Horror: The 100 Best Books by Kim Newman, Stephen Jones Read Free Book Online

logical hairy thing, an innocent thing with its master's razor.) Exploration was an adventure, and if the adventurers died it was boldly and clear-eyed. Edgar descended the Maelstrom and confronted Arthur Gordon Pym with something white beyond reason. It was Edgar who exposed the elegant system of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, telling us that we would not always be able to tell the loonies from their keepers. It was Edgar who pointed out that Scheherezade was safe only as long as she spun fictions for the King. Since even Edgar's black vision did not plumb the horrors of the bestseller system, he wrote whatever he pleased. Tales of Mystery? And Imagination ? My God, Eddie, what rack of the bookstore are we gonna put that in? You're never going anywhere unless you get out of genre . . . He was also, when he felt like it, funny as hell. (Something that seems generally true of fear's fine technicians. The idiom may cut closer than it seems: if you don't see what's funny about hell, you'll never make it back to type up your report). Edgar told us what horror was, and where it comes from, and in terms that will carry the message as long as horror and its source exist: which is to say, as long as we are human. Here we sit, and the Raven has told us what to expect. We walk the decks, waiting for the tarred canvas to unfurl and spell out something meaningful. On we dance, against the arrival of the guest who wears no mask. -- JOHN M. FORD
    12: [1837, expanded 1842] NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE - Twice-Told Tales

    Following in the literary footsteps of Washington Irving and Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne was instrumental in establishing a distinctively American tradition of ghost, horror and supernatural fiction. Twice-Told Tales features stories of apparitions, madness, revenge, witchcraft and proto-science fiction experimentation. His later collections in a similar vein were Mosses From an Old Manse (1846) and The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1850), which contain such much-anthologized tales as "Young Goodman Brown" and "Ethan Brand". Edgar Allan Poe praised Hawthorne's short stories well before the author attained prominence as a novelist with The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The 1963 film Twice-Told Tales , a Vincent Price vehicle conceived as an imitation of the Poe-derived Tales of Terror (1962), features adaptations of "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", "Rappacini's Daughter" and the prologue to The House of the Seven Gables .
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    We have very few American tales of real merit -- we may say, indeed, none, with the exception of The Tales of a Traveller of Washington Irving, and these Twice-Told Tales of Mr. Hawthorne. Of Mr. Hawthorne's Tales we would say, emphatically, that they belong to the highest region of Art -- an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order. We had supposed, with good reason for so supposing, that he had been thrust into his present position by one of those impudent cliqu which beset our literature, and whose pretensions it is our full purpose to expose at the earliest opportunity; but we have been most agreeably mistaken. We know of few compositions which the critic can more honestly commend than these Twice-Told Tales . As Americans, we feel proud of the book. Mr. Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality -- a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest. But the nature of the originality, so far as regards its manifestation in letters, is but imperfectly understood. The inventive or original mind as frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of matter. Mr. Hawthorne is original in all points. It would be a matter of some difficulty to designate the best of these tales; we repeat that, without exception, they are beautiful. "Wakefield" is remarkable for the skill with which an old idea -- a well-known incident -- is worked up or discussed. A man of whims conceives the