“Consciousness itself is the malady; the pest; of which he only is cured who ceases to think.”
“They are ugly phantoms that stole out of my mind; not things that I created, but things that haunt me.”
“In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don’t think I like reality very much.”
Throughout its history, horror literature has frequently mediated its eponymous affect through an obsession with the act of writing. The field is replete with writer protagonists, with depictions of the writing act (through epistolary framing devices and metatextuality), and with written objects (through myriad forms of “found documents”). Faye Ringel aptly observes this historical trend in The Gothic Literature and History of New England (2022), a regional study of Gothic literature (ancestor and kin to horror fiction): Namely, Ringel argues that Gothic literature’s very emblem is “the hidden text: the lost manuscript, the missing will, the madman’s ravings.”
Indeed, figures of writing occupy horror’s literary shadows from its inception: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), customarily described as the earliest Gothic novel proper, frames itself as a “found document.” The protagonist of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic masterpiece, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), is an aspiring poet. Epistolary devices and found documents factor into many major nineteenth-century Gothic horror novels, including Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). And haunted writers continue to populate the works of many defining twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror writers—consider, for example, Arthur Machen’s writer-centered Bildungsroman The Hill of Dreams (1907); William Hope Hodgson’s epistolary, dimension-crossing novel The House on the Borderland (1908); Shirley Jackson’s writer-led study of traumatized psychological fragmentation, Hangsaman (1951); Fritz Leiber’s semi-autobiographical Our Lady of Darkness (1977); Peter Straub’s Timothy Underhill cycle, beginning with Koko (1988) and ending with In the Night Room (2004); and of course, much of Stephen King’s oeuvre (writers figure large in classic novels such as The Shining [1977], It [1986], Misery [1987], The Dark Half [1989], Bag of Bones [1998], and Lisey’s Story [2006], among many others).1 Amidst their studies of creative process and cognition, all these narratives engage fundamentally with objects of horror: internal and external, physical and metaphysical, abstract and literal. Such works of horror fiction thus possess compelling internal tensions—between the thought-annihilating, precognitive experience of fear and the cerebrally creative task of describing that same experience through writing.
In a 2001 introduction to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Peter Straub notes that horror literature’s intended result is “the creation in the reader of the emotion that gives the genre its name.” John Clute echoes this sentiment in The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (2006), stating that “since the beginning of the 1980s, it has become common to state not only that certain emotional responses are normally generated in the readers of horror texts, but also to claim that these responses are, in themselves, what actually define horror.” Stephen King, conversely, locates horror in the shadowy corridors between conscious thought and unconscious instinct, noting that “the horror tale lives most naturally at that connection point between the conscious and the subconscious, the place where both image and allegory occur most naturally and with the most devastating effect” (foreword to Night Shift [1978]). What, then, is the relationship between horror’s affective engine and its persistent engagements with writers, the act of writing, and written objects? Horror literature certainly traffics in intense atavistic affects—unease, shock, dread, terror, and so on—but how do we account for the equally central, pervading role of meta-reflexiveness, of creativity in the face of death?
I propose that horror literature, by definition, hinges on this vexed dialectic, between the affective destruction of thought and the creative process of thought (specifically, of cognizing the incognizable: the supernatural, the numinous, the unseen, the illegible). Within this dialectic, the horror writer oscillates between helpless prey to horror and the creative agent of horror. Mary Shelley’s aforementioned epistolary novel, Frankenstein, exemplifies this dynamic: The hubristic titular scientist is a creator who assembles and animates a creature out of corpse parts, but he becomes prey to his hapless creation’s abject misery and vengeance. Frankenstein is author and victim of his own manufactured horror.
In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010), Thomas Ligotti argues that horror “needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them”; instead, horror’s “ontological havoc” is “mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And ultimately, we must face up to it: Horror is more real than we are.” Confronted with the disastrous impact of his creation, Victor Frankenstein might well share this sentiment. Indeed, the writer of horror fiction is often enraptured both by the fanged, spectral, and faceless entities swimming around her, and by the aspiration to evade these entities’ destructive designs, to mine transcendent expression from the affect such demons elicit. Does the writer expunge her demons onto the page, or does her pen will them into being? Horror resides in the liminal, foggy landscape where the supernatural entices and repels; the writer of horror fiction seeks not to domesticate her subject but to subsume its thought-shattering destructiveness within the genre’s other dialectical half: creation. Two twenty-first-century writer-focused novels deftly capture this complex interplay: Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Gothic-Weird hybrid The Red Tree (2009), and Joyce Carol Oates’s profoundly genre-conscious psychological horror novel, Jack of Spades (2015). Both texts engage explicitly and substantively with their literary traditions; both are rife with extratextual references that substantiate their genre-conscious preoccupations; and both include unique studies of genre-spanning questions—what does it mean for the writer to inhabit horror? What visions does this chimerical genre, equally bound up in annihilation and creation, engender?
Kiernan’s The Red Tree includes an Author’s Note listing a range of philosophical and literary inspirations (including Borges, Machen, Poe, Lovecraft, Straub, Jackson, Blackwood, M. R. James, and Angela Carter). Joyce Carol Oates’s Jack of Spades is vitally haunted by the literary specters of Stephen King (especially The Dark Half) and Edgar Allan Poe (especially “The Black Cat” and “The Imp of the Perverse,” which supplies the novel’s epigraph). Spades is also wallpapered with references to other canonical horror writers (including Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood, and Peter Straub). Crucially, both Kiernan and Oates focus their novels on processes of thought anchored expressly to the abyss of horror. Both novels feature metatextual narrative searches for something like philosophical “centers” within their longstanding literary lineages; both seek to create meaning from a genre whose hunger is bottomless, and whose ultimate designs mean nothing less than death. Both see their writer characters tugged between the stations of creator and prey.
Kiernan’s Red Tree puts itself in conversation with the long epistolary Gothic tradition. Framed as a “found document” by a fictional “editor’s preface,” the novel depicts a grieving writer named Sarah Crowe who—following the tragic death of her lover, Amanda—retreats to a Gothically decrepit farmhouse in rural Rhode Island (Lovecraft’s birth state). Crowe discovers an incomplete manuscript in the house’s walls that evidences its parapsychologist author’s increasingly hallucinatory obsession with the titular tree growing on the property. Crowe writes herself into the pages of this manuscript, haunted both by its object of study and by its attempts to cognize the menacingly numinous. In the earliest scenes of its primary narrative, The Red Tree expresses an interest in Crowe’s unconscious; Crowe’s narration conveys conflicting desires, to process her nightmares and to keep them submerged: “I … sat down at the table to write out all I could recall of the dream, and now I am glad that all I can recall are fleeting glimpses and impressions … Yes, of course, the dream was a nightmare. They are all nightmares now.” As the novel progresses, Crowe’s unconscious begins to swallow her process of conscious creation—her vivid nightmares entangle with her waking life; she discovers material she wrote, but she has no memory of doing so.
The titular tree becomes emblematic of horror as an object of philosophical inquiry; its psychic impact is generationally inherited, its meaning is constantly deferred. In the third act of the novel, Crowe wonders how she “ever could have mistaken it for anything so uncomplicated and inconsequential as a mere tree.” The Red Tree’s two primary narrators frequently quote Poe and Jung, and in seeking to cognitively process what this tree represents, Crowe again searches for meaning in preexisting literature: “Maybe it’s cheating, cadging the words of another author because I find myself wanting, inadequate to the task at hand.” She turns to a foundational work of literary horror, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899): “We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories” (italics in Kiernan’s original). Crowe, the writer of horror, pores over literature in a desperate and inevitably failed effort to cognize that which demolishes cognition: the red tree, symbol of that which cannot be captured through language—a symbol of horror. In the context of Kiernan’s complexly braided Gothic, Crowe’s surrender to her literary predecessors represents a fundamental truth about the act of writing horror: As Roger B. Salomon notes in Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative (2002), “with horror we are dealing with a material and metaphysical experience, with mystery, with that which by its nature cannot be explained but can only be described as a phenomenon that impinges to a greater or lesser degree on the human condition.” Horror cannot be domesticated through creation; horror consumes.
Like The Red Tree, Oates’s Jack of Spades studies horror expressly through the lens of writing—does horror possess the writer, or does the writer will horror into being? Like Stephen King’s The Dark Half, Spades depicts a writer who articulates his most depraved impulses through pseudonym-penned novels (it is worth noting that King’s The Dark Half playfully addresses its author’s experiences writing novels under the Richard Bachman pseudonym; Jack of Spades might similarly draw on Oates’s Rosamond Smith pseudonym, under which she has written several excellent novels of suspense). Jack of Spades is a deceptively slim novel whose propulsive suspense plot is a conduit for questions about the nature of horror as an object of literary inquiry. Like The Red Tree, it interrogates the vexed relationship between authorial agency and the unconscious. Protagonist Andrew J. Rush, a writer of “respectable” mystery fiction, creates the Jack of Spades pseudonym to produce violent, transgressive, nakedly sleazy thrillers. To further complicate the novel’s dealings with authorship, an enraged older woman named C.W. Haider charges Rush with plagiarizing her unpublished manuscripts. Haider’s case is dismissed, but Rush becomes obsessed with Haider’s claims and breaks into her home to investigate. He discovers evidence suggesting that several leading male writers have consciously or unconsciously stolen Haider’s ideas (he locates manuscripts with disconcerting similarities to Straub’s Ghost Story [1979], Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick [1984], and King’s The Shining and The Dark Half, all written by Haider before any of these male-authored classics). Haider’s presence further muddies the authorial waters of Jack of Spades—what gives birth to literary horror? Have all these writers been possessed by the same, ineffable inspiration of darkness?
Oates scrutinizes the split Rush-Spades self in search of uneasy interactions between authorial intention and affective instinct: “where each sentence by Andrew J. Rush was an effort, and felt at times as if I were dragging mangled veins and arteries out of my body to impress upon a blank page, entire passages and pages, even chapters, by ‘Jack of Spades’ passed in a rabid blur leaving me exhausted, but gratified.” Writing as Jack of Spades, Rush finds himself possessed by something like the force that compels his predecessors and competitors; he obsesses over King and often finds himself thinking involuntarily of Poe’s grotesque horror story, “The Black Cat.” Oates’s extratextual references are deliberate. Thad Beaumont, the writer protagonist of The Dark Half, becomes a target of police investigation when a serial killer begins imitating material from Beaumont’s pseudonymously penned novels. The narrator of Poe’s violent, psychologically claustrophobic “The Black Cat” wrestles with the presence of vicious human impulse, which he describes as the “spirit of perverseness,” meaning the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only.” Jack of Spades contends similarly with horror as impulse, Rush’s mind sometimes overtaken unexpectedly by Jack of Spades: “I like not that. Such phrases Jack of Spades inserted into the stream of my thoughts, that were random and inexplicable and not to be taken seriously.” Despite his attempts to reason away these invasive thoughts, as “not to be taken seriously,” Rush is pulled into a vortex of horror with ambiguously internal and external origins. Like The Red Tree, Jack of Spades leaves the origins of horror inevitably obtuse and deferred.
The writer of horror fiction is always already in conversation with an affect that threatens to devour thought. The horror writer’s creation is paradoxically of and from destruction, meaning that the act of writing is inextricably tied to that which would efface its possibility. The horror writer is thus defined by duality, as illustrated by Oates’s Rush-Spades character and Kiernan’s tormented Crowe. Peter Straub observes in his aforementioned introduction to Dracula that “[d]oubleness and duality ripely inform the Gothic, which abounds in lost twins, doppelgangers, secret sharers, and mirrored images.” Straub describes this Gothic motif as “an absence that defines a presence,” meaning that the “doppelganger, the most psychologically loaded version of duality” is “the figure that has stepped out of the mirror to roam the world, a split-off or denied part of the self allowed to run rampant by reason of having been defined as the Other. (And the Other is always that aspect of ourselves we least wish to see in the mirror).” The horror writer alternately emancipates, builds, and flees from this Other, a figure sometimes fanged, sometimes phantasmal, and often altogether too human for comfort. This figure is called Horror, and its affective power persistently threatens to absorb the writer’s creative mind. And so, horror literature continues poring over the act of writing. Consider recent contributions from major writers in the field: S. P. Miskowski’s phantom-narrated I Wish I Was Like You (2017); the epistolary entries in Paula D. Ashe’s We Are Here to Hurt Each Other (2022); Christa Carmen’s meta-Gothic The Daughters of Block Island (2023); Bret Easton Ellis’s autofictional The Shards (2023); and Kathe Koja’s Catherine the Ghost (2024), a ghost-led sequel to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Horror literature is always already preoccupied with the paradoxes at the center of its being: affect and cognition, life and death. To write horror is to submit oneself to this dialectic. Much like Victor Frankenstein plumbs cemeteries and charnel houses to assemble his creation, the horror writer creates forces that might just have designs of their own.
Writing-Centred Horror Must-Reads
- Shirley Jackson. Hangsaman. Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951.
- Caitlín R. Kiernan. The Red Tree. Roc, 2009.
- Stephen King. Lisey’s Story. Scribner, 2006.
- Thomas Ligotti. “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” (from Songs of a Dead Dreamer). Silver Scarab Press, 1986.
- Arthur Machen. The Hill of Dreams. Grant Richards, 1907.
- Joyce Carol Oates. Jack of Spades. Mysterious Press, 2015.
- Peter Straub. lost boy, lost girl. Random House, 2003.
1. Bev Vincent provides a comprehensive list of King’s writer protagonists in Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences (2022).
