10 Tales of Classic Horror
Lance Eaton
10 Classic Tales of Horror
Edited by Lance V. Eaton
December 21, 2014
Lance V. Eaton
https://www.LanceEaton.com
Table of Contents
Introduction
About the Editor
The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe
Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce
The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft
The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Horla, or Modern Ghosts by Guy De Maupaussant
The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker
Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Recommended in Horror
The Selected Texts
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Introduction
Horror has many different faces. What scares people can be deeply personal and unique, and yet, we know that there are some definite universal fears out there; torture, alienation, and death being but a few of the big ones.
Horror in storytelling stands as old as storytelling itself. So many ancient tales and poems deliver horror as part and parcel of what they do. If one looks to the Bible there are no end of horrific tales from the jealousy-fueled rage of Cain to the destruction of the world by flood to escaping of Sodom and Gomorrah all the way to the crucifixion (the ultimate ghost story) to the apocalypse.
Horror as a recognized genre has a much shorter history. Though horror is to be found in much classic literature (e.g. Beowulf, Dante’s Inferno) or folktales, it still has not been much of a recognized genre until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still, it has lived a much shorter span as a respectable genre and some still would negate that idea. However, the preponderance of films, TV shows, novels, comics, and video games that contain horror are quite prolific and tell us that even if the critics fail to include horror, they are the only ones.
Over the course of my graduate work, I had several opportunities to explore horror and think about its purpose and use. I found that horror as story often depicted or captured something else. Like all great literature, the horror was not about the horror, but about something else altogether. Horror as story has much to offer society and can be found regularly serving as an outlet for the anxieties and fears that we cannot ride ourselves from. Whether it is giant monster films in the 1950s, slasher films in the 1970s and 1980s, vampire films of the 1980s and 1990s, or zombie films of the 2000s, each cycle with its special type of monster seems to tap into a deep-seeded fear in culture such as fears of the atomic bomb, feminism, AIDS, and terrorism or infectious disease (depending on how one breaks down the zombie).
It’s easy to argue that horror is about cheap thrills. So much of horror does exactly that. Yet like all other forms of literature, the Theodore Sturgeon law is worth invoking in that “90% of everything is crud.” No surprise there. However, when we look at the great works of horror—they go far beyond cheap thrills. They leave lasting impressions upon us and in the most egregious of works, make us question our own sanity.
Horror sticks with us in some ways because the impression it provides hits us where it counts. Gore, blood, guts—are not particularly impressive as devices. However, walk a reader through how one becomes alienated from his or her body or how a dearly loved partner transforms from something known into something inconceivable, and the horror creator unravels our deepest binds to the real world.
To that end, I have collected here some of what I find is the greatest horror in literature that I have encountered over the years and regularly return to or share with friends, students, and colleagues.
About the Editor
Lance Eaton is writer and educator living on the North Shore of Massachusetts. He has received degrees in History, Criminal Justice, American Studies, Public Administration and Instructional Design. He has taught at numerous colleges and universities including North Shore Community College, Salem State University, Emerson College, and University of Massachusetts in Lowell. He has taught courses on World History, Composition, American Literature, Comics and Graphic Novels, Horror Fiction, Adapting Fiction, Popular Culture, Making Monsters, and Cultural Construction of Identity. He has presented at regional, national, and international conferences and published on topics such as using comics within history courses, exploring intertextual influences between the Incredible Hulk and Mr. Hyde, exploring superheroes in a Post-9/11 paradigm, and zombies as a 9/11 metaphor. He has been a regular contributor to Publishers Weekly and Audiofile Magazine. His regular musings can be found on his blog: By Any Other Nerd: https://byanyothernerd.blogspot.org and his website is https://www.LanceEaton.com.
The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe
Published: August 19, 1843
Publication: Saturday Evening Post
Introduction
One simply does not talk about horror without mentioning the great Poe. One has to wonder what Poe would think of about his legacy given that he appears in so many anthologies and courses around the world. One can barely escape formal education without several encounters with the brilliant writer. There are so many works of Poe’s to choose from. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is often a given for anthologies as is “The Cask of Amontillado” or even “The Pit and The Pendulum”. Yet I have always been a big fan of “The Black Cat,” more so now that I reside with a black cat (if this story has taught me anything, it is that I do not own or possess a black cat—it owns or possesses me in fact).
What attracted me so much to the story is the narrator’s own blindness. I love the references to his downfall relating to alcohol and the symbolism of a black cat named Pluto, but I think the unraveling relation from the onset between the narrator and his wife most fascinating. If one follows the relational dynamic between the narrator and his wife, there are clear lines of tension between them. He states he married early and was surprised that his wife was of similar disposition of him; this always told me that his marriage was not intentional and from there, increasing critiques and issues with his wife escape from him. The tension seems clear enough that killing his wife seems more intentional than accidental. The black cat is merely his focal point. In reading the tale, watch closely to how quickly and morbid his mind becomes after killing his wife. It’s regular feature of Poe’s tale—a bait and switch about the madness that possesses the protagonist.
