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Conceptualizing Horror
JackMorgan
Here, in this supreme menace to the will, there approaches a redeeming, healing
enchantress-art. She alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion at the horror
and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life. (Nietzsche)
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perhaps unfortunate that she did not consider horror as a distinct literary
type (Poe is mentioned only with regard to his poetic criticism), since
hers is a theory of art that lends itself particularly well to an elucidation
of the horror genres feeling and form.
Langers 1953 study by that name, carrying forward the thesis of her
earlier Philosophy in a New Key, posited a fundamental unity underlying
all of arts various individual expressions-a complex argument running
to 415 pages and ranging well beyond the scope of the present essay. I
will instead focus on her treatment of comedy as a basis for this discussion of horror, it being my argument that horror-in a way entirely distinct from tragedy-represents the other side of the Comic coin, that it is
the inverse of the comic spirit. In so arguing I follow up on the invitation
implied in Langers introduction to Feeling and Form when she urges a
seminal view of her work: nothing in this book is exhaustively treated.
Every subject in it demands further analysis, research, invention (viii).
Criticism addressing the literature of horror is notoriously lacking in
an established terminology. Recent work in the field, as S.T. Joshi points
out, has caused an irremediable confusion of terms such as horror,
terror, the supernatural, fantasy, the fantastic, ghost story, Gothic fiction
and others (2). Chris Baldick, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of
Gothic Tales, having noted that his anthology attempts to set forth a relatively pure line of shorter Gothic fiction adds the following caveat: I
am aware, however, that a broader definition of Gothic is possible and
have at some points slackened the line to accommodate this view (xxii).
Noel Carroll writes that in terms of the theory propounded in his book,
most of Poes work does not fit into the genre of horror (215). No
attempt will be made here to sort out this vexatious taxonomy problem.
For the purposes of this essay, I feel reasonably comfortable using the
term Gothic in the generic sense which Joshi finds offensive (The
Weird Tale 3)-i.e., to refer broadly to the horror genre as well as to its
particular 18th century literary manifestations. When the terms weird
tales (Lovecrafts preference) or horror tales are used, they are meant to
refer to something not fundamentally at odds with the designation
Gothic and are used for variation rather than to draw a distinction. For
the most part, examples will be drawn from the kind of literature that
would fall within the framework of The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales.
Narrowly regarded, of course, the Gothic is an historical,
Eurocentric literary genre owing to Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliff, and
other 18th century pioneers of the form. But the more primitive sources
that define it, its nightmare archetypes, its ventures into the realms of
magic and taboo, are arguably as atavistic, sacramental, and folkloric as
those which define the Comic. Traces of horrors ritual origins often
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Nevertheless, he did not pursue this biological insight much farther, and
historicism and taxonomy have continued to preoccupy much of the critical energy so far devoted to the analysis of horror.
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Langers thesis arguably comes out of Romantic literary and philosophical theory-Jane Harrison by way of Cassirer, Whitehead, and
Bergson. But a not dissimilar view regarding the well-springs of the
comic imagination was set forth by Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s when
he argued that the Rabelaisian comic image-whether reflected in folkfestival or literature-is grounded in the physical body: the leading
themes in these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming over abundance (19). C. L. Barber, for another, has argued-relating Shakespearean comedy to annual folk celebration-that a traditional
festival like the May Game, growing out of the rhythms of a seasonal/
agricultural calendar, involved the composition of experience in ways
which literature and drama could [later] take over (1 8). In a similar
vein, Jessie Weston remarked the biological sources of Romance, arguing that the roots of the grail legend lay in fertility ritual and ramified
later, enhanced through folk and Christian traditions, to literature: the
pre-existence of these symbols in a popular ritual setting would admit,
indeed would invite, later accretion alike from folk belief and ecclesiastical legend (69). It is in this context, and in terms of a similar ancestry,
that horror literature should be viewed.
Langer, too, emphasizes fertility patterns that were first articulated
in ritual, arguing that the essence of the comic artifice lies in images
reflecting the energetic patterns of our biological being. Presented with
images of this energetic fundamental form of consciousness, we experience a delightful recognition, a celebrative sense of the mysterious
vitality that begets and sustains us (326-29). Thus, bawdy, for instance,
the ribald jokes and double-entendre of Shakespeares comedies, like the
considerably more obscene humor of Rabelais, does not stem from the
authors deference to the tastes of contemporary audiences, but rather is
an integral part of the comic imagination, tracing back to the genres
earthy origins of which the Greek Comus was but one expression.
...The Comus was a fertility rite, and the god it celebrated a fertility
god ... (Langer 331). Even familiar everyday jokes like the following are
informed by this biological dynamic.
A traveling salesman is driving along back roads through the Dakotas in the
dead of winter and meets with a major winter storm-howling winds and blinding snow. There is no shelter in sight and near zero visibility. His heater gives
out and soon after the car rolls to a halt, unable to proceed through the many
feet of snow. Recognizing he will freeze to death in the car-he is already
numb-he sets out through the storm, wearing only his business suit and dress
shoes, on the slim chance he may find a homestead. After hours of aimless
trekking, snow blinded and all but frozen to death, he miraculously stumbles
right up against the door of a farmhouse.
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The owner hears the thud and opens the door. The frostbitten salesman, unable
to speak, slumps against the doorframe. The farmer, appalled at the mans condition and anxious to help, says to him: My friend, I can see you are in need of
help-111 be glad to give you a change of clothes, some hot cider, a warm bed
for the night and a hot farm breakfast in the morning. But I think it only fair to
make clear that my wife and teenage daughter are gone to my mother-in-laws
in Sioux Falls for a week. There are no women here nor will there be during
your stay. With a trembling hand, the traveling salesman wipes away some of
the ice that has frozen his lips shut and says to the farmer, Well, is there
another farmhouse near here?
This is deeply comic whether or not it is funny. On one level it is a
cultural artifact-a good part of the jokes character derives from the
fact that it is a variation upon a familiar formula. It depends on audience
awareness of that formula-the perhaps hundreds of American obscene
jokes whose plot involves a traveling salesman being given a room at a
farmhouse for the night and then having some kind of sexual misadventure involving the farmers daughter. But, on a deeper level, the joke is
existential, provoking the kind of surge of vital feeling which is the
essence of comic energy and, Langer maintains, the source of laughter
(340). The joke goes to our recognition in it of the survival of Eros, the
delightful resurgence of that fertile life spirit against all odds, against the
darkest winter-where, for instance, death threatens if our body temperature should fall very far short of a critical 98.6 degrees. The joke is
what C. L. Barber called, speaking of comedic drama, an expression of
the going-on power of life (1 18). This sense of life, Langer argues, at
once religious and ribald, knowing and defiant, social and freakishly
individual, is the driving force of Comedy (331). The organism maintains its equilibrium by adjustment, by adaptation, by hook or by crook,
despite the stresses it undergoes moment by moment. Its equilibrium disturbed-by infection for example-the body normally recovers and
reestablishes its well-being. It does so again and again; and it is this flexibility, this pattern of lost and recovered organic balance and vigor, the
image of human vitality holding its own in the world that is the essential comic image. But, significantly, the spunky elan of living things celebrated by comedy-notably human brainy opportunism-is displayed in the context of an essentially dreadful universe (Langer 33 1).
It is this dreadful universe that the horror mythos addresses, and the
waning of organic energy in the face of it. Horror is the obverse against
which the comic expresses itself, as abundant harvest is relished against
the foil of deficiency and drought. Tales of terror turn upon threats to the
bodys coherence, the failure of physiological adjustment and adaptation,
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the all too possible victory of morbid forces. That the organic focus of
fertility ritual held forth dark as well as comic possibilities for later literary development, is evident, for instance, in that perhaps darkest of
modern poems The Waste Land, whose debt to Jessie Westons elucidation of the Grail legend-particularly the Fisher King motif-Eliots
notes acknowledged.
To paraphrase an observation of Langers regarding the comic: the
ultimate source of horror is physiological. The horror imagination is
informed, to quote Lovecraft again, by our innermost biological heritage. If in comedy the livingness of the human world is abstracted and
presented to us (Langer 348), in horror the dieingness, as it were, of
the human world is imaged forth, ritually recapitulated. The comic
masks antithesis is not only the tragic mask but the repellent mask in
molded rubber sold in K-Mart in November: a face deathly white, shading to green, a face crumpled and hollow eyed, suggestive of decay and
the grave. As opposed to simple death, repugnant, agonized dying is suggested. Underscoring our the bodys vulnerability, the Gothic heightens
our sense of physical peril. It is no accident that the shower scene in
Hitchcocks Psycho-a scene wherein a naked body, the quintessential
image of our carnal vulnerability, is materialized, violated and radically
unmade-occupies a primary place in contemporary popular cultural
memory. Thus the familiar, often-expressed perception that Gothic
horror reflects basic human fears, while sketchy, is not erroneous,
though visceral human dreads would perhaps put it more exactly.
Almost at random in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, for example, one
finds passages like the following from Patrick McGraths story Blood
Disease in which an anthropologist in an equatorial rainforest is bitten
by a mosquito:
From the thorny tip of her mouthparts she unsheathed a slender stylus, and
having sliced through Bills skin tissue, pierced a tiny blood vessel. Bill noticed
nothing. Two powerful pumps of the insects head began to draw off blood
while simultaneously hundreds of tiny parasites were discharged into his bloodstream. Within half-an-hour, when the mosquito had long since returned to the
water, the parasites were safely established in his liver. For six days they multiplied, asexually, and then on the morning of the seventh they burst out and
invaded the red blood cells. (502)
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this physiological concern, this focus upon the sickening of the organism, consistently underlying the traditional Gothic literary conventions-this preoccupation with vitality lost, the bloodstream invaded and
hopelessly compromised. As Carrol Smith-Rosenburg observes, the
bodys physical integrity constitutes as significant a material vehicle for
symbolic representation as the bodys evocative sensuality (161). It
finds that symbolic representation in horror literature. The organism has
its own intelligence and its own stock of pre-rational aversion
responses-triggered, for example, by exposure to the dormant revelations under large, flat rocks and heavy boards, or glimpses of infestation,
mold, and decay. As John E. Mack, M.D., notes in Nightmares and
Human Conflict,the potentiality for...fear responses is innately present
in the organism and requires only the appropriate releasing stimulus...
(42). Horror arises from our proprioceptive awareness of our physical
being, our embededness in a vast organic matrix. But rather than on fertility, the Gothic focuses upon withering; rather than on growth, it
focuses on morbid deterioration; rather than on an intrepid human vitality, it focuses upon the human body eminently assailable.
Compare the same basic issue in Poes House of Usher where the
Usher bloodline has become enfeebled and stagnant, or H.P. Lovecrafts
Shadow over Innsmuth where alien blood has entered and corrupted a
towns and the narrators circulation. In the early 19th century Gothic
classic Melmoth the Wanderer, Stanton is locked in an asylum and trying
unsuccessfully to maintain his physical and mental integrity against the
incursion of abjection and dissipation:
He had at first risen early ...and availed himself of every opportunity of being in
the open air. He took the strictest care of his person in point of cleanliness ...and
all these efforts were even pleasant .... But now he began to relax them all. He
passed half the day in his wretched bed ...declined shaving or changing his linen,
and, when the sun shone into his cell, turned from it .... (40)
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***
As the comic imagination apparently traces back through drama to
carnival, to fertility ritual, the horror imagination would seem to issue
from implicit physiological fear responses finding imaginative embodiment in the darker aspects of fertility cults (human sacrifice, for
instance) and to trace through witchcraft and walpurgisnacht kinds of
later traditions (the pagan Irish festival of Samhain, for example, or the
Mexican Day of the Dead), finally inhabiting the neo-feudal,
labyrinthine corridors of 18th century literature like The Castle of
Otranto. So elegant was this conjunction that we often find it hard to
imagine horror literature apart from its traditional, specifically Gothic
expression. But recent literature in which the Gothic antiquarian framework is absent or vestigial makes the point that the essential elements of
horror, as mentioned earlier, are by no means solely historical, nor satis-
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touch real ground. The scriveners carry out their debilitating paperwork
in a setting devoid of natural light (a Gothic set piece), devoid in fact of
any intercourse with the outside, natural world at all. The lawyer/nmators chambers-a word of Gothic resonance-look out upon a shaft at
one end and at the other command an unobstructed view of a lofty brick
wall, black by age and everlasting shade... (Melville 41). Indeed the
very concept life has become the jargon of a few artistes. The narrator
concedes that the view from his chambers might be considered deficient
in, not life, but what landscape painters call life (my italics).
Bartleby himself, in his unspeakable dejection, is the epitome of enervation and bio-entropy ; he is quintessentially run-down.
The location of the horror tales ancestry in the Grail or similar traditions is arguably evident here. Bartleby is the figure of failed vitality; his
malady embodies the greater malady of the commonweal-of the city, or
the street as it were. While Bartleby is the title character, the subtitle
foregrounds the setting: A Tale of Wall St. The scriveners work is a
dull, wearisome and lethargic affair carried out in an environment given
over largely to paper-that epitome of dryness. Bartleby sends out for
cookies occasionally, but there is no mention of his drinking anything. In
the grail tradition the enfeebled or maimed Fisher King embodies the
enfeeblement of the culture, the kingdom, the land. The task of the hero
is the restoration of the kings health and thereby the vegetative health of
the land which is implicit in the Kings situation (Weston 23). The
would-be hero here is the narrator, who tries earnestly, within his limited
powers, to heal Bartleby. The ancient pattern is that of the infirm host
visited by a sympathetic guest who must restore the host to health. While
Bartleby is initially the visitor or guest, in that the office is the lawyers,
the roles, significantly enough, are later reversed-Bartleby taking on
the role of proprietor-bringing things into accord with the mythic tradition. The narrator goes to his chambers one Sunday morning only to discover that his key will not open the door:
When to my consternation the key was turned from within ...and holding the
door ajar, the apparition of Bartleby appeared, in his shirt sleeves ...saying quietly that he was sorry, but he was deeply engaged just then ...and preferred not
admitting me at present. (53-54)
A similar sense of the organisms vulnerability is evident in the following passage from John Cheevers dark tale The Five-Forty-Eight.
A businessman exits the elevator in his office building and finds he is
being followed by a woman, a former employee-her facial expression
one of loathing and purpose. When he proceeds outside, it is raining,
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found in the Adonis cults, the European Spring Festivals, the Mumming
plays of the British Isles, in all of which, as Jessie Weston noted, the
salient point is that the representative of the Spirit of Vegetation is considered dead, and the object ...is to restore him to life ( 1 19). The Waste
Land motif is clear in lines like these: I looked upon the scene before
me-upon ...the bleak walls-upon the vacant, eye-like windows-upon
a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with
an utter depression of soul ... (Baldick 85).
The narrator realizes as he approaches the malevolent Usher mansion, and during his first experiences within, that all the mental capacity
he commands is proving inadequate. Man is inordinately proud of and
dependent upon hidher rational powers. Mental adroitness, Langer
notes, is humanitys chief asset in confronting its vastly involved and
extended symbolic world (330). David R. Salina, referring to the narrator in Poes stories generally, notes his incessant rationalizing and his
confusing version of the facts... (67). Indeed our symbolic, intellectual
powers, once doubted and neutralized, generate phantasms themselves
and are of doubtful trustworthiness. We begin to suspect, as the narrator
does, that our own imagination, our own thought, is implicated in the
very fear we would wish to overcome. Indeed because man is so dependent upon his virtuaVsymbolic world, he is easily victimized by it, and,
as Langer points out in a sentence that becomes all the more resonant in
a horror context, Even the dead may still play into his life (330).
One of the most familiar motifs of Gothic horror is relevant here.
RationaVintellectual prying into the seamless organic mystery and presumptuous attempts to gain control over it are doomed-and horribly so.
Rappachinis daughters body ends up so poisoned that what should be a
healthful restorative kills her. Captain Obeds crosspecies experiment in
Lovecrafts The Shadow Over Innsmuth results in a loathsome, misbegotten breed. And it is noteworthy that it is the unnatural gait of these
creatures which particularly horrifies the narrator, i.e., the discrepancy
between their bodily movements and those of normal human beings:
Their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. He
describes their flopping march in the moonlight as a malignant saraband (175) i.e., a distorted similitude of courtly dance. In a likewise
chilling scene in the 1995 film version of Frankenstein, the sciencebesotted doctor joins in a dance with the experimentally ravaged body of
his beloved. Their waltz is a ghastly antidance, a gruesome semblance of
natural dances celebration of the bodys graceful potentials. (Cf. the
chilling pavilion dance of the dead in the cult film Carnival of Souls.)
And because of certain obtrusive and eager enquiries on their part,
Usher suspects the doctors whose medical knowledge has been stumped
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by the nature of his sisters malady, may, in their overweening postmortem curiosity, violate her grave and her body. This body-sacrilege
theme, pervasive in the Gothic literature corpus, is one more expression
of the genres physiological inspiration.
This most famous of Poes tales concerns disintegration and
decline-a single, organic dissipation taking in family line, the contemporary Ushers, the house and grounds. Life is flow, dynamic movement,
constant refreshment, elasticity; thus, we are repulsed by what is stagnant, stale, desiccated, musty-we recognize all the latter as anti-life,
entropic, unwholesome. Poe uses image upon image throughout his tale
to evoke an atmosphere of pervasive enervation. The atmosphere is
devoid of natural air and light-those mainstays of life; it is an atmosphere which has reeked up from the decayed trees ...and the silent tam,
in the form of an inelastic vapor or gas-dull, sluggish ...leaden hued
(Baldick 87). There is reference to woodwork rotted for long years in
some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external
air (87). The prevailing images are of things cut off like Lovecrafts
Innsmuth badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and
creeks, or the Bates Motel in Psycho left behind by interstate highway
construction. Usher himself, like Faulkners Emily and so many other
characters in Gothic literature, has not left the house for years-everything, including the family tree, is biologically static, unrefreshed, spent.
Madeline lingers in a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away (90). The
failure of vitality is the tales predominate note. The narrator remarks
that the books and musical instruments in Ushers quarters, for example,
failed to give any vitality to the scene (88).
Ushers entire vision in fact expresses an infirm, distorted organicism-a demented version of the comic festive perception c. L. Barber
describes as an experience of the relationship between vitality in people
and nature (19). Usher sees the ancestral estate, its grounds and natural environs as (cf. again the Fisher King motif) radically continuous
with his own decrepit organism which is itself the contemporary expression of the Usher family line. He is convinced of the sentience of all
vegetable things and so on. What in the comic-festive tradition is a
robust and exhilarating perception-the recognition, for example, of all
living things stirring together (Barber 21), becomes for Usher a horrid
undifferentiation, a terrifying trespass upon the kingdom of inorganization. At root the horror tale exploits the materialistic, presenting a
reductio ad absurdum of the materialist world view.
This is why the scientific 17th-18th century world view described by
Whitehead in Science and the Modern World-material on the one hand,
mind on the other-was conducive to exploitation by the Gothic authors.
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With its simply located bits of material (Whitehead 58), this devitalized cosmology was ill-suited to accommodate organicism; organic
material in the materialist model being itself simply located, decontextualized, de trup as Sartre puts it in Nausea. S. T. Joshi writes that
Lovecraft is correct in maintaining that weird fiction as such can only
be a product of an age that has ceased to believe in the existence of the
supernatural... (Lovecraft: A Life 28). But it might be better put that
Horror writers are either, like Lovecraft, irresistibly mechanistic materialists (qtd. in Joshi, Weird Tale 171) or they embrace that stance-what
Whitehead would call the requisite abstractions-temporarily for the
sake of their art, in order to explore the dead-end implications of the
mechanistic cosmology. The spirits in the Gothic are not religious, transcendent entities, but rather disconnected, drifting indictments haunting
materialism. Works in the horror genre presuppose a suspension of belief
as well as disbelief on the readers part-there must be no exit.
***
All human expression, Langer argues, bespeaks our physiological
nature; the human environment is throughout informed by it. Therefore
any building that can create the illusion of ...a place articulated by the
imprint of human life, must seem organic, like a living form (99). A
house, like a ship or, for that matter, a Gothic tale itself, is biogenic.
Langer refers to the obvious, rationalized examples of this principal in
the works of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. But the same
architectural insight-the organic nature of the house, its identification
with its inhabitants and the landscape-emerges in a darker, horrific
embodiment in The Fall of the House of Usher wherein the house is
distressingly and radically on a continuum with its living, breathing
inhabitants. Again, the ecological continuity of living things, a joy in the
comic/carnivalesque context, is an overwhelming, sickening concept to
the hyperintellectualized Usher.
Already eluded to have been the remote vicinities within the
dwellings in Gothic tale-cellars, attics, chambers long closed off, and
so on. From what are they closed off? Essentially from life-air, sunlight, human presence and care. They are repulsive in that they bespeak
abandonment and unlife. A house is a human nest. Areas that are
squalid-dust covered, moldy, cobwebbed-reflect malaise and irresolution, an absence of biologically sound human functioning. Only a sick,
neurotic animal allows its nest to become befouled. Maintenance-of its
own body, its offspring, its place of habitation and so forth, is an unmistakable signal of a sound, viable organism. Areas shut off and not kept
up suggest morbidity and locales where things sinister and repulsive may
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...These tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian
canal. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-
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like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolic devices; uppermost and
central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate
neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked. (241)
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Notes
In both Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, the revivification
imperative found in the Fisher King tradition is evident. In both, the would-be
restorative meal is offered by the visiting agent-in Bartleby the iawyer pays
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the grub man at the prison to bring Bartleby the best dinner you can get
(Norton 2257). And in Benito Cereno, Captain Delano brings baskets of fish,
bread, water, and cider to the failing Cereno. Cf. Jessie Weston (Chapter IX)
regarding the mystic meal, especially the sacramental fish meal, in the Fisher
king legend.
2See Terry Castles discussion of the world upside down theme and of
elements of the sinister in the Masquerade topos (Masquerade and Civilization,
Chapter 8).
Works Cited
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Barber, C. L. Shakepeares Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its
Relation to Social Custom. New York: Meridian, 1959.
Baym, Nina. Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed., Vol 1.
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Carroll, Noell. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New
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Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Camivalesque in EighteenthCentury English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986.
Cheever, John. The Five-Fort-Eight. Points of View: An Anthology of Short
Stories. Ed. James Moffett and Kenneth McElheny. New York: New
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Docherty, Brian, ed. American Horror Fiction. New York: St. Martins, 1990.
Heaney, Seamus. Death o f a Naturalist. New York: Oxford UP, 1966.
Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror.
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Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon P, 1996.
-. The Weird Tale. Austin: Texas UP, 1990.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981.
Langer, Suzanne. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York:
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Lovecraft, H. P. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. New York: Ballantine,
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-. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Abramson, 1945.
Mack, John E., M.D. Nightmares and Human Conflict. Boston: Houghton,
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Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1961.
Melville, Herman. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Ed. Warner
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