before the final victory, Good will triumph.
The Dark Tower
is not only a brilliant and fascinating unfinished masterpiece of mystery and horror: it is a worthwhile philosophical statement. -- LIONEL FANTHORPE

A young American soldier, hit by a shell on the last day of the First World War, lies in a hospital bed, a quadruple amputee who has lost his eyes, ears, mouth and nose. He remains conscious, and able to reason, and tries to communicate to his doctors his wish that he be put on show in a carnival as a demonstration of the horrors of war. Trumbo's impassioned novel -- written in a pacifist fervour as the world geared up for another war -- was one of the main causes of his later troubles with the House of Un-American Activities Commission. In 1971, the author returned to
Johnny Got His Gun
and made his only film as a director, from his own screenplay. Despite Trumbo's obvious commitment to the material, and its universal timeliness, the film -- which stars Timothy Bottoms, Jason Robards, Diane Varsi and Donald Sutherland as Jesus Christ -- is an awkward work that adds little to the shattering brilliance of the original.

***

This is the most powerful piece of fiction I know, and the most frightening. Like Andreyev's
The Seven Who Were Hanged
and Patchen's
The Journal of Albion Moonlight
,
Johnny Got His Gun
is a brilliant, all but unbearable
tour de force
, combining a high level of artistic technique with a fearless depth of human compassion to achieve a work that is not only breathtaking in its virtuosity but potentially life-changing for those who read it. Dalton Trumbo's novel certainly changed my life, and I suspect that it has altered irrevocably anyone daring enough to encounter it on its own fierce terms. It is surely a story about the horrors of war. But to say that
Johnny Got His Gun
is a horror story would be tantamount to calling
Hamlet
a murder mystery: true enough as far as it goes, but a trivialization. This is difficult reading in the finest sense; its unflinching courage and passion demand a braver response than the rudimentary esthetic sense and readiness to be entertained that are required by most novels. As challenging as it is, its terrifying beauty has kept it in print for 50 years, and I suspect that it will outlive us all. Since I have found it necessary to make my selection from outside the genre, I am moved to wonder why the best-known titles in dark fantasy, the very field that purports to deal most directly with matters of life and death, should compare less than favorably with a book by a man who was primarily a screenwriter (one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten) and whose magnum opus remains unexamined, if not altogether unknown, by aficionados of horror. Perhaps the problem -- the reason why such a question can even be raised -- is inherent in the nature of genrefication. It seems to me that to embrace the assumptions underlying such subdivision does a disservice to readers and writers alike. For favoritism, amusing and comforting though it seems to those receiving special treatment, may ultimately imply disrespect for oneself and for others, as does any indulgence. All injustices, arising as they do out of hierarchical thinking, have at their root the notion of dualism as a common factor. And just as slaves degrade their masters by co-operating with presumptions of superiority and inferiority, to accept the splitting of fiction into separate camps does violence to the medium itself as well as the individuals who comprise the body of world literature as a whole. It finally occurs to Trumbo's Johnny that if guns are made they will be aimed, and if bullets are fired they may one day be directed at us.

Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn't fight . . . The menace to our lives does not lie on the other side of a nomansland that was set apart without our consent it lies within our own boundaries here and now . . .