05 Horror Stories

“The uncanny affords us a rare pleasure,” the late cultural critic Jacques Barzun wrote of horror fiction, “that of not knowing what to think.” He would surely have appreciated Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson (Oxford University Press, $24.95), edited by Darryl Jones.This collection serves up a magnificent dose of the “rare pleasure.”

Haunted castles, demented scientists and gruesome deaths may have lost some of their power to shock a contemporary readership.What remains fascinating, though, is the roiling subtext of a great 19th-century debate about the inevitability of progress and the power of science to regulate, tame and explain everything.

The narrator of Arthur Machen's “Novel of the White Powder,” for example, practices a kind of radical empiricism, heaping scorn upon those who “timidly hinted that perhaps the senses are not, after all, the eternal, impenetrable bounds of all knowledge.” The protagonist of Algernon Blackwood's brilliant “The Wendigo,” from 1910, is likewise “grounded in common sense and established in logic.”The forays into the darkness of irrationality compiled here were a counter narrative, a seething id that worked corrosively on the public certitudes of the era.By giving voice to these macabre fantasies, the Victorians hoped to exorcise the lingering suspicion that their carefully considered Enlightenment virtues were really illusory.At the climax of Ronald Ross's “The Vivisector Vivisected”—a particularly lurid example of the genre—the subject of the experiment “seemed to have become more like an ape than a man.His face was turbid and red, his mouth drawn back at the corners.” He has become subhuman, a visitor from hell, and the story has served as a safety valve for the nightmare of science run amok, an incantatory form of collective therapeutic release.