Three Images

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: This discussion is based on Tzvetan Todorov's analysis of the fantastic, which is detailed in “The Tzvetan Todorov Plot.”

In solving crimes, Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and other consulting or amateur detectives often look for singularities—things that were out of place, things that didn't “belong,” things that stood out.

Why do things stand out from everything else? Why, in a myriad of other objects, does this one physical entity catch the eye (or the ear or the nose or the tongue or the finger)? What makes it different and, therefore, visible?

A bell rope attached to nothing: how singular!

Abnormal things stand out. According to Oxford Dictionaries, “abnormal” means “deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.” Something abnormal deviates, or departs from, the normal or the usual. A beautiful woman, in this sense, is “abnormal,” but she is neither “undesirable” nor “worrying,” so she doesn't fill the bill.

What about a nude? Even if she (or he) were unusually attractive and naked, it's likely that a nude's presence, among clothed people, would be regarded as at least “undesirable” by some—perhaps many. Such a person's presence might also be seen as “worrying.” However, in a nudist camp, a clothed person would stand out, perhaps as “undesirable” or even “worrying,” even if he or she were attractive. In either case, the person, nude or clothed, has violated the norms, or “rules,” of the greater group. Abnormality, like beauty, is, it appears, in the eyes of the beholder, at least to some extent.

Fortunately, we do not need to be philosophers to recognize things that many, if not all, people regard as abnormal. We can start with a good image browser (I prefer Bing; you may favor Google.) All we need to do is to select our filters and type in our search term: “abnormal.” The server will return lots of images that have been labeled “abnormal.” We can then select those that we also view as abnormal and ask ourselves why these particular images seem abnormal to us.

Something uncanny!

Here is an image in which placement and shape conspire to create an abnormal effect. A glass of wine is positioned directly in front of a woman in a simple white dress. At the level of her crotch, the glass of wine, at first glance, appears to be her pubic hair. However, the woman is fully dressed, the dark triangular shape cannot be her pubic hair—unless, perhaps, her dress is cut out to reveal this feature. We look again, more closely. No. The dress does not have a cutout, and the dark triangle is not hair, but wine in a glass. A sight which had seemed to be fantastic turns out to be uncanny. At first, the sight appeared to deviate from the norms or propriety in a manner which some would find “undesirable or worrying.” Closer inspection shows that such is not the case.

Something marvelous!

This image shows a spoon lying on a white surface. It casts a shadow, part of which is visible below the bowl of the spoon. The spoon itself looks quite normal. There is nothing in the least unusual about the utensil itself. However, the image is slightly “worrying” because the spoon casts the shadow of a different implement altogether—that of a fork. The shapes of the fork's tines, rather than the rounded edge of the spoon's bowl, contradict our interpretation of the object as a spoon. The shadow under the spoon defies our experience, wherein a fork, not a spoon, would cast such a shadow. All we know about spoons and forks, about shadows, and about the science of optic is contravened.

The first image, although seemingly abnormal, can be explained as normal. What we see is an illusion caused by placement and shape. The effect is uncanny, but not fantastic. However, neither science nor reason can account for the shadow of the fork cast by the spoon. This image, therefore, is marvelous, and the marvelous is, or can be, the source of the horrific. In this image, we are confronted by a refutation of reason, a denial of the validity of empiricism, a denunciation of science itself. This image suggests that we neither know anything for certain nor are able to know anything with certainty.

Something fantastic!

A third possibility exists: the fantastic consists of things that could be either marvelous (for example, supernatural) or uncanny (extremely unusual but explainable through science or reason) and for which the jury remains undecided. Such a thing might be the cyclops of ancient Greek mythology. Some scientists suggest that the apparently fantastic creature is explained by ancient people's mistaking the skull of Deinotherium giganteum for that of a gigantic, one-eyed human:

The large hole in the center of the skull of Deinotherium giganteum, representing the animal's extremely large nasal opening, could well be the foundation for their tales of the fearsome one-eyed Cyclops.

The fantastic and the uncanny are variation on Holmes's singularity. Holmes's singularity is strange; it is displaced; it does not “belong” in its present environment; therefore, for the detective, it is a possible clue regarding the mystery he seeks to solve. However, that it is solvable is never in doubt, either to Holmes himself or to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legion of readers. Likewise, the fantastic is potentially solvable, while the uncanny is completely solvable.

Holmes' singularity is at first fantastic, but it is always, in the end, found to be uncanny. The marvelous is inexplicable; that is precisely why it is and remains marvelous. As such, it has no place in the detective story as it is practiced by Holmes.

Plotting a Horror Story as a Mystery

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Many of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories start with Sherlock Holmes's observations about a client. In “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” the detective makes declarations about the modes of transportation Helen Stoner used and about her truthfulness.

“You have come by train this morning, I see,” he tells her. He adds that she also “had a good drive in a dog-cart, along heavy roads, before [reaching] the station.” Helen is “bewildered” by Holmes's performance, until he explains how he deduced these facts: “I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm of your left glove,” he says, adding, concerning her ride in the dog-cart, “the left arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less [sic] than seven places. There is no vehicle save a dog-cart which throws up mud in that way, and then only when you sit on the left hand side of the driver.”

Later, when he asks her whether she has told him everything and she answers that she has, Holmes says she has not; she is shielding her stepfather. The “five little livid spots” on her hand, representing pressure from “four fingers and a thumb” indicate that her stepfather has “cruelly used” her. Holmes's display of such skills characterize him as an astute detective, amazing readers, just as he has amazed Helen and as he regularly amazes his friend and colleague, Dr. Watson.

Doyle was inspired in employing this method of characterization by Dr. Joseph Bell, who taught classes at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary, where he frequently demonstrated the powers of observation and deduction to his students, one of whom was Doyle. In “ From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon, Mattias Bostrom includes four examples of Bell's prowess.

In the first, Bell dips a finger into a “vial” filled with a “bitter liquid” before tasting it. He then invites his students to do the same, and they pass the container from one to the next. After all have complied with his request, he expresses his disappointment at their lack of observation, confessing to them, “While I placed my index finger in the awful brew, it was the middle finger—aye—which somehow found its way into my mouth” (7-8).

In the presence of his students, Bell demonstrated the degree to which a person can ascertain information concerning a patient's “history, nationality, and occupation” simply by means of observation and deduction. The doctor told the day's “first patient,” who wore “civilian clothes,” that the man had “served in the army,” in “a Highland regiment,” as a non-commissioned officer “stationed at Barbados,” and had only recently been discharged (8-9). When the patient confirmed the accuracy of Bell's statements, the doctor explained to his students how he'd reached these conclusions:

“The man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he long been discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to the Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and nor British” (9).

The third example of the powers of observation and deduction occurs as Bell asks a woman at “another lecture” where her cutty pipe is, causing her to produce the item from her handbag. He deduced that she smoked such a pipe, he explains to his students, from the presence of “the ulcer on her lower lip and the glossy scar on her left cheek, indicating a superficial burn.” These marks were produced by the “short-stemmed clay pipe [she] held close to the cheek while smoking.”

Bostrom's fourth example of Bell's skills in observation and deduction follow a student's failed application of the doctor's method. Asked for his diagnosis concerning “another patient,” the student ventures the opinion that the patient suffers from “hip-joint disease.” Bell corrects his pupil:

“The man's limp isn't from his hip but from his foot. Were you to observe closely, you would see there are slits, cut by a knife, in those parts of the shoe where the pressure of the shoe is greater against the foot. The man is a sufferer from corns . . . and has no hip trouble at all. But he has not come here to be treated for corns . . . . His trouble is of a much more serious nature. This is a case of chronic alcoholism . . . . The rubicund nose, the puffed, bloated face, the bloodshot eyes, the tremulous hands and twitching face muscles, with the quick pulsating temporal arteries, all show this. These deductions, gentlemen, must however be confirmed by absolute and concrete evidence. In this instance my diagnosis is confirmed by the fact of my seeing the neck of a whiskey bottle protruding from the patient's right hand coat pocket. . . . Never neglect to ratify your deductions” (9-10).

In these examples, Holmes's own method, based on that of Bell, is summed up nicely: observe, deduce, and verify one's deductions with “absolute and concrete evidence.”

As Bostrom points out, “Bell's assertions, which had first seemed miraculous, appeared perfectly logical after his explanations” (9). In this statement rests the method of the mystery story: present effects, but withhold causes; show the what and even the how, but not the why. Without a full context, readers will find it difficult, if not impossible, to solve the mystery. Therefore, the cause should be provided only at the end of the story, when the detective explains the case.

Interesting, one may think, but what do the methods of detectives and the manner of the mystery have to do with horror fiction? Horror writers do much the same thing as authors of detective stories, except that the explanation, which typically includes an account of the nature or origin of the monster, provides the information the protagonist needs to neutralize or eliminate the monster (or other threat), rather than to solve a crime.

In an interview, Doyle revealed that he normally started the writing process by envisioning the story's end. “The art,” he said, “then lay in writing his way to the end while managing to conceal the finale from the reader” (Bostrom, 78). It's possible that Doyle learned this approach from Edgar Allan Poe, whose own earlier detective fiction Doyle admired; in explaining the process, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” by which he wrote his poem The Raven, Poe says he wrote the poem backward, first devising the end and then making everything lead toward this conclusion so that the story had unity of effect and the end seemed inevitable.

In Writing Monsters, Philip Athans quotes Lynn Abbey as recommending a similar backward approach to plotting horror fiction. She recommends determining how the monster will be neutralized or eliminated and then dismantling “the characters' knowledge and preparation” before developing the “plot details that allow the characters to pick up the pieces [i. e., the clues and other information] they're going to need.”

Such an approach allows writers of both detective and horror fiction to develop their plots since, at the heart of both genres, there is a mystery: a crime in the former case and the nature or origin of a monstrous menace in the latter instance.

Doyle also wrote according to “template,” or formula, from which he seldom varied, Bostrom observes: a client arrives for a consultation; based on observations, Holmes makes and explains deductions about the client; Holmes explains these deductions, identifying his observations; the client presents the facts of his or her case; Holmes investigates the case, sometimes in the company of Watson; Holmes solves the case; the perpetrator is captured (or, we might add, killed).

Applying the writing-backward approach and using this template, Doyle's short story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” might look like this:

The perpetrator is apprehended.	Dr. Grimesby Roylott is killed by a venomous snake.
Holmes solves the case.	Holmes explains that, to prevent his stepdaughters from inheriting most of the fortune their late mother left in his charge when they wed, Roylott uses milk to train a venomous snake to return, at the sound of a whistle, to his room, through a ventilator between his bedroom and that of his first victim, Helen Stoner's sister, Julia. He would then slip a leather loose around the snake's body to return the reptile to the safe he kept in his bedroom. To provide the snake with access from the vent to the bed he'd bolted in place in Julia's bedroom, Roylott installed a bell-cord unconnected to a bell. After Julia's death, he ordered Helen to switch from her own bedroom to her sister's, under the pretext that construction was underway in the wing of the house in which Helen's bedroom is located. He would release the snake at the same time every night until it bit its victim.
Holmes investigates the case.	Holmes, accompanied by Watson, travels to Roylott's house while Roylott is away from home. There, they determine that reliable shutters on the bedroom windows and its locked door are sufficient to have kept out both wild animals and gypsies roaming the estate. Holmes also discovers a vent that connects with the adjacent bedroom, that of Roylott, rather than emptying outdoors; a dummy bell cord; a bed bolted to the floor to make it immovable (a clue shared only at the end of the story); and, in Dr. Roylott's bedroom, a saucer of milk atop a safe (despite the absence of a house cat), a leather leash with a loop in it, and a chair beneath the vent leading to Julia's bedroom.
The client presents the facts of the case.	Helen recounts the engagement of her sister Julia to be married and Julia's mysterious death; the sound of a whistle she hears every night; unnecessary construction on her stepfather's estate; the fortune her late mother left for them, in Dr. Roylott's care, payable to them upon their marriage; and the presence of wild animals and gypsies that freely roam the estate.
Holmes makes and explains the deductions he makes about the client based on his observations.	“You have come by train this morning, I see,” Holmes tells Helen. He adds that she also “had a good drive in a dog-cart, along heavy roads, before you reached the station.” Helen is “bewildered” by Holmes's performance, until he explains how he deduced these facts: “I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm of your left glove,” he says, adding, concerning her ride in the dog-cart, “The left arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less [sic] than seven places. There is no vehicle save a dog-cart which throws up mud in that way, and then only when you sit on the left hand side of the driver.” Later, when he asks her whether she has told him everything and she answers that she has, Holmes says she has not; she is shielding her stepfather. The “five little livid spots” on her hand, representing pressure from “four fingers and a thumb” indicate that her stepfather has “cruelly used” her.
A new client arrives to consult with Holmes.	Holmes's landlady and housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, announces the arrival of Helen Stoner to see him.

Note: The gypsies and the wild animals are introduced as possible suspects in Julia's death.

Not surprisingly, the same method can be used to plot a popular type of horror story. However, the template, or formula, for this type of story differs from the one Doyle used to write his Sherlock Holmes stories. Typically, the template for this type of horror story includes these phases:

1. A series of bizarre incidents occurs.
2. The protagonist learns the nature, origin, or cause of the bizarre incidents.
3. The protagonist uses the knowledge of the nature, origin, or cause of the bizarre incidents to put an end to them.
   
   

Applied to Them!, backward plotting from this horror template might result in something like this:

The protagonist uses the knowledge of the nature, origin, or cause of the bizarre incidents to put an end to them.	Army troops use flamethrowers to destroy two escaped queen ants and their brood. (By nature, queen ants are vital to the survival of their colony and, indeed, to the species itself, “producing thousands of eggs” over their lifetimes.
The protagonist learns the nature, origin, or cause of the bizarre incidents.	FBI agents destroy a gigantic ant with their sub-machine guns. A scientist theorizes that a colony of ants became giants after atomic radiation from a nuclear test at Alamogordo caused them to mutate.
A series of bizarre incidents occurs.	In shock, a girl wanders the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Her trailer appears to have been attacked and destroyed. Gramps Johnson, a store owner is found dead inside his ripped-open store. In an ambulance, the girl sits up when a high-pitched sound occurs. State Trooper Ed Blackburn screams as he goes outdoors to investigate a shrill sound. Since both Johnson, who died of a broken neck and whose body contains formic acid, and Blackburn were found with fired weapons, it seems unlikely their attackers were gunmen. The girl found wandering in the desert awakens from her catatonic state when exposed to formic acid and yells, “Them!”

Plot Twists and Cliffhangers

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Although Charles Dickens didn't actually invent the cliffhanger—it was used as early as The Arabian Nights—he did popularize its use. Like many authors of his day, Dickens serialized his novels, a few chapters of his novels appearing each month until the conclusions of their stories. To keep readers interested in the developing narratives, Dickens ended each installment with a cliffhanger, leaving his protagonists in a difficult situation, in a quandary, with a discovery, or with a revelation. The next installment would resolve the cliffhanger and, at its end, introduce another plot twist.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes “adventures,” introduced another innovation in serialized storytelling. Instead of relying upon plot twists to maintain suspense, Doyle's stories employed the same characters and some of the same settings, but he centered each of his stories upon a new mystery, often with a new villain, for his detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his friend and colleague, Dr. John Watson, to solve. Over time, the characters of both Holmes and Watson were gradually developed, as readers learned more about them.

For any long story or for any continuing story, plot twists, whether in the form of cliffhangers at the end of the story or as unanticipated incidents within a particular story or installment itself, are vital. They seem difficult to devise, but they aren't all that challenging, because writers—and television series' writers in particular—have already developed a sizable number of types of plot twists that represent a source from which other writers may draw inspiration.

In addition to the four types already mentioned (difficult situation, quandary, discovery, and revelation), the American crime drama Justified suggests such types of plot twists and cliffhangers as the double-cross, the triple-cross, the setup, the death (often as the result of a murder) of a character, the rescue, and the assumed identity, to mention but a few variations.

A double-cross occurs when Boyd Crowder's cousin Johnny agrees to betray Boyd to a rival criminal, Wynn Duffy, to avenge himself for Boyd's father Bo's having crippled him as a result of having shot Johnny in the stomach. (Bo was avenging himself on Johnny for Johnny's having tipped Boyd off about an Ephedrine shipment Bo was due to receive, allowing Boyd to blow up the shipment with a rocket launcher. Johnny's betrayal of Bo is another example of a double-cross.)

A triple-cross is shown during a poker game Bo is playing with Roscoe, Jay, and Ali, men who work for Rodney Dunham, a marijuana distributor. Dunham has sold Johnny out to Boyd, who tried to recruit him as a partner in the state-wide heroin-distribution ring Boyd hopes to establish in Tennessee. Learning from Boyd of an upcoming drug shipment from Mexico, Dunham suggests that he and his men hijack it. Asked his source of the information concerning the shipment, Dunham identifies Boyd, as Roscoe, Jay, and Ali point their guns at Johnny, their action suggesting that Dunham has double-crossed Johnny. However, when Johnny reveals that he invested in “people power” by sharing the money he received for his part in an earlier robbery with Roscoe, Jay, and Ali, the men turn their weapons on Dunham, suggesting a triple-cross against Dunham on Johnny's part.

A setup takes place when Albert Fekus, a jail guard, plants a makeshift knife, or “shiv,” in the cell that Boyd's fiancee, Ava Randolph, occupies after her arrest for attempting to dispose of the body of Delroy Baker, whom she shot to protect Ellen May, a prostitute who'd worked for her. Albert had earlier tried to rape Ava, but he was interrupted by the arrival of Susan Crane, a female guard, who informed Albert that Ava was a “protected” prisoner. Albert stabs and cuts himself with the shiv, blaming Ava, whose cellmate backs up Albert's lie. As a result, Ava is transferred to a state prison to await trial on an attempted murder charge. The setup is intensified by the fact that, the day before, charges had been dropped against Ava after Boyd eliminated the witnesses who observed Ava's attempt to dispose of Baker's body (after their scheme to incriminate Boyd for the same act backfired on Ava.)

Deaths occur frequently on Justified as Raylan dispatches outlaws and criminals kill one another as well as the victims of their crimes. Often, such deaths introduce plot twists, as when Boyd's murder of crooked businessman Lee Paxton and Boyd's murderer-for-hire, Hayes Workman, kills Deputy Sheriff Nick Mooney results in the dismissal of charges against Ava for having murdered Baker.

Ellen May is about to be murdered by Boyd's henchman, Colton “Colt” Rhodes, who enters the restroom at a local gas station to cock his pistol, in preparation for shooting Ellen May, while she fills his car's gas tank. (He is driving her to Alabama, when Ava decides it's better to kill than to relocate Ellen May.) When Colt returns, Ellen May has mysteriously disappeared. Did she catch a ride with someone else? Did she run away? The audience is left hanging until the next episode, when it's revealed that a local lawman, Sheriff Shelby Parlow, rescued her.

Parlow also later surprises the series' viewers when it's revealed that he is not who he appears to be. He is introduced as a security agent for the Black Pike Mining Company. He's saved by Boyd during a robbery. To gain control of Harlan County's sheriff's department, Boyd helps Shelby get elected as sheriff. After several other plot twists, it's revealed that Parlow has been living under an assumed identity. He's actually Drew Thompson, a former member of Detroit's Theo Tonin Crime Family. After witnessing Tonin murder someone, Thompson relocated to Harlan, Kentucky, where he started a new life under the name of Shelby Parlow. 

Justified isn't a horror series, of course, but the types of plot twists and cliffhangers it introduces can be used in any genre, so, to make a novel or a short story suspenseful and unpredictable, these types of such devices, used judiciously and with finesse, are recommended:

• difficult situation
• quandary
• discovery
• revelation
• double-cross
• triple-cross
• setup
• death (often as the result of a murder) of a character
• rescue
• assumed identity
  
  

Other television series also suggest a variety of types of plot twists and cliffhangers. Arrow has a multitude, as do most others. By analyzing the episodes in these series, you can compile a long list of types of situations and actions with which to surprise, shock, and intrigue readers while you maintain and heighten your story's suspense. To get you started, here are a few examples from several television series and other works of fiction; there are plenty of others:

Type	Setup	Twist
Death follows survival of death	Arrow: Oliver Queen's father survives a shipwreck.	He commits suicide.
Survival of death or apparent death	Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Holmes falls from the edge of a cliff.	Holmes survives.
	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy Summers drowns.	Buffy is revived by Xander, who administers mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy Summers is killed.	Willow Rosenberg uses witchcraft to return Buffy to life.
	Arrow: Sara Lance is presumed dead in same shipwreck.	She was rescued and trained by the League of Assassins.
	Arrow: Thea Queen kills Sara Lance (Black Canary).	Sara is brought back to life by the Lazarus Pit.
Secret, false, or mistaken identity (anagnorisis)	Arrow: Oliver Queen's father is not Thea's father.	Malcolm Merlyn is Thea's father.
	Arrow: Oliver Queen is not Thea's full brother.	They are half-siblings.
Murder of a recurring character	Arrow: Oliver Queen's mother is a recurring character.	Oliver's mother is murdered.
Murder of a recurring character (continued)	Arrow: Laurel Lance is a recurring character.	Damien Darhk kills Laurel.
Star-crossed lovers meet their doom	Romeo and Juliet: Romeo and Juliet love one another.	Romeo and Juliet commit suicide.
	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy Summers falls in love with Angel, a vampire.	Angel leaves Buffy, moving away from Sunnydale.
A seemingly unbreakable rule is broken	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: There is only one Slayer in all the world.	Kendra Young appears after Buffy Summers's “momentary” death.
	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: There is only one Slayer in all the world.	Faith LaHane appears after Kendra's death.
Reversal of fortune (peripeteia )	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Cordelia Chase's father is wealthy.	Cordelia's father loses his fortune.
A character discovers a life-changing truth about him- or herself	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow Rosenberg believes she is heterosexual.	Willow discovers she's a lesbian.
Readers discover a secret about a character	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Oz seems to be a typical high school student.	Oz discovers he's a werewolf.
	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Joyce Summers's new boyfriend, Ted, seems a likable man.	Ted is a robot.
	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Rupert Giles is a sedate, responsible, mature mentor.	In his youth, Giles, then known as “Ripper,” was wild and violent and dabbled in witchcraft.

Readers discover a secret about a character (continued)	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Sunnydale's germophobic mayor, Richard Wilkins, seems personable, if a bit wacky.	Wilkins is a demon.
	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Professor Maggie Walsh and her graduate assistant, Riley Finn, work at UC Sunnydale.	Walsh and Riley are both secret government agents.
Mistaken belief	Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A threat is believed to have been neutralized.	The threat reappears.
Chekov's gun: a seemingly minor character or plot element introduced early in the narrative that suddenly acquires great importance to the narrative.	A beggar woman appears at the beginning of Sweeney Todd.	The beggar woman is Todd's wife.

Ghosts: An Endangered Species?

Copyright 2010 by Gary Pullman

For various reasons, from humanity’s earliest days, the spirits of the dead, or ghosts, are alleged to have visited the living. Some return to avenge their murders, other to warn loved ones of impending catastrophes, and still others to assuage guilt so powerful that it has survived the grave. If one can believe the stories associated with ghosts, they have haunted everything from ancient graveyards and medieval castles to modern mansions and hotels. Short story writers, novelists, and screenwriters would have their readers and audiences believe that some ghosts have a sense of humor while others are somber, indeed. They have appeared in literary works as diverse as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room,” Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Mark Twain’s “A Ghost Story,” Stephen King’s The Shining and Bag of Bones, and Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas. Ghosts have appeared as guest stars, so to speak, in such movies as Topper, Poltergeist, Beetlejuice, Ghost Busters, The Sixth Sense, The Others, An American Haunting, and many others, and in episodes of such television shows as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Bewitched, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ghost Hunters. There’s no doubt about it: ghosts have not only been reported throughout history, but they have also enjoyed plenty of airtime. The virtual omnipresence of ghosts is curious when one considers that such entities may not actually exist. Although men and women who believe in the existence of ghosts offer such evidence for their existence as eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation, this evidence can be explained without reference to the entities that are supposed to cause them, which makes the actual existence of ghosts questionable at best.

Since the beginning of time, people have claimed to have seen ghosts, and believers in the existence of spirits of the dead declare that so many people couldn’t be deceived or lying in providing eye-witness testimony. It does seem likely that some--perhaps many--such eyewitnesses really do believe that they have seen ghosts. Seeing isn’t believing, though, or shouldn’t be. Scientists regard eyewitness testimony, or anecdotal or testimonial evidence, as they prefer to call it, as being notoriously unreliable. In “anecdotal (testimonial) evidence,” an Internet article concerning such evidence, Robert T. Carroll points out that “anecdotes are unreliable for various reasons,” including the distortion that occurs as accounts are told and retold, exaggeration, confusion regarding “time sequences,” “selective” memory, misrepresented “experiences,” and a variety of other conditions, including the affect upon their testimony that “biases, memories, and beliefs” have. Carroll also suggests that gullibility, “delusions,” and even deliberate deceit also make such testimony “inherently problematic and usually. . . impossible to test for accuracy.”

Most people who investigate reports concerning the presence or appearances of ghosts also seek to photograph them. It has been said that cameras do not lie, but the problem with photographic evidence is that it is easy for photographers to doctor film. In his Internet article concerning “spirit photography,” James Randi gives an example of a rather crude attempt by some spiritualists to fool folks into believing they’d captured the apparition of the deceased author of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, as himself a spiritualist, was a frequent focus of “spook-snappers” who “claimed to summon him up after his death in 1930.” The problem, Randi says, with their evidence is that it is “apparently a cut-out of a reversed photo placed in what appears to be cotton wool”; otherwise, the spirit photograph “agrees in detail, lighting, and expression with the original” photograph of the Doyle which was taken in the author’s “prime” (“spirit photography”). In other words, the photograph is a fake. A favorite technique among those who create fake spirit photographs, Carroll points out, is the “double exposure,” an example of which appears on the article’s webpage. A double exposure occurs when the same film is exposed to first one, and then another, object, with the result that the image of the second object overlays or overlaps the image of the first object; both images appear to have been photographed together, at the same time and in the same place. However, pictures of supposed ghosts sometimes result from the photographer’s own incompetence or “natural events,” rather than deliberate deceitfulness, Carroll concedes, including

various flaws in camera or film, effects due to various exposures, film-processing errors, lens flares (caused by interreflection between lens surfaces), the camera or lens strap hanging over the lens, effects of the flash reflecting off of mirrors, jewelry. . . light patterns, polarization, [or] chemical reactions.

When deliberate deceit occurs, photographers may also use graphic art software or computer graphics software to deliberately manipulate photographs that are uploaded from the camera, into a computer.

If neither eyewitness testimony nor photographs prove the existence of ghosts, perhaps electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, do so. A sophisticated term for tape-recorded voices, EVP demonstrate the presence of ghosts, some contend, since sensitive instruments have recorded the disembodied voices of apparitions. However, as Carroll indicates, in his Internet article, “electric voice phenomenon,” skeptics point out that such sounds may not be voices at all, but may be nothing more than the results of “interference from a nearby CB [citizen’s band radio] operator or cross modulation”--one radio station transmitting over another station’s broadcast. Likewise, EVP may be nothing more than a listener’s interpreting “random noise” as the statements of a disembodied voice or voices. In the same Internet article, Carroll cites the explanation for this tendency by Jim Alcock, a psychologist: “When our brains try to find patterns, they are guided in part by what we expect to hear. . . . People can clearly ‘hear’ voices and words not just in the context of muddled voices, but in a pattern of white noise in which there are no words at all.” It seems that, for these reasons, EVP is just as problematic as the proof of ghosts’ existence as eyewitness reports and photographs have been shown to be.

Perhaps the abrupt drop in temperature that some ghost hunters have both felt and recorded will prove more convincing evidence of the existence of the spirits of the dead. According to an anonymous “paranormal researcher,” who writes, in answer to a question posted on Yahoo! Answers, it is believed that such “cold spots” result from ghosts’ draining of energy sources, such as electricity, as a means to produce sounds or to speak. Supposedly, the energy they draw from the environment heats their own energy, but this heat is then dissipated by the sound effect the ghost produces with this borrowed energy. Neither this researcher nor any other seems able to explain how a disembodied spirit--that is, an entity that has no lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, or lungs--can speak, even if it does help itself to ambient energy sources. Once again, Carroll finds such evidence to be less than persuasive. In his Internet article, “ghost,” he notes that “many people report physical changes in haunted places, especially a feeling of a presence accompanied by temperature drop and hearing unaccountable sounds” and agreeing that such people “are not imagining things,” he, nevertheless, discounts the notion that ghosts are responsible for these phenomena. Instead, he says,

Scientists who have investigated haunted places account for both the temperature changes and the sounds by finding physical sources of the drafts, such as empty spaces behind walls or currents set in motion by low frequency sound waves (infrasound) produced by such mundane objects as extraction fans.

Sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation are “produced by such things as power lines, electric appliances, radio waves, and microwaves,” Carroll observes, in his Internet article “EMF (EMT).” Therefore, he adds, the idea that ghosts somehow cause such radiation seems unlikely, and, indeed, “some think that electromagnetic fields are inducing the haunting experience” (“ghost”).

Occasionally, as a Halloween feature, some newspapers or television shows spotlight a supposedly haunted house. The ghostly phenomena are described, and then a natural explanation is provided for each of the supposedly supernatural elements of the tale. One such account, by Cathy Lubenski, appeared under the title “When your house has spooks, who are you going to call” in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her story included reports of slime oozing from walls, cold spots, lights flashing on and off, doors opening by themselves, knocking inside walls, foul odors, and howling. Were one living in a house in which such phenomena were occurring, it might well seem that the residence was indeed haunted. Instead, each of these phenomena had a natural cause, not a supernatural origin. The slime was from a bee’s nest in the attic; the cold spots resulted from an air-conditioner unit’s return airflow; the stench was an effect of dead rats in the wall and trapped sewer gas; the howling was the wind, blowing down a vent. Philosophers advise people to adopt the principle of Occam’s razor, which says, essentially, that one should never consider more possible causes than the number that are necessary to explain why something happens. As Carroll points out, “Occam’s razor is also called the principle of parsimony,” and “it is usually interpreted to mean something like ‘the simpler the explanation, the better’” or “as most people would put it today, ‘don’t make any more assumptions than you have to.’” To demonstrate the principle, Carroll offers this example: “[Erik] Von Däniken could be right: maybe extraterrestrials did teach ancient people art and engineering, but we don't need to posit alien visitations in order to explain the feats of ancient people.” Therefore, according to Occam’s razor, one should not attribute “art and engineering” to the human intelligence and ingenuity that men and women develop as the result of their evolutionary, genetic and environmental inheritance. The same applies, of course, with respect to ghosts. The fact that eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation that have been cited as evidence for the existence of ghosts can be explained without reference to these supernatural entities, which are supposed to cause them, makes the actual existence of ghosts questionable at best. Therefore, one can conclude that it is more likely that ghosts do not exist than to suppose that they do. Nevertheless, some are likely to believe in them because they add mystery to the everydayness of ordinary life, they suggest that there is some sort of existence after death, and they make interesting literary and dramatic characters that enliven short stories, novels, and movies. Likewise, they are convenient symbols of such emotional and psychological states and experiences as guilt, the memory of traumatic past experiences, and of actual historical events. In the sense that human beings are, to some extent, products of their own previous experiences and of historical affairs, they are haunted, after all--by the ghosts of their pasts.

Works Cited

Carroll, Robert. "anecdotal (testimonial) evidence." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

---. "electronic voice phenomenon (EVP)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009.

---. "EMF (EMR)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

---. "ghost." The Skeptic’s Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

"I believe spirits use energy to communicate with us. But which energy sources?" Yahoo! Answers. 2009. Yahoo!. 22 May 2009.

Lubenski, Cathy. "When your house has spooks, who are you going to call." The San Diego Union-Tribune 29 Oct 2000: C6. Print.

Randi, James. "spirit photography." An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. 2007. James Randi Education Foundation. 22 May 2009

Cunning Devices: Plot as Invention

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,” Mark Twain observes that the author of the Leatherstocking series lacks inventiveness:

Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it as he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go.

(For Twain‘s own “rules governing literary art,” refer to “Mark Twain’s ’Rules For Governing Literary Art”). The analogy in which a narrative plot is compared to an invention is fruitful as an aid in understanding the plotting of fiction. Many patents are issued not for original inventions but for improvements to them. For example, the original mousetrap could be patented, but so could a better mousetrap. This fact suggests something analogous in regard to fiction. To devise an original plot for oneself, a writer can adapt the plot of another writer. But, wait! Isn't that plagiarism? It could, but need not, be. Huh? Let me explain. To steal another writer’s plot is definitely plagiarism, but ideas cannot be patented. Therefore, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, among many others, which all feature dinosaurs, are acceptable (that is, legal). If more than one writer has succeeded with a particular type of monster (dinosaurs, for instance), you might do likewise, provided that you use only the idea of dinosaurs as your monsters and not the specific treatments of dinosaurs that others have employed. Here’s a way to go about the business of “improving” upon (or tinkering with) the plots of others so as to produce a story idea of one’s own. Consider the original in terms of its categories or elements: character, setting, theme, conflict, plot. Can you think of a twist on any (or more) of them? In the 1932 film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a scientist, Henry Frankenstein, creates a monster from parts of human cadavers which he electrifies in his laboratory. (In the novel, it is unclear how the protagonist, medical student Victor Frankenstein, animates his monster, although a chemical [or alchemical] means is suggested.) The film version departs from the novel in these, and other, ways, but Shelley’s novel could also have suggested H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. Wells’ setting is an island laboratory. Instead of human cadavers, human-animal hybrids are the mad scientist’s raw materials, and Dr. Moreau uses vivisection, rather than chemistry or electricity, to accomplish his wonders. Although it is debatable whether Shelley’s novel suggested The Island of Dr. Moreau, these sorts of innovations do represent the kind of adaptations to the plot of another, earlier work of which I speak. Thinking of plots as inventions also suggests a caution. Twain was a great writer, but a poor investor, and he lost a fortune in his investments in the James W. Paige’s “compositor,” a typesetting machine which boasted 18,000 parts! Sadder but much wiser, the author gave up “speculating” as a means of getting rich (or richer) quick and recouped his fortune by returning to what he did best: writing and reading his literary works to paying audiences. The moral of the story? To a degree, complexity in a story, especially a novel-length narrative, is a good thing. Readers want twists and turns in their stories. However, a plot that is more labyrinth than zigzag is apt to lose the reader. After all, one typically has only so many hours or days that he or she is willing to devote to the reading of a novel. If readers complain of, rather than praise, the length of a story, as even Stephen King’s most ardent “constant readers” are wont to do on occasion, their grievances may suggest more maze than meander.

Some Thoughts on Horror

If a man harbors any sort of fear, it makes him landlord to a ghost. -- Lloyd Douglas

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Where there is no imagination, there is no horror. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror. -- Carlos Fuentes

Jennifer Love Hewitt

I'd never watch a horror film, but after I found out I was going to be in one, I watched, like, four of them, including The Shining. I was terrified--I couldn't sleep for days. But I wanted to get myself used to things I was going to see on the set. -- Jennifer Love Hewitt

Eric Hoffer

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. -- Eric Hoffer

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. -- Victor Hugo

Terror. . . often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment: that things are in the unmaking. -- Stephen King

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music. -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on. -- River Phoenix

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth--more than ruin, more even than death. -- Bertrand Russell

Civilization is hideously fragile [and] there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish. -- C. P. Snow

He's not stupid; he's possessed by a retarded ghost. --Unknown

One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses and oppresses. -- Robin Wood

Guest Speaker: H. P. Lovecraft: Supernatural Horror In Literature, Part IX

IX. The Weird Tradition In The British Isles

Rudyard Kipling

Recent British literature, besides including the three or four greatest fantaisistes of the present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often approached it, and has, despite the omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with indubitable mastery in such tales as "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Finest Story in the World," "The Recrudescence of Imray," and "The Mark of the Beast." This latter is of particular poignancy; the pictures of the naked leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear which horses began to display toward him, and of the eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the malignant sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity of its mystery.

Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther from the realm of the real; and with the supreme artistry of a sensitive poet weaves phantasies impossible to an author of the solid roast beef type. His Fantastics, written in America, contains some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all literature; whilst his Kwaidan, written in Japan, crystallises with matchless skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colourful nation. Still more of Helm's wizardry of language is shown in some of his translations from the French, especially from Gautier and Flaubert. His version of the latter's Temptation of St. Anthony is a classic of fevered and riotous imagery clad in the magic of singing words.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for certain of his exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a marvellous portrait for years assumes the duty of aging and coarsening instead of its original, who meanwhile plunges into every excess of vice and crime without the outward loss of youth, beauty, and freshness. There is a sudden and potent climax when Dorian Gray, at last become a murderer, seeks to destroy the painting whose changes testify to his moral degeneracy. He stabs it with a knife, and a hideous cry and crash are heard; but when the servants enter they find it in all its pristine loveliness. "Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined the rings that they recognised who he was."

Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and adventurous novels and tales, occasionally attains a high level of horrific magic. "Xelucha" is a noxiously hideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shiel's undoubted masterpiece, "The House of Sounds," floridly written in the "yellow nineties," and recast with more artistic restraint in the early twentieth century. This story, in final form, deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells of a creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic island off the coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of daemon winds and the ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead man built a brazen tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." In the novel The Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with tremendous power a curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind, and which for a time appears to have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The sensations of this lone survivor as he realises his position, and roams through the corpse-littered and treasure-strewn cities of the world as their absolute master, are delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty. Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally romantic element, involves a distinct letdown.

Bram Stoker

Better known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs their net effect. The Lair of the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile. The Jewel of Seven Stars, touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection, is less crudely written. But best of all is the famous Dracula, which has become almost the standard modern exploitation of the frightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, a vampire, dwells in a horrible castle in the Carpathians, but finally migrates to England with the design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How an Englishman fares within Dracula's stronghold of terrors, and how the dead fiend's plot for domination is at last defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now justly assigned a permanent place in English letters. Dracula evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by "Sax Rohmer" (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Bliss. The latter handles quite dexterously the standard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more artistic, and told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the several characters, is the novel Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young, in which an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated. The mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the Manfred-Montoni type of early Gothic "villain," but is redeemed from triteness by many clever individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the close, and the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keep this tale from approaching absolute perfection.

In the novel Witch Wood John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of the evil Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland. The description of the black forest with the evil stone, and of the terrible cosmic adumbrations when the horror is finally extirpated, will repay one for wading through the very gradual action and plethora of Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan's short stories are also extremely vivid in their spectral intimations; "The Green Wildebeest," a tale of African witchcraft, "The Wind in the Portico," with its awakening of dead Britanno-Roman horrors, and "Skule Skerry," with its touches of sub-arctic fright, being especially remarkable.
Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette The Werewolf, attains a high degree of gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore. In The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent effects despite a general naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing summons up strange and terrible vistas. George Macdonald's Lilith has a compelling bizarrerie all its own, the first and simpler of the two versions being perhaps the more effective.

H. G. Wells

Deseving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen mystic world is ever a dose and vital reality is the poet Walter de la Mare, whose haunting verse and exquisite prose alike bear consistent traces of a strange vision reaching deeply into veiled spheres of beauty and terrible and forbidden dimensions of being. In the novel The Return we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several volumes exist, many are unforgettable for their command of fear's and sorcery's darkest ramifications; notably "Seaton's Aunt," in which there lowers a noxious background of malignant vampirism; "The Tree," which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the yard of a starving artist; "Out of the Deep," wherein we are given leave to imagine what thing answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a dark lonely house when he pulled a long-feared bell-cord in the attic of his dread-haunted boyhood; "A Recluse," which hints at what sent a chance guest flying from a house in the night; "Mr. Kempe," which shows us a mad clerical hermit in quest of the human soul, dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff region beside an archaic abandoned chapel; and "All-Hallows," a glimpse of dæmoniac forces besieging a lonely mediaeval church and miraculously restoring the rotting masonry. De la Mare does not make fear the sole or even the dominant element of most of his tales, being apparently more interested in the subtleties of character involved. Occasionally he sinks to sheer whimisical phantasy of the Barrie order. Still he is among the very few to whom unreality is a vivid, living presence; and as such he is able to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve. His poem The Listeners restores the Gothic shudder to modern verse.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose The Man Who Went Too Far breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan's hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson's volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power; notably "Negotiam Perambulans," whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and "The Horror-Horn," through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks. "The Face," in another collection, is lethally potent, in its relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in his collections, They Return at Evening and Others Who Return, manages now and then to achieve great heights of horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication. The most notable stories are "The Red Lodge" with its slimy acqueous evil, "He Cometh and He Passeth By," "And He Shall Sing," "The Cairn," "Look Up There," "Blind Man's Buff," and that bit of lurking millennial horror, "The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster." Mention has been made of the weird work of H. G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in "The Ghost of Fear," reaches a very high level while all the items in Thirty Strange Stories have strong fantastic implications. Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as in “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” a tale of arctic ghostliness, and Lot No. 249, wherein the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, of the same family as the founder of Gothic fiction, has sometimes approached the bizarre with much success, his short story Mrs. Lunt carrying a very poignant shudder. John Metcalfe, in the collection published as The Smoking Leg, attains now and then a rare pitch of potency, the tale entitled "The Bad Lands," containing graduations of horror that strongly savour of genius. More whimiscial and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous phantasy of Sir J. M. Barrie are the short tales of E.M. Forster, grouped under the title of The Celestial Omnibus. Of these only one, dealing with a glimpse of Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the true element of cosmic horror. Mrs. H.D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models, occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of short stories, The Death Mask. L. P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and extremely ghastly tale, "A Visitor from Down Under," May Sinclair's Uncanny Stories contain more of traditional "occultism" than of that creative treatment of fear which marks mastery in this field, and are inclined to lay more stress on human emotions and psychological delving than upon the stark phenomena of a cosmos utterly unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness than do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.

Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its sgestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man's relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings.

In The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.

The House on the Borderland (1908)--perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works--tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.

The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with the two previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.

The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth's infinitely remote future--billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig.

Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort--the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid--are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author's touch.

Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years--and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole. Mr. Hodgson's later volume, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, consists of several longish short stories published many years before in magazines. In quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the "infallible detective" type--the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood's John Silence--moving through scenes and events badly marred by an atmosphere of professional "occultism." A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power, and afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.

Robert Browning

Naturally it is impossible in brief sketch to trace out all the classic modern uses of the terror element. The ingredient must of necessity enter into all work, both prose and verse, treating broadly of life; and we are therefore not surprised to find a share in such writers as the poet Browning, whose Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea, and of the dæmoniac driving power of Fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally resolute men. Its trail is one of infinite ramifications; but we must here confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively unmixed state, where it determines and dominates the work of art containing it.

Somewhat separate from the main British stream is that current of weirdness in Irish literature which came to the fore in the Celtic Renaissance of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ghost and fairy lore have always been of great prominence in Ireland, and for over a hundred years have been recorded by a line of such faithful transcribers and translators as William Carleton, T. Crofton Croker, Lady Wilde--mother of Oscar Wilde--Douglas Hyde, and W.B. Yeats. Brought to notice by the modern movement, this body of myth has been carefully collected and studied; and its salient features reproduced in the work of later figures like Yeats, J. M. Synge, "A. E.," Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, James Stephens and their colleagues.
Whilst on the whole more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such folklore and its consciously artistic counterparts contain much that falls truly within the domain of cosmic horror. Tales of burials in sunken churches beneath haunted lakes, accounts of death-heralding banshees and sinister changelings, ballads of spectres and "the unholy creatures of the Raths"--all these have their poignant and definite shivers, and mark a strong and distinctive element in weird literature. Despite homely grotesqueness and absolute naiveté, there is genuine nightmare in the class of narrative represented by the yarn of Teig O'Kane, who in punishment for his wild life was ridden all night by a hideous corpse that demanded burial and drove him from churchyard to churchyard as the dead rose up loathsomely in each one and refused to accommodate the newcomer with a berth. Yeats, undoubtedly the greatest figure of the Irish revival if not the greatest of all living poets, has accomplished notable things both in original work and in the codification of old legends.