Image © Art Chantry

At the very heart of the moment of Aftermath lies an awareness that the story is done. This moment — which prefigures a world incapable of change, a world no longer storyable — terminates the four-seasons model of the narrative structure for horror laid down in this lexicon, the other stages being Sighting, Thickening and Revel. The passage through these stages will have been taxing — the greater novels of Horror are almost certainly the most exhausting of all popular books to experience; and the passage out of Revel — out of the moment of transvaluation of all values into a fixated awareness that the world so exposed is in fact the real world — may be so swift, and the ending of the tale may come so soon, that the desiccating torpor of Aftermath may be no more than glimpsed, a surreal echo of the flash of Sighting which has earlier announced that the end is nigh. This is almost inevitable. The central sense conveyed by Aftermath, after all, is that there is nothing to be done, that there is no cure to hand, no more story to tell, no deus ex machina, no statement that It Was All a Dream: “Son, ‘This ain’t a dream no more, it’s the real thing’” (Bob Dylan, “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” in Street Legal, 1978 album). (The dozen or so greatest songs from the later career of Bob Dylan comprise — in their surreal, profoundly-worn desertedness — a visceral mapping of the gut dislocation that marks Aftermath.) A structurally similar awareness of terminus pervades our understanding of return in fantasy, though in this case the end of Story constitutes an pastoral arrival in Eden: there is no Story to tell because there is no problem. But Aftermath is all problem, like muskeg: problem without solution, a geography without watershed.

The term Aftermath itself is of course highly weighted. It has been most frequently used to characterize the world and literatures of the societies of Europe after the vast Revel of world war one, when the survivors of that conflict began dazedly to reiterate after the fact wisdoms adumbrated by so many central European intellects in the years before 1914. Two literary forms of interest in the context of this lexicon — they are not in fact comparable terms — were born during the years of Revel: Modernism, which we do not focus upon here (though the famous invocation of “silence, exile, and cunning” which concludes James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916] is a mantra for surviving Aftermath); and Fantasy, which was gestated not only by J R R Tolkien but at least a dozen other central figures who took their sense of the wrongness of the world from the trenches, often literally.) To choose the term Aftermath in consciousness of its historical use is of course deliberately to foreground the argument (made throughout this lexicon) that the body of texts comprising Horror is best understood in relation to the world. The choice implies a further claim: that Horror, which as a formal enterprise is a creation of the Western World, ends where the buck stops for Western humanity: in the Waste Land we have created. The true conspectus and habitation of Horror is the desolate world proleptically glimpsed by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899 Blackwood’s Magazine); it is the most famous use of the word Horror in all literature, and the truest to the case: “The horror, the horror!” exclaims Kurtz, on being vouchsafed one final dying gaze upon the world, which is also the world to come.

Though they anatomize the future for our species, Horror novels properly tend to unpack their message within the frame of the present tense of things; only in the spasm of Aftermath — which may seem an eternity — are the lineaments of the future likely to come clear. A single example can demonstrate the case, and provide an exception to the rule that Aftermath is a “prestige” of the flaccid relaxation of the tale into death. Perhaps the most striking single novel of Horror set in World War One is The Cross of Carl: an Allegory (1931) by Walter Owen (1884–1953). It is a short novel, with no real compass for expressions of Sighting or Thickening; it properly begins at the Battle of the Somme (see Revel for description), and continues into an apotheosis of Aftermath that occupies more than half the book. After Carl has undergone the danse macabre of the battle, he is left for dead on the shattered ground: as dead as Europa seems then. He awakens some time later on a railway siding, bound into a faggot of corpses from the battleground; he is shunted into the adjoining warehouse-like “utilization” factory, where the dead are rendered into swill for pigs (see Serpent’s Egg). Owen is of course not literally prophesizing Auschwitz here: but he is certainly delineating a paradigm for Europe into which Auschwitz slides like grease. As for Carl, he escapes the factory and is shot dead, while lying the shallow grave he has constructed for himself, by two powerful bemedaled gentlemen who represent the obscenity of the powers-to-be in the world to come. To construct — or to witness — such paradigms is an essential function of Horror: a flash of such a paradigm perhaps constitutes the central extra-textual or para-textual function of Aftermath, beyond its central role in terminating the story at hand: to flash-freeze the future is the final gift of Horror.

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Image © Mike King

Literally: a laying waste to a land or a psyche; a physical or psychological devastation; desolation. More specifically: a term introduced into the stream of Western religious thought by Emanual Swedenborg (1688–1772), who used it to characterize a particular crisis in the extraordinarily complex dramatic actions which characterize his cosmogony in action. It here defines the disintegrative moment when the elements or accidents of evil are separated off from the essential goodness of those who, thus purified, then approach salvation; it also defines the even more disintegrative moment when the accidents of goodness are shaved mercilessly from the unsalvageable central core of the wicked. As far as this lexicon of Horror is concerned, those who are destined to be saved are of less interest than those banned from any subsequent Swedenborgian uplift.

But the relevant consideration here is not so much the profound desolation experienced by the Vastated, for our diagnostic language is amply rich in terms descriptive of modes of depression in modern humans, just as it is rich in the description of subjective understandings of the external world; the point here is that Vastation is the consequence of a measurable change in the relationship of the sufferer to the world story. It is an emotion linked to the story of the world at those moments when that story threatens to overwhelm us, or when its incoherence or coherence becomes mercilessly visible — as H P Lovecraft puts it in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928 Weird Tales): “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” The term does not inherently fix to any particular moment in the four-part model of the moves of horror that has shaped this lexicon; the moment of Sighting may clearly prelude a full immersion or clarity, though the final, Aftermath moments of a tale normally serve to focus the kind of awareness — like that of Vastation — whose effect is terminal.

Vastation is not, therefore, used in this lexicon as a synomym for depression or bipolar disorder, nor for personal grief; nor for hallucinatory states, nor any other sort of false understanding of the external world. An hallucinatory vision of a ghost is an hallucination. To experience the malice of the made or revealed cosmos — as with the narrator’s philosophical despair in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) after a curse-induced plague (see Infection) has begun to end all human life; or when “the enormous machinery of hell” expresses itself into the world through the objective emblem of the monkey demon from Hell in J Sheridan Le Fanu’s great Swedenborgian “Green Tea” (1869 All the Year Round) — is to experience Vastation. What happens to Le Fanu’s victim protagonists, in particular, is that they find out too much about the world; more specifically, they find out, in a sense, that the world means its malice, for a natural disaster may evoke a million griefs, but not, in the sense here understood, Vastation. Mourning experienced after a death in the family may be multiplied a thousandfold, but still be adequately defined as mourning; mourning experienced as a consequence of the Final Solution is Vastation.

In the literatures of Horror, Vastation contagiously joins the world — which is the fundamental arena for all forms of what is here designated the Bound Fantastic — to the sentient creatures (almost always humans) tethered to its disintegrating and/or newly exposed frame; it represents, in fictional form, a vision of the deranging effect of the world on story (see part 3 of Difficulty for short discussion), and consequently upon the utterands of Story, who are usually us. Vastation occurs when the “malignant system of the world” (as Le Fanu puts it) is tearing you apart: after Vastation, the utterands of Story, and Story itself, falls into dead silence: for there is no way to proceed. Most of the protagonists in H P Lovecraft’s linked stories about the Cthulhu Mythos are shattered by Vastation after they see the true face of things; it is depicting a character so devastated that Fred Chappell’s Dagon (1968) reflects most deeply on Lovecraft. The stories of Franz Kafka are full of the Vastation consequent upon attempting to ascertain rules in a world that cannot hear them. Vastation eats Beckett into a silence which it is his heroism to break. In very many of the tales of Robert Aickman, the term will represent the internal disintegration of a protagonist when the real world cannot any longer be apprehended as knowable, any more than existence after a profound mid-life crisis may seem knowable; alternately, the protagonist of a novel like Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) suffers internal despair because she apprehends the real world as intolerably storyable: what might be called the Lesser Vastation describes not only incoherence and nullity, but also Bondage. The sense of Belatedness and entrapment and staleness felt by various protagonists of the stories assembled in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover (coll 1945) is precisely tied to their intuition that World War Two has repeated as terminal farce the reaving of the civilized world first experienced through the catastrophe of World War One: history repeating itself Vastates her world into an irredeemable belatedness.

The poetry and fiction of the Great War to End War is of course irradiated by a different sense: that we have, here and now, come face to face with the present tense of things (see again Aftermath. There are many famous examples; a lesser-known but supremely horrific text can stand for all of them. In The Cross of Carl: an Allegory (1931) by Walter Owen (1884–1953), the burning of the Auschwitz-like “utilization” factory — where human corpses fresh from Somme-like slaughter are rendered into pig swill — does not mark the extinction of horror, but a prophecy that it is eternal. What Carl sees in the flames from a distance is a Serpent’s Egg giving birth to Vastation forever: “a great red eye”, “an iris of orange light that hung spectral-like above the wold…” What he sees is Sauron awakening into his kingdom.

When the narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand (1969) time-slips into an England devastated by the Black Plague, the desolate world he sees foretells “all the most hideous features of a twentieth-century landscape after disaster, suggesting a total abandonment of hope, the aftertaste of atomic doom.” “Two Sadnesses” (in Bad Moon Rising, anth 1973, ed Thomas M Disch) by George Alec Effinger is a fantasy whose beast-fable protagonists, taken from tales by Kenneth Grahame and A A Milne, discover that their hallowed pre-Aftermath enclaves have been invaded by the history of the later 20th century, and that, “Indeed, up ahead the thick, orange water of the river itself was blazing in a towering wall of flame.” In “The Warden” (in The King’s Indian, coll 1976) by John Gardner, the eponymous protagonist is Vastated through having to promulgate Kafkaesque rules in a venue which vitiates any attempt to enforce them. Almost every character in Elizabeth Hand’s Glimmering (1997) has a Vastated sense of the imminence of the end of the world. In Thomas Ligotti’s “I Have a Special Plan for This World” (2000 Horror Garage), a yellow fog wells up through the unnamed city where the protagonist exercises his capacity, in the coils of a great corporation, of wringing events to their uttermost, and thus exposing the “baseless sense of purpose” which underlies all actions here and now in this urban fantasy world. In this story, experiencing Late-High Capitalism is seen as a form of Vastation.

In Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution (2004), a black clergyman understands his utter despair — at the ruin of his life, his faith, his son, his marriage, his career — as precisely equivalent to the ruining of London while the Blitz progresses, though he has no way of knowing that this Lesser Vastation hovers over the deeper Vastation of the Final Solution. Indeed, it may be said that the underlying tenor of all Holocaust Fiction is Vastation; and the paradigm text for understanding the etiology and action of the term may well be D M Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), in which the clairvoyant protagonist’s private griefs and hysteria and valiant healing exfoliate inexorably into a profound memorial paeon for the loss of civilization as a whole, but in particular — as she approaches her temporal end at Babi Yar in 1941 — for Europe Between the Wars. Her Vastated bone vulnerability to the malice of the world is as clear a representation of the inner genius of the Bound Fantastic as can be found in the literature.

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Image © Diana Sudyka

The title of a 1977 film by Ingmar Bergman (1918- ) set in 1923, in early Weimar Berlin, when hyperinflation and deep cultural stress and growing Nazi influence seemed both to express to the fullest a sense of the Aftermath of the world, and to work as a literal (though literally distorting) Mirror of times to come. In the course of the film it is revealed that a paradigm set of citizens of Berlin — whose behaviour has become increasingly so amoral and dysfunctional and desperate that many viewers of the film came away with the impression that Bergman himself had lost his touch — are victims of ruthless experiments in social engineering designed to formulate a “new society [that] will be based on a realistic assessment of man’s potentials and limitations”. As victims of this Infection, which they ingest through their drinking water, their behaviour in the first three quarters of the film comprises an ideogram — an iconography — of human behavior in general, later in the century. Bergman’s final argument — or revelation — is therefore that the mirror on our state exposed by these experiments is not a distorting mirror. “Anyone who makes the slightest effort,” the experimental institute’s head scientist tells the victimized protagonist, “can see what is waiting in there in the future. It’s like a serpent’s egg. Through the thin membranes you can clearly discern the already perfect reptile.” In a sense, every moment of the film is a Serpent’s Egg.

In this lexicon the term Serpent’s Egg is used to help illuminate the Bound Fantastic nature of Horror texts to the passing of time: that the process of Horror is, at least in part, a process of uncovering the true future out of the false rind of the past; the term Serpent’s Egg points to realized moments when apparent metaphors of our state turn out to be literal descriptions of birth pangs, when it can be seen that Horror is simply a vision of history to come: when the world to come turns out to be exactly what we feared. In terms of the full model of Horror, the future is what happens when you find out. Bound to the world, whose constant transformation is necessarily the undertext of any full Horror tale — a constant burn of transformation that exposes our viscera to the light — texts of the Bound Fantastic work as manuals of instruction, in which Serpent’s Eggs can be understood as maxims. For such a maxim to work in a text, what is actually seen through the thin membrane of the Egg need not necessarily be described, or exposed, to the reader. The closing moments of a Club Story like Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899 Blackwood’s Magazine) — as Marlow, the teller of the tale, gazes “into the heart of an immense darkness” — can be understood as a terminal gaze of outward regard at the “already perfect reptile” of the new century (when it is remembered that Marlow at this point can be seen as analogous to the New Zealander gazing across the same commercial Empire-sustaining Thames at the ruins of London in Gustave Doré’s famous 1872 illustration, this last scene of “Heart of Darkness” gains the poignant snowglobe clarity of the best examples of the Serpent’s Egg). The blank gaze of the “converted” Donald Sutherland character at the end of the 1979 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a Serpent’s Egg gaze, analogous to the one-eyed idiot gape of the eponymous god in Fred Chappell’s Dagon (1968), who is reality ground down to the nub, who is the wasted world to come: “the god was omnipotent but did not possess intelligence”: it was

Reptilian. Legless. Truncated scaly wings, flightless, useless. The god Dagon was less than three feet long. Fat and rounded, like the belly of a crocodile. He couldn’t see the mouth hidden away under the body, but he knew it: a wirelike grin like a rattlesnake’s; double rows of venomous needles in the maw.

The eponymous hotel in D M Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), also an historical tale about the working of history on humans, is a Serpent’s Egg.

A Serpent’s Egg within a tale does not argue the future; it grasps it. Nor, technically, need examples of the Serpent’s Egg be confined to horror — it is simply that the course of the twentieth century has been most profoundly adumbrated through visions of what the opened eye — the rind of the eye peeled — has seen. Here is Thomas Mann, ending Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des Deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, Erzählt von Einem Freunde (1947 Sweden; trans H T Lowe-Porter as Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend 1948 US), a Pact-With-the-Devil tale ostensibly about Germany (but hence about Europe) at the edge of a Serpent’s Egg gaze into the abyss of 1940: “Today,” the book concludes,

clung round by demons, a hand over one eye, with the other staring into horrors, down [Europa, hence us] flings from despair to despair. When will she reach the bottom of the abyss?

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Image © Tara McPherson

Revel is both a noun and a verb. As a noun it describes a formal event bound in time and place, an event in which the field of the world is reversed: good becomes evil; parody becomes jurisprudence; the jester is king; Hyde lives; autumn is the growing season. As a verb, Revel refers to actions which create and animate such an event, actions of telling which catch revelation on the wing; it also points to the subversive nature of story itself: because, as it is being told, every story about the world threatens to transport us out of our previous understanding of the world. In this lexicon, therefore, Revel as noun and verb represents the third of four successive stages — Sighting, Thickening, Revel and Aftermath — that describe those works of Horror which seem most completely to exhaust the potentials of the form. Revel comes after the thickening rind of appearances is peeled away at last, when the truth of things glares through the peeled Masque or Danse Macabre; and resolves into the exhausted latency of Aftermath. Revel delivers the truth (see also Serpent’s Egg); it is most devastating when the truth it delivers is revealed to be some form of Vastation, some defining expression of the malice of the world. Revel occupies the same slot in the four-seasons model of the narrative structure for horror as recognition does in the similar model for Fantasy, which is elaborated in several linked entries by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) ed John Clute and John Grant. But Recognition is weighted towards a recovery of the lost or stolen past (the season it is analogous to is spring), while Revel tends to announce the world to come (and the season it is analogous to is fall). The wings of revelation create a wind from the future, from the winter of the world that the occupants of the early 21st century are now entering (see Horror for a short presentation of the concept that as a whole Fantasy is shaped around recapturing the past, while as a whole horror is shaped around obeying the future (see, again, Vastation). Revel is the action of the real world announcing itself. It is “Reason” awakening itself from sleep.

Revel, in other words, marks the moment when a horror tale ceases to describe the welling up of the repressed and the subversive within the restraining walls of “civilization”, and begins to tell it as it is. The most perfect example of this may be found in a film not usually thought of as horror, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) dir Frank Capra (1897–1991). It is a film open to an almost infinite variety of interpretations as regards the meaning of George Bailey’s imprisoned life; the most common of these interpretations is that the provincial airlessness of that life — a life which leads him to try to kill himself — is worth the cost, because the innumerable life-frustrations inflicted upon this latterday Bob Cratchett have bettered the lives of others, all of whom remain unaware that he has sacrificed his life to them. This reading of the film plausibly treats its climax positively: when the angel causes Bailey to recognize the worth of his life, and allows him to return to and to recover that life, It’s a Wonderful Life can properly be understood as a full Fantasy tale (for the relationship of these terms, and of Fantasy as a whole, to the range of subjects covered in this lexicon, see Horror). But if the angel’s counter-story is true — if Bailey had never been born into his life of benumbing sacrifice — then the proper climax of the film is the unveiling of Bailey’s Bedford Falls as Pottersville in the long Revel sequence during which the never-born Bailey sees the true faces of his neighbours, sees the true nature of capitalist exploitation of the heart of America, sees the future (significantly, Mr Potter, the villainous cheating banker who has been instrumental in exposing Bailey to the way of the world, escapes any punishment for his criminal actions; as the film closes, he lies in wait for the next opportunity to bring Bailey — whose life-problems have not been solved but simply deferred — to his senses). Under the latter reading, It’s a Wonderful Life neatly transacts the four stages of the full Horror model: Bailey’s Sightings of the nightmare to come, each time his normal need to experience life has been melodramatically frustrated; the Thickening and intertwining of these frustrations into a net of fixated circumstance; the Revel as described above; the Aftermath, which is not directly experienced but which can be clearly anticipated lurking beyond the final frame: because Potter lives; because Christmas lasts only a single day; because George Bailey has seen the Revel.

We spend time on this film for two reasons: because it offers a dramatic opportunity to note the radical distinction between a fantasy and a horror reading of a familiar story; and because that distinction here hinges on whether its climax is to be understood as a recovery of the past or as obedience to the future, as Recognition or as Revel. Certainly, in terms of the arguments presented in this lexicon, the heart of the film lies in the latter reading, in its telling demonstration of the subversive power of Horror to open the eyes. This seductiveness of Horror (some form of seduction or uncanny persuasiveness lies at the heart of almost all supernatural fiction, cf. the angel in Capra’s film) is often rendered as a Masque or Carnival, in which the movements of the dance themselves seem to peel away the rind of the congested past. Both the masque and carnival are best understood — in the frame of argument presented here — as manifestations of the Revel. Such moments are prominent in 19th-century writers like E T A Hoffmann, Sir Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolai Gogol, though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), unless one think of its inwardly spiralling narrative as analogous to a dance of revelation, or the wedding night murder as ceremonial, does not express itself through Revel. Nor is it unsurprising — slightly further into the century — that the various Christmas Books of Charles Dickens — including of course A Christmas Carol (1843) — constantly invoke, and refuse, the carnivalesque. Given that it is a deliberate fantasia on Dickens’s Carol, it is perhaps inevitable that It’s a Wonderful Life both quotes the 19th century, life-affirming aspects of the dance, in its parody-with-love of the Fezziwig Ball, and simultaneously enacts a horrific counter-dance of Revel out of the changed world of the 20th century, as described at length above.

There are Revels in Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (coll 1895). The artistic rendering of a Revel, in Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (in The Great God Pan, coll 1894), persuades the appalling clique of Late Victorian gentlemen who “occupy” the foreground of the tale into forcing the suicide of a woman who kills men by — in effect — forcing them to see her naked and entire (see Motif of Harmful Sensation). Much fin de siècle and decadent writing hints at Revels which unfreeze the action into full horror, but rarely enters fully into the enactment of “festivities” prophetic in this way of the world to come, though Joseph Conrad, in “Heart of Darkness” (1899 Blackwood’s Magazine), comes very close indeed in his depiction of the life of Kurz. More explicitly, though very much less resonantly, Kenneth Grahame comes closer to creating a pre-Aftermath vision of the world turned upside down in the picnic of the under-beasts in The Wind in the Willows (1908). It is, however, an argument frequently proposed in this lexicon that Horror — like all examples of the literatures of the fantastic — is deeply sensitive to the nature of the world itself, and as the engines of history accelerated the rate of change at the beginning of the 20th century, this sensitivity became more and more tortured, increasingly more exorbitant.

So we enter the full spate of Revel. No one single text definitively marks the shifts in the ground of being generated by World War One; it might in fact be argued that World War One itself is a definitive rendering of the Revel of the world. Indeed, such imagery, variously couched, is commonly found. It is certainly the case, for instance, that trench warfare has often been seen as a Danse Macabre; that No Man’s Land has been understood as the veritable face of the world, our home from now on; that, in essence, the Great War is understood to have peeled the rind off the civilized world, and that we have been naked to reality ever since: hence the denial cultures that poison the early 21st century. A single example of the literary use of the war may stand in here for dozens: the long opening “Gethsemane” sequence from The Cross of Carl: an Allegory (1931) by Walter Owen (1884–1953) depicts an unnamed apocalyptic battle, perhaps the Battle of the Somme, as a world-ending Revel; the remainder of the book uncannily prefigures the Aftermath-years of the century up to and including world war two (see Aftermath for details; Owen’s quite extraordinary text may have been drafted as early as 1917). Less case-specific, two of Gustav Meyrink’s novels — The Green Face (1916) and Walpurgisnacht (1917) — are Revels inherently illustrative of the trauma of war; and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) sublimates — as does much of his work — similar material into an artifact of taming discourse, which readers may be expected to pretend to believe; by the end of his second great work about the 20th century, Dr Faustus (1947), a tale that sets out to define the convulsions of an Aftermath world, there is no belief left in a saved world: all we can hope for from a universe defined in terms of syphilitic dance is that the Revel will not be worse than last time.

As the 20th century progresses, Revels begin to proliferate. Charles G Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao (1935) is perhaps the best known story to conflate Circus and Revel, along with many further tales, from authors like Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, that examine the same ambivalent relation between nostalgia for a world well lost and subversion of the present. A similar nostalgia/subversion dynamic marks the Baseball story in fantasy; but despite the omphalos of Home Base, and the fact that its players “horrifically” act out — almost like clockwork — plays fully describable as iterations of the rules that govern those plays (baseball may be the only sport describable to the blind), baseball stories tend largely to mute the Revel aspect so visibly potentiated within their fundamental structure: this may be a form of patriotism. Out of an ocean of choices, four more exemplary titles can be mentioned. Robert Aickman’s “Ringing the Changes” (in The Third Ghost Book, anth 1955, ed Cynthia Asquith) ends in a literal Dance of Death, but one in which the protagonist’s wife joins, leaving him forever as she gallivants deadpan into the new desert world which he will never understand, being belated. The long descent of the protagonist of Fred Chappell’s Dagon (1968) into Bondage culminates in an epiphanic (though almost immobile) Revel conducted in the presence of the God, which is an idiot, and a Serpent’s Egg, and which will rule the world. The whole second half of Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon (1982), as a whole an omnium gatherum of Affect Horror effects, can be understood to superimpose Revel upon Thickening, a Revel so boisterous and prolonged it almost seems to proclaim a welcome to the worst infections the world can offer. Elizabeth Hand’s Winterlong (1990) is structured entirely through a crescendo of Revels which, once again, strip the world of its masks. And Glen Hirshberg’s “Mr Dark’s Carnival” (in Shadows and Silence, anth 2000, ed Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden) returns to an even blacker outcome, for the dance his protagonist enters is death for sure, and the world which echoes his terminal moves is made up of the betrayed bones beneath America. In this tale, and in so many others, the dance of Revel is Taps for the future.

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The first volume of Robert Aickman’s autobiography is entitled The Attempted Rescue (1966). As he describes its formative years in this volume, the course of his life, and by extension the course of human life in general, could be described as an attempt to rescue oneself from the iron cage of circumstance and destiny and gene: from family, disabling inheritance, accident, destiny, mortality: to make one’s adult self into a kind of vessel capable of floating free of these iron circumstances. Attempted Rescue is a shorthand for any understanding of the personality structure of the mature human being which conceives of that structure as being guardedly recuperative of past stages of the self and of the unconscious. More specifically, as far as the arguments suggested in this lexicon are concerned, Attempted Rescue can usefully refer to the personality structure of the twin who is visible, the twin on top of the world (in horror it is the invisible twin who counts in the end: the untermensch twin, the Monster, the twin whose Sighting spells the end of the Attempted Rescue personality of its mate above): see Double. Even the most successful self is only an Attempted Rescue. Throughout Aickman’s fiction, these escape attempts are futile.

In terms of horror, the term also describes a particular story structure, one which traces its protagonist’s literal attempt to escape his circumstances (see Difficulty for a contrast between monologic and dialogic Story types: the Attempted Rescue clearly being an example of the latter). Its most melodramatic formulation is in the Appointment in Samarra tale, where the protagonist flees a projected terror in exactly the direction fated to confront him with that terror. Quest tales in horror — there are relatively few of them, as opposed to the vast number of quests in fantasy literature — can be thought of in these terms too, as types of the Appointment in Samarra: for they are generally disguises for attempts to flee; they do not normally succeed (see Followed; Hook). In Slick Fantasy, the protagonist’s hubris (or mere trickery) is almost always punished by a plot twist which uncovers the foolishness of the attempt to gain an advantage on the world. For horror in general, any protagonist who attempts to repudiate his Double or his Twin, to abandon his past, to start anew, is normally doomed to gain, at the end of the trail, nothing but the sight of his own haunted visage (perhaps in a Mirror which reflects the past); his fate; his guilt; his future.

With so broad a remit — for the Attempted Rescue tale can easily be understood to manifest the underlying antagonistic dualisms that motor most horror tales (see Followed; Horror) — examples are very common. Most of Peter Straub’s work since Koko (1988) can be understood as extraordinarily complexified enactments of attempted rescue — certainly Tim Underhill’s obsessive novelistic re-creations of the past in order to liberate quite possibly dead children from Bondage, most clearly in lost boy lost girl (2003), can be see in this light. In The Throat (1993), his greatest Underhill novel, Straub quotes a “gnostic gospel” whose message is very close to what Robert Aickman has said about ghosts:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Stories which enact the attempted rescue motif include Robert Aickman’s “The Unsettled Dust” (in Sub Rosa, coll 1968) and “The Stains” (in New Terrors #1, anth 1980, ed Ramsey Campbell), Joan Aiken’s “Die from Day to Day” (in A Creepy Company, coll 1993), Rhoda Broughton’s “Behold It Was a Dream” (1872 The Temple Bar), Joe Hill’s Twentieth-Century Ghosts (coll 2005) Vincent O’Sullivan’s “They” (date unestablished, circa 1915), Lucius Shepard’s Green Eyes (1984), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and many others.

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Thickening begins after the uncanny afflatus of Sighting begins to fade, and the future adumbrated in the terrorizing flash of Sighting begins to come true. In the prescriptive four-seasons model of the narrative structure of Horror which governs most of the entries in this lexicon, Thickening comes second: the full model comprises Sighting, Thickening, Revel and Aftermath; the moment of Sighting may be conveyed in a sentence, but the process of Thickening normally occupies most of any text being considered. Thickening, taken alone, can of course be thought of as simply another way of pointing to the kind of plot-complicating common to much fiction; but even here, if Thickening is focused on deeply, an effect similar to that of Horror — unresolved Horror — may be felt: the greatest novel focused on Thickening alone may be Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; Or, the History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life (1748), a tale of extraordinary and suffocating intensity (but whose subtitle marks it off from Horror as understood here).

As part of the four-part model, the process of Thickening will normally be felt as a cumulative movement towards a further stage: betrayals and mysterious absences (or presences) and keys that do not open and trains that do not come clot the mise en scene, force protagonists down paths they do not wish to tread; nothing adds up; confusion reigns; life is inherently impeded: there seems no exit from the suffocating tangle of plot; the atmosphere  of things literally thickens; it is hard to breathe; in the end there has been a progressive unmapping of the paths within the world, which increasingly shuts in one’s face, so that protagonists have no choice available to them except that of obedience to the pull of gravity, the Hook that will expose them to the Revel: this all takes time to convey.

And all of it is false. Thickening may point to some truth which the moment of Revel may reveal, similar to the “metonomy contagion” familiar to readers of the Gothic, a process by which that which lies below becomes identified with seductive bits of the surface, a knocking of the truth from underneath manifested as gear, visages, veils, fetishes in shop windows, grotesques, salads of sorts. Partly through an accumulation of these metonymies, the phenomenal world is increasingly revealed as a rind that, once peeled, exposes the vacancies within the false consciousness of “normal” life, and the imposture of the history of the world: which we are taught to think of as a story which justifies our lives, not a sentence which convicts us. So the rind of the world, whose haecceity or thingness is mockingly focused upon through the various narrative ingenuities of Thickening in the hands of a competent author, is a rind of lies: as is the assemblage of evasions, the scar tissue over the unendurable past, which comprises the Hooked self: the face worn outdoors by the careerists (that is, you and me) who profit from obeying the rules of daylight “reality”: who breed and thrive, who consume upon the sinking deck. Look into the mirror, Dr Jekyll, and you will see rind.

But in terms of Horror, a further entanglement binds writers and readers; within 21st century Horror texts, it also tends to bind protagonists recursively familiar with the prior stories that are telling them again: that entanglement being the accumulated mass of precedent and conversation contained in everything already written and read. Ghosts and parodies out of this shared past haunt and encumber what we write and read today. Most of us do understand that characters in books are fictions, but there is some sense in which we share their experiences, as Ghosts and Parodies, out of a very similar shared past, haunt and encumber them as well. An essential part of the 21st century experience of Thickening — where most of the icons are resurrected and told again, where most of the assumptions Horror makes about the world are iterated and reiterated at length — is therefore an experience of deja vu; the past inhabits our present, doubles the stories being told. Recursiveness slows the course of story, embrambles the path with echoes. For better and for worse, it Thickens our passage.

The second effect of the past record of written Horror may be more important: it is a sense that the stories of the past 250 years are somehow testamentary, and that the world they testify to is continuous with our own. When we re-read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818), and recognize the “monster’s” estrangement and his longing to surface upwards into the world, we recognize the echo of his fate within every Double in the literature of Horror, as he stalks the surface twin who has Sighted him and who flees uselessly from him through the Thickening world (see Followed); but we also recognize, in the life of the “monster”, an exposure of history itself: the underclass exposed by the speed of change; the working-class man who learns to read and threatens to become dictator; the lubricious otherness of the breeds without the law who sue to join the golf club; the sense that the world now changes faster than its thrones can be inherited: to succeed in the 21st century world we must be made to do so. This incessant texturing of the storyable world irradiates almost any 21st century Horror novel; some shudder to a halt under the burden. But if the contemporary Horror novel is genuinely transgressive, it is not so through any discovery of new fluxes of affect. It is transgressive because it continues to tell us that Baron Frankenstein is the true monster, that we who are the owners of the world are the devourers of the world.

Were we wrong to have eaten
it all in just one century? No.We were
the true suicide bombers, and Paradise
was our reward. We will have left nothing behind
but the memory of our movie stars.

“Prayer of Thanksgiving” (2006) by Tom Disch. The truth of things wells up….

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Or “Strange Tales”. One of a large number of terms which writers and critics have used in attempts to characterize the nature of the horror story, almost always (it seems) in order to distinguish some particular family of tales from Affect Horror. Though it has never gained wide acceptance as a noun phrase descriptive of any specific aspect of Horror or of the Bound Fantastic in general, the term “strange stories/tales” thus used has nevertheless a long history in the literatures of the fantastic; the phrase probably appears first in any significant context as the title of the first American translation of E T A Hoffmann, Hoffmann’s Strange Stories: from the German (trans anon 1855). Subsequent similar instances of the phrase in significant use include Grant Allen’s Strange Stories (coll 1884); H G Wells’s Thirty Strange Stories (coll 1897); Algernon Blackwood’s Strange Stories (coll 1929); Histories et Contes Fantastiques (coll 1849; trans anon as Strange Stories 1880 US) by Erckmann-Chatrian (1826–1890); the Strange Stories anthology series 1943–1945 ed John L Hardie (1893-?); as subtitle for most of Gustav Meyrink’s Austian collections, none translated; Out of My Mind: Strange Stories (coll 1946) by Jack Bilbo (1907–1967), a German who wrote in English while in exile, 1936–1949; Saere Historier (coll 1953; trans Maureen Neiiendam as Strange Stories 1956) by Villy Sorensen (1929–2001); and, most influentially to date, Robert Aickman’s use of the phrase to subtitle his collections; Strange Tales (anth 2003) ed Rosalie Parker and R B Russell.

The examples given are not entirely heterogenous, for the inner creative bent of most of those who have used the term is towards the writing of tales of estrangement rather than Affect Horror as such. None of the writers instanced above are American; only two are British-born. Very roughly, the term may be seen to apply primarily to work from writers of European extraction, and/or work from writers, like Aickman, primarily interested in writing stories which articulate something of the inexplicable dread that the world evokes in the unprepared. There is, moreover, an implied sense of argument in the term, a sense that the estrangement of the world from the individual soul is arguably what we experience in these later years; that estrangement is an arguable (or ascertainable) condition of the world. Strange stories often, therefore, take place where estrangement is consciously worn or displayed, Carnival venues, for instance, or places where Commedia Dell’Arte  theatricals ordonnate reality, or masquerades. (Karen Blixen would certainly rank high among those authors who could have properly used the term of their work.) Whenever a strange story treats estrangement as an objective condition (rather than a symptom of personal malaise), that story is likely as well to evoke an afflicted, incomplete hint of Vastation.

In terms of Horror, Strange Stories can be seen as tales whose protagonists are snared at the moment of Sighting: innocence is lost to them; but likewise the harsh release of a passage into the reality of things, however terrorizing that reality may be to contemplate.

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Sighting is a glimpse of terror to come; it is uncanny to experience (see below), and it tells us that something worse than what we just sighted is in the offing: like the first glimpse of the child who will become devouringly the protagonist’s son in Thomas M Disch’s “The Asian Shore” (in Orbit 6, anth 1970, ed Damon Knight), or the first flash of red in Nicholas Roeg’s film version (1973) of Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” (1966), or the protagonist’s friend’s eyes, which “glisten like wet marbles in the gathering twilight” in Rick Hautala’s “Worst Fears” (in Gothic Ghosts, anth 1997, ed Wendy Webb and Charles Grant), telling us that she, and the city, and all else, are dead. Sighting is therefore more than an initial experience of horror (see Affect Horror), whose effects may be exhausted in the seeing, for it is central to Affect Horror that what you see is what you get. Sighting predicts; it is an aliquot sample of what is to come; an Infection of the next. It is the first “sentence” in an argument whose outcome will be an unpeeling of the true world (see Bound Fantastic). Sighting is directly analogous to the sense of wrongness that initiates most fantasy tales set in a secondary world (see Free Fantastic). They are both transitive: they convey us to the next thing.

In terms of the prescriptive four-seasons model of the narrative structure of Horror which governs most of the entries in this lexicon, Sighting, the first stage in that model, signals the moment when the protagonist (or the narrative voice of the story) begins to recognize a Thickening (which is the second stage) in the texture of the world, just as Wrongness (stage one in the equivalent Fantasy model) is an augur of the Thinning (stage two) of the old world into a condition of desert Amnesia. Sighting is the first sign that we are going to be unmapped or unhouseled from the normal world — “normal world” being a term simply designating a world that we are accustomed to, a world which we may indeed discover to have been unreal. In terms of the model used here, what Horror unmaps — from the first Sighting — is exactly not the real world, though it may be the world we desperately prefer, but the worldrind of civilized usage, the world-lie we use to repress the worldstory, the cover up which coats over the Horror beneath: that being the true history of our times: the universal Vastation that attends true sight of our species and its riven planet.

Sighting clearly signals a release of material that in any psychological reading of Horror is likely to have been repressed, though a wholly expressionist reading of the dynamic between the prior world, and the world Sighting exposes to view, does unduly restrict the range of meanings intended here. It is still surely the case that something like the return of the repressed — the re-emergence into sight of that which “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”, as Sigmund Freud describes the Uncanny in his famous essay “Das Unheimlich” (1919) — does characterize Sighting. But for Freud the Uncanny is not simply (or not only) an exposure of the horrific unfamiliar within the familiar: it is far more slippery than that, as Susan Bernstein argues in “It Walks — The Ambulatory Uncanny” (MLN, vol 118, #5, December 2003): for Freud the Uncanny is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Moreover, the Uncanny (passing beyond “Das Unheimlich”, but doing so insecurely, because Freud is cleverer than his readers) is not a term adequately restricted to the experience of an individual psyche in distress as the individual past wells up from within; the Uncanny. certainly in terms of the arguments being sketched here, is a pun of the world.

The Uncanny — which is to say Sighting — is a trompe l’oeil which the world generates. It is the familiar, which is the false, and the unfamiliar, which is the true, in one aspect. Because it is both the same and not the same, it affects the protagonist who bears witness as both sacred and profane: which it is. A Sighting is often first experienced, therefore, in a Mirror; the first glimpse of a double or twin also constitutes — almost invariably in modern Horror — a Sighting. Its slipperiness is both chthonic and horrific, a doubling common in myth, and common once again after 1800. It is the wit of Terror, and makes the heart of the protagonist (and of the identifying reader) thump in the breast, though not for joy of the joke; and it is all more terrible in that the heart now beats to the rhythm of the world to come. Having experienced this pun of the world, and walking now to its beat, the protagonist (and the reader) may now attempt to escape their Sighting, but to run away in Horror is to be Followed; to run away is to make an Appointment in Samarra. Once a Sighting has been made, there is no return. Alternatively, protagonists may respond proactively, they may set out on what they claim is a quest for the unknown: but there is no such thing as a genuine quest in Horror, for the unknown has already taken them; they are already hooked. (What is quest in Fantasy is Hook in Horror.) Sighting is the beginning of the end of things. Sighting is a flash of the future.

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Or Hooked. A term which is understood here in the sense that a gaffed fish is understood to have been Hooked. It is the equivalent in Horror to the quest in Fantasy; its use here is primarily as a mnemonic device to remind readers of a characteristic expression of the grammar of Horror. It is not, in other words, intended to provide an architectural equivalent to Quest as, for instance, that term is utilized in “Portal/Quest Fantasies”, the first chapter of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). The term as used here points rather to a practical question as to how Horror is told: what is it that can impel a protagonist to pass through the frying pan of Thickening into the fire of Revel? Advocates of Affect Horror tend to think of protagonists as in fact engaging upon a kind of Quest, that their lust to penetrate the Unknown is in some sense voluntary. The model here presented of Horror — as a grammar of moves that culminate in an understanding that the true world augurs and embodies an ultimate terror that does not lie to us — does however make it difficult to focus on volunteers: hence the use of the term Hook.

The “granting” to a protagonist of a first Sighting of things to come is not an invitation but an impalement. To catch Sight of something (especially something in a Mirror) is to be Hooked in the eye, the organ that trompe l’oeils are designed to fool, like the protagonist of Tanith Lee’s “Snow-Drop” (in Snow White, Blood Red, anth 1993, ed Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), who destroys the uncanny image of a young girl who haunts her only to be trawled into the presence of the girl herself, in the flesh, fatally. (This one example, out of thousands, may suffice for all.) So the protagonist may deny that she is swimming upstream into a Thickening world at a pace that would kill any ungaffed mortal; he may deny that he is being Followed by nemesis, often in the form of a Double or some other topiary parody of the norm, some “metonymy contagion” (see Thickening) that wells up like magma through the rind. But this is according to the rules of Horror: for the world in which a Horror tale begins is a world of denial: protagonists in Horror begin, therefore, in a state of denial. They are like fish in an aquarium, who cannot see the glass. For the Horror tale to continue, they must be Hooked out of there. They must be given a chance to see the world.

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Horror is defined here, and is understood throughout this lexicon, as one of several genres or modes of the fantastic in literature. There is of course an element of convenience in this calving off of Horror so conceived from a larger overview which treats both fantastic and non-fantastic horror within a single conceptual framework. There is also an element of convenience in a connected presumption: that the theory of Affect Horror — crudely, that texts may be defined as Horror if they generate certain emotions — works more satisfactorily with non-fantastic Horror than with Fantastic Horror. Indeed it is hard to see how the congeries of story types that make up non-fantastic Horror could be sorted in any other way except through affect. Locating non-fantastic Horror in this fashion makes it easier to concentrate here on the special nature of Fantastic Horror, which is described in this lexicon as a pattern of story moves deeply and at times grotesquely responsive — like all genres of the Fantastic — to the nature of the world since 1750: attendance to the world precedes affect.

This is not a neutral or supine attendance; the first Gothic stories are not merely sensational. Like all the genres of the Fantastic, Horror is born at point when it has begun to be possible to glimpse the planet itself as a drama: a very dangerous time in the history of the West, because it is at this point that (to put it very crudely) Enlightened Europeans were beginning to know it all, were beginning to think that glimpsing the world was tantamount to owning it. Horror is (in part) a subversive response to the falseness of that Enlightenment ambition to totalize knowledge and the world into an imperial harmony that, soon enough, would become treasonous to dispute (viz Stalin). Horror — and the Fantastic as a whole — are conceived in contradiction of the imperialisms of the West. The Fantastic is Enlightenmemt’s dark, mocking Twin: Humbert Humbert’s Quilty. Bound to the world, the Fantastic exposes the lie that we own the world to which we are bound.

Of these contrarian modes, Horror is the extremest: Science Fiction, which might be called the Fantastic of the Case, declares that certain fixes answer the world, as though the world were composed of query (it is the least angry of genres); Fantasy (see Free Fantastic) repudiates the Wrongness of the world, and makes its escape from prison into a truer world (its rage may sublimate heavenwards, or not); but Horror (see Bound Fantastic) comprises a process of uncovering the true nature of the prison, which is seen to be inescapable, for the prison of the world is where the buck stops, huis clos. Horror exercises its rage ripping open the one-way gates to truth; after which is silence, a deep transparency of utter rage. Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899 Blackwood’s Magazine) incorporates maybe the definitive — and certainly the best known — utterance of the nature of Horror in all literature, an ultimate gape of rage, a final saying of the world at the close. As the supernaturally meme-absorbent Stanley Kurtz approaches death, he gazes upon something not explicable as a vision of African landscape illegibile to aliens, or of atrocities he may have committed within it: but there is no God to damn him. What he gazes upon is the heart of darkness — the naked, impersonal malice of the world, the VASTATION consequent upon true seeing — stripped of all the impedimenta of false “civilized” darkness we have seen Marlow hoick up the Congo. By the time Kurtz cries out at last, “The horror, the horror!”, he has transited all that fiddle of story, and can only utter the final grammar of reality entire, a rage isomorphic with how the world is truly said, the still point where any great Horror story ends: nothing but true, intransitive. Horror is that category of stories set in worlds that are false until the tale is told.

The prescriptive four-part model of Horror given in this lexicon, in order to suggest the ideal course of the full Horror story, parallels but moves in the opposite direction from the four-part model of Fantasy proposed in entries by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) ed John Clute and John Grant. The two models parody each other: despite the earlier creation of the Fantasy model, neither is meant to be thought of as precedent. The relationship of the sets of terms is easy to put in graphical form:

HORROR                    FANTASY
SIGHTING                  Wrongness
THICKENING             Thinning
REVEL                         Recognition
AFTERMATH              Return

The definitions and arguments proposed in the entries dedicated to these four terms may of course be read in any order; but they are also intended to read consecutively. The central arguments about the nature of Horror presented here might therefore be pursued in the following order: Horror (this entry); Affect Horror (to distinguish between that formatting of Horror and the course chosen here); Sighting; Thickening; Revel; Aftermath.

A further (but subsidiary) patterning connects the two sets of entries with a traditional temperate-zone four-part breakdown of the seasons. The resonances thus generated are not, in terms of this lexicon, exactly substantive; but they seem inescapable for anyone raised in a world subject to the grammar of the Seasons:

FANTASY                    SEASON
Wrongness                   Autumn
Thinning                       Winter
Recognition                  Spring
Return                          Summer

HORROR                     SEASON
Sighting                        Spring
Thickening                   Summer
Revel                             Autumn
Aftermath                    Winter

It should be noted that little attention is paid in this lexicon to texts which frustrate the model, or can be seen as stalled at some point in the grammar, or which parody the model. Horror, like any genre, has many mansions. In the full knowledge that the texts concentrated upon here do not conform to the normal canon of Horror, it has seemed preferable at this stage to focus on texts easy to read in terms of the moves here described. At the same time, the model does have heuristic uses over and above the elucidation of texts which fit it easily. It might be noted briefly (for instance) that much Affect Horror could be described as being stuck in the Thickening phase of the model (for reasons which seem moderately clear). It is also clear that Parodies and reversals and semblances mark some of the greatest instances of the modern Fantastic, a process to which this model is very clearly subject: a bald paraphrase of Peter Pan; Or, the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (1928) might (for instance) unpack this great play as a Horror narrative trapped in unending Aftermath, though no one could actually experience the play without understanding it as — or also as — a Fantasy of Return.

It should also be noted — this is a caveat and an apologia which might appear in almost every entry — that models of grammatical moves like those described here for Horror and Fantasy have been constructed exactly to illuminate and to value the chance-taking — the opportunism — the pushing against the limits of Order that seems inherent in any creative act, and manifest in any live creation of Story. If rules have been created here, they are rules intended to generate extremely various outcomes. They are what might be called tone-rows in music, though of course they are hugely less stringent than the serialist tone-rows which exhale entire compositions or else. The models or moves suggested here are inherently open, therefore, to modulations, contradictions, fugal combinations of simultaneously uttered material, mirror reversals, spoofing. In fact the real danger of models of Horror or Fantasy like these is not that they are procrustean, but that they are the reverse: that the meaning and relationship of these sets of verbs can be adjusted to fit any size. In the end, however, there are constraints. The models for Horror and Fantasy presented here are, after all, attempts to articulate a profound and specific fastening of Story to world. After all the ludic displays attendant upon the uttering of grammars, that much is binding.

To summarize and to conclude: it is argued here that over the past 250 years there has evolved an understory or grammar that governs the literal telling of stories of Horror, and that the cast of Horror — the bloodsuckers, the eaters, the undead, the Doubles and/or twins surfacing out of the oppressed past into the mirror, the creatures of the Id, the Attempted Rescures, the fanatics, the elder races — that all these creatures who might be called the utterands of Horror are participants in a great parade, that they march truthwards to the tune of the Bound Fantastic, the tune of history turning out of Eden. The still centre of Horror may be the supernal intransitive howl of Kurtz, but the passage to that ultimate point — as in some great Theatre of Memory — is lined with utterands of the storyable, who remind us through their grimaces and caperings of the world that burned them into these shapes. They are expressions of the world. When we encounter Horror’s utterands in our waking dreams, we are communing with stigmata of the Earth, anguishes of the darkening of the garden.

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