Non-Emetic Horror Novels

[joysilence]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY cloudhurler)

To be a connoisseur of horror literature, it seems that a reader must almost entirely rely upon short fiction. There are exceptions, of course, but after reading countless poor novels -- by good and bad authors alike -- I have almost quit reading horror novels entirely. And even with the better novels I have, for the most part, come away somewhat unsatisfied where the aspect of horror is concerned. It is obvious that the various emotional facets of horror cannot be sustained for the duration of a novel, but even so most horror novels are extremely wanting. As an aside: Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird is harrowing throughout, but I certainly would not want to read a book like that too frequently. Continuing, yesterday I was perusing S.T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale and came across the following:

"Commercial demands for the production of novels (as opposed to collections of short stories), combined with the difficulty of maintaining a "nonrealistic" weird conception over novel length without merely lapsing into conventionalized imaginary-world fantasy, have led to the proliferation of novels whose basic scenarios may have genuine literary potential only in the short story or may not be weird at all in their essence but fundamentally allied to suspense or melodrama. Again I point to Campbell, since this most talented of modern weird writers has himself been only indifferently successful in the novel; many of his works have been spun out to novel length only by increasing the number of characters involved (Obsession, The Hungry Moon) rather than by the creation of a plot that actually requires a novel for its exposition. There seem to be three solutions to this general difficulty: write a frankly nonrealistic novel; write a novel that is avowedly largely a mystery or suspense tale with supernatural interludes, or perhaps one that does not involve the supernatural at all; or write a novel that is truly structured around a complex supernatural phenomenon. Let us consider each of these in greater detail.

"The first has been tried and found quite successful, but it has now become so distinct a form that it is virtually beyond the scope of the purely supernatural horror tale. Dunsany was a pioneer in this regard: The Blessing of Pan (1927), The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933), The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939), and The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950) are all tours de force in that, although emphatically set in the "real" world, they are very little concerned with mundane human motivations in the manner of mainstream novels; they are, in some inexplicable way, imaginary-world fantasies without the imaginary world. Subsequent efforts at nonrealistic weird fiction have generally fallen more conventionally into the imaginary-world pattern, and Eddison, Tolkien, Peake, and their followers have certainly produced very brilliant and substantial work in this form, but this is now regarded as a distinct subgenre of its own with little relation to the main body of weird writing. Perhaps only Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs (1980) should be cited here -- a work that is curiously similar to the novels of Dunsany mentioned above, in that it portrays an imaginary world somehow inserted within the realm of the real. Clive Barker has also attempted something along this line, with relative success in Weaveworld (1987), and with spectacular lack of success in The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Imajica (1991).

"It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of weird novels written in the last two decades are subject to Ligotti's complaint that they are merely mystery or suspense tales with or without supernatural interludes. Some of these are nevertheless very successful, even though -- especially with purely nonsupernatural work -- it sometimes becomes problematical to classify them within weird fiction at all. There is a lively debate as to whether the nonsupernatural suspense novels of Thomas Harris are or are not weird -- and there are many other works of this type. A number of unquestionably brilliant novels of this sort have certainly been produced, from Bloch's The Scarf (1947) and Psycho (1959), to Campbell's The Face That Must Die (1979), to Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory (1984), to Harris' The Silence of the Lambs (1988). But there will always be a question as to whether these are genuinely weird. It is, however, in those novels that are theoretically based upon a supernatural premise, but in which that premise that does not always function in a systematic way, that the "banalization" of horror is particularly evident. In many of King's or Straub's novels there is not even a mystery or suspense foundation for the weird but merely long stretches of irrelevant character portrayal and melodramatic human conflict. This tendency reaches its nadir in the soap-opera supernaturalism of Charles L. Grant.

"Only rarely are novels actually founded upon a weird situation of novel length. I do not see any formula for the creation of such a thing, and one can only point to the successes: Tryon's The Other (1971) and Harvest Home (1973); Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976); Campbell's Incarnate (1983) and Midnight Sun (1990); Barker's The Damnation Game (1985); Klein's The Ceremonies (1984); David J. Schow's The Shaft (1990); and, of course, the grandfather (or should one say grandmother) of them all, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959). It is of note that not a single one of Machen's or Dunsany's or Blackwood's novels can be called horror novels as such. They may perhaps be weird (although even this is in doubt in the case of such a tenuous if poignant work as Machen's The Hill of Dreams), but they must be classed more as fantasy than as supernatural horror. There were a few other fairly successful weird novels prior to Lovecraft (among them William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland [1908] and Leonard Cline's The Dark Chamber [1927]), but of those written subsequent to Lovecraft, the above are all I can think of that rank among the authentic masterpieces of the form. It can be seen that these novels have virtually nothing in common with each other, either in theme or in style or in execution; it is simply that in each instance the author has conceived of a scenario that is sufficiently complex and sufficiently supernatural in its essence such that a novel is required for its exposition."

I found the preceding interesting: perhaps it will even initiate some discussion. Besides being somewhat interesting, however, it is related to my topic of the paucity of great horror novels. Perhaps we could all suggest a title or two and why we believe said title(s) to be worthwhile. What say you?