The spooky season is upon us, so I thought I’d write something befitting of Halloween and explore an oftentimes-maligned genre.
I haven’t really touched on horror fiction before, which is odd because it’s a literary species I regularly come back to, with several of my favourite stories being unashamedly paranormal in tone, and I wanted to explore what it is that appeals to me so much about them.
Before I try to find the unifying thread that links all the macabre stories I love together, I should clarify something about ‘horror’.
We used to differentiate between horror and supernatural tales but they tend to get mashed together these days into one beast. Horror is designed to evoke fear or revulsion, whereas stories of the paranormal include experiences that defy scientific explanation (in filmic terms, the former might feature homicidal slashers and the latter deals with things that go bump in the night). In short, I’m less interested in gore, and more intrigued by the Gothic.
Going forwards, therefore, I shall use the term ‘the uncanny’ to describe a specific genre of literature, one which Sigmund Freud, in 1919, defined as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. It is this familiar world that makes the uncanny so psychologically mysterious, or creepy. If we can’t explain something, as humans, as readers (really, what’s the difference?), we may find ourselves entering the realm of the sinister, and sometimes that sinisterness (there must be a better noun) is also malevolent.
Two of my favourite stories, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad feature everyday objects that spell unimaginable horror, and - most creepily - sightings of apparitions in rooms the protagonists know to be empty. Taking this idea further, The Red Room by H.G. Wells features nothing but fear itself and concerns a sceptic who agrees to spend the night in an allegedly haunted room and finds himself in a state of panic as the candles he lights are, one by one, snuffed out as fast as he can light them. Here the ghost is - perhaps - little more than a draught, but it is still one of the most intense narratives I’ve ever read.
It shares similarities, of course, with The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, in which the narrator’s overly acute senses are also his undoing. The expectation of a supernatural entity turns out to be the murderer’s own guilt as our protagonist insists the police officers tear up the floorboards.
Mental instability is also a feature of The Tomb by H.P. Lovecraft, which may or may not play with the idea of reincarnation as Jervas continually hallucinates entering a locked tomb with his own name upon it, and this notion of losing touch with reality, coupled with strong hints that a single location is possessing a character, is a fate which similarly befalls Eleanor in Shirley Jackson’s outstanding The Haunting of Hill House, not to mention Jack Torrance’s exacerbated insanity at the metaphorical hands of The Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s classic novel The Shining.
This last book is terrifying, in part, because the main antagonist isn’t who he seems to be. He looks like Danny’s dad, he sounds like Danny’s dad, but he is in fact an entity of unspecified evil. Much like Dracula looks like a man, but isn’t. Or Frankenstein’s monster does, but can never be. Or the same way the venomous Mr Hyde hides inside the benevolent Dr Jekyll.
All examples of the Uncanny. The familiar made unfamiliar.
Now, there’s more to a successful supernatural story than the elements above, of course. The chief ingredient is tension. Like traditional ‘horror’ stories, that tension is created through fear and the uncanny genre shares a lot of DNA with suspense and thriller fiction, a building of the foreboding, a gradual upping of the stakes, the facing down of danger. Tension is built, much like in film before a jump scare, by periods of rising action followed by the puncturing of said action, then repeating the cycle. In the examples I’ve mentioned already, there is one common theme: the allusion to, or possibly the illusion of, an afterlife. Without the threat from the great beyond, none of my favourites would exist.
The fact that so many of these tales have their roots, or indeed settings, in the nineteenth century is no coincidence. Science as we know it today was in its infancy and the church was still a powerful institution in the century before last. When, in the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley began Frankenstein on Lake Geneva, she was voicing a prevailing fear of the time; namely that human ingenuity might outstrip nature’s own basic tenets. Life and death represented, somehow, a nightmarish interchangeability. And every ‘horror’ story since has been bound by these terms, just as the better writers understand, in some innate way, that explanations, scientific or otherwise, take away all satisfaction from the terror. The ending must be ambiguous. Fear is rational, when it comes to the grave, but the reasons for that fear should never be explicitly justified. Maybe the Devil exists, maybe he doesn’t, but our own death is a certainty.
All of these themes and ingredients are best exemplified in what is, to my mind, the greatest example of the uncanny ever written.
Charles Dickens’ The Signalman concerns a worker in a signal box who witnesses an apparition shortly before three separate tragic events on the stretch of railway beneath which he works. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t read it, but it reads like a checklist of all the fundamental elements that make so many of the stories I’ve mentioned in this article effective. Here we see: a man gifted or cursed with either warnings or premonitions of death; sightings of ghosts in places humans couldn’t possibly exist; the usual Gothic darknesses and ill omens; other characters who misunderstand our unfortunate signalman or consider him mad due to the sights and, in this case, sounds only he can discern.
And an ending that surprises us, but was - much like death itself - foreshadowed all along.
Happy Halloween, and happy reading.
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