Horror: The 100 Best Books (19 page)

In a post-war clubroom, Alan Querdilion tells a tall story about his escape from a Second World War POW camp and temporary projection one hundred years into a future where Nazi Germany won the war and has established complete domination over a neo-feudalized Europe. Eschewing the science fictional/political speculations of most "If Hitler Had Won" novels, Sarban (really John W. Wall) concentrates instead on a horrific vision of the Thousand Year Reich at play. Genetically-altered humans are hunted for sport and Querdilion finds himself the quarry of Count von Hackelnberg, a bloated cross between Guy of Gisbourne, Count Zaroff and Hermann Goering. Sarban is also the author of two volumes of weird fantasy,
Ringstones and Other Stories
(1951) and
The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny
(1953).
The Sound of His Horn
remains his best-known work, and has been an influence on such Nazi fantasies as Keith Roberts' "Weihnachtsabend" and David Erin's "Thor Meets Captain America".

***

This short novel comprises a nightmare within a vision within a dream. The dream, of peaceful country life in post-Second-World-War Britain, contains in turn the vision of an alternative future in which advanced technology supports a carefully crafted, idealized version of an imaginary Aryan past. The estate of Hackelnberg is a theme park, a "Naziland" which provides the illusion of a robust outdoor life of baronial pleasures to the fat, lazy functionaries of an urbanized modern tyranny. But at the core of this amusement park is the Count, a fabulous, superhuman figure far more ferocious and horrifying than Hitler's heirs. The distance between this savage giant, Beowulf and Grendel rolled into one, and the Gauleiters whom he seems to serve out of whim, is one source of the resonance of the work. The thought of Nazism victorious is horrible enough. But suppose these nauseating sadists have somehow conjured, by their attempt to restore some pure, hierarchical, morally unambiguous version of the past, a dreadful primordial spirit -- the Master of the Wild Hunt. The Count embodies the frightful truth behind all such reactionary longings. He treats everyone around him with the brutal contempt typical of the oldest, crudest deities, to whom human beings were merely slaves. That longed-for, perfect past is always mythical, and the world of myth reverberates with the wilful, utterly untrammeled ferocity of the early gods. Their casual habit of turning men and women into animals surfaces here as the deliberate debasement of subject peoples, through science and art, to animal levels. Sarban dramatizes the link between the Count's archaic, macho ferocity and the modern urge to dehumanize all those perceived as weak -- in the Nazi formulation, non-Aryans and, more particularly, women. The women of the Count's domain are reduced to three basic western stereotypes: mindlessly predatory cat-women; game girls, fantastically costumed as exotic birds to become helpless prey fleeing the hunters; and gilded torch-bearers, who serve beautifully but mutely. The shock of recognizing a heightened version of current sexist attitudes contributes strongly to the reader's unease. In fact there are hardly any characters as such in
The Sound of His Horn
. It is filled with emblematic figures like creatures in a dream, with a dream's power to fascinate. But the work has more amplitude and depth than its brevity suggests. Prodigies of economy are achieved with a deceptively artless style. The gradually accelerating narrative becomes not only an observer's tour of his own nightmare, but both a love story and a headlong adventure tale as well. The love affair is used not just as a breathing space in the form of a poignant idyll, but as an opportunity to give readers some chillingly realistic glimpses of the Nazified world beyond the estate fence. The ostensibly distancing device of having the hero tell his story to a friend who then tells it to us serves rather to draw us easily into the heart of the tale, and by contrast sharpens the focus of the terror-filled final chase; and the book becomes a grim reflection upon the atavistic and sadistic aspects of all blood sport. Above all, using a sure and delicate selection of sensory details the author evokes not only the horrors but the seductive beauties of Hackelnberg, and this ambiguity is the dark, dreamy heart of the book. The bloodthirsty, joyous call of the Count's hunting horn, the gold and green livery of his foresters, the sunlit glades of his carefully manicured woods, the gabbling yammer of the maniacal cat-women -- these flashes from a vision at once false and true, enchantingly beautiful and starkly hideous, sink indelibly into the mind. A lasting, eerie echo is the mark of Sarban's achievement in this brief, unforgettable book. -- SUZY McKEE CHARNAS

A vague crisis -- perhaps a worldwide nuclear war -- forces an aeroplane carrying a party of English schoolboys down on an isolated tropical island. The children, members of a public school choir, try to set up some form of adult civilization, but gradually revert to savagery. A decapitated wild boar becomes a sort of god and appears to speak to the children, influencing Jack, the bully, towards tyranny and -- it is suggested -- cannibalism. Piggy, a fat boy, becomes the tribe's ritual outcast and Ralph, the hero, is forced to make a stand against Jack's growing power. Golding's novel has survived being taught in schools, and stands as both a realist revision ofR. M. Ballantyne's classic children's adventure
The Coral Island
(1858) and an examination of the Jekyll and Hyde "beast within" horror theme. Much of Golding's output, which includes the anthropological
The Inheritors
(1956) and the historical
The Spire
(1964), deals with fringe-horrific material.
Lord of the Flies
was starkly filmed in 1963 by Peter Brook and badly remade in 1989 by Harry Hook.

***

When William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 there was an unsurprising amount of huffing and puffing, partly because he was considered a popular and even, horrors, accessible author (at least to those who haven't sought access to works like
Pincher Martin
) --but largely because his view of the human condition seems to be so unrelentingly negative. After all, Alfred Nobel wanted the award to go to "the most distinguished literary work of an idealist tendency". (So it's been given to such dewy-eyed optimists as Andre Gide, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner.) And he is indeed deliciously negative, probably never more so than in the grotesque fable
Lord of the Flies
. In fact, the repeatedly avowed dour purpose of the book was to "attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature", a misanthropic demonstration of our imperfectibility. Whether the book seems to succeed in this goal, or in what way it fails, may be more a reflection of the reader's attitudes than of the writer's skill. I personally have no quarrel with the Nobel Committee's choice; I think Golding is a writer of remarkable virtuosity and power. Nevertheless, while I enjoyed
Lord of the Flies
, and was properly scared by it, the overall effect doesn't seem to argue strongly for his premise. The boys carry a great deal of obvious symbolic weight, the burden of representing archetypes, which is wonderful for the atmosphere of the story, and has everything to do with its success as a horror classic. But I think that undermines its didactic power. Acting out their simplified stereotypical roles, the boys move inevitably towards disassociation and savagery. It's the inevitableness that gives the book its fearsome suspense, the reader worrying
not
"will they change their behavior and save themselves?" but rather "will an outside force save them from themselves before it's too late?" Although in other aspects a comparison would be ludicrous, this pattern is the same plot dynamic that energizes most horror films, good or bad. A vampire or werewolf wouldn't be scary enough if its potential victims had any chance to vanquish it by simple application of intelligence and strength. There has to be the sense that inexorable Fate is in charge; they are only human, and human is not going to do the trick. God or Science has to intervene. So we experience the delectable catharsis of being temporarily terrified, but then walk out of the theater into a real world where we know things are more complicated but at least are free of flesh-rending man-beasts or bloodsucking Eastern Europeans. I have a similar feeling of detachment after reading
Lord of the Flies
again. The book works beautifully on its own terms, but when I shut it, I don't accept those terms any more. This may just go back to my initial premise, though. Golding and I are polar opposites when it comes to the central theme of the book. I believe human nature is improvable, if not perfectible; and that humans in ones and twos and even threes can be marvelously good, but in the diffusion of moral responsibility that "society" brings, we gravitate toward the evil and ugly. Of course I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from reading the book because of my quibble with its theme. It's an evening of good solid terror, and solid food for thought besides. -- JOE HALDEMAN

1976. Robert Neville, formerly a scientist, lives alone, besieged in his ordinary home by nocturnal creatures who used to be his neighbours. By day, he tries to find the lair in which the bulk of the vampires hide from the sunlight and destroys by staking those he can find. In flashback, we learn that he is the only immune human in a world blighted by an epidemic of vampirism. A rational, bacteriological explanation is presented for the ancient myth, and Neville is able to use some of the legendary trappings of the vampire hunter -- garlic, the cross -- against his enemy for medical or psychological reasons. Finally, he is hunted down not by the vampires he is seeking to destroy but by a new society of infected humans who have learned to live with the disease. In a world of vampires, the last human being becomes a monster.
I am Legend
, one of the first attempts to treat a traditional horror theme in a science-fictional manner, was an instant classic. It has been unsuccessfully filmed twice, as
The Last Man on Earth
(1964) with Vincent Price and
The Omega Man
(1971) with Charlton Heston, but more importantly served as the inspiration for George A. Romero's seminal
Night of the Living Dead
(1968) and its sequels.

***

Blood. Endless, red avenues of it, roaring in blackness. The body's ancient aqueducts splash its sleepless current; spreading life. Sometimes death. Like the famished death which the infected in
I am Legend
chaperone each night. Like the death which their sunset predation and thirst bring to Robert Neville. As the novel's crucified hero, his life hemorrhages before us. Rampant pain and loss pool around his existence; dark, inescapable. He is bleeding, somewhere deep; unseen. And the undead envoys who vulture and loiter septically outside his house each night want not only the red liquid inside him. They want the aching psyche which floats like a failing raft. Blood. Protected in our body vaults; royalty behind a walled city. Like Neville, barricaded within his battered house. He is blood; the wet voltage which runs within the book. Safe in his house, as blood in a body. His unrelenting flow is the kinetic stream which makes each chapter continue on, despite pestilent, viral assault from without. Yet Neville, too, knows anemia. It shifts within a wounded soul; an isolated dune, blown by empty routine. The liquor he is addicted to is only so much sweetened, civilized blood. The vampires who shriek obscene rage outside his house, as he drinks, simply crave a more horrid vintage and in Neville discover a warm, living vineyard. Blood. It drifts like thought and in
I am Legend
becomes the presence of evil itself; an unmerciful irrigation of postwar toxicity and dementia. The novel's layers are not unlike blood itself. Dense; intricate. Textured by a rich compositional weave. And in an era of AIDS, the global contagion which roves like some hideous vagabond, the ideas expressed in
I am Legend
are especially disturbing and prophetic. The AIDS virus, too, hides amorally in human waterways. Waiting. Polluting the body's helpless Amazon torrents with death. It is impossible to stop; like the vampires Neville tries uselessly to slaughter. Did my father have a vision which extended beyond merely a brilliant novel? Did he see what was coming? I believe psychics exist. I believe we are all possessed of such ability. I therefore must, at least partially, support those visions which strike the psychically sensitive most powerfully; strike with most precise imagery and articulation. And I find myself asking, what could be more specifically articulate than a detailed novel, the crux of which is a central image so exact, it's virtually the duplicate of AIDS; a blood holocaust.
I am Legend
was set during a period between 1976 and 1979. The first, vague, unresponded-to reports about AIDS began to appear around 1980. It is, if nothing more, an evocative coincidence. Still, if Orwell's fictive predictions in the novel
1984
unsettle the nerves, what then should we make of what might be equally predictive, albeit equally fictive, visions contained within
I am Legend
? Blood. It is passed from father to son; a divine transfusion. All life comes from it. Worships it. Forfeits it in death. It is essence. And as we are all now grimly aware, it is the perfect messenger for horror. Perhaps
I am Legend
, without my father's conscious awareness, might have been written not only to frighten us. It might have been written to prepare us. -- RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON

The October Country
is substantially a reprint of
Dark Carnival
(1947), an Arkham House collection of stories Bradbury originally published in
Weird Tales
and other magazine markets in the '40s.
Dark Carnival
was never widely available, and
The October Country
, which includes several tales original to the collection, stands as the definitive assembly of Bradbury's early horror fiction. As the title suggests, the mood is usually autumnal and sombre, as in "The Scythe", where the protagonist becomes the Grim Reaper, chopping down wheatfields in the knowledge that every stalk represents a human life. However, there are also horrific tales along the lines of "Skeleton", in which a hypochondriac becomes obsessed with the idea that his own bones have turned against him, and several stories ("Uncle Einar", "The Homecoming ) about a Charles Addamsish family of non-humans living in the Midwest. All these themes recur in the novel
Something Wicked This Way Comes
(1962).