Horror Stories

Introduction

The horror fiction and mystery fiction genres have a number of natural affinities that create various points of contact between them. Crime fiction is a fundamental genre in that it exemplifies the most basic kind of story arc: A state of normality is violated by a deviant occurrence, the necessity of whose repair provides a problem needing heroic address and a satisfactory sense of narrative closure. Within the framework of this normalizing story arc, many of the central motifs of horror fiction function quite straightforwardly as more extreme forms of deviance than are represented by thefts and murders. Indeed, many monsters of horror fiction are designed to represent particular extremes of conceivable deviance. In much horror fiction the central issue of the narrative is that of penetrating the mystery of how a breach in normality has come about, in order that a plan can be made for its effective repair, while the protagonist is endangered by forces intent on inhibiting that solution.

The Line Separating Horror and Mystery Fiction

There is a nearly continuous spectrum of fictional deviance, in which such melodramatically exaggerated antagonists as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter are not far removed from such prototypical horror fiction adversaries as Clemence Housman’s The Were-wolf (1896), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Bram Stoker’sDracula (1897). However, one very significant difference between the two genres has resulted in the drawing of clear line between them in terms of their historical development and readership.

When a detective’s use of logic eventually leads to an unassailable conclusion as to the identity of a perpetrator, he or she usually has an established legal apparatus to bring to bear on the apprehension, conviction, and punishment of the offender. Should that fail—as it often does in tales of crime-fighting that take a cynical view of the law’s efficacy—the detective can fall back on some other practical means of retribution (usually a gun). By contrast, in a horror novel, the conclusion to which a protagonist’s logic leads is an arbitrary contrivance of the author, and so is any means of exorcism by which normality can be restored. The law cannot cope with the supernatural, and guns are impotent to dispel it.

This discrepancy is so considerable as to create awkward difficulties for any narrative that attempts to straddle the line separating the horror and mystery genres, in spite of the fact that much horror fiction is, structurally speaking, a subspecies of mystery fiction, and the fact that much naturalistic mystery fiction also finds opportunities to deploy an exploit an element of horror.

Mystery Elements of Ghost Stories

The basic narrative affinity between horror and mystery fiction is elaborated and complicated in several significant ways. Many motifs that horror fiction adopted from folklore came with assumptions of deviance built in; the Devil is, quite literally, deviance personified. Other motifs were already coupled by traditional belief with assumptions regarding the means by which normality might be restored, such as the rule that vampires may be destroyed by wooden stakes driven through their hearts, or that werewolves can be killed with silver bullets. However, some images stubbornly resist this kind of artifice, especially ghosts.

Ghosts traditionally appear to demand reparation for some moral deficit, such as the failure of the living to live up to their ancestors’ ideals, or to demand vengeance against their own murderers, or simply to provide enduring reminders of past violations of the moral order. Whatever their reason for appearing, though, they cannot be banished by any cheap trick; if they are to be banished, their demands must be met.

In consequence of this, the mystery element of longer ghost stories typically extends far beyond the simple problem of exorcising apparitions, usually demanding further reparative action. Short ghost stories normally lack space for this kind of elaboration, often functioning as producers of mysteries whose investigation is abruptly cut short by the deaths or defections of potential investigators. However, even short stories of a sophisticated sort—those of M. R. James are archetypal in this respect—obtain their force by reference to a broader moral scheme. In most long ghost stories, ranging from such pioneering examples as Edward Bulwer Lytton’s “The Haunted and the Haunters” (1859) and Mrs. Oliphant’sA Beleaguered City (1879) to such modern extravaganzas as Richard Matheson’sHell House (1971) and Peter Straub’sGhost Story (1979), the central task facing the ghost-seer is to unravel the mystery of why the ghost manifests itself, and what demands it is making of the living.

Ghosts of this questing kind far outnumber straightforwardly malevolent apparitions that function as monsters, and even in novels of the latter sort, the motivations of ghosts are often rooted in past events requiring investigation. Curses and other magical impositions are similarly rooted in a broader moral scheme, which means that the actions required to lift them routinely involve some kind of reparation or expiation.

Psychological Affinities Between Horror and Mystery Fiction

Complications of a different sort—although they are often entangled with the other—arise from the fact that horror is an excitation of the nervous system that is, to at least some extent, transmutable into other sorts of excitation. The Marquis de Sade earned himself an enduring notoriety by pointing out that when erotic excitation begins to lag it can often be renewed by an injection of horror—with the consequence that erotic stimulation becomes a significant, if quintessentially perverse, motivation for various kinds of crime, especially the most extreme. Sade’s observation is extensively celebrated by the hybrid horror/mystery subgenre of serial-killer fiction, which has always traded heavily in sadistic perversity, even when subject to restraints by censorship.

This complication lends an additional mystery element to much psychological horror fiction, over and above its narrative convenience—a complication that lends itself well to such highbrow literary analyses of deviant motivation as Fyodor Dostoevski’sPrestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). In more typical middlebrow examples, the mystery element is foregrounded because the nasty behavior of antagonists requires explanation and revelation in terms of sexual psychopathology; the fact that sufferers from such pathological urges are bound to make every effort to keep them hidden is a readily exploitable resource in the amplification and maintenance of this sort of mystery.

An extra twist is added to this variety of horror/mystery hybrid by the occasional tendency of individuals guilty of nasty behavior to hide it even from themselves. This gives rise to a subgenre of stories focused on deeply divided and conflicted characters, who are as mysterious to themselves as to others, ranging from James Hogg’sPrivate Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839) and Robert Louis Stevenson’sStrange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), to the late twentieth century vogue launched by George Cukor’s film A Double Life (1947) and Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1960).

Such split-personality stories as these lie at the core of a more elaborate and generalized kind of horror/mystery fiction based in the idea of “madness”—a concept that is both intrinsically horrific and intrinsically mysterious. The essential horror of madness, in fact, arises from its inexplicability, which cuts so deep that it has never been clear what kind of explanation might suffice. It was once considered a matter of divine affliction, but its gradual recategorization as “mental illness” resulted in concerted attempts to categorize it, analyze its various forms, and devise successful treatments—all of which impinged on the historical development of both mystery and horror fiction, especially on subgenres lying close to the border between them.

The horrific quality of madness reflects the most fundamental of all the affiliations between horror and mystery: the fact that there is a particular kind of horror that arises reflexively from the absence of explanation, and thus from mystery itself. Unlike the literal void, of which the universe has no shortage, this is one kind of vacuum that human nature really does seem instinctively to abhor.

It is presumably this innate psychological horror that generates makeshift supernatural explanations, on a massive scale, for occurrences that seem—at least for the moment—otherwise inexplicable, lending almost-unbreakable support to superstition, religious faith, and pseudoscience and donating considerable psychological plausibility to the entire tradition of occult fiction.

Rationalization in Gothic Fiction

Modern horror fiction was born in the pages of the German schauer-roman and its English equivalent, the gothic novel. The German tradition made exceedingly free with its supernatural materials but nevertheless played host to a number of mysteries that are among the earliest significant examples of crime fiction. It was, however, the most popular English writer of gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe—the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797)—who highlighted the mystery element of gothic fiction most forcefully.

Acutely conscious of living in an Age of Enlightenment, as well as being a dutiful Christian, Radcliffe apparently considered it a moral duty not to endorse the superstitious fears that she mobilized so skillfully to harass, pressure, and terrify her heroines. She always took her normalizing story arcs to the conscientious extreme of “rationalizing” all their seemingly supernatural manifestations, thus restoring the natural order of her fictional worlds as well as the personal situations of her favored characters. One side effect of this policy was to transform all such menacing manifestations into mysteries whose solutions would include explanations based on mundane causes and effects.

Radcliffe’s policy would have been widely imitated in any case, given that she was the best-selling and most highly paid author of her era. However, it really did catch the mood of her era, which became very disapproving of superstition, especially when it smacked of residual paganism. The crusade against such materials generated such a powerful lobby in Great Britain that it threatened for a while to banish fairy tales from children’s reading, and required champions of the imagination to mount their own campaigns in opposition; Charles Dickens’s plea that conventional standards might be relaxed at Christmas helped give rise to the odd subgenre of Christmas ghost stories.

Although the supernatural made a spectacular comeback, in terms of real belief as well as literary usage, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Radcliffe method of double normalization gave rise to a significant descendant subgenre of horror/mystery fiction. The influence of her policy is obvious in the hybrid works of Edgar Allan Poe, especially “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), and Wilkie Collins, especially The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). Collins’s influence fed in its turn into Charles Dickens’s ventures into mystery fiction, Our Mutual Friend (1865) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), as well as many works by Arthur Conan Doyle, including such Sherlock Holmes stories as The Sign of Four (1889), “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

The pertinence of this rationalizing methodology is reflected in the fact that one of the key activities of early detective agencies, such as the Pinkerton Detective Agency founded in the United States by Allan Pinkerton, was the investigation and exposure of fake spiritualist mediums, as Pinkerton himself recorded in The Spiritualists and the Detectives (1877). In terms of fictional norms, an insistence on rationalizing seemingly supernatural events fit in very well with the emerging ethos of problematic detective fiction, one of whose central tenets was Sherlock Holmes’s famous assertion that “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth.”

Twentieth Century Rationalization of Neogothic Appearances

The principal flaw in the Holmesian doctrine is that “eliminating the impossible” can only be achieved conclusively when one knows exactly where the limits of the possible actually lie. Ann Radcliffe had been in no doubt about that question, and many others agreed with her—although Sadducistic champions of the Enlightenment and doctrinaire Christians did not necessarily agree with one another.

Arthur Conan Doyle was by no means as sure as Sherlock Holmes of where possibility ended and impossibility began. However, he recognized that Holmes’s methods would be far less effective in a world in which the dead routinely spoke to the living through spiritualist mediums and children could photograph fairies in their gardens. This was one of the reasons why he developed such a strong antipathy to his own character. The occult revival of the late nineteenth century turned the tables on Holmes and Pinkerton alike, in both social and literary terms.

Twentieth century manifestations of stubbornly rationalized gothic fiction sometimes seem bizarre, if not perverse. This is partly because what are considered rational solutions are often far less psychologically plausible than interventions of the supernatural. It is also because their inherently anticlimactic quality easily extends to absurdly bathetic extremes—as it often did in the produce of the “weird menace” pulps of the 1930’s and even the late twentieth century’s children’s animated television series Scooby-Doo. Even so, the subgenre retains a particular aesthetic charm, derived from the extreme ingenuity required to produce convincing naturalistic explanations for seemingly impossible events.

Notable examples of rationalized neogothic fiction include Maurice Renard’s Les mains d’Orlac (1920; the hands of Orlac), Eden Phillpotts’s The Grey Room (1921) and Lycanthrope (1937), Sydney Horler’sThe Curse of Doone (1928) and “The Screaming Skull” (1930), John Dickson Carr’s The Three Coffins (1935) and He Who Whispers (1946), and Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1939). Other examples include Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel Celle qui ne’était plus (1952), which was filmed as Les Diaboliques in 1954, and D’entre les morts (1954; The Living and the Dead, 1956), which was the basis of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. Two more examples include Paul Gallico’s novels Too Many Ghosts (1959) and The Hand of Mary Constable (1964). So successful was the occult revival in the real and literary worlds, however, that such works retain an air of fugitive eccentricity, and examples are far outnumbered by unashamedly supernatural mysteries whose essentially arbitrary, so-called solutions are far less ingenious.

The Horror of Unsolved Mysteries

Rationalized neogothic fiction obtains increased dramatic tension from its protagonists’ hesitation to choose between supernatural and rationalistic explanations of seemingly impossible events. This dilemma is frequently sharpened by the suspicion that the only rationalistic explanation that seems possible is that the protagonist is seriously deluded, and hence in the process of going mad.

French horror fiction trades heavily on this kind of hesitation, to the extent that the usual French label for horror/mystery fiction, le fantastique, was defined by Tzvetan Todorov in terms of a hesitation between rival explanations—which, if settled, removes the text into one of two bordering genres: either le merveilleux or l’inconnu. These terms shift their meaning considerably if they are transposed into English as “the fantastic,” “the marvelous,” and “the uncanny.” The last term is further confused by virtue of its being used as the standard English translation of the German unheimlich, a word used by Sigmund Freud in a classic essay on the psychological operation of horror fiction.

Even when the question of the potential intervention of the supernatural does not arise in borderlands where the genres of thriller and horror fiction come close—as in novels of suspenseful persecution like such as Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950), Stephen King’s Misery (1987), and Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door (1989)—the psychological pressure exerted on protagonists by anxiety, terror, and dread routinely acquire awesome dimensions. The kind of ambiguity that lies at the heart of rationalized neogothic fiction and the French fantastique is, in fact, the tip of a much bigger iceberg.

The central task of the detective in fiction is to demonstrate that the seemingly insoluble is always soluble—that there is no “perfect crime.” This is a psychologically taxing process in itself, given extravagant representation in the various mental agonies suffered by Sherlock Holmes and many of his imitators. The subgenre of locked-room mysteries, for example, involves no potential evocation of the supernatural, but offers a puzzle that threatens to defeat any and all potential explanations, thus remaining vexatious forever. The prospect of being “driven mad” by an inability to solve such problems need not, however, be literal in order to be painful.

Given the primal horror of the unexplained, it is not surprising that the heroic efforts of Allan Pinkerton and Harry Houdini to expose all spiritualist mediums as frauds were soon eclipsed by the much more sympathetic enquiries of the physicist William Crookes and other members of the Society for Psychic Research. Nor is it surprising that literary endeavors were even more extravagant in favoring attempts to fill the occult vacuum. The heroic detective of L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace’sMaster of Mysteries (1898), who invariably debunked apparent hauntings and magical accomplishments, was soon overshadowed by a host of specialists whose task was to analyze authentically supernatural problems. This legion was headed by E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low, in Ghosts (1899), Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1913).

Detectives and the Occult

It is hardly surprising that the kind of mystery fiction in which freelance detectives neutralize threats by elaborating supernatural explanations, rather than by reducing menacing manifestations to mere banality, was attractive to would-be occultists. Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune, respectively, added their own candidates to the list of occult detectives in The Scrutinies of Simon Iff (written c. 1920; collected 1987) and The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (1926). The less flamboyant poseur Margery Lawrence added Miles Pennoyer in Number Seven Queer Street (1945). The tradition of occult detective stories lost some of its impetus as the occult revival waned, but it extended to the end of the twentieth century in such series as one featuring John Burke’s Alexander Caspian, begun with The Devil’s Footsteps (1976), and one collected in Glen Cook and Mark Valentine’s In Violet Veils and Other Tales of the Connoisseur (1999).

There was also a small but significant subgenre of early twentieth century mystery fiction in which mundane detectives find themselves faced with incontrovertibly supernatural events, with the result that the issue at stake ceases to be a matter of elucidation and becomes a matter of pragmatic response. Jack Mann’s Gees, who sometimes solved perfectly ordinary cases, often found himself in pickles of this sort, most significantly in Grey Shapes (1937), Nightmare Farm (1937), Maker of Shadows (1937), and The Ninth Life (1939). He inevitably accumulated a certain rough-and-ready expertise as the catalog of his confrontations grew. Other notable examples of the formula include A. Merritt’sBurn, Witch, Burn! (1933), many of the adventures of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, whose pulp magazine career lasted from 1925 to 1951—a representative sample is contained in The Phantom-Fighter (1966)—and Dennis Wheatley’s Black Magic series, launched with The Devil Rides Out (1935).

There was an even smaller—and considerably less significant—subgenre of stories of the same period featuring psychic detectives who solved ordinary crimes by extraordinary means. J. U. Giesy’s astrologically talented Semi-Dual and Sax Rohmer Morris Klaw in The Dream Detective (1920), who solved crimes by dreaming the solutions, were notable examples. Although this kind of crime solving seemed suspiciously like cheating, in terms of the normal expectations of detective fiction, the subgenre received a considerable boost when self-supposed psychics actually began offering their services to the police and to victims of crime on a considerable scale. Their fictional equivalents—especially the heroine of the television series Medium (2005-   )—inevitably have a much higher success rate. The subgenre of modern detective fiction featuring psychological profilers is arguably not greatly different, and it is significant that its fictional variants are most frequently invoked in cases of exotic murder, which trade heavily on their horrific components.

Corollaries of the Medicalization of Madness

The subgenre of psychopathological mystery stories descended from gothic accounts of insane villainy inevitably became the most important twentieth century horror/mystery hybrid. Social order depends on the predictability of behavior, which in turn depends on the assumed rationality of the individual. When the behavior of others becomes peculiar, the peculiarity generates unease long before the point at which it involves any manifest threat or danger.

As with all aberrations from the norm, madness has been a perennial preoccupation of literature, from classical representations of the madness of Orestes through such representations as Ludovico Ariosto’sOrlando Furioso (1516), William Shakespeare’sHamlet (c. 1600-1601) and King Lear (1606), and Miguel de Cervantes’sDon Quixote (1605-1615), to modern representations of the psychopath as the ultimate villain of crime fiction. These examples demonstrate clearly that literary madness inevitably takes on all the kinds of meaning that are absent by definition from actual madness—Hamlet was by no means alone in displaying madness with method in it—but they also demonstrate, with equal clarity, that such impositions of meaning never serve to eliminate either the essential horror or the essential mystery of madness.

It is not only the possibility that others might be mad—and hence disposed to threatening behavior—that is intrinsically horrific; the possibility that an individual might be going mad can easily seem even more horrific to that individual than the threat of mutilation or death. A significant subgenre of horror fiction comprises madman narratives, many of which are studies of obsessive attempts to penetrate mysteries that cannot, in the end, be resolved—often with horrific consequences. The formula is particularly well represented in the tradition of French fantastique fiction. Notable examples include Honoré de Balzac’sLa recherche de l’absolu (1834: The Quest for the Absolute, 1859), Jean Richepin’s “La machine à métaphysique” (1877; “The Metaphysical Machine”) and Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” (1887)—but it became increasingly significant in English fiction as the twentieth century progressed.

The horrific component of fiction dealing with madness is sometimes further exaggerated by representations of attempts to contain, treat, and understand madness by administrators of asylums. The prospect of being deemed mad is, in a sense, only the penultimate horror. The ultimate horror is being thus delivered into the keeping of people who believe they can cure one’s madness by means that in any other circumstances would be considered torture—a delusion that is not only commonplace but frequently obtains official sanction. The involvement of legal process in committing patients to asylums creates another significant bridge between crime and horror fiction.

As the medical taxonomy of mental aberration evolved it was rapidly transplanted into problematic literary case studies of a sort pioneered by Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “medicated novels”: Elsie Venner (1861), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Mortal Antipathy (1885). Thomas Bailey Aldrich’sThe Queen of Sheba (1877) followed in the same vein in the United States, while the English physician who first described alcoholism as a disease, William Gilbert, collected a more extensive and inventive series of hypothetical case studies in Shirley Hall Asylum (1863) and Dr. Austin’s Guests (1866). The conspicuous clinicality of these imaginary case studies is meticulous in shunning gothic extravagance, but that kind of method, like the other, only serves to refine their elements of horror and mystery.

Clinicality can embody a particular horror of its own, most extremely manifest in such real-world examples of moral anesthesia as the activities of Dr. Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz concentration camp and such ingenious demonstrations as Stanley Milgram’s experiments persuading subjects to administer what they believed to be painful and dangerous electric shocks to other alleged volunteers. That kind of horror gives rise to a subgenre of mad scientist stories, which are mostly horror and mystery stories even when they are solidly embedded in the science fiction genre. This kind of horror is extensively exploited in twentieth century “medicated” thrillers like those wrote by Robin Cook, and reaches its finest pitch of acuity in those that maximize the mystery element in their plotting.

Narratives of Erotic Insanity

The various fetishisms explored in minute detail in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’sPsychopathia Sexualis in 1886 provided abundant fodder for the literary construction of narratives of erotic insanity over the next two decades, especially by French writers affiliated to the Decadent Movement. Numerous examples can be found in such samplers of translations as Rémy de Gourmont’sAngels of Perversity (1992) and Jean Lorrain’sNightmares of an Ether-Drinker (2002). Although the development of such narratives in the English language was initially inhibited by Victorian moralism, the delay eventually caused something of a backlash in such conscientiously provocative English explorations as Edward Heron-Allen’sThe Cheetah Girl (1923) and Ronald Fraser’sThe Flower Phantoms (1926).

The most extravagant Decadent fantasy written in America, Ben Hecht’sFantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922) is a straightforward narrative of erotic insanity. Hecht also toyed with similar narrative developments in his ingenious detective story The Florentine Dagger (1923) and his film script The Specter of the Rose (1946). Hecht’s contemporary Guy Endore was similarly versatile, couching his classic account of The Werewolf of Paris (1933) as a narrative on insanity before producing the conscientiously Freudian murder mystery Methinks the Lady (1945). Endore scripted one of the film adaptations of Renard’s Les mains d’Orlac as Mad Love (1935) and also had a hand in the talkie version of Tod Browning’s classic rationalized gothic film, Mark of the Vampire (1935; based on the silent London After Midnight, 1927).

As psychological theory and psychiatric practice made significant advances during the late twentieth century, narratives of erotic insanity evolved further layers of complexity and sophistication, increasingly cashing in on the horrific aspects of clinicality. Notable examples of horror/mystery fiction illustrating this increase of sophistication in one way or another include Robert Bloch’sThe Scarf (1947), Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini’sThe Running of Beasts (1976), Patrick McGrath’sSpider (1990), Peter Ackroyd’sHawksmoor (1985), Jonathan Aycliffe’sNaomi’s Room (1991), Joyce Carol Oates’sZombie (1995), and Poppy Z. Brite’sExquisite Corpse (1996). After Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of Bloch’s Psycho, this kind of fiction became a key cinematic resource, extravagantly redeveloped in such horror/mystery films as the Thomas Harris-based The Silence of the Lambs (1990), Se7en (1995), the James Patterson-based Kiss the Girls (1997), and The Bone Collector (1999).

Chimerical Combinations of Horror and Mystery

The various affiliations between horror and mystery have generated several hybrid subgenres in which elements of horror and mystery are carefully fused. The readiness with which such hybridizations can be contrived and exploited should not, however, be allowed to obscure the logical incompatibility of the rival accounting schemes whose clash produces the tension fundamental to fantastique fiction. There remains a basic discrepancy between the expectations of readers who are fond of detective stories and those who are fond of horror stories.

Although they form a marginal subgenre, tales of occult detectives are not enjoyed equally by fans of mystery and horror fiction. They are conventionally seen as a subgenre of horror fiction, which happens to feature “detectives,” not as a subgenre of detective fiction that happens to involve supernatural agencies. The latter combination appears to detective story fans to be a fatal breach of the fundamental Holmesian principle that the establishment of a sole mundane possibility is adequate proof of its actual occurrence.

An interesting test case for this rule was established by John Dickson Carr in The Burning Court (1937), in which the detective provides a brilliantly ingenious explanation of how a seemingly supernatural murder could have been committed by naturalistic means. However, the author then adds a coda stating that it was, after all, committed by supernatural means, and that the production of a possible naturalistic explanation has only served to deflect blame from the actual guilty party. This controversial move seemed to many detective story readers to be a blatant violation of impropriety and a betrayal of the genre’s fundamental ethos. Such a move can, in fact, only be tolerated as an exception trading on its shock value; the basic assumption of the mystery genre has to be the persistent and triumphant reaffirmation of the Holmesian rule.

This creates a problem for horror/mystery stories of the kind featured in Jack Mann’s Gees series, in which a professional detective routinely confronts supernatural mysteries. Like the plots of occult detective stories, such plots belong to the horror genre rather than to the mystery genre, and their proximity to the borderline between the two genres does not result in an actual crossover. Rather than being generic hybrids, in fact, they are more like generic chimeras, in which incompatible elements are juxtaposed without being fused.

Such chimerization seems less offensive in accounts where the investigators are amateurs, as in Dennis Wheatley’s Black Magic series, than they do in accounts where the detectives are professionals; it was not unknown for literary policemen and members of other official law-enforcement agencies to meet supernatural threats, but it remained very rare throughout the early history of both genres. It did, however, become much more common in the second half of the twentieth century.

Modern Experiments in Chimerization

The increase in chimerical texts was mainly due to the fact that attempts to contrive generic crossovers for marketing reasons became much more common; as all genre sales figures waned, the possibility of producing books that would appeal to fans of more than one genre inevitably became more attractive. Notable groundbreaking examples of stories in which formal law-enforcement agencies are faced with supernatural adversaries include Leslie Whitten’sProgeny of the Adder (1965) and Moon of the Wolf (1967), Whitley Strieber’sThe Wolfen (1978), Basil Copper’sNecropolis (1980), Thomas F. Monteleone’sNight Train (1984), Dean R. Koontz’sDarkfall (1984; initially published under the pseudonym by Owen West) and Midnight (1989), and David C. Morrell’sThe Totem (1979).

The most sustained attempt to overcome the essential awkwardness of this kind of story was the television series The X-Files (1993-2000), which imagined a hypothetical department of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assigned to investigate naturalistically inexplicable occurrences. Although the show’s basic explanatory scheme was science fiction—a common means of neutralizing the apparent incompatibility between naturalism and the supernatural—it retained a far closer generic affiliation to both horror and mystery than to science fiction, and thus served to highlight certain key effects of chimerization, especially the way in which the credulous agent Fox Mulder is treated by his more orthodox colleagues—suspicions of madness shading into naked contempt—and the stress the show placed on the mechanics of the normalizing story arc fundamental to television series production. At the end of every episode the deviant manifestation had not only to be defeated but to vanish without leaving any evidential trace that it had ever existed. The same necessity of awkward contrivance had afflicted the show’s most conspicuous predecessor, which used an investigative reporter as its protagonist, Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1983-1985).

The blatant clumsiness of normalizing contrivance was a considerable handicap to this kind of story, but refusal of such contrivance brings about a drastic alteration of a story’s generic status, because it involves a profound transformation of the world within the text. A good illustration is provided by Jack Williamson’sDarker than You Think (1948), in which the logical extrapolation of an investigative reporter’s confrontation with a werewolf leads into highly exotic narrative territory. Even in a relatively discreet example like William Hjortsberg’sFalling Angel (1978), in which a private eye discovers that he is embroiled in a deal with the Devil, the story moves far beyond the mere trickery of The Burning Court into deeper metaphysical waters.

What the 1980’s experiments with fiction of this sort did demonstrate, however, was that chimerization can generate literary rewards of its own, and that there is a certain amount of narrative energy to be obtained from exotic clashes of methods and worldviews. As the turn of the twenty-first century slipped by, there was a spectacular boom in fiction that grasped this nettle wholeheartedly, thus developing a host of exotic literary worlds in which mystery and horror could be more enterprising and exciting bedfellows—worlds that brought horror/mystery fiction to unprecedented levels of best-sellerdom and that generated some of the most successful television shows of the era.

The New Zenith of Horror/Mystery Fiction

There are two ways in which the world within a literary text might be transformed in such a way as to make it hospitable to innovative horror/mystery combinations. One is to set stories in a Secondary World that resembles our own world in many respects but is crucially different in its entertainment of supernatural motifs. This is the strategy followed by Laurel K. Hamilton in the Anita Blake series launched by Guilty Pleasures (1994) and the Merry Gentry series launched by A Kiss of Shadows (2000). Both series are set in a world in which the acceptance of all manner of supernatural monsters is taken for granted. The first series features a vampire-hunter, while the second stars a mystery-solving “fey princess.”

The employment of a Secondary World facilitates further genre crossovers; Hamilton’s second series also incorporates strong elements of genre romance, reflecting a concerted attempt by publishers in that genre to diversify in several new directions; “vampire romances” cashing in on the popularity of Anne Rice were the forerunners of a much broader spectrum of “paranormal romances,” which provide a further example of the negotiability of nervous excitement and the use of horror as an erotic stimulant. A much more common strategy, however, is to juxtapose some such Secondary World with the primary one, in such a way that it provides a hidden metaphysical backcloth to the routines of everyday life, whose existence is unsuspected by the majority but perfectly familiar to a chosen few. Hamilton’s success was, to some extent, built on precedents provided by P. N. Elrod, whose Vampire Files series of hard-boiled detective thrillers in which the principal adversaries are vampires was launched with Bloodlist (1990). Simon R. Green’s series launched with Hawk and Fisher (1990) is similar in kind.

The highest profile series of this narrowly defined sort is the television show extrapolating the horror-comedy film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), which ran from 1997 through 2003. Much narrative capital was extrapolated from its heroine’s attempt to function in two worlds simultaneously, enduring the conventional agonies of high-school adolescence while simultaneously functioning as a superhero keeping the world safe from continual invasions by vampires and other monsters. This formula was further extrapolated in other television shows, most successfully in Charmed (1998-2006), but it achieved its most spectacular success when it was broadened out and transplanted back into the literary arena by J. K. Rowling in her accounts of troubled adolescence in the series of novels begun with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States).

Another kind of quasi-chimerical combination—pioneered in Alexander Laing’s classic mystery The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (1934)—results from the use of human teratology and extreme injury to spice up a mystery plot. Although that kind of “gross-out” horror is much more readily exploitable in nonfictional context—as in the early twenty-first century boom in so-called “freak show” television and cosmetic surgery shows—the remarkable television drama series House (2004-    ), which continually referenced Sherlock Holmes in its representation of an expert diagnostician, achieved unprecedented dimensions of fictitious excruciation in its first two seasons.

This sequence of developments transported the narrative strategy of chimerization a long way from its roots in formal detective fiction, but always retained and made constructive use of the mystery element of the fiction; the Harry Potter books are framed as exotic but carefully constructed mysteries, whose solution is confused and inhibited by all manner of other pressures constraining and tempting the young hero. The books benefited from, and lent considerable impetus to, a sudden weakening in the taboos that had previously forbidden or discouraged the use of horror in fiction marketed for young readers. Long before that barrier came crashing down, however, the confrontation of child characters with supernatural agents— especially ghosts—had been forced to put a heavy emphasis on the mystery element of their plots, precisely because the horror element had to be soft-pedaled. Rowling’s work extrapolated that tendency very cleverly, to strike a balance whose success was reflected in monumental sales figures.

Conclusion

The successful establishment of so many new exercises in generic hybridization and chimerization in the final years of the twentieth century suggests that horror/mystery fiction not only had a bright future at the beginning of the twenty-first century but one in which the natural affiliations between the two genres would become more intimate and more intricate. In the final analysis, however, the protective wall that has always separated purist mystery fiction from supernatural fiction seemed bound to remain intact, despite the increased traffic across its various drawbridges.

Despite the various threats to which it has been subject, the Holmesian principle holds: the true solution to any mystery can only be determined by eliminating the impossible, and refining the evidence until only one possible solution remains. Within that framework, the only permissible intrusions of horror into mystery fiction are mundane and naturalistic: the horror of violence, the horror of grief, the horror of madness and—least obviously but perhaps most significantly—the horror of unsolved mystery.

Such horrors are psychologically corrosive rather than imagistically flamboyant, but they are effective enough, especially when they are deployed in the context of a sophisticated awareness of the erotic potential of horror, which stimulates rather than—or as well as—corroding the mind’s self-confidence. It is difficult to imagine that serial killers in fiction have any further depths of perverse depravity to plumb, or that their further proliferation can have any other effect than a numbing of affect leading inexorably to ennui, but if that turns out to be the case it will force writers to return more attentively to the mystery elements of that sort of fiction, emphasizing the methodology of pursuit rather than the horrific monstrousness of the quarry.

Bibliography

Joshi, S. T., and Stefan Dziemianowicz, eds. Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia 3 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Best reference guide to horror fiction yet published. Includes discussions of many of the authors and works central to the horror fiction genre, as well as discussions of such subgenres as “Occult Detectives.”

Morrow, Bradford, and Patrick McGrath, eds. The New Gothic. New York: Random House, 1991. Showcase anthology of neogothic fiction, much of which fuses the horror and mystery fiction genres.

Palmer, Jerry. Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Sociohistorical analysis of thriller fiction, which pays considerable attention to subgenres of crime fiction that lie close to the border with horror fiction.

Sayers, Dorothy L., ed. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. London: Gollancz, 1928. The first of a series of three showcase anthologies recognizing and celebrating the affinities between the horror and mystery subgenres. Julian Hawthorne’s “Lock and Key Library” had earlier done likewise, and there was a glut of such hybrid showcases during the 1930’s, including several edited by John Gawsworth, notably Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries (1935), and the Odhams Press Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries (1936).

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973. Useful, if somewhat abstract, account of the horror innate in ambiguity, which is central to the genre Todorov defines as le fantastique.