Everyday Horrors: The Police

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In more innocent times, parents taught their children that the police were their friends. Cops were good guys, who could be trusted. If one were ever to be in trouble, he or she was to run to an officer of the law (assuming that an officer was available, although, adults often joked, “there’s never a cop around when you need one”). In those days, only a few policemen were women--mostly crossing guards and meter maids. Police officers were respected, if not admired, or, at least, they seemed to be, and, among bakers, glazed doughnut-crazed cops were loved. Whenever the police appeared in films (other than as the Keystone Kops), they were cast as good guys who were brave and noble, living, like Superman, to enforce “truth, justice, and the American way,” if not always life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In the interval between the 1950’s and the turn of the century, something happened. Cops lost their shine. The badge became a badge not of honor so much as of disgrace. Rather than receiving praise from the public that the police claimed to “protect and serve,” the blue knights became the recipients of doubt, fear, and disdain, especially among minorities, who complained of “police brutality” (a charge that has often been shown to be true in videotapes of brutal police beatings and of cops' unnecessary use of their favorite new weapon, the taser). Newspaper and television reports cited police corruption, detailing cases in which cops had been bribed or became extortionists, rapists, and even murderers. The police became criminals themselves. They were just another gang among gangs. The public no longer trusted and admired, or even respected, the police. Instead, they feared and loathed their supposed protectors, their alleged servants, their supposed defenders.


As the public’s confidence in the police waned, the police became “pigs,” and the ways in which they were portrayed in fiction changed as well. In science fiction and horror stories, as in mainstream literature, when the cops weren’t shown as incompetent or as victims themselves (as in The Terminator, in which a cyborg killer goes on a rampage inside a police precinct, slaughtering the officers and detectives on duty), the police were revealed as just another threat in the ever-growing cavalcade of monsters. They were seen, and portrayed, as fiends with badges, handcuffs, Mace--and guns. In Terminator 2, the villain, a new breed, as it were, of cyborg assassin known as a T-1000-series android, is a shape shifter among whose many disguises is that of a policeman. A cop-killer, the T-1000 assumes the identity of its victim, tracking down his target, John Connor, using the computer aboard the dead cop’s patrol car. The movie’s anti-police subtext is anything but subtle, showing the public’s fear and hatred of corrupt peace officers who use their badges and guns to perpetrate crimes against members of the very public they are sworn to protect and serve.

Not surprisingly, Stephen King’s novels sometimes depict police as everyday horrors. Like his fans, King knows the horror that can lurk behind the badge of a cop gone bad. In Rose Madder, the protagonist’s husband, Norman Daniels, is a brutal, sadistic cop who routinely beats his wife, Rose, within an inch of her life, even when she is pregnant with their child (causing her to have a miscarriage). Norman is, in fact, a misogynist, having been charged, recently, with assaulting a black woman, Wendy Yarrow. The internal affairs investigation has been as fuel to his fiery rage, which explodes in his near-fatal assault upon Rose. Her latest beating, for the “offense” of having accidentally spilled iced tea upon Norman, makes her again consider leaving him. She’s been the victim of his brutality for fourteen years. If anything, his mindless rage has become even worse, and she fears that if she continues to stay with him, she’s liable to be killed. If she isn’t killed, she might well wish she were dead if she suffers at his hands for another fourteen years. By then, she may be unrecognizable, she thinks. She finally flees, but Norman, adept at skip-tracing, soon locates her, and the story takes on a supernatural dimension that leads to a particularly violent and gruesome climax and a resolution that underscores the permanent damage that domestic violence, especially at the hands of a rogue cop, can have upon its victim’s life.


As bad as Norman Daniels is, he’s not King’s worst monster behind a badge. This distinction (so far) belongs to Desperation’s Collie Entragian, whose very surname is an anagram for “near giant.” The deputy sheriff of Desperation, Nevada, a small mining town along U. S. Highway 50, the “loneliest road in America,” Entragian makes a habit of stopping, kidnapping, torturing, and killing hapless motorists, using the highway as if it were a strand of spider’s web bringing victims into his jurisdiction. True to the experience of many a driver, the deputy uses one trumped-up charge after another to justify his many traffic stops. However, the arrested offenders are, in reality, his captives, and they soon discover that Entragian is a madman. (In reading one couple their Miranda rights, he reserves his “right” to kill them.) In fact, he’s worse even than a psychotic killer; he’s possessed by a parasitic demon named Tak who uses the police officer as his latest host. The device of having the deputy possessed by a demon allows King to depict the mindless violence of a policeman whose own soul has become corrupted by the power that society has bestowed upon him. This cop could care less about bribes and payoffs; he wants nothing less than the power to bludgeon, torture, and kill those who fall into his demonic hands. In this novel, the power of the police is absolute, and absolute power not only corrupts but kills in the most horrific ways imaginable. Again, the subtext is hard to miss: a police state is a terrible state of affairs, indeed, even in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Entragian--or Tak--is such a threat to society that God himself intervenes to put things right, just as the deity does, implicitly, in Thomas Jefferson’s call to revolution, in The Declaration of Independence.

Of course, the police are sometimes dependable, if perfunctory, characters in King’s fiction. In this dichotomy as dutiful, but unimaginative, defenders of the status quo on one hand and as vile and brutal criminals or worse on the other hand lies the true terror of the men (and, increasingly, the women) in blue. Daily news stories of out-of-control cops reinforce the ambiguity with which law-abiding folk view those whom they’ve trusted to protect and to serve them. It’s a horrible experience to know that the police officer who, today, saves a hostage from a psychotic drug addict with nothing left to lose may be the same one who, tomorrow, pulls over a female on a dark and deserted highway and rapes and kills her or who turns a blind eye to a mob killing.

Modern-day variants upon the Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde theme, police fare the same in other horror writers’ fiction. They’re both the good guy and the bad guy (sometimes at the same time). For example, in the novels of Dean Koontz, cops are sometimes competent and trustworthy, but they are, other times, corrupt and treacherous. When they’re neither the good guys nor the villains in his novels, they’re often simply ineffective, incompetent, and moronic. Velocity, The Husband, and The Good Guy are cases in point. Cops don’t generally fare well in such novels as Bentley Little’s The Store and The Ignored, either, where they’re cast as barely a blip on the Stanford-Binet I. Q. scale.

Even when the police aren’t stupid, bungling, or vicious and corrupt, they’re not good for much when it comes to matching wits--or tooth and fang--with the monsters of horror fiction. As the protagonist of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer says, “Cops can’t fight demons. I have to do it.” (Besides, as the town’s high school principal says, “The police in Sunnydale are deeply stupid.”)

In horror fiction, cops are often creepy--maybe it's because of their fetish for polyester and doughnuts.

“Everyday Horrors: The Police” is one in a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

A Catalogue of Vulnerabilities

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

When one considers the variety of ways in which human beings are vulnerable, it’s a wonder that any of us manages to survive at all, to say nothing of the species itself. In horror fiction, such vulnerability is desirable, for it is the stuff of suspense, pathos, and dread. It behooves the writer of such fiction to keep handy, mentally or actually, a catalogue of vulnerabilities that he or she can call upon in times of dramatic need. This post represents a start of such a list, to which one may add any other vulnerabilities that may occur to him or her in the wee hours of the morning or when, within the deepening shadows of twilight, a mysterious sound is heard that sets the teeth upon edge and the hair upon end.

First, though, let’s consider what, precisely, we mean by the term “vulnerability.” What does it mean to say that someone is “vulnerable”? As is often the case, a simple list of synonyms and a bit of investigation as to the etymology of the resulting collection of terms sheds much light upon the matter. Let’s start with the synonyms:

Vulnerability: susceptibility, weakness (liability, flaw, fault, Achilles heel, failing, limitation, disadvantage, drawback), defenselessness (frailty, nakedness), helplessness, exposure.

This list suggests some examples from horror fiction and ideas for various situations that would put a victim--or even the protagonist--at risk. The shower scene in Psycho, for example, involves nakedness, exposing Marion Crane to not only the ogling eyes of Norman Bates but also to the disapproving inspection of a voyeur--Norman’s alter ego, the misogynistic, murderous mom within. Similar shower scenes have since appeared in such horror movies as Prowler, Friday the 13th (a rare guy-in-the-shower scene), Grudge, and others, as much because of the vulnerability of the victim--for obvious reasons, the victim is almost always a she--as for the gratuitous nudity that such scenes allow to voyeur--that is, the viewer.


The etymologies of these words also suggest profitable ways by which characters may become susceptible to horror villains' horrible villainy. “Vulnerable” is derived from the late Latin term vulnerabilis, which means “wounded.” A wounded character, naturally, is more likely to become monster food than one who is hale, hearty, and whole. “Weak” comes from an Old High German term that means “to bend,” and suggests that a victim could be such because of his or her emotional or moral as well as physical weakness, or ability to be “bent.” An emotionally crippled or morally twisted character makes a good potential villain. (Not all infirmities need to be literal ones; symbolism is always a welcome possibility in horror, as in other types of, fiction.) “Flaw” stems from the Old Norse word flaga, meaning “stone slab” or “flake,” and was probably used, in the sense of a defect, as “fragment.” Characters who are physically, emotionally, mentally, morally, socially, spiritually, or otherwise “fragmented” or “flawed” had better look over their shoulders frequently, for, no doubt, The Doors’ “cold, grinding grizzly bear jaws” will be “hot on. . . [their] heels.” Or maybe its not a grizzly bear, but a bogeyman, who’s pursuing them. “Frail” has an interesting etymology as well, suggesting, again, that vulnerabilities need not be limited to the physical aspects of a character’s constitution; more than bones may be broken, after all:

c.1340, "morally weak," from O.Fr. frele, from L. fragilis, "easily broken" (see fragility). Sense of "liable to break" is first recorded in Eng. 1382. The U.S. slang noun meaning "a woman" is attested from 1908.

Getting back to the list per se--susceptibility suggests that victims may succumb to germs, as they do in sci fi and horror movies that involve extraterrestrial bacteria or viruses or exotic earthly germs that have unexpectedly hideous symptoms. The Andromeda Strain, Cabin Fever, Dreamcatcher, The Invasion, Slither, and Warning Sign are examples of novels or films (or, in some cases, both) in which the culprit that threatens individuals (and, in some cases, the planet’s population as a whole) is a germ of some sort. (The infection can come through infected animals, too, such as mad cows or rabid dogs, and some diseases--elephantiasis or rabies, for instance--are horrible in themselves--which can add to the horror of the story’s situation, specific and general.) However, as we will see, humans are susceptible to more than microbes’ attacks.


Weakness puts a character at risk, which is one reason that female characters and children, who are generally weaker than men, have traditionally been victims more often than male characters, although, lately, monsters are increasingly becoming equal-opportunity killers. Of course, there are other ways to be weak. A character can be mentally or emotionally vulnerable or unstable. Monsters are no respecters of infirmities, and will as readily slice and dice a character who is mentally ill as it will attack a character who is physically sick. Other forms or weakness may be derived from physical conditions that are not, in themselves, types of weakness or sickness but which are debilitating nonetheless, such as mental retardation, physical deformity, or being crippled or paralyzed. A bedfast or wheelchair-bound character is as enticing to a murderous monster as an hors d’oeuvre is to a party crasher.


Frailty applies to some aged characters. The loss of flexibility in one’s joints, the presence of arthritis or rheumatism, the depletion of calcium in the bones, the atrophy of muscles, the attenuation of eyesight and hearing, a tendency toward forgetfulness, and the general depletion of one’s energy and physical strength combine to make some seniors ideal snacks for attacking monsters, so much so that it’s a wonder that more horror stories are not set in nursing homes or managed-care facilities.

Exposure to the elements, to scientific experiments, and to radioactive substances creates both monsters and victims in many sci fi and horror stories, including Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Attack of the Fifty-foot Woman, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Omega Man, Damnation Alley, and a host of others.

Other situations and conditions also render a character a potential victim, including sleep (Nightmare on Elm Street) (it’s hard to fight or to take flight while one is asleep unless, perhaps, he or she is a dream warrior), being lost (Wrong Turn), darkness (virtually every horror movie ever filmed, and a good many novels as well), isolation (The Howling), sex (almost every slasher movie) (especially if the couple are underage and in a lonely spot, such as a forest) stupidity (a terminal state, if ever there was one), insanity (madness hampers one’s ability to think rationally or at all), envy (since the days of Cain and Abel, this emotion--and many others, for that matter--have brought characters to a bad, sometimes untimely, end), youth (or, more specifically, inexperience or naiveté), unwarranted trust (especially in the kindness of strangers), the pursuit of forbidden, usually occult knowledge (Frankenstein and most stories involving ill-advised scientific experimentation or research or apprenticing oneself to a sorcerer or shaman of some kind), close-mindedness (skeptics, such as the protagonists of “The Red Room” and 1408 tend to come to harm), and a host of others--as we said, when one considers the variety of ways in which human beings are vulnerable, it’s a wonder that any of us manages to survive at all, to say nothing of the species itself.

What most of these states, conditions, and situations have in common is their interference with or prevention of the exercise either of the senses themselves or the body (the negation of physical abilities) or of the exercise of the mind (the negation of rational abilities). These circumstances, whether they originate in blindness, deafness, infirmity, paralysis, madness, naiveté, isolation, or otherwise, limit or eliminate a character’s ability to act and react, physically, mentally, or both, thereby inhibiting the fight-or-flight instinct and making victims of the vulnerable.

In most cases, something unpleasant--disease, sickness, dismemberment, torture, injury, disfigurement, and/or death--is apt to follow, individually or collectively. An exception occurs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the stereotypically weak and helpless teenage girl turns out to be imbued with supernatural strength and fighting prowess and, instead of being slain by the monsters that stalk her, is their slayer. In Hollywood, standing a cliché upon its head is enough, sometimes, to pass for creativity and to land one a series that lasts for seven years. (In fairness, the series had a lot more going for it than merely its iconoclasm.)

This catalogue is by no means complete--as we said, when one considers the variety of ways in which human beings are vulnerable, it’s a wonder that any of us manages to survive at all, to say nothing of the species itself--but it is a start. Writers, wannabe writers, and would-be writers alike are encouraged to update this list and to keep it handy. Victims are as much a necessity to horror fiction as the monster itself, and the monster is hungry; it’s always hungry.

The Nature of the Beast

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu

Adam Smith points out, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that, President Bill Clinton’s claim to “feel your pain” notwithstanding, people can know only their own feelings. To the extent that an individual empathizes and sympathizes with another, he or she does so only vicariously, by imaginatively putting him- or herself in the other’s place. The ability to identify with other people, only if imaginatively, creates a sense of community as a “fellow-feeling” develops, which allows people to regard others as their kith and kin. Occasionally (and usually to their regret) people project their own feelings onto animals, including bears, gorillas, and lions, regarding them as their fellows as well. Something of such a fellow-feeling between humans and animals may be evident in the half-human, half-animal hybrid creatures of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Indian mythologies.

When an animal attacks, without warning, as wild animals are wont to do, people who have invested the animals with personalities similar to their own are sometimes at a loss to account for the beasts’ apparent betrayal. Other times, such individuals make an attempt to psychoanalyze the animal, as a female diver did after the whale she was petting, gripping her leg in its mouth, dove to a depth of approximately fifty feet before releasing her, and, short on oxygen, she barely made it back to the surface of the water. The whale, she believed, was annoyed at her for her invading its personal space. In past times, animals have even been condemned and executed for the “crimes” they committed against individuals, and in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab stalks the great white whale that bit off his leg.

It may be that people prefer anthropomorphism to the truth that animals are not people and, therefore, do not aspire, believe, doubt, feel, imagine, or think as people do. Although animals are definitely sentient and may be capable of limited cognition, including the ability to experience emotions to a degree, they are obviously not as sophisticated as even a young child in their ability to engage in complex, prolonged cognitive processes. Most animals do not have opposable thumbs, of course, which is a serious handicap, no doubt, in using (or even manufacturing) tools, but there are many other obstacles to their creation, maintaining, and developing art, science, and the other accoutrements of culture. No matter how fond one may be of one’s goldfish, hamster, guinea pig, rat, snake, canary, cat, dog, pot-bellied pig, or horse, the animal is not going to write a symphony to rival one by Johann Sebastian Bach, devise an invention to rival Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb, or put one of their own on the moon.

Animals are not human. By nature--even by definition--they are other-than-human, the closest approximation that we have to the extraterrestrial biological entities of science fiction and horror, as alien as the great gelatinous mass of The Blob or H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. We cannot put ourselves in their places, because they are not the same as we; they are not our equals in consciousness, memory, cognition, imagination, emotion, or any other mental process. In short, they are as William Butler Yeats describes the “rough beast” that, in “The Second Coming,” “slouches. . . towards Bethlehem to be born,” its “gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun.” Anyone who has ever studied the eye of a rattlesnake, an eagle, or a tiger knows the gaze that Yeats describes. It is unnerving precisely because of its inhumanity. The eyes, for men and women, may be “mirrors of the soul,” but animals have no souls to mirror, which is the very reason that their “blank and pitiless” stare is horrible and terrifying to us. Their gaze proves, to the intuition, if not to reason, that the animal is other-than-human and that it may be dangerous. There is no “fellow-feeling” between a man or a woman and a serpent, a hawk, or a lion for the simple reason that there cannot be. Therefore, beasts are dreadful.

Poets know this, as Yeats’ description of his poem’s “rough beast” shows. Emily Dickinson knows, too, the alien nature of the animal, as her poem about the “narrow fellow in the grass” whose presence leaves her “zero at the bone” shows. D. H. Lawrence also knows the alien nature of the serpent, as his poem, “The Snake,” indicates. Steve Irwin believed that he knew animals, although he was never sentimental enough to suppose that they feel as he felt or think as he thought. He loved the beasts of the field and the forest, the air and the sea, but, the moment he was careless, he paid with his life, a stingray’s barb through his heart, and Roy, of the Las Vegas magic act billed as “Sigfried and Roy,” was mauled by the white tiger that the duo used in their act, despite his love for the great cat.

It is the otherness of animals' nature that compels horror writers to use them--or parts of them, such as their fangs, their claws, their scales, their wings, their impervious hides, to describe monsters. By assigning animal characteristics to human beings, such writers reverse the process of which Smith writes, causing readers to alienate themselves from the monster who is too unlike them, fanged and clawed as these monsters are, to allow identification and sympathy. There can be no fondness, no fellow-feeling, no trust between the human and the other-than-human, because whatever is inaccessible to the imagination is beyond empathy. This is true despite the fact that some people--the Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Dahmers and Adolph Hitlers and Saddam Husseins among us--are worse than any lion, tiger, or bear, oh, my. Therefore, in science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction, readers may continue to expect such monsters as the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the ape-like mutants of “The Lurking Fear,” the gigantic spider of It and The Lord of the Rings, and the human-animal-alien hybrids of the thousands of horror stories, in print and on film, that have been are, and are to come.

Since the days of Job, when God asked his loyal servant whether he’d considered Leviathan and his ways, such has been the nature of the beast.

Masters of the Macabre

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Genre fiction focuses upon the conveyance of one emotion. For science fiction, according to C. S. Lewis, the emotion is wonder, whereas, Edgar Allan Poe implies, horror fiction, as the genre’s name suggests, evokes horror. Why readers would want to be frightened out of their wits is taken up in another post, “Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear.” Other genres inspire other emotions, but this post is concerned simply with naming names--that is, with identifying authors who have written works of horror fiction. Many mined the mother lode of horror; others panned for the gold only once or twice. In every respect, though, each of the authors listed has written at least one satisfying poem, short story, novel, play, or motion picture that delves into fear, and, in this regard, may be considered a master of the macabre. When a writer has written many works in the genre, only his or her name is listed; when the author has written only one or two instances of the fiction of fear (or a truly seminal work* in the field), the title of the work is also listed. Some of the names on our roster are likely to surprise those for whom horror fiction is not one’s daily bread. We thought of listing the names chronologically, by sex, by the stature of the author’s literary reputation, by the volume of works that he or she wrote in the horror genre, and in various other ways, but decided, at last, upon an alphabetical listing.

• Adam, Richard, The Girl in a Swing
• Andrews, V. C.
• Anson, Jay, The Amityville Horror
• Barker, Clive
• Beaumont, Charles
• Benchley, Peter, Jaws
• Bierce, Ambrose
• Blackwood, Algernon

William Peter Blatty

• Blatty, William Peter, The Exorcist (seminal)
• Bloch, Robert, Psycho (seminal)

Robert Bloch

• Bradbury, Ray, Something Wicked This Way Comes
• Brandner, Gary, The Howling
• Brite, Poppy Z.
• Browning, Robert
• Campbell, Ramsey
• Clark, Mary Higgins
• Clegg, Douglas
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel (seminal)
• Dante, Alighieri, The Inferno
• De Felitta, Frank, Audrey Rose
• Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, “The Signalman”
• Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
• Du Maurier, Daphne, The Birds (seminal)
• Duncan, Lois, I Know What You Did Last Summer
• Eddy, Jr., C. M.
• Ehrlich, Max, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud
• Faulkner, William, “A Rose for Emily”
• Farris, John
• Finney, Jack, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Fowles, John, The Collector
• Gilbert, Stephen
• Golding, William, Lord of the Flies

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Hawthorne, Nathaniel (seminal)
• Irving, Washington, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
• Jackson, Shirley, The Haunting of Hill House (seminal), “The Lottery”
• Jacobs, W. W., “The Monkey’s Paw”
• James, Henry, “The Turn of the Screw”
• James, M. R.
• Kafka, Franz, The Metamorphosis
• Keene, Brian

Stephen King

• King, Stephen (seminal)
• Koontz, Dean (seminal)
• Laimo, Michael
• Le Fanu, Sheridan
• Levin, Ira, Rosemary’s Baby (seminal)
• Ligotti, Thomas
• Little, Bentley
• Lovecraft, H. P. (seminal)
• Machen, Arthur
• Marasco, Robert, Burnt Offerings
• Matheson, Richard
• McCammon, Robert
• Milton, John, Paradise Lost
• Oates, Joyce Carol

Flannery O'Connor

• O’Connor, Flannery (seminal)
• Onion, Oliver, “The Beckoning Fair One”
• Peck, Richard, Are You Alone in the House?
• Peretti, Frank E. (seminal)
• Perkins, Charlotte, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Pike, Christopher

Edgar Allan Poe

• Poe, Edgar Allan, Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque (seminal)
• Polidori, John William, The Vampyre
• Preston, Douglas and Lincoln Child
• Price, E. Hoffman
• Quinn, Seabury
• Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Rice, Anne
• Rollins, James
• Saul, John
• Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet (seminal)
• Shan, Darren

Mary Shelley

• Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (seminal)
• Simmons, Dan
• Smith, Clark Ashton

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (seminal)
• Stine, R. L.

Bram Stoker

• Stoker, Bram, Dracula (seminal)
• Straub, Peter
• Tem, Steve and Melanie
• Tryon, Thomas
• Twain, Mark, “A Ghost Story” (seminal)
• Van Vogt, A. E., “The Black Destroyer”
• Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Faust
• Wakefield, H. Russell
• Wallace, Edgar, King Kong (seminal)
• Walpole, Horace, The Castle or Otranto (seminal)

H. G. Wells

• Wells, H. G. (seminal)
• Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (seminal)
• Wilson, Colin
• Wordsworth, William, the “Lucy” poems
• Wyndham, John, The Village of the Damned (seminal)

* Although what one considers to be a "seminal work" is apt to be controversial, the term as it is used in this post is attributed to literary works that have had a lasting importance upon the horror genre or that proved innovative in having established a new direction for succeeding works in the same genre or in expanding its subject matter.