Horror: The 100 Best Books

  64: [1968] ROBERT AICKMAN - Sub Rosa

  Sub Rosa is an original collection of ghost stories — or “strange stories”, to use the author’s preferred term — concentrating on ambiguity, unease and stark terror. It consists of eight novella-length tales: “Ravissante”, “The Inner Room”, “Never Visit Venice”, “The Unsettled Dust”, “The Houses of the Russians”, “No Stronger Than a Flower”, “The Cicerones” and “Into the Wood”. Aickman’s other collections, all of a similarly high standard, are Dark Entries (1964), Powers of Darkness (1966), Cold Hand in Mine (1975), Tales of Love and Death (1977), Painted Devils (1979) and The Wine-Dark Sea (1988).

  ***

  At the beginning of “Ravissante” our anonymous narrator recalls meeting a married couple at a party. The man told him he had given up painting for easier and more lucrative employment editing coffee-table books. His wife the narrator describes as a “nearly invisible woman”. She did not speak. “I remark on this,” says the narrator, “simply as a fact. I do not imply that she was bored. She might indeed have been enthralled. Silence can, after all, mean either thing. In her case, I never found out which it meant.” The Latin tag sub rosa means “secretly; in strict confidence”. The estimable E. Cobham Brewer explains that “Cupid gave Harpocrates (the god of silence) a rose, to bribe him not to betray the amours of Venus. Hence the flower became the emblem of silence.” Robert Aickman tells us secrets, secrets we would generally rather not know; secrets so bizarre we do not know how to take them; secrets so private we may doubt whether he has told us anything at all. He has. He has shown us views of the domain of Harpocrates: told us something of the nature of the silence. In the silence there may be anything. Most often it is sex or death, or for Curtis in “No Stronger Than a Flower” as for Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, one wearing the mask of the other. We long for silence as we long for sleep; as we long for one another. We do not know the face of what we long for; but when we see it, we know it, and with that we are extinguished. The editor of coffee-table books leaves an account of the horrid experience that induced him to give up painting. In a foreign country, in a house he did not know, the squat, ugly widow of an artist he much admired subjected him to a sexually degrading ritual before a canvas he immediately recognized as his own work, but which he knew he had never painted. It was to keep out of this region of terror and humiliation that the man gave up his art and married a woman who would efface herself for him; or perhaps because he had been there already. “The Inner Room” tells how a woman shelters from a storm in a house that resembles entirely the macabre doll’s house she owned briefly as a child, but could never open. The musty, embittered inhabitants show her a photograph of herself when young, pierced with a rusty needle. Robert Aickman’s “strange tales” enter into secret limbos and private hells where the outer world has come to resemble the inner. Coded out of gestures, urges, and hesitations, their landscapes are no more comprehensible and no less compelling than the scenarios of dreams. “These areas,” says Aickman in “Into the Wood”, “are not uncommon if you know how (or are compelled) to look for them.” Trant, the central character of “The Cicerones”, comes with ease among the tombs of the bishops of St. Bavon. “The gate had every appearance of being locked, but in fact it opened at once.” In this story it is Christianity itself, with its mechanisms of martyrdom and election, that generates horror. At the last it is not clear whether Trant has been saved or damned, only that he has been removed from the world of guidebooks and wristwatches. Aickman’s characters are tourists and travellers, solitaries abroad. Nugent Oxenhope, in “The Unsettled Dust”, is an official forced to put up at a dreary stately home, the barely tenanted husk of a former grandeur. Aickman thought this a suitable image for Britain in the twentieth century. In “Never Visit Venice” and “Into the Wood”, as in “Ravissante” and “The Cicerones”, Britons carry their disappointment and loneliness into Europe, where different forms of paralysis await them. In “The Houses of the Russians” a British surveyor’s clerk on business in Finland is given a gratuitous vision of an Orthodox heaven and hell, and a protective talisman. Harpocrates too can be kind. Aickman’s was not a malign universe, or even a retributive tragic order that automatically punished transgressions and oversights. Rather he maintained, in the stories of his eight collections (one collaborative, one posthumous), that human existence is a narrow path through the absolute unknown; and we occasionally, inevitably, stray. Introducing the ex-painter’s manuscript, the narrator of “Ravissante” says: “The sheer oddity of life seems to me of more and more importance, because more and more the pretence is that life is charted, predictable, and controllable.” In the house of the dead artist, so the manuscript records, the writer suddenly noticed a small black poodle in the room. “It seemed to me, as I looked at it, to have very big eyes and very long legs, perhaps more like a spider than a poodle.” He lost track of it, and mentioned it to the widow. She had not seen it. “If it’s not yours,” he told her, “it must have got in from the darkness outside.” — COLIN GREENLAND

  65: [1969] KINGSLEY AMIS - The Green Man

  Maurice Allington, owner of a pub in Fareham, Hertfordshire, called The Green Man — which numbers Brian W. Aldiss among its patrons — begins to see ghosts. A heavy drinker and a womanizer, Allington is at first more preoccupied with his complicated day-to-day life, specifically his attempts to get his wife Joyce and mistress Diana to join him in a bout of troilist sex, than the supernatural visitations. However, the sinister presence of Dr. Thomas Underhill, a dead magician, soon persuades him to take an interest. It develops that Underhill has plans to return from the beyond; plans which involve Maurice and his young daughter Amy, not to mention the imposing folklore figure after which the pub is named. A witty, scary combination of typical Amis social/sexual comedy and the M. R. James tradition, The Green Man includes several fine digressions on the natures of death, ghostliness and the ghost story itself. Although Amis has tried his hand several times at science fiction, this remains his only major venture into the horror field. It was adapted by Malcolm Bradbury as a three-part BBC-TV serial, starring Albert Finney, in 1990.

  ***

  The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its definition of Horror, “A painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear”. The Green Man provides plenty of fear and loathing, as well as painful emotion in its own right. Unlike some novels, which take a while before introducing their frisson, The Green Man begins briskly: a ghost arrives on page four of the text. This relatively harmless — that is, merely disconcerting — female apparition serves as a prelude to a series of malevolent figures, some more substantial than others, all capable of raising the fear and loathing level. We meet an old man, a young man, an unpleasant bird, and the particularly unsettling creature of the title. This might sound like gilding the lily, but not in Kingsley Amis’ hands. An acclaimed novelist makes his horrors telling by staging them in the prosaic setting of a public house, The Green Man, eight miles off the M1 in Hertfordshire. The owner of the pub is Maurice Allington, a man with a drink problem and several other problems of a personal nature which lead to the disaffection of his second wife and the alienation of his young daughter. The Green Man works as a novel, rather than just as a horror tale, its strengths being the rough-edged character of Allington and the lucidity with which his pub and its working life are described. A reader soon feels that he could find his way round the premises alone at night, from the bedrooms to the bar. Not that this would be the most desirable of activities. For The Green Man is home to the evil shade of a 17th-century practitioner of the black arts, Dr. Thomas Underhill. Allington comes up against him in what is now the pub dining-room, once Underhill’s study.

  In leisurely fashion, but without delay, the head turned and the eyes met mine. They were dark brown eyes with deeply creased lids, thick lower lashes, and arching brows. I also saw a pale, indoors complexion scattered with broken veins to what seemed an incongruous degree, a broad forehead, a long, skewed nose,
and a mouth that, in another’s face, I might have called humorous, with very clearly denned lips. Then, or rather at once, Dr. Underhill recognised me. Then he smiled. It was the kind of smile with which a bully might greet an inferior person prepared to join with him in the persecution of some helpless third party.

  Amis never piles on the agony, using words with his customary care. This coolness also characterizes much of Allington’s behaviour, whereas his old father dies of shock when confronted by one of the apparitions. If Underhill was once human, the bird which flies through Allington’s hand — to his terror — manifestly is not. The green monster, which Underhill once controlled, is even further from human, though it takes on an approximately human shape. It is a destructive force arising from nature, not entirely unlike Theodore Sturgeon’s It. Last in the apparition queue, most far from humanity, is “the young man”. The young man, appearing in the upstairs dining-room when the whole world is struck by temporal paralysis, is God himself. However many times I read the novel, these passages, with the universe stopping and this pallid apparition sitting in a chair, strike me with deep and genuine dismay. Allington’s conversation with the young man touches profound depths of ontological discomfort: the Almighty is a petty creature. In all, The Green Man is one of Amis’s most agreeably rancid novels, packed with disconcerting moments, both human and inhuman, and ending on a memorable note of Angst. It’s genuinely and enduringly chilling, the real McCoy, and no tomato sauce. — BRIAN W. ALDISS

  66: [1969] ANTHONY BOUCHER - The Compleat Werewolf, and Other Stories of Fantasy and SF

  This collection assembles the best of Anthony Boucher’s short fiction. A major influence on the field as founder and editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Boucher (the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White) wrote these stories between 1941 and 1945, mainly for John W. Campbell’s Unknown. The title story is a classic mix of lycanthropy, private eyes, fiendish Nazi agents and wisecracking humour. In a similar vein, the book also includes such witty variations on old horror themes as “Snulbug”, about a deal with a demon, “Mr. Lupescu”, about an imaginary friend, “The Ghost of Me”, a doppelgdnger with a twist, and “We Print the Truth”, about a newspaper editor given the power to change the world. “They Bite”, a rare straight horror tale about desert-dwelling mutants (perhaps an influence on The Hills Have Eyes) is one of the most often-anthologized and praised ’40s horror stories. Boucher’s other work includes fine, traditional detective novels like The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937), The Case of the Crumpled Knave (1939), Nine Times Nine (1940), The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940) and Rocket to the Morgue (1942).

  ***

  I saw one of the most distressing newspaper headlines of my life last month; someone was reading The Sun at Haywards Heath railway station, and the headline blared out from the cover and it made my heart sink and my fingers cross. “Oh no,” I thought. “They haven’t!” The Headline read: Werewolf Captured in Southend. The concept was terrifying. If there really were werewolves — and Southend did seem the kind of place they’d find one — then werewolves would be reduced to reality, be codified and counted, make TV appearances, be explained away. No longer could shapechanging lycanthropes stalk the darkness outside the circle of firelight that fits into everyday experience and dry textbooks, no longer would they be fair game for any writer with a yen to set someone howling at a full moon. Instead they’d be case histories and oddities and half of the fun would vanish as we learned the facts. Make that all of the fun. Luckily, like much else in the tabloid press, the headline bore no relation to the actual state of affairs at all. The disgruntled gentleman in Southend wasn’t actually a werewolf. But it had been a close call. I think I would feel the same way if any of the creatures of Dark Myth actually turned up and became quantifiable: if a Unicorn was caged in Bognor, or a Zombie in Blackpool, or if Count Dracula landed at Grimsby and was detained by Immigration. If they existed then we could no longer invent them, and the world would be poorer by a myth or three. It was Ogden Nash who said that “where there’s a monster there’s a miracle”, but I’d discovered that for myself at the age of ten, when I read The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher. At first glance the book might not seem a prime candidate for a Best Horror selection. It’s a short-story collection, of which less than half the ten stories could be categorized as strict horror, and three are simply good-natured Astounding-type SF. But it contains at least two stories worth their weight in chilled blood, and the title story, which, for me, is special. “They Bite” is one of the blood chillers. On rereading it I realized that I had forgotten the plot, what there is of it, that I had in memory stripped the tale down to a leaner framework. But the central motif (of the Carkers — emaciated, brown, desert-dwellers who live in the corner of your vision, moving faster than the eye can follow; cannibals, and they bite) had always stayed with me, as had the final scene, of Tallant, the protagonist, trapped in the adobe hut the Carkers have made their home, blood pouring from his severed wrist, waiting for the returning female Carker to come and finish him off. “We Print the Truth” tells of the town of Grover. The Editor of the local paper, MacVeagh, wishes that his paper will always print the truth; his wish is granted. Whatever is printed in the paper is the truth — in Grover. The opportunity to play God becomes too much for MacVeagh; he ends the Second World War, marries the girl of his dreams, tries to make a perfect world. But fairytale wishes always have catches, and this has worse catches than most. His wife is unhappy, commits adultery with the man she would have married, eventually attempts suicide by drinking iodine. MacVeagh “fixes” this with a newspaper article but the results are even more unpleasant than he expected. And outside Grover things are even worse; after all, outside the paper’s sphere of influence, the war continues. That things resolve eventually, according to the rules, doesn’t subtract from the overall feeling that one is watching MacVeagh dig himself further and further into a pit from which there really is no escape — like the bartender given a wish by the same old wish-granting god (Wayland Smith) who wishes for an inexhaustible beer pitcher, and drinks himself to death. The post-coital moment at which MacVeagh realizes that his wife can never possibly love him is true horror indeed. “Mr. Lupescu” is an elegant variation on a theme, which recalls to mind John Collier’s superior short story, “Thus We Refute Beelzy”. Both stories involve fathers murdered by “imaginary friends”. In the Boucher tale the imaginary friend is more real than might initially be imagined; and the imaginary friend has an imaginary fiend … “The Pink Caterpillar” is a time-travel black magic detective story about a man and a skeleton; “The Ghost of Me” is a doppelganger variant, about a man whose ghost turns up to haunt the spot where he was killed, but slightly too early. And then there’s the story that changed the way I saw things. “The Compleat Werewolf isn’t a horror story. But it’s a story that affects how you perceive the icons of horror — especially if exposed to it early enough. It affects whose side you are on from then on out; I’m on the side of the werewolf, have been ever since. Wolfe Wolf is a professor of old German, hopelessly in love with Gloria, a feckless film starlet. When, during the course of a drunken night, Wolfe discovers from Ozymandias the Great (a real magician who no longer practises, because people want fakes) that he is a werewolf, that he can change into a wolf simply by saying “Absarka”, he sees glory ahead, a chance to impress and win Gloria. But there are disadvantages — like the fact that in wolf form it is impossible to say Absarka and change back again, or the trouble one has with one’s lack of clothes on changing from wolf into human form in front of a classroom of students. He converses with cats, listens to Ozymandias’ endless anecdotes of magic in Madagascar, and unfinished tales of Darjeeling, rescues small children, and even begins to understand how people could snack on them … Again the plot — chock-full of fifth columnists, spies, Germans, film people, FBI men and Fergus O’Breen (redheaded Irish private eye) — matters hardly at all. It’s the werewolf. Compleatly the
werewolf. And you could ask me why I picked this book, rather than any one of well over a hundred other possibilities, many of them written by authors for whom I have more respect or affection, or books which are more deserving masterworks of outstanding literary or artistic or horrific achievement … I suppose it’s because they didn’t catch a werewolf in Southend last month, and, Fate willing, they never will. — NEIL GAIMAN

  67: [1971] JOHN GARDNER - Grendel

  The story of Beowulf, told from the point of view of Grendel, the monster who terrorises the meadhall of King Hrothgar until the mighty hero — nameless here — slays him in combat. Unlike Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1976), which retells the same myth but rationalizes Grendel and his mother as the last surviving Neanderthals, Gardner’s novel accepts the fantastic elements of the original story — monsters, dragons, heroes — and re-uses them as part of a meditation upon the nature of humanity, the indifference of God, and the interdependence of heroism and monstrousness in legend and song. John Gardner, an American academic, was also the author of The Resurrection (1966), The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), The Sunlight Dialogues (1972) and other novels. Grendel was filmed a little too whimsically as an animated feature in Australia, entitled Grendel, Grendel, Grendel (1980), directed by Alexander Stitt, with Peter Ustinov as the voice of the monster.