Bordering On Fear: A Comparative Literary Study Of Horror Fiction - CURVE

2of violence and "the body fantastic" (Badley 1995) are endlessly debated by publicpolicymakers, fans, scholars and moralists, the corresponding discussions of written horrorfiction's graphic prose are notably absent, with one or two exceptions, such as Bret EastonEllis's American Psycho, which occasioned protests by some feminists. Robert Bloch stated thecase admirably in his contention that "the few horror stories approved by the literaryestablishment [have] dealt almost exclusively with polite antiquarians and retired Englishgentlemen encountering a ghost" ("Heritage of Horror" xvii). Examples of the latter,whether they are penned by Montague Rhodes or Henry James, are not commonly dealt withby the academic establishment as horror fictions perse. Rather they are classified as "classic"short stories and are handled accordingly, with little mention of what makes themparticularly "classic" as horror other than acknowledgement of the presence of thesupernatural. Horror can thus be set aside or placed sous rature as an unpleasant side-effect ofa classic literary work.One reason for such a wholesale shunning of the horrific elements of a text might bethe prevalence in the field of what Matt Hills has termed "horror-as-schooling" or usinghorror to illustrate a particular pet theory. This "theory-first, pleasure-second" tendency,Hills argues, has been a recurring habit for academics who study horror:All such theories (including sociologies and cognitive philosophies of horror)appear to proceed from the basic notion that horror's pleasures stand in needof explanation, whether this is done by relating horror texts to the 'real'cultural anxieties of a time period, or to transhistorical notions of 'theunconscious'. I am suggesting here that theoretical approaches to horror have

3explained (away) the genre's pleasures by invoking their own disciplinary andtheoretical norms.1 (Pleasures of Horror 2)Hills argues that taking pleasure in the text's affects2 is too redolent of fandom forthe established hierarchies of knowledge that distinguish academic work: a claim which isborne out by my own research. When I first began to read scholarly horror criticism in thenineties which was and still is overwhelmingly dominated by film criticism, I found that thefew literary critics who had tiptoed at all into the field unanimously struggled to distancethemselves from what Steffen Hantke calls "the shady territory of fandom" (n.pag.). Theinference here is that horror fandom is a shadowy realm infested by monstrous, mindlessmorons slavering bestially over their prurient spectacles of gore, dismemberment, occultpossession and cannibalism. As others have noted (Gelder; Hills: 2002; Laity), allusions tohorror's "sick-making" pleasures raise the spectre of Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital,where the taste or distaste for horror more properly "classifies the classifier" (6). ForBourdieu, taste becomesthe basis of all that one has - people and things - and all that one is forothers, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others. Tastes. . .1As Hills notes, this practice will tend to radically over-simplify crucial aspects of thetexts: "At worst, theoretical answers seem to be determined in advance of critics' encounterswith horror texts, while at best scholarly theories continue to be accorded discursive primacy(that is, academic texts routinely offer pop-cultural examples that somehow mirror, 'prove'or allegorize the writer's chosen / favoured theory") (2).21 deliberately use "affects" instead of "effects" to describe the horror responsesevoked by the text in order to avoid confusion with the debate, to which I will briefly alludelater on, about horror's "ill effects" on society. See for example III Effects: the media/ violencedebate, eds. Martin Barker, Julian Petley, Routledge, 2001.

4are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. . . In matters of taste,more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhapsfirst and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceralintolerance ("sick-making") of the tastes of others. (56)3In this famous formulation, it is interesting to note how quickly the language ofhorror surfaces as a sort of primal response to "the tastes of others," which "negation" isthen regulated into the positive shaping of one's own taste. As scholars and fans proudlystake out a claim on horror's territory, they are enacting, as Hills points out, aconnoisseurship of horror that demarcates the border between "Them" (non-horror fans)and "Us" (74). Both scholars and fans profess to "get" horror, rather than it "getting" them,and to possess special knowledge in the field. Horror, then, "first and foremost" can beexpressed as a reaction through distaste, where its "sick-making" strategies, as we have seen,becomes a way to classify and to determine "negation" as a yardstick for measuring anddetermining distances between subjectivities. Rooted in the notion of the fan is theconnotation of the cultish, subliterate "fanatic": the person unable to maintain the propercritical distance from his or her obsessive interests. By contrast, the scholar follows the rule3Gelder, Kermode, Laity, Jancovich, Hills and others have also taken up Bourdieu'stheory of cultural distinctions to discuss horror production and the cultural capital wieldedby horror fans, and to weigh the pleasures of horror connoisseurship, reading and viewingagainst the broader expression of distaste for horror in mainstream reception, which is oftenevinced as distaste for its fans. Before Bourdieu, the Frankfurt School defined a "cultureindustry" where the differentiation between "A and B films" serves as a mechanism for"classifying, organizing, and labelling consumers" (Horkheimer and Adorno 5). With itsfigurative feet firmly placed on the "B" side, horror defines us, not the other way around.

5of academic decorum in keeping a "healthy," detached, tasteful and objective stance vis-a-visher or his subjects of research.4A certain habit of genteel avoidance of borders thus pervades scholarship on horrorfiction. These fictions might be said to hold the danger of contaminating or polluting purelyobjective literary scholarship with the taint of forbidden pleasures taken in the reading of thetexts themselves.5 Ironically, then, academic studies of horror fiction often dance around theissue of the horrific as it appears in the text, presenting such issues only coyly and obliquely.In order to be effective and taken seriously, the scholar must scrupulously avoid lingeringupon the narrative elements of graphic violence, mutilations and madness, deformities anddeaths, monstrous spectacles and tormented victims that abound in the pages of horrorliterature. Instead, the disturbing impact of these images and narrative affects is either takenfor granted or merely hinted at, and so the resonant core of the texts — indeed theirconstitutive meaning as horror — becomes obscured between the decorous lines of analysisand theory. This oblique approach means that die distinguishing attributes of horror fictionsthemselves have seldom been directly addressed, as my overview of the existing scholarship4This idealized distance has been critically interrogated and dismantled by culturalstudies scholars. Following the trail blazed by Henry Jenkins (Textual Poaching, 1992; ScienceFiction Audiences with John Tulloch, 1995), Hills proposes that the fear of fandom in theacademy arises from the devaluation of fandom as "pseudo-knowledge," " inappropriatelearning" and "uncritical engagement with the media" (2002). Hills points out that muchacademic work is premised upon die tidy compartmentalization of messy cultural productioninto worthy and unworthy objects of study. Such "decisionist" thinking, as Hills terms it,fails to question the hegemonic processes whereby "good" and "bad" instances of popularculture are singled out for scholarly attention.5Diana Brydon speaks of "contamination" as a literary device of the "cross-culturalimagination" (136).

6in the first chapter will show. As an institutionally unacceptable form of knowledge, horror'sburgeoning presence in the academy continues to create confusion and uncertainty. Theshocking imagery and graphic excesses of many horror fictions, moreover, engender acutediscomfort, which further challenges the established protocols of how "good" and "bad"cultural objects may be handled. Often, the discomfort itself is all that can be agreed upon inthe absence of a sanctioned space or language for expressing this knowledge as well asresistance to fan appreciation. Thus, Hantke describes the reaction of an academic audienceattending a conference on popular culture to the screening of a clip from a graphic Japanesehorror film. The audience settles down, prepared for a "familiar experience," and is thentreated to "roughly four minutes of extremely skillful and convincing special effects,suggesting, among other things, on-camera self-cannibalization." As their conventionalexpectations were disrupted, Hantke writes,most audience members seemed generally uncertain as to what exactly wouldconstitute a correct response to such footage. There were those who werebewildered and too insecure to speak, and those who were offended but hadlittle else to articulate other than their anger. And there were those who,physically repulsed to the point of nausea, obviously had other things toworry about for the moment. There may have even been some audiencemembers who liked what they saw. But by and large, they kept theirenthusiasm to themselves, recognizing that this admission would disqualifythem from academic discourse and move them into the shady territory offandom. (n.pag.)

7As Hantke suggests, academic discourse makes literally no place for any enthusiasmabout horror's graphic imagery of violence, mutilation and death, or any other affective oraesthetic quality. For Hantke, horror's powerful sensory and affective impact resists attemptsto canonize its texts and thus confounds academic attempts at mediation between the textand the reader. The "imagined subjectivity," as Hills puts it, of the scholar as antithetical to afan simply does not permit such room to be made. I urge scholars to take a page from thehorror fan's book and turn their attention to studying horror's narratives, its aesthetics andits literary forms as well as its cinematic spectacles in order to express responses that venturebeyond anger and disgust.This dissertation contributes an analysis of these aesthetic and narrativecharacteristics to the emerging field of horror studies.6 As such, the dissertation both buildson and departs from the work of most other scholars in this field. Taking up Matt Hills'sresounding challenge to the hegemonic practices informing the scholar-fan divide, I willinterrogate the commonplace given that horror literature is an oxymoronic proposition or, atbest, a seedy and disreputable topic, by examining a wide selection of short horror stories,taken from the "golden age" of pulp fiction publishing at the turn of the twentieth century tothe present. In so doing, I hope to build upon the valuable work and insights produced byfilm scholars and to draw critical attention to a rich, but neglected realm of literaryproduction that currently only dares to whisper its name — the modern, short, horror story. I6While, as I stated above, critical work on horror film has appeared at least since the1980s and in one or two cases (Wood, White) earlier, an identified field of horror studies hasonly recentiy taken shape. The publication by Routledge of The Horror Reader, edited by KenGelder, in 2000, can be said to have ushered in a more defined approach to the field whichremains, however, strongly oriented towards film criticism.

8argue that the short story form is essential to understanding horror fiction and that the neartotal neglect of the short horror story in the scholarship to date has entailed a skewed andseverely limited vision of the field. In both film and literature, the centrality of what I willcall the Gothic consensus with its emphasis upon the historicity of horror's "origins" in theeighteenth century has decentred Edgar Allan Poe's aesthetic principle of the "unity ofeffect" expounded in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). Poe, describing theprocess which led to his poem "The Raven," stated that "[i]f any literary work is too long tobe read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effectderivable from unity of impression — for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the worldinterfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed" (163-4).Poe's "unity of effect" was an idea which subsequendy had a strong influence uponH. P. Lovecraft's doctrine of "cosmic horror" elaborated in "Supernatural Horror inLiterature" (1925-27). Lovecraft remarked: "Truly may it be said that Poe invented the shortstory in its present form" (396) and praised the "faultless unity throughout and thunderouseffectiveness at the climactic moment" (399). For Poe, for Lovecraft and for coundesspractitioners of the short story form after them, "Atmosphere is the all-important thing, forthe final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a givensensation" (368). The emphasis that has been placed upon horror film and where literature ismentioned, the horror novel, has created an overly narrow view of horror fiction.It is my contention that any study of horror in literature worthy of the name shouldideally engage with at least some of horror's specific narrative elements prior to proceedingto more general theoretical formulations. The work of too many scholars in the field, insofaras this work fails to take up horror's narrative affects, only serves to reveal their lack of

9appreciation of the richness of the horror tradition beyond a handful of shopworn examplesderived mostly from film. Hastening towards formulations, they offer only a passing nod toanother handful of canonical and well-known horror novels such as Frankenstein or Draculabefore proclaiming that fictional horror is really "about" Kristevan abjection, "about" gendernormativity, "about" counter-discursivity, "about" Deleuzian schizoanalysis or some otherenticing theoretical blank. Many of the theories produced in this way are both compellingand clever, but do not adequately cover the field. While they may raise intriguing andprovocative questions about horror fiction, they ultimately subordinate it to theory. Such"accounts"7 of horror, I argue, are the reason why so many horror fans and writers scornacademic work, instead preferring to produce their own analyses, reviews, publications,conferences and anthologies.8 Again, it is astonishing that no scholars in the academy referto any of this copious work, beyond a few references to Stephen King's Danse Macabre (1981)and one allusion to Les Daniels's Living in Fear (1975).9Theorists of fan cultures such as Tulloch, Jenkins and Hills may point out that thisalternative production of knowledge is a scornful gesture on the part of fans who arepositioning their own knowledge as superior to that of the scholars: however, they wisely7Throughout this dissertation, I critique the word "account" and avoid using it asmuch as possible, except where it appears in quotes, for the reason that I think such an overused term connotes a rather dry and business-like view of "accounting for" literature withwhich I do not agree, particularly in a climate where literature and the arts are constantlycalled on to "account" for their "value."8See Kermode (1997) and Hills (2005) for a discussion of how extensive fanculture's horror connoisseurship and knowledge production can be.9Few references exist to this non-fiction survey of horror by a well-known horrorwriter, with the exception of Yvonne Leffler's study Horror as Pleasure (2000).

10contend that room should indeed be made for fan knowledge. In the ever-expanding field ofhorror, so much fan knowledge has been and continues to be generated that it is absurd notto acknowledge it. The opposition between fandom and scholarship has in fact been viewedas somewhat artificial and reflective of a "torn social dynamic" between fans and scholars(Hills Fan Cultures 2). Both communities have constructed mutually marginalizing boundariesaround particular ways of knowing: a false dichotomy that can be challenged by "comingout" as a fan. Despite die groundbreaking work that has been done on fan cultures and thepossibilities of hybrid audience / reader positions - "scholar-fans" and "fan-scholars" - thebreach of academic boundaries by the "absolute Other" of fandom, and particularly horrorfandom, remains suspect, particularly outside cultural studies.This dissertation, in taking up a neglected area of horror studies, poses a challenge topersistent scholarly assumptions about the horror field by offering research and analysis thatis unapologetically grounded in the "soil" of my own horror fandom. In so doing, I am notmerely indulging in "position-taking" as a scholar-fan or what Hills rather patronizingly andunfairly disparages as "a petulant revolt aimed at building symbolic capital" (15).101 amattempting to work within a paradigm of hybrid, organic intellectualism that does notOutside the comfort of the horror habitus — be it listserv, movie theatre or lesslikely, the classroom - real consequences remain attached to being consigned to the field ofhorror fan(g)dom, politically, socially and academically. This is rather convenientlyoverlooked by Hills when he remarks that the figure of the academic-fan is actually less"scandalous" than those who seek to build "symbolic capital" (reputations) would admit (FanCultures 15) and insists that horror and horror audiences have not been neglected in theacademy but, on the contrary, that the horror fan has been "theorized to death" {Pleasures ofHorror 13). Certainly, within Hills's own terrain of British cultural studies, this terrain mayhave become "rather conventional," but, again, academic cultural studies itself functions asanother privileged and cozy habitus where it is possible to devote research time to such topicswithout facing the scandalized censure and ridicule of Outside.

11denigrate literary criticism at the expense of fan knowledge or vice versa, but seeks rather tobroaden, enrich

In literature, horror has become almost entirely subsumed under the category of the Gothic. Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the scholarship to date, this dissertation takes issue with the "Gothic consensus" that written horror fiction is covered by the Gothic, arguing that more analysis of horror literature, and