Books Read in February 2017

February  2017 Books

Here's the book I read in February 2017 and what I thought of it.

Horror: A Literary History edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes

Turns out horror wasn't even a distinct genre until the twentieth century. This collection of seven essays charts the history of stories that provoke a feeling of fear or repulsion, starting in the eighteenth century with the 'horrible romances' of Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, graveyard poetry (hadn't heard of that before), Matthew Lewis's fantastic The Monk, and the Big Daddy, Frankenstein.

It goes on to talk about the origins of American horror, like seventeenth and eighteenth century captivity narratives, where white women were kidnapped, incarcerated and abused by Native Americans. The Salem witch trials of the 1690s and the dark, extreme beliefs of the Puritans also had a profound impact on the American horror to come - dangerous religious zeal and murderous irrationalism cropped up in nineteenth century witch trials stories, and Arthur Miller's 1953 The Crucible, for example. There's a section on Edgar Allan Poe, because he really was the father of American horror, a gigantic influence on everyone who followed.

Next is a look at nineteenth-century Britain, and the fact that there were horrific bits in Eliot, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, etc but still no proper horror genre. There were grisly medical casebook tales, and penny dreadfuls depicting bloody murders. It's not until the 1880s we start getting 'proper horror', or at least a Victorian Gothic revival, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885), Arthur Machen's The Three Imposters (1895), and Dracula (1897).

The twentieth century sees H.P. Lovecraft write his cosmic horror, continuing a trend where horror stops having religious dimensions, as in the eighteenth century Gothic stuff, and becomes more about psychology and biology - the degenerate Morlocks in The Time Machine, the monstrous transformation of Dr Jekyll, the madness that afflicts puny humans confronted by the Cthulhu Mythos, the virus-infected zombies of the brilliant I Am Legend, leading right up to Norman Bates in Psycho.

The 1980s horror boom is discussed, with leading writers like Stephen King, Clive Barker, James Herbert, Ramsey Campbell, and Peter Straub, who came by way of Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Dennis Wheatley, via the odd 1950s EC horror comic and pulp magazine Weird Tales. Then on to the nihilistic turn-of-the-century books of American Psycho and Fight Club, both bringing out the darkness of modern, humdrum Western life. And ending with horror video games, and the 'new weird' fiction of the twenty-first century, the extra-gloomy Thomas Ligotti, and Laird Barron, both reimagining Lovecraftian terror in new, interesting ways.

It's a good read for weirdos like me who are into this kind of thing. I wasn't really aware of the distinction between 'terror' and 'horror' before reading this, apart from the dictionary definitions being a bit different, but apparently it's of great importance. Some authors try to horrify, some to terrify (which is considered the higher literary ambition), some to do both. As long as we keep getting interesting, creepy, atmospheric tales, I'm satisfied.