(UECE) Apart from being about murder, suicide, torture, fear and madness, horror stories are also concerned with ghosts, vampires, succubi, incubi, poltergeists, demonic pacts, diabolic possession and exorcism, witchcraft, spiritualism, voodoo, lycanthropy and the macabre, plus such occult or quasi occult practices as telekinesis and hylomancy. Some horror stories are serio-comic or comic- grotesque, but none the less alarming or frightening for that.

From late in the 18th c. until the present day – in short, for some two hundred years – the horror story (which is perhaps a mode rather than an identifiable genre) in its many and various forms has been a diachronic feature of British and American literature and is of considerable importance in literary history, especially in the evolution of the short story. It is also important because of its connections with the Gothic novel and with a multitude of fiction associated with tales of mystery, suspense, terror and the supernatural, with the ghost story and the thriller and with numerous stories in the 19th and 20th c. in which crime is a central theme.

The horror story is part of a long process by which people have tried to come to terms with and find adequate descriptions and symbols for deeply rooted, primitive and powerful forces, energies and fears which are related to death, afterlife, punishment, darkness, evil, violence and destruction.

Writers have long been aware of the magnetic attraction of the horrific and have seen how to exploit or appeal to particular inclinations and appetites. It was the poets and artists of the late medieval period who figured out and expressed some of the innermost fears and some of the ultimate horrors (real and imaginary) of human consciousness. Fear created horrors enough and the eschatological order was never far from people’s minds. Poets dwelt on and amplified the ubi sunt motif and artists depicted the spectre of death in paint, through sculpture and by means of woodcut. The most potent and ¹frightening image of all was that of hell: the abode of eternal loss, pain and damnation. There were numerous “visions” of hell in literature.

Gradually, imperceptibly, during the 16th c. hell was “moved” from its traditional site in the center of the earth. It came to be located in the mind; it was a part of a state of consciousness. This was the ²beginning of the growth of the idea of a subjective, inner hell, a psychological hell; a personal and individual source of horror and terror, such as the chaos of a disturbed and tormented mind, the pandaemonium of psychopathic conditions, rather than the abode of lux atra and ³everlasting pain with its definite location in a measurable cosmological system.

The horror stories of the late 16th and early 17th c. (like the ghost stories) are provided for us by the playwrights. The Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedians were deeply interested in evil, crime, murder, suicide and violence. They were also very interested in states of extreme ⁵suffering: pain, fear and madness. They found new modes, new metaphors and images, for presenting the horrific and in doing so they created simulacra of hell.

One might cite perhaps a thousand or more instances from plays in the period c. 1580 to c. 1642 in which hell is an all- purpose, variable and diachronic image of horror whether as a place of punishment or as a state of mind and spirit. Horrific action on stage was commonplace in the tragedy and revenge tragedy of the period. The satiety which Macbeth claimed to have experienced when he said: “I have supp’d full of horrors;/ Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, /Cannot once start me…” was representative of it.

During the 18th c. (as during the 19th ), in orthodox doctrine taught by various “churches” and sects, hell remained a place of eternal fire and punishment and the abode of the Devil. For the most part writers of the Romantic period and thereafter did not re-create it as a visitable place. However, artists were drawn to “illustrate” earlier conceptions of hell. William Blake did 102 engravings for Dante’s Inferno. John Martin illustrated Paradise Lost and Gustave Doré applied himself to Dante and Milton. The actual hells of the 18th and 19th c. were the gaols, the madhouses, the slums and bedlams and those lanes and alleys where vice, squalor, depravity and unspeakable misery created a social and moral chaos: terrestrial counterparts to the horrors of Dante’s Circles.

Gothic influence traveled to America and affected writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales are short, intense, sensational and have the power to inspire horror and terror. He depicts extremes of fear and insanity and, through the operations of evil, gives us glimpses of hell.

Poe’s long-term influence was immeasurable (and in the case of some writers not altogether for their good), and one can detect it persisting through the 19th c.; in, for example the French symbolistes (Baudelaire published translations of his tales in 1856 and 1857), in such British writers as Rossetti, Swinburne, Dowson and R. L. Stevenson, and in such Americans as Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane and H.P. Lovecraft.

Towards the end of the 19th c. a number of British and American writers were ⁴experimenting with different modes of horror story, and this was at a time when there had been a steadily growing interest in the occult, in supernatural agencies, in psychic phenomena, in psychotherapy, in extreme psychological states and also in spiritualism.

The enormous increase in science fiction since the 1950s has diversified horror fiction even more than might at first be supposed. New maps of hell have been drawn and are being drawn; new dimensions of the horrific exposed and explored; new simulacra and exempla created. Fear, pain, suffering, guilt and madness (what has already been touched on in miscellaneous “hells”) remain powerful and emotive elements in horror stories. In a chaotic world, which many see to be on a disaster course, through the cracks, “the faults in reality”, we and our writers catch other vertiginous glimpses of “chaos and old night”, fissiparating images of death and destruction.

From:CUDDON, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1999.

The sentences “He depicts extremes of fear and insanity and, through the operations of evil, gives us glimpses of hell.” “Fear created horrors enough and the eschatological order was never far from people1s minds.” and “From late in the 18th c. until the present day – in short, for some two hundred years – the horror story in its many and various forms has been a diachronic feature of British and American literature…” should be classified respectively as: