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

novels of regional life written in a realistic manner. The Black Spider is quite different, and very special. Although it's a short novel it combines the plague tale, the historical legend and the religious parable with a quirky, personal style. The result is a work of both epic scope and driving immediacy, and even now it reads as a thoroughly modern piece of fiction. That the midwife, motivated only by a desire to help, should be forced to act the mother in a bestial travesty of natural birth is one of the more disturbing ironies in this remarkable story. It is also one of the best early examples in literature of the human body being invaded by alien or demonic forces. The devil is eventually trapped, but it is a stalemate rather than a simple victory. Evil remains at hand, a constant threat and a dangerous temptation, as we are shown when there is a reprise of the terror two hundred years later. There's much more to it than that, of course. The Black Spider is actually an artful, highly involved twofold narrative couched in the kind of literary framework that Henry James used more than fifty years later in The Turn of the Screw , one that would become routine in countless tales of terror. At times the writing is so casual as to appear slapdash, but any minor infelicities have the cunning effect of heightening tension and atmosphere, and the story never lets up, even though it ranges over a period of nearly six centuries. Gotthelf was not a craftsman but he was a spontaneous, intuitive writer who had a sure sense of what he was doing. When The Black Spider first appeared its transparent religious lesson was no doubt taken as the whole point of the novel, and there's no denying it has an almost Biblical quality. That may be the least important side of it, however. The Black Spider is a richly suggestive work with clear political and even environmental overtones; it rewards attention at several different levels. But perhaps its greatest strength can be found in its very real, human characters and the emotional intensity of their terrible situation. The Black Spider is a macabre, darkly glittering classic. -- THOMAS TESSIER
    14: [1844-5] EUGENE SUE - The Wandering Jew

    Marie-Joseph Eugene Sue's Le Juif Errant is perhaps the most sustained literary treatment of the legend of the Jew cursed by Jesus Christ to remain alive until the Second Coming. The Wandering Jew has cameo appearances in novels as diverse as Lewis' The Monk (1796) and Walter M. Miller Jr's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). Sue's Jew, influenced perhaps by Maturin's Melmoth, travels a degraded modern world, spreading cholera wherever he goes, and is used by the author to expose various contemporary evils. As in many late Gothics, the perfidious Jesuits come in for a particular bashing. The novel was filmed several times in the early days of the cinema, by French film pioneer Georges Melies in 1904, and by Italian studios in 1913 (as L'Ebreo errante ) and 1918 (as Morok ). Later movies under the same title -- including a "lost" 1933 Conrad Veidt vehicle -- are adaptations of a play by E. Temple Thurston. Sue was also the author of the grisly melodramatic novels Les Mysteres de Paris ( The Mysteries of Paris , 1842-3), Les Septs Peches Capitaux ( The Seven Cardinal Sins , 1847-9) and Les Mysteres du Peuple ( The Mysteries of the People , 1849-56). The Wandering Jew has recently been brought back into print by UK publisher Dedalus, also responsible for the anthology Tales of the Wandering Jew , edited by Brian Stableford, and featuring stories by Stableford, Steve Rasnic Tern, David Longford and Kim Newman, amongst others.
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    Publishers call them blockbusters; critics dismiss them as potboilers; in their own time and place -- Paris of the 1840s -- they were romans-feuilletons , or "newspaper-novels" -- and the greatest of them all was Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew (unless that honor belongs to The Count of Monte Cristo , which was being serialized at exactly the