Their books are the gates to the kingdom of darkness, their imaginations are the focus of human nightmares. We talk about ten classical authors who filled the pages of their prose with black creatures, nightmarish forebodings, ominous insights and the most vile of vices that are characteristic of the human heart.
“Only they were not and are not, / Only the shadows flashed through the books, / Hoffman was drunk when he wrote this nonsense / In the morning the shadows will return to the grave,” - metaphysical punks from the group “Cooperative nishtyak” sang twenty years ago on the album “25 John Lennons . “Theirs” are the heroes of black fantasy, “the literature of restless presence”, creatures from the inside of the universe, which make themselves felt by knocks from behind a blank wall, rustles, creaks, visions in a state of sleep paralysis and a breath of unearthly draft, from which one heartbeat stops. Some writers, they say, were especially sensitive to these signs and managed to learn from the shadows the secrets of their disembodied existence before the wind carried them back to the cemetery.
Anna Radcliffe (1764-1823)
An Englishwoman, Anna Radcliffe, married a journalist and had no children, began her literary studies just to pass the time, and soon became the highest paid professional writer of the late 18th century.
Radcliffe's novels are full of insidious intrigues, ruthless villainies, outraged love, lost relatives and dizzying plot somersaults. At the same time, surprisingly, in the books of one of the founders of the Gothic genre, which most readers associate with the description of supernatural horrors, absolutely nothing magical happened.
Radcliffe loved to use mystical surroundings, sending heroes to the cemetery, to the ruins of a castle in the middle of the forest, or forcing them to spend the night in a suite of rooms supposedly inhabited by ghosts, but all the miracles in her books are rationally explained.
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In the novel "The Italian, or the Confessional of the Penitent, Clothed in Black", which has become a classic of Gothic prose, there are many signs characteristic of the work of romantics: forbidden love, a mysterious monk, betrayal, poison and murder. But what we won't see there is magic and the devil.
In many ways, The Italian was a reaction to The Monk, written a year earlier by nineteen-year-old Englishman Matthew Louis and amazed the public (including the Marquis de Sade himself) with descriptions of black magic, rape and Satanism.
Few of her male colleagues could support her in this. The direction in which Gothic prose began to develop disappointed her, and it is believed that this is why Radcliffe did not publish a single book after the publication of The Italian.
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822)
The German storyteller Ernst Hoffmann, who was born a decade later, Radcliffe, followed a completely different path in literature. The supernatural in his prose is at arm's length from a person: it is enough to look under an elderberry bush to meet a lovely snake and fall in love with it (The Golden Pot), Frankfurt inhabitants have mystical counterparts who kidnap each other and fight for the heart of a beautiful princess ("Lord of the Fleas"), and the strange old man turns out to be the very spirit of music, doomed to wander among the uninitiated ("Cavalier Gluck").
It was common for all romantics to oppose everyday reality and the world of art, but in the case of Hoffmann this contradiction turned out to be especially tragic. He loved music so much that in honor of Mozart he changed one of his names to Amadeus, but instead of the post of conductor, which he had dreamed of all his life, he had to earn money in the civil service. Working as a court clerk during the day, Hoffmann deliberately rocked his nerves at night with insomnia and wine. The horrors that then came out of his pen sometimes frightened even himself.
In his native country, he never received critical acclaim during his lifetime, preferring more serious romantics to him. Hoffmann's prose is always ironic, even when he is seriously trying to frighten the reader, and the world of the elements and spirits that his characters encounter is as cozy as a glass ball with snow falling inside.
The Elixirs of Satan is the closest to Gothic horror literature written by Hoffmann, although its characteristic techniques are exaggerated to such an extent that the book sometimes turns almost into a parody.
The main character of the novel, the young man Medard, was left by his mother in the monastery, he never knew his own father.
Despite the warnings of his brother in Christ, Medard uncorks the bottle and not only offers wine to the count who has arrived at the monastery, who does not believe in monastic fables, but he himself drinks a glass of satanic potion.
After that, Medard falls into a devilish exaltation. The walls of the monastery become too cramped for him, and he is already thinking of fleeing from them, but the abbot himself agrees to let him go to Rome. On the way to the Eternal City, he will soon have to commit the first adultery and the first murder, and in the future, the secrets of his origin and his family will be revealed to Medard.
In the culminating scene of the novel, when Medard confesses to the Roman prior of all the atrocities he has committed, he imposes a penance on him and pronounces a monologue about sin, repentance and miracles:
In all likelihood, these were the views of the structure of the universe and Hoffmann himself.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Edgar Allan Poe's life was not only short, but also not particularly happy. His father left the family when he was one year old, and soon his mother died of consumption. His relationship with his stepfather did not work out. His first lover, Jane Stenard (an adult married woman, mother of a college buddy), fell ill with meningitis, lost her mind, and died. His cousin Virginia, whom he, despite the opposition of relatives, married when she was thirteenth year, died twelve years later from tuberculosis.
He was great, drunk, drank, and, it seems, did not feel any joy from alcohol, but simply went crazy and behaved ugly. He died more stupidly: he was found in torn dirty clothes clearly from someone else's shoulder and in a serious semi-swooning state next to the tavern, where (which was completely unsurprising for those years) the polling station was located, and a few days later he died. Rumor has it that Po was the victim of an electoral carousel, in which the descending townspeople were paid with alcohol for dropping their ballots into the ballot box several times, but the mystery of his death has not yet been reliably solved.
One of his best stories, "The Black Cat", is dedicated to the inability to resist the black craving for alcohol. From childhood, the storyteller was distinguished by an agreeable character, and more than anything in the world he loved different animals. The same love was shared by his wife, and they had many animals at home, of which the narrator especially singled out the black, without a single white spot, Pluto's cat.
Committing more and more cruel acts, the hero does not want to be held responsible for them, shifting all the blame to alcohol, and in the end he bears a terrible mystical punishment.
Similar in structure to him is another famous story Poe "The Tell-Tale Heart", where the narrator, suffering from anomalous heightened perception, decides to kill an old man with whom he shares a house, because he cannot bear the sight of his eye: "bluish, covered with a film." … He does not feel any evil feelings towards the old man and does not want to take possession of his wealth. All that is unbearable to him in an old man is only the look of his sick eye, from which the blood runs cold. After killing his neighbor and dismembering his body, he hides the pieces of the corpse under the floor. The police leave, not suspecting anything, but the protagonist continues to go mad more and more, because he cannot get rid of the beating of the old man's heart beating in his ears, which, it seems to him, continues to sound from under the floorboards.
The short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, written without a single superfluous detail, the best illustrations of which are prints by Aubrey Beardsley, long after his death will excite the minds of fans of black prose and serve as a source of inspiration for the creators of decadence literature.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - presumably 1914)
The biography of the American writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce ends so effectively, as if he were contemplating his own disappearance as a finale to one of his stories. A seventy-year-old man who lost his wife and both sons, he traveled to civil war-torn Mexico and joined Pancho Villa's army as a reporter. “As for me, I am leaving from here tomorrow in an unknown direction” - with these words he completed the last letter to a friend, after which he disappeared without a trace. The circumstances of Bierce's death still remain an unsolved mystery and a popular story among science fiction writers.
Half a century ago, he fought on the side of the northerners in the American Civil War, was badly wounded in the head, was demobilized with the rank of major, settled in the profession of a journalist, changed many occupations, and earned his trademark acrimony the nickname Bitter Bierce.
The absurdity and cruelty of what is happening in the war brings them closer to stories about human encounters with the supernatural, which also do not end well.
In one of Bierce's best works, the short and outrageously creepy story "Chickamoga", a boy of about six, the son of a wealthy planter, possessed by the courageous spirit of his ancestors awakened in him, "many generations of discoverers and conquerors", goes for a walk in the forest. In the clearing, he meets many ugly and clumsy creatures, crawling through the forest on their bellies and on all fours.
These are soldiers of the southern army, crippled in the last battle, but the child does not understand what is happening, and the meeting with adults, crawling for some reason like babies, remains for him only a fun incident, as when at home, on the plantation, negros got on all fours. to amuse him. The boy even tries to saddle one of the soldiers, but he violently throws it off, showing a face that lacks a lower jaw:
For what he will encounter further during this walk, words in the human language no longer exist, and in response the child will be able to utter only "incoherent, indescribable sounds, something between the babble of a monkey and the cooing of a turkey - eerie, inhuman, wild sounds, the language of the devil himself."
Henry James (1843-1916)
The writer Henry James, brother of the famous psychologist William James, lived in the United States until the age of thirty, and in his 40s he moved to Europe and, shortly before his death, took British citizenship. Life at the junction of two cultures allowed him to make the relationship between the New and the Old World the leitmotif of extraordinary prolific (twenty novels and over a hundred stories) creativity. Among other characteristic features of his prose, critics singled out deep psychologism and anticipation of modernist aesthetics: in particular, he managed to come close to the technique of the "stream of consciousness".
The story "The Turn of the Screw" became his most famous work, was filmed more than ten times and served as the literary basis for the opera of the same name by Benjamin Britten. This book begins in the spirit of a classic gothic ghost story: a company gathered around the fireplace on Christmas Eve, talk of ghosts, and a hero offering to read a manuscript about mysterious and macabre events that a real woman allegedly mailed him twenty years ago.
The main character of the manuscript, the girl Flora, left an orphan, lives in the care of her uncle in a country estate. Her brother Miles was recently expelled from school for an act so abhorrent that the administration hesitates to report it in a letter.
From conversations with the housekeeper, the girl concludes that the ghostly couple could have been a servant and a maid who had previously lived in the estate and died here, who were distinguished by a fair amount of debauchery and, possibly, involved in the corruption of her brother.
But did these ghosts really exist or were they just a figment of poor Flora's imagination? The author does not answer this question, leaving it to the discretion of the reader.
Having preserved all the external attributes of the Gothic history, James turned it into an elegant variation on the peculiarities of human perception and threw a bridge from it to modern psychological horror. In the end, the creations of our own consciousness can be much more terrible than the tricks of any evil spirit.
Count de Lautréamont (1846-1870)
The twenty-two-year-old French poet Isidore Ducasse took the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont in honor of the arrogant and proud blasphemer, the character of the Gothic novel Eugene Sue. It is these qualities that he will bring to the limit in the image of his Maldoror: the brightest romantic hero and the most radical theomist of all the protagonists ever created by world literature.
Living on his father's money in Parisian furniture, Ducasse divided his time between reading in the libraries of philosophers and romantics and writing "Songs of Maldoror": hundreds of infinitely poetic pages full of blackest melancholy, hatred and bilious humor. At the age of twenty-four, he passed away from an unknown illness, never seeing his creation published. Of the six songs during his lifetime, only the first was printed. Looking at the others, the publisher got scared of the legal charges of spreading blasphemy and obscenity.
Transformed into a giant octopus, each of whose eight terrifying tentacles could easily cover the planet, Maldoror engages in battle with the Creator. He will not be able to defeat the Creator in a fight, and, wounded, he will hide in his cave, but the Demiurge does not dare to enter there either:
From his inexhaustible mine, Maldoror retrieves huge, mountain-sized lumps of lice, then chops them into pieces with an ax and scatters them along the city streets on a dark night.
Maldoror does not kill animals ("for he did not touch other living creatures: neither a horse, nor a dog, do you hear? Never touched!"), But his hatred of man as a creature created in the image and likeness of God is unmatched. All that awaits naive young men who have trusted the greatest theomachist is to be sewn into a sack and beaten to death like a mad dog. The logical outcome for those who were stupid enough to believe that justice and friendship can exist in a world like ours.
Lautréamont's Opus magnum spent years gathering dust in a publisher's desk drawer until it was brought to light of the hideous world created by the Demiurge to inspire the French Symbolists, Surrealists, Gnostics, decadents and other sad rebels against God and master.
Unless you read Songs of Maldoror at sixteen, you have not had youth.
Arthur Macken (1863-1947)
Among the fans of the English prose writer Arthur Macken, whose surname was often incorrectly transcribed as Machen in Russian translations, there were such different people as Aleister Crowley, who emphasized their magical reliability, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and Jorge Luis Borges, who called him the forerunners of magical realism.
At the outbreak of World War I, Macken, who made his living as a journalist, was the creator of a massive newspaper hoax. He published a short essay, The Archers, according to which, during the Battle of Mons in August 1914, the Germans saw the soldiers of Henry V in the fog shooting in their direction, and this sight horrified them and forced them to retreat. Despite the fact that the story was completely invented by Macken, many soldiers who fought at the front began to write to him about the fact that they also saw the "Mons angels" in the fog.
Were not his other stories about magic and ominous wonders just a means of entertaining the reader, who only through thoughtlessness can believe in the reality of otherworldly forces? Macken's participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn suggests that he took his work much more seriously.
In the most famous work of Maken - the story "The Great God Pan" - an experimental doctor performs an operation on the brain of the village girl Mary, removing from it the part that protects us from the perception of supernatural reality. One glance at this world hidden from the eyes of an ordinary person is enough for her to irrevocably lose her mind.
Raymond, however, could not have imagined that the mentally ill Mary would have a daughter, Helen, who from childhood would be accompanied by mysterious and terrible events. A small boy living next door meets Helen with a "strange naked man" in the forest, after which he soon falls ill with incurable dementia.
Her father was the pagan god Pan himself, and through her he continues to appear to people.
When Helen herself dies, her body will disintegrate, undergoing nightmarish metamorphosis.
The story of the hero of Macken's story "White Powder" will end with a monstrous reincarnation, who, as a result of the pharmacist's mistake, received the essence from which the wine of the Sabbat was made in ancient times, Vinum Sabbati, instead of a medicine for overwork. The awakening in the overzealous student of primordial forces is as far from the erotic pictures of the Sabbath as a free celebration of the flesh, as Pan invading Victorian England is from the mischievous faun playing the flute. With each sip of this elixir, the unfortunate one moves further and further from the human way of thinking and human appearance towards black, shapeless creatures, woven from primordial matter.
Welsh by blood and spirit, Macken had a wonderful sense of the Celtic mysticism of his native land, but had no illusions about it. The kingdom of the pre-Christian forces of nature in his prose is terrible, ruthless and anti-human. In the end, it was with the light hand of Macken that the fairies began to be portrayed in popular culture not as graceful Victorian creatures, but as an insidious and evil little people living next door to people.
Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932)
In 1902, 34-year-old Prague banker Gustav Meyrink was arrested on charges of using witchcraft in business. Two and a half months later, he was released, the charges could not be proved. However, Meyrink's business reputation had already been irretrievably undermined, and in order to feed his family, he was forced to engage in translations and writing.
Thirteen years later, he wrote the famous Golem, one of the most significant works of Expressionist literature, full of Jewish mysticism, dreams and lovingly described labyrinths of Prague streets.
After he confused his hat with someone else's, on the lining of which was written the name of its owner - Athanasios (Greek "immortal") Pernat, the narrator begins to have unusual dreams. In them, he becomes the very Pernat: a stone cutter from the Jewish quarter of Prague. Trying to find the owner of the hat, the narrator realizes that the events he saw in his dreams really happened many years ago.
It is easy to see that the main idea of the novel refers not so much to the Jewish worldview as to the Eastern religions: in fact, the text begins with the narrator's reading of the life story of Gautama Buddha.
The heroes of Meyrink's latest novel "The Angel of the West Window" - the legendary alchemist John Dee and his descendant, who several centuries later read the manuscript left by the legendary ancestor - are also connected by a thread running through the centuries. Due to the extremely complex symbolism of the novel, rich in alchemical and tantric allegories, the novel did not receive success during the life of the author, but for the same reason it was appreciated by esotericists of the second half of the twentieth century.
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951)
The Englishman Algernon Blackwood, in his youth, was fond of theosophy and the occult, was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, traveled to the Caucasus and Egypt, wandered the whole summer through the Canadian forests and worked as a reporter in New York, where he almost lost his life. He will meet old age as a respectable Knight Commander of the British Empire and a host of ghost stories on the Air Force.
Among his hundreds of works are the esoteric novel The Centaur, many ghost stories, and a collection of detective stories about a psychic detective unraveling supernatural stories called "Several Cases from the Occult Practice of Dr. John Silence."
In Blackwood's story "Willows", two friends, having gone on a boat trip on the Danube, find themselves in a place where an overflowing river forms a swamp with many islets overgrown with willow trees.
There is no way out of the island, the boat turns out to be perforated, and all attempts by one of the companions to find a logical explanation for what is happening come across sullen chuckles from a friend.
The veil between the worlds has been rubbed, and now terrible creatures peep through it, for whom the fate of human empires and earthly continents is nothing more than dust.
This sense of the immeasurable subtlety of the film separating the human world from the supernatural reality made Blackwood a popular author among horror writers: Howard Lovecraft called "Willows" a work "without a single false note," and homage to this story is not difficult to find in Clive Barker's "Books of Blood".
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937)
A weak and sickly boy who had recently survived the death of his grandmother, 6-year-old Howard Phillips began to have nightmares. In these dreams, creatures with webbed wings picked him up and lifted him into the air. Who would have guessed that when this boy grows up, creatures from the world of the darkest visions that visit a man in a feverish sticky delirium, he will populate thousands of pages of his prose.
There is no point in retelling Lovecraft's life story. Everyone who was even a little interested in the work of Howard Phillips, its circumstances (poverty, publications in penny magazines, the unthinkable volume of correspondence, which amounted to about 100,000 letters to friends and colleagues), are already known, and the rest we can refer to the biography written by Lyon Sprague de Campom. We will not bother with psychoanalytic interpretations of his works, although Stephen King wrote about the erotic connotations of Lovecraft's at first glance asexual prose (mucus, tentacles, biting teeth).
There is no doubt that Lovecraft was not a gifted stylist, but an unpleasant xenophobe he was, and what kind. Its sectarians, intending to awaken chthonic evil, are a reflection of the horror of a white American before the hordes of migrants with alien beliefs and culture that fill the country, and in the story of the Great Yit Race (extremely highly developed cones that subdued space and time) no, no, yes, statements like those that the socio-political system on the planet of wise cones is called social fascism, and the weak representatives of this race are destroyed immediately after the defect is discovered.
A deity dormant under the water column, who invades the nightmares of especially sensitive people and drives the sectarians who believe in his imminent awakening to a frenzy, after which they rage in wild orgies and bring human sacrifices to the disgusting idol. A fishing town whose inhabitants mated with frogs living under water for generations, until they themselves began to degenerate into gray-skinned and vicious amphibians. Cyclopean ruins of cities of ancient races that lived millions of years before the appearance of mankind and were just as many times superior in power. Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Babies. Mushrooms from Yuggoth.
All these images should be familiar to you, even if you have not read a single page from Lovecraft's stories, because even eighty years after the death of the writer, countless writers, game makers and directors continue to parasitize on the fruits of his fantasy. Among the prose writers of the twentieth century, only Tolkien could compete with him in terms of how a new myth could be created for humanity by the play of imagination. No less science fiction writers fell under the spell of his prose and representatives of the fashionable philosophical school of speculative realism, fascinated by the horror, inhumanity and unknowability of the Lovecraftian world.
We dare to suggest that Lovecraft owes this halo of posthumous glory to the fact that it was he who was able to get closest to unraveling the nightmarish mystery of the structure of the universe, the center of which we imagined ourselves to be in incredible pride.