Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Guidance

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles (and psychologist Henry Murray), the need for guidance is universal; everyone experiences it, male and female, young and old—everyone. In promoting their clients' products, advertisements use this basic need, one of the fifteen identified by Fowles, to appeal to potential customers. Since these needs are universal, they pop up, quite frequently, in fiction of all types, including that of the horror genre.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, guidance is provided by two major sources: Buffy's high school's library, a repository of a surprising number of books concerning the paranormal, supernatural, and occult, and her mentor, the Watcher Rupert Giles, himself a human repository of all things metaphysical and mystical. Although the Hellmouth, rather than the Sunnydale High School library, is the plot generator for much of the series, the library's books are often the means of explaining, if not always understanding, the threats the protagonist and her friends face each week.

In Supernatural, the plot generator, the notebook of demon hunters Sam and Dean Winchester's father, John, is also the source of the series's appeal to the need for guidance. Often absent, as he pursues demons and other things that go bump in the night on his own, John later sacrifices his life on behalf of Sam and is killed by the greatest adversary among the demons and other supernatural entities he's hunted. However, his notebook remains a source of knowledge about such threats, often not only describing their origin and nature, but also explaining how to eliminate them. After John's death, his friend, Bobby Singer, himself an experienced demon hunter in his own right, steps in, occasionally, as another source of guidance for the Winchester brothers.

As D. H. Lawrence suggests in his poem “The Snake,” one's culture and education are also “voices” that provide guidance. However, the guidance they provide may not always serve one as well as might be supposed. Such guidance may insist that natural and unconscious sources of wisdom and experience be “killed” as mysterious and potentially dangerous forces (represented, in Lawrence's poem, by the snake). Religion, mythology, philosophy, literature, and, more recently, some forms of psychology, such as Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, are often suggested (although not in “The Snake”) as means of ascertaining, interpreting, and applying such mystical or metaphysical wisdom. The key is that the irrational or the natural must be interpreted in rational terms, often by a trusted intermediary, such as a priest, a philosopher, a poet, or a psychoanalyst. Often, this is the task assigned, in fantasy, to the source of guidance upon which the characters depend.

In horror fiction that includes a science fiction context, the source of guidance is likely to be scientists or researchers. This situation is especially true in regard to the science fiction-horror movies of the 1950s, such as Them!, The Thing from Another World, The Giant Behemoth, The Trollenberg Terror (also known as The Crawling Eye), and The Monolith Monsters, to name a few.

In Them! myrmecologists dispatched by the U. S. Department of Agriculture determine that the giant ants attacking people near Alamagordo, new Mexico, are mutants produced by atomic bomb radiation.

The thing from another world, a biped, appears to be an animal, but scientists examining the tissue from one of its severed arms reveal that the organism is actually a plant.

Scientists determine that the “behemoth” that ravages the greater London metropolitan area was spawned, as it were, by radiation resulting from atomic testing (a major theme of these films) and provide guidance concerning how to kill the creature: subject it to even more radiation to expedite its demise (the creature, the scientists have found, is dying from radiation poisoning).

An astronomer at the Trollenberg observatory explains that mysterious deaths in the vicinity may be connected to an immobile, radioactive cloud hanging over the south face of Switzerland's Mount Trollenberg. Although the cloud, which later moves and splits into four smaller versions of itself, isn't explained in the movie, film critic Leonard Maltin reveals that it's a cloaking device of sorts, which conceals the film's true menaces, “alien invaders.”

After discovering a catatonic girl alive beneath the rubble of her family's farmhouse, doctors determine that she is slowly turning to stone. If the source of her contagion can be discovered, they may be able to save her life. A professor identifies a sample of the stone as having come from a meteorite. The stone is found to have the property of draining silicon from anything it touches. In humans, silicon maintains tissue flexibility. Without it, the girl's body is turning to stone, so she is injected with the element. Researchers discover that the salt in the solution administered to the girl stopped the stone from extracting silicon from her tissues, so a dam is dynamited, allowing local salt flats to be flooded, thereby saving the day for humanity.

Whether the source of guidance is mystical or scientific, horror fiction, whether on the page or the sound stage, often appeals to the need for guidance universal among all human beings. Like other appeals to the fifteen basic needs identified by Fowles, the need for guidance is one of interest to all readers and audiences.

Horror Fiction: The Need to Nurture

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to Jib Fowles, adults, male and female alike, have a need to nurture children, animals, and other helpless creatures. In discussing this need, psychologist Henry Murray refers to feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing such dependents.

Horror fiction, like advertising, often taps this basic need, either by showing its neglect or by perverting it. In addition, such fiction frequently depicts the nurture of children or pets as a way to set up the later reversal of such care when a villain disrupts or destroys familial or relationships or relationships based upon friendships or, indeed, kills family members or friends.

In the film Rosemary's Baby (1968), based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel of the same name, Rosemary Woodhouse is raped by Satan after her neighbors, a cult of Satanists, drug her. She believes that her vision of having been raped by the devil was a delusion and that her husband, Guy, is the true father.

After her baby is born, she is told that the child died, but she refuses to believe this and discovers the infant son in her her satanic neighbors' apartment, surrounded by the their fellow members of their cult. She is asked to accept the child as her own, and, reluctantly, she does so, rocking the baby's cradle as she smiles.

This plot involves the need to nurture, a drive so strong, especially when it is combined with the maternal instinct, the movie implies, that it can overcome even the fear and disgust that having delivered a son of Satan inspires. No matter what level of nurture Rosemary provides to her son, the child will not fare well; according to the Bible, her son, the Antichrist, or “the beast from the earth,”will be defeated and cast into hell, wherein he will suffer eternal torment (Rev. 19:19-20).

The plot addresses two questions: who (or whom) is to be nurtured and why?

Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption, which originally appeared in his 1982 collection, Different Seasons, presents, as its subtitle suggests, a perversion of the need to nurture. Having discovered that an elderly German immigrant, Arthur Denker, is a Nazi war criminal, Kurt Dussander, a teenage boy, Todd Bowden, threatens to expose him if Dussander does not recount the atrocities that Dussander committed during the Holocaust.

The need to nurture is perverted in two ways: it is forced upon the nurturer, rather than freely given by him, and it involves teaching about atrocities rather than virtues. It also results in catastrophes, as, separately, Todd and Dussander murder homeless vagrants and Todd shoots a rifle at motorists on a freeway before he is killed by authorities.

King's 1977 novel The Shining also involves the need to nurture, this time addressing it negatively, by denying it to five-year-old Danny Torrance. His father, Jack, an alcoholic subject to fits of rage, broke his son's arm and was fired from his teaching position after assaulting a student. After accepting the position of caretaker of the vast, remote Overlook Hotel, Jack is possessed and, under the influence of a former caretaker's ghost, driven to murder his wife, Wendy, and Danny. 

King acknowledges that his own alcoholism and his anger and frustration concerning his own children's behavior was an inspiration for Jack's character. He also insists that Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel, the 1980 movie The Shining, departed from his novel's theme of a family's “disintegration” and objected to Kubrick's suggesting that Jack is influenced from within, by his own psychological demons, rather than externally, by the ghosts of the haunted hotel.

Scottish broadcast journalist Laura Miller takes issue with King's criticism of Kubrick, pointing out that, in King's novel, Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family, whereas, “in Kubrick’s The Shining, the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a choice.”

King's Point of View

King's Novel	King's Criticism
Theme = family's “disintegration”	Film departs from novel's theme
Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences	Film suggests Jack's own psychological demons cause his downfall

Miller's Criticism of King's Point of View

King's Novel	Kubrick's Film
Jack's own choices cause the evil that afflicts him and his family	Family's disintegration caused by supernatural influences
Domestic violence results from Jack's own choices	Domestic violence occurs

In short, Miller argues that King's novel is psychological, rather than theological, in its identification of the cause of the domestic abuse Jack commits, whereas Kubrick's film suggests that Jack's behavior, including his domestic abuse, results from supernatural influences—the opposite of King's own point of view and basis of his criticism of Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel.

King's criticism of Kubrick's film has been inconsistent, with King first damning and later praising the movie. In one comment, he attributes the filmmaker's sometimes “flat” scenes to a failure of imagination and religious faith:

. . . a visceral skeptic [concerning the existence of the supernatural] just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked instead for the evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others. What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little . . . .

Critic Mark Browning suggests the opposite is true: King “feels too much and thinks too little.”

King's criticism of Kubrick and Miller's and Browning's criticism of King's criticism of Kubrick seem to suggest that romanticism tends to promote an emotional and psychological view of the problem of evil, such as King's, while a rationalistic outlook tends to advance a rational and theological or idealistic perspective regarding the existence of evil, such as Kubrick's.

If nothing else, the controversy between King's perceptions of Kubrick's movie and Kubrick's own point of view concerning his film suggest that stories that involve the need to nurture can address much larger issues, such as the romanticism, rationalism, and the nature of both evil and ultimate reality.

King approaches the need to nurture from a different perspective in It.

Not only do many of his adolescent characters lack a nurturing home environment, but one of them in particular, Beverly Marsh, is abused both by her father Alvin, and, later, her husband, Tom Rogan, among other, previous romantic partners. As an eleven-year-old girl, she is a member, with six of male friends of the same age, of the Losers' Club.

The parents of another member, Bill Denbrough, treat him with cold indifference following the death of his younger brother. His stuttering subjects him to the bullying of his classmates.

Benjamin Harrison, another member, is obese, which makes him a target of the same school bullies who torment and attack the other “Losers.” 

Edward Kaspbrak is a victim of “smother love” and his mother's Munchhausen syndrome by proxy; he also suffers psychosomatic asthma. 

Michael Hanion, another “Loser,” is African-American; he is persecuted by bully Henry Bowers because of a feud Bowers's father had with Hanion's father.

Bowers also persecutes Stanley Uris, who's a “Loser” by virtue of his Jewish faith.

As Fowles points out, advertisements can allude to the need to nurture by suggesting its absence. In fiction, children who are portrayed as being in need of feeding, helping, supporting, consoling, protecting, comforting, nursing, and healing are naturally sympathetic to readers, who hope such characters will get the care they need.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Affiliation

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King's novels are prime examples of horror fiction that appeals to readers' need for affiliation. Many of his books primarily concern an individual child (Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Christine) or a group of individuals, often children (It) who've been rejected by their peers. (Sometimes, as in Under the Dome, 'Salem's Lot, Desperation, and The Regulators, the group consists of both adult and adolescent members.) His recurring theme seems to be that, in humanity's struggles against evil, brotherly love saves the day. When such love is absent, as in Carrie, the ultimate result is catastrophic; when present, as in most of King's novels, the “good guys” triumph.

According to Jib Fowles, whether a person feels included in or excluded by his or her social peers, advertisements which appeal to the need for affiliation are effective. In the former case, an advertisement's “images of companionship are compensation for what Americans privately lack”; in the latter instance, these images are affirmations of their fellowship with others. The same, it would seem, is apt to be true of fiction's portrayal of affiliated characters or the lack thereof in such instances as that of Carrie White.

Affiliation is more complex than it may seem. Quoting psychologist Henry Murray, Fowles writes:

. . . the need for affiliation consists of 24 desires “to draw near and enjoyably cooperate or reciprocate with another; to please and win affection of another; to adhere and remain loyal to a friend.” The manifestations of this motive can be segmented into several different types of affiliation, beginning with romance.

In King's novels, there is little romance; he tends to focus on cooperation, reciprocation, and loyalty, which is more relevant to the adolescent characters typical of his fiction. Even when adults play a relatively important part, as they do in such novels as Desperation, 'Salem's Lot, Under the Dome, and others, there is usually little or no romance between them. His families tend to be dysfunctional, as in Carrie, The Shining, Under the Dome, It, and others. King's main approach to employing the need for affiliation in his novels is friendship. 
 

Dean Koontz's theme is the same as King's: against evil, brotherly love will save the day. Unlike King, however, Koontz populates his fiction mostly with adults. When children are present, they're usually in the charge of an adult, rather than acting on their own, as King's more autonomous adolescents typically are. At least insofar as his earlier work is concerned (I stopped reading Koontz when he trotted out his Odd Thomas series), an alpha male and a damsel in distress are brought together through dangerous circumstances that appear, at first, to stem from different origins but are revealed to have sprung from the same cause, often the malevolent motives of a powerful cabal, government organization, or sociopathic serial killer (Chase, Whispers, The Eyes of Darkness, Midnight, The Good Guy).

Whether through friendships among children rejected by their peers or romance between a couple whom shared dangers unite against a common foe, the fiction of both King and Koontz, respectively, tap the need for affiliation Fowles identities as one of the fifteen such 'basic needs” that unite and motivate people everywhere. These writers' use of this appeal is one of the reasons their fiction is probably routinely on bestsellers' lists.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Sex

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As we saw in the last post (the first in this series), Jib Fowles identifies 15 basic appeals used in advertising. These same appeals, we argue, are frequently employed in horror fiction; indeed, their presence in horror novels and movies accounts for much of the appeal of these types of fiction.

In this post, we'll take a look at the appeal to readers' or viewers' need for sex. The fulfillment of the “needs for,” as opposed to the “needs to” on Fowles's list, require the presence or participation of another person or persons besides oneself. While it is possible to satisfy oneself sexually, by masturbation or other means, to find true sexual fulfillment, one requires a partner (or, some might contend, partners), whether of the male, the female, both, or another gender.

In horror, the need for sex characteristically involves perversion. Since all communication is reducible to seven basic questions, the forms of sexual perversion about which horror writers may write take seven possible types of forms. (A type, as we're using it, means a sexual behavioral set identifiable by shared characteristics.) These types of perversion (i. e., a deviation, corruption, or distortion of the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing) can be subsumed under these questions:

Who?

What?

When?

Where?

How?

Why?

How many? or How much?

We can further refine these questions by associating each of them with specific referents:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)

Let's add a couple more rows, identifying an example of a horror novel or movie that perverts human sexuality by deviating from, corrupting, or distorting the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing involved in sexual behavior:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time, occasion, or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)
Demon Seed (1973 novel; 1977 film)	The Exorcist (1973)	Maleus Maleficarum (1487)*	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])	Alien (1979)	Rosemary's Baby (1967 novel; 1968 film)	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])
A computer becomes a woman's sexual partner.	Regan MacNeil, the possessed girl, masturbates with a crucifix.	A demon, having assumed a female form, spends so long in intercourse with her victim that she absolutely drains him of semen and he thereafter dies.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.	Parasitic pregnancy ends in the fetus's bursting through the human host's abdomen.	After being raped by a demon, Rosemary Wood-house conceives a demonic child.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.

As the above table shows, the same movie may contain two (or more) of these types of sexual perversion: The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils]) contains orgies involving many individuals participating simultaneously in various sex acts; it also takes place in a convent. Likewise, these types of perversions can vary in how they are represented.

For example, a perverse location need not be a geographical place or an architectural space (a convent); it could be an anatomical site, as in Teeth (2008), in which a young woman discovers that she has two sets of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her vagina. Other possible variations? One's partner could be a poltergeist, as in The Entity (1982) (Who?); human corpses, as in the necrophilia scenes in the novel Under the Dome (2009) (What?); or a man transformed into metal kills his girlfriend after his penis becomes a power drill, as in Tetsuo:The Iron Man (1989) (How?).

Writers are limited pretty much only by their imaginations, their sense of morality, their personal taste, and the law of the land. Publishing houses will print and distribute just about anything that promises to make a buck. It seems unlikely, though, that the majority of readers or viewers are likely to have a need for extreme types of sex, even when it occurs in horror stories.

* Although the Malleus Maleficarum is a book—a manual for prosecuting witchcraft trials—rather than a novel or a movie, it contains supposed accounts of demonic sex, one of which suggests such a long-lasting (and fatal) encounter between a succubus and “her” victim, a hermit, that the hermit was completely drained of his semen:

When he [the hermit] was done and had arisen, the demon said to him, “behold what you have done, for I am not a girl or a woman but a demon,” and at once he disappeared from view, while the hermit remained absolutely astonished. And because the demon, with his great power, had withdrawn a very great quantity of semen, the hermit was permanently dried up, so that he died at the end of a month's time.

One can imagine the use of this description of demonic sexual activity as the basis for a terrifying sex scene in a horror novel or movie!

Note: For you may also want to read my post “Note: You may want to read “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the nature of Sin.”

Imaginary vs. Imaginative Worlds as They relate to Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In C. S. Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath points out the distinction that Lewis makes between imaginary and imaginative worlds. For Lewis, the former, McGrath says, depicts a landscape having “no counterpart in reality,” whereas the latter seeks to convey “images adequate to” the depiction of a transcendent “reality.” The worlds of mythology are examples of imaginative worlds, and “the more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability, Lewis says, to “communicate more reality to us.”

McGrath makes it clear that, in discussing imaginative worlds, Lewis does not mean that such worlds—or the works devoted to them—are allegories. They may be interpreted allegorically, but that does not mean that they themselves are allegories. As Lewis explains, his own Chronicles of Narnia can be allegorized, but that “of itself is no proof that it is an allegory.” Instead, his Narnia series, which presents an imaginative world, is a “supposal,” by which he means fiction that supplies possible answers to questions of a transcendent nature. Using Narnia as an example, Lewis writes:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress] represents Despair, he [Aslan] would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours? This is not allegory at all.”

Lewis makes several points:

1. The writer's work asks or implies a question.
2. Although the question is posed in or by a work of fiction, the question relates to an actual event or events in the real world.
3. In the context of its imaginative world, the work poses an answer to the question.
   
   

Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fails these tests and is, indeed, McGrath states, a work about an imaginary, rather than an imaginative, world. The world of Oz has no referent beyond itself. Narnia, by contrast, is shadow of another world which is itself the shadow of yet another world, just as, in Plato's thought, our sense perceptions of phenomena are shadows of the objects in the world and the world is itself a shadow of the transcendent world of perfect Forms.

An illustration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” pictures a man chained against a wall behind which men carry clay figures. The men hold the figures over their heads, and the upper portions of the figures are higher than the top of the wall against which the man on the other side is chained. A fire burning on a stone shelf of the cave, on the other side of the men, casts the shadows of the objects onto the wall in front of the chained man. Rather than seeing the actual objects—clay figures of a horse, a bull, and a pot—the chained man sees only their shadows. High on one of the cave's walls, a ladder ascends to the world above, where the sun shines in the sky. The objects the men carry are mere copies of the things in the world above—representations of the animals—and the shadows are copies, as it were, of these copies. Only in the unseen world above are the unseen, actual animals (representing, in the allegory, the Forms themselves).

Lewis's Narnia is somewhat like Plato's allegorical cave. The real world is Narnia, where Aslan dwells. Its copy is The Chronicles of Narnia, which recount the events in Narnia. The copy of the copy is our own world, a dim reflection of the imaginative world of the novels, which is, in turn, itself a faint likeness of Aslan's real world. The images that depict the world of the novels are the clay pots in Jung's cave, which represent, but do not truly reflect, the true objects themselves, any more than the objects truly reflect their transcendent Forms. As Lord Digory says, in The Last Battle, “It's all there in Plato.”

In attempting to envision Forms (i. e., in a Christian context, divine realities), Lewis depicts Christ as the lion Aslan, Satan as the White Witch, the fallen, unredeemed world as a frozen wasteland in which Christmas never arrives (until Aslan appears), and the Pevensie children are disciples. As McGrath points out,

Lewis's remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story and feel what it was like to be part of it . . . . The Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story.

Do any horror stories accomplish something similar, creating imaginative worlds wherein the writer's work asks or implies and answers a question related to an actual event or events in the real world? Do any works of horror fiction shadow the true horrors of the real world in such a way that readers can enter their imaginative worlds and “experience” the stories depicting these landscapes? Do any of them give rise to myths? Are any horror stories mythopoeic?

The icons of horror that continue to resonate with readers and moviegoers may indicate which images have particular force in conveying feelings of terror and disgust (probably the two chief elements of horror). Often, these icons appear in literary works, but they are also present in the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. Such icons include demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies, all of which have appeared in novels, short stories, or movies that meet Lewis's criteria, asking or implying a question related to what is (or is, at least, believed by some to be) related to an actual event or events in the real world, and pose answers to the question they pose.

To get just an intimation of the power these images of horror originally held for their audiences, we must try, to the best of our abilities, to envision the world as it was to them and to see, in this context, the supernatural beings they imagined as their enemies.

The world in which such creatures existed was a pre-scientific world wherein there was no well-established association of objective cause and effect. Demons, rather than bacteria, birth defects, viruses, radiation, or the like afflicted people with disease, blindness, or mental illness. They also animated human corpses, using dead bodies, as “vampires,” to drink blood. Demons also empowered witches to perform spectacular feats and wonders. The soul's survival of death enabled the existence of ghosts and zombies.

Today, we might call such a view of “reality” superstitious, but, for the ancients, it was simply the truth, the way things were, reality itself. Against such evils, such remedies as prayers, rituals, incantations were the only recourse which might prevail, and, only then, because God ruled over even the supernatural entities that afflicted humanity.

Horror is, like poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and many other human enterprises, of religious, not secular, origin, and, despite the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Enlightenment, horror continues to tap the primeval aspects of our existence as human beings that religion once addressed and, indeed, continues, for many, to address.

Just as adults retain vestiges of their childhood experience, humanity retains traces of its primordial heritage. In our fiction and in the dark, dim recesses of our ancient selves, demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies continue to horrify us, just as, in times past, they possessed, haunted, stalked, hexed, and vexed our ancestors in the “real world” in which they lived. If you doubt this, spend a few minutes alone in a cemetery by yourself after dark or imagine spending a night alone in the catacombs, among centuries-old corpses and skeletons of the dead.

Then, you will begin to fathom the terrible terror felt by those who believed in things that go bump in the night, and reading Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King will take on a new intensity. In Platonic and mythopoeic terms, their works are, after all, shadows of the shadows of the Real Horrors awaiting us beyond this world.

H. G. Wells: The Art of "The Cone"

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

H. G. Wells's masterful short story, “The Cone,” tells a simple, straightforward tale of vengeance and horror. During his stay with Horrocks, who manages the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the artist Raut, who is making a study of the ironworks, has an affair with Horrocks's wife, talk of which the manager overhears, including his wife's confession of her love for Raut.

During the lovers' conversation, Horrocks's wife insults and denigrates her husband as unimaginative and insensitive and praises Raut for the love and beauty he has brought into her dull, drab life. Like Raut, she has an aesthetic appreciation of life, whereas, she tells Raut, her husband “thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel,” having “no imagination, no poetry.” Horrocks also overhears his wife's mockery of him, before he enters the room and offers to take Raut for a tour of the ironworks so the artist can get a better view of its aesthetic effects.

As the men tour the ironworks, Horrocks points out its “effects,” as he leads the artist along, gripping his arm so firmly that it hurts Raut. On their way through the industrial landscape, Horrocks explains how cones have been added to block the throats of the furnaces so fire doesn't “flare out” of them like “pillars of cloud by day . . . and pillars of fire by night.” Despite the cones, however, occasionally a furnace does belch “a burst of fire and smoke.”

A sign warns, “Beware of the Trains.” As a train approaches, Horrocks shoves Raut into its path, pulling him back at the last moment, so that the artist narrowly escapes death. As they resume the tour, Raut wonders whether Horrocks is aware of his affair with his wife and whether, as a result, he had “just been within an ace of being murdered.”

Continuing the tour, Horrocks points out additional effects, such as the canal. “You've never seen it? Fancy that! You've spent too many of your evenings philandering,” Horrocks tells Raut.

They take an elevator to a “narrow rail” overhanging a furnace seventy feet below. “That's the cone I've been telling you of,” shouts Horrocks, “and, below that, sixty feet of molten metal, with the air of the blast frothing through it like gas in soda-water.” He adds that the cone's “top side” is 300 degrees, which is hot enough to “boil the blood out of you in no time.” Raut tries to escape, struggling with Horrocks, who detains him, and Raut plunges into “empty air.” Although his lower body makes contact with the “hot cone,” Raut manages to cling to the chain from which the furnace's cone is suspended, the tremendous heat singeing his hands and causing “intense pain” to assail “him at the knees.” Raut tries to ascend the chain, but Horrocks flings coal at him, shouting, “Fizzle you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You hot-blooded hound! Boil! boil! boil!”

Only after Raut, still clinging to the chain, has been immolated does Horrocks's anger pass and “a deadly sickness [comes] upon him.” as he smells “the heavy odour of burning flesh . . . . his sanity” returning.

From “below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of rolling in the shed ceased abruptly.”

* * *

The plot of Wells's story is itself a thing of beauty. Tight, unified, and artistically executed, with every detail leading to the final effect, it's a tale of terror worthy of Edgar Allan Poe.

Beyond the plot itself, Wells's story is a masterpiece of literary excellence because of its style. A tale of vengeance against an artist, the story is rendered as if Raut himself might have painted it, as a series of images, some impressionistic, others surreal. Wells's protagonist doesn't only speak of the aesthetic effects of his workplace, but the omniscient narrator's artistic descriptions of these effects is like detailed verbal paintings, as these few samples indicate:

The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering sunset of mid-summer. . . . The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark; beyond in the roadway a gas-lamp burnt, bright orange against the hazy blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the railway signal against the lowering sky.

* * *

Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them now: a weird-looking place it seemed, in the blood-red reflections of the furnaces. The hot water that cooled the tuyeres [“a nozzle through which air is forced into a smelter, furnace, or forge”] came into it, some fifty yards up—a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up from the water in silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping damply about them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red eddies, a white uprising that made the head swim.

* * *

They went . . . through the rolling-mills [“a factory or machine for rolling steel or other metal into sheets”], where amidst an incessant din the deliberate steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black, half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between the wheels. . . . They went and peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left the eye blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across the dark, they went to the lift . . . .

These descriptions support Horrocks's view of the ironworks as itself an artistic setting as well as a technological marvel. Unlike Raut and his own wife, Horrocks is able to see the beauty of technology and industry. It is ironic that such beauty, as Horrocks perceives it and the narrator describes it, should be the background to the artist's demise at the hands of Horrocks and the technology of the ironworks itself.

But Wells achieves yet more through the figures of speeches, allusions, and point of view his omniscient narrator employs in describing what, to Horrocks, is a work of art and what is to his victim, “Gehenna,” “a place of burning, torment, or misery.” From Horrocks's point of view, the ironworks is described as a work of art; the furnace is personified as Horrocks's “pet” (“I packed him myself, and he's boiled away cheerfully with iron in his guts for five long years. I have a particular fancy for him”); and the water of the steaming canal is described with an allusion to “sin” and “death,” just as the “flames” that once erupted from the “throats” of the furnaces looked like God, as He revealed Himself to Moses and the Israelites, as “pillars of cloud by day . . . and pillars of fire by night” (Exodus 13:21-22) as they journeyed through the wilderness.

Wells's descriptions are dynamic, not static; they move and act, as if the ironworks is itself a conscious entity, a willing instrument of its manager's revenge. The movement prevents the plot from slowing, keeps up the pace of the action, and is perfectly suited to the tour of his workplace that Horrocks conducts. The descriptions heighten and underscore the unity between Horrocks and his beloved ironworks, emphasizing the relationship that exists between him, as a man, and the industry and technology of the works he manages.

Horrocks's appreciation of the beauty of the ironworks also suggests that both the artist Raut and Horrocks's wife underestimate his sensitivity, intelligence, and imagination. It is not that he lacks the ability to appreciate beauty, but that the type of beauty he appreciates differs from that of Raut and Horrocks's wife. They are detached from the material world, thinking in terms of “effects” and of romantic passion; a man of the earth, a “Titan,” Horrocks is immersed in the physical world of labor and sweat, of industry and technology. To him, the ironworks is a place of beauty, whereas, to Raut, it is a “Gehenna,” a blot upon the beauty of the countryside, and, to Horrocks's wife, it is a stifling, suffocating place devoid of beauty and love. The story suggests that it is the illicit lovers who are unable to appreciate beauty—at least the beauty that Horrocks is able to see.

The characters live in different worlds, which results in a conflict of aesthetics, passion, and love that ends in horrible death for Raut, a realization of the darkness within him for Horrocks, and the end of an affair that Horrocks's wife said opened “a world of love” to her. The story suggests that life, like the setting in which it is experienced, may be a place of beauty which suggests the presence of God, as the ironworks does for Horrocks, or a “Gehenna” of torment and anguish suggestive of hell for those who cannot fathom the beauty and majesty of the place. The story also suggests the significance and power of aesthetics, for it is both the appreciation of the ironworks's beauty, on Horrocks's part, and the failure to appreciate the beauty of such a place, on Raut's and Horrocks's wife's part, that leads to adultery, betrayal, vengeance, and murder and to the horrific death of the artist at the hand of the ironmaster:

His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had passed, Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood, still clutching and fumbling with the chain, and writhing in agony—a cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing intermittent shriek.

Abruptly, at the sight, the ironmaster's anger passed. A deadly sickness came upon him. The heavy odour of flesh came drifting up to his nostrils. His sanity returned to him.

“God have mercy upon me!” he cried. “O God! what have I done?”

He knew the thing below him, save that it moved and felt, was already a dead man—that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in his veins. An intense realisation of that agony came to his mind, and overcame every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and then, turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the struggling thing that had once been a man. The mass fell with a thud, and went radiating over the cone. With the thud the shriek ended, and a boiling confusion of smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up towards him. As it passed, he saw the cone clear again.