Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult Read online

  PUBLISHER'S WARNING

  Readers should be advised that the consumption of the written words on the following pages could lead to nightmares, irresistible urges, spontaneous dance or ritual, and deep-seated needs to cloister oneself in a damp basement, musty library, or cavernous tomb. We urge you to bolt your doors and dim the lights, as this book is best read by antique lamp or candlelight. Should you find yourself reading this in a public setting—perhaps a lovely park bench or a crowded bus—we advise careful consideration of loud screams or gasps of horror, as they could give your fellow citizens an altogether wrong impression of you. Above all, be warned that there are some dark and twisting roads ahead, and we cannot be held responsible for what ghoulish companions you encounter—nor for what inevitably follows behind you, slinky and shuddering, as you run.

  This edition first published in 2014 by Weiser Books

  Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

  With offices at:

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  All new materials © 2014 by Weiser Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

  “The Sea Lure” was first published in The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, copyright © 1926, 1989 by The Society of the Inner Light. Used with permission.

  ISBN: 978-1-57863-572-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

  Cover design by Barb Fisher

  Cover art © Symonenko Viktoriia/Shutterstock

  Interior by Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

  Typeset in Mrs. Eaves and Futura

  Printed in the United States of America.

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  CONTENTS

  Horror Takes Its Time, an Introduction by LON MILO DUQUETTE

  1. The House and the Brain by SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON

  2. Casting the Runes by MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES

  3. Luella Miller by MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN

  4. An Inhabitant of Carcosa by AMBROSE BIERCE

  5. No. 252 Rue M. le Prince by RALPH ADAMS CRAM

  6. The Testament of Magdalen Blair by ALEISTER CROWLEY

  7. The Messenger by ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

  8. The Ring of Thoth by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  9. A Dream of Red Hands by BRAM STOKER

  10. Ligeia by EDGAR ALLAN POE

  11. At the Home of Poe by FRANK BELKNAP LONG, JR.

  12. The Alchemist by H.P. LOVECRAFT

  13. Dickon the Devil by JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU

  14. The White People by ARTHUR MACHEN

  15. The Sea Lure by DION FORTUNE

  HORROR TAKES ITS TIME

  Lon Milo DuQuette

  The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.

  H.P. LOVECRAFT, Supernatural Horror in Literature

  “Oh, my sweet summer child,” Old Nan said quietly, “what do you know of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the dire wolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods.”

  GEORGE R.R. MARTIN, A Game of Thrones

  Horror is the literature of the damned; a demon-child art-form—conceived in the fertile depths of subconscious hell; gestated in the lonely womb of fear and despair; brought to troubled birth by the midwife of tortured obsessions; and reared to grotesque maturity in the prison asylum of a terrified imagination. Horror, to be truly horror, must be more than a frightening story. It must be a cloistered odyssey, a claustrophobic dance with madness. Above all, horror must be a traumatic and soul-mutating spiritual experience—sublime, elegant, and terrible.

  Sounds disturbing, doesn't it? I hope so. Horror should be disturbing. But, at first glance, classic horror seldom presents itself as the product of a disturbed mind. On the contrary, some of the best works of the genre are introduced by a narrator who seems as sane and rational as you or I—an ordinary mind which, at the moment, is merely grappling with extraordinary psychological issues with which we all can more or less identify. But beware dear reader! Your gentle empathy with the story's protagonist is a subtle poison that within a breathtakingly few paragraphs disrobes your soul and lulls you into a poppied sleep. Naked and vulnerable (and now uncertain of your own sanity), horror draws you irresistibly into the mind of the main character of a nightmare.

  For me (or anyone who stubbornly refuses to grow up completely) literature doesn't get better than that.

  I turned nine years old in July of 1957, and was enduring my second melancholy summer of exile in the uncivilized wilderness of Nebraska.1 I realize the word “exile” probably sounds melodramatic, but I was a very melodramatic child in 1957. Nebraska was for me an alien planet, cruel and hostile.

  I hadn't been born in Nebraska. I had been kidnapped by my own parents and taken there against my will.2 I was a Southern California boy, and I thoroughly enjoyed my first seven years in that hip and sunny fairyland where movies were made; where rock-n-roll was evolving and the dreams and industries of the “Space Age” made us all feel like citizens of a bright and gleaming future. The family's move to Nebraska in 1955 was in my eyes a doleful exodus back to the dark ages—a “trail of tears” from a twentieth-century beach paradise to a nineteenth-century prairie hell. Powerless to change my circumstances, I pouted and steeped in a bitter broth of self-absorbed discontentment.

  I hated Nebraska. I hated Nebraskans. I hated the way they talked. I hated the way they laughed about butchering animals. I hated the way they preached about their wrathful God—a God who hated Negroes and Chinese (even though there wasn't a Negro or Chinese person within a hundred miles of our provincial town); a God who would condemn little boys to the flames of eternal torment just for the sin of not believing in a God who hated Negroes and Chinese. Most of all, I hated the way Nebraskans, young and old, actually took smug pride in their own lack of sophistication. They wore their ingenuousness like a badge of honor, and rudely ridiculed and bullied anyone else who did not also proudly clothe themselves with the same coarse robe of premeditated ignorance.

  I admit this must sound terribly unkind. “Hate” is a strong and unhealthy passion, especially for a nine-year-old boy. But hate springs from fear (real or imagined), and in my young mind there was much to fear in Nebraska. Even as a youngster I sensed a palpable darkness; a prairie madness; a nameless evil brooding just underneath the surface of the bib overalls and cotton house dresses; a slumbering beast just waiting to be awakened by the kiss of alcohol or jealousy or greed or lust; an evil that is ever mindful that the nearest policeman is many miles (and perhaps hours) away; a black and primitive wickedness that takes poisonous root in the solitary psyche of those who toil alone in the earth from dawn to dusk, season after season, year after year; an evil that smothers in the heart all breath of human compassion or empathy for the pain and terror they inflict daily on the helpless beasts they breed for s
laughter or the children they breed for labor and war; a twisted and perverse evil that feeds on guilt and self-loathing; an evil that incubates in the deafening silence of sweltering summer nights or the perpetual darkness of winter and hideously hatches like a basilisk egg into monstrous acts of rape and incest, and murder, and suicide.

  The houses themselves are possessed of dark subconscious secrets—indeed, they are built upon them. Unlike the sunny and uninsulated bungalows of Southern California, Nebraska houses hide their own dungeons. Large as the footprint of the house itself, these cinder block chambers (the natives call them “basements”) offer a modicum of insulation from the frozen sod of winter, and an area of damp coolness from the blistering heat of summer. Basements also provide residents a dark hole in the ground in which to cower from the whirling death clouds called tornadoes—tangible wind devils that regularly strike down from pus-green clouds and sweep across the earth, bringing grotesque death and destruction to anything and everyone in their path.

  Yes. There was much for a young man to fear in Nebraska. I was lonely, depressed, and morose. One sweltering humid summer morning I became so desperately bored I did something unthinkable for a nine-year-old boy in Nebraska.

  I found something to read.

  That morning I lingered in my sweat-soaked bed until I knew I was alone in the house. I got up and turned on our old Raytheon television set in the living room but could only get a scattered signal of a “farm report.” Like electricity and indoor toilets, television was new to rural Nebraska, and the few broadcast stations in operation were very far away. Reluctantly, I switched off the crackling television and turned my attention to the living room bookcase. I looked for something—anything—that might alleviate my ennui or titillate my idle brain.

  The family library had a few things that might distract me. My father was a pretty interesting guy (a native Californian and very un-Nebraskan). He valued education and wanted his sons to cherish books, so he had recently purchased a new set of World Book Encyclopedia to display next to a few old sets of matched volumes of literature. I figured the encyclopedia would be too much like homework, so I turned my attention to an old twenty-volume set of the World's Greatest Literature.3

  At first glance The Last of the Mohicans looked like it might be fun, but I soon discovered it much too grown-up and difficult. I finally settled on volume 8 of the series, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe. I opened it up and saw to my delight that it was a collection of short stories with titles that were absolutely irresistible to a miserable nine-year-old boy: “The Premature Burial,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and so on. Premature burials and red death sounded very promising indeed, but back in California I had actually seen a terrifying cartoon called “The Tell-Tale Heart” at the old Lakewood Theater.4 I recalled that my mother became very upset with my older brother Marc for taking “little Lonnie” to see such an adult and disturbing film. I poured myself a glass of buttermilk, plopped down in the big chair by the open window, and opened the book.

  Once I started to read, however, I knew I was way out of my depth. There were lots of big words, incomprehensible foreign language phrases and epigrams, and geographic references. Every other sentence seemed to make reference to some ancient legend or myth or classic poem. I was forced to actually use the dictionary and encyclopedia just to plod my way through the first story, “The Pit and the Pendulum.” But I eventually did get through it, and after I closed the book I realized I had become someone else—someone I liked who could use the dictionary and encyclopedia. I learned about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition (How delightfully evil was that!); I was exposed for the first time to the melodically elegant use of the English language;5 most importantly, I discovered I was capable of being touched by art—capable of being possessed by passion. My ennui lifted and was replaced by a pre-adolescent worship of the macabre and the genius and wit of its creators. This passion has yet to subside. I spent the rest of that summer with Poe . . . and the dictionary, and the World Book Encyclopedia.

  Ironically, the same nineteenth-century-esque liabilities I despised about 1950s Nebraska life proved to be priceless assets of atmosphere that allowed me to conjure the perfect reading environment to savor the ecstasy of classic horror.

  Horror takes its time, and to properly appreciate it you must also take your time. It has a pace, a slow, incessant rhythm—like your own heartbeat, or your own breath. After all, the great innovators of the art were writers of the Gilded Age who wrote for a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century audience.6 Nebraska in 1957 had both her feet planted firmly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That summer morning in 1957 could have just as easily been 1857, accompanied by the same soundtrack of bucolic silence; the same light searing through the same sun-stained yellow window shades; no hint of modern objective reality, no diversions of bustling civilization; no diversions of airplanes roaring overhead, no freeways in the distance, no sirens, no television, no radio, no air-conditioner; only the white noise of a million cicadas and the hiss of my own blood running through my brain, the incessant swing of the pendulum of an ancient clock, the barking of a distant dog, the cawing of a crow, the almost imperceptible whisper of the delicate film of curtains as they billowed gently toward me like the gossamer negligée of a lovesick ghost.

  This was the background music of my honeymoon with horror—playing as the honey-sweet words of Edgar Allan Poe, lugubriously woven elegant phrases from the age of gilded manners into a symphony of tortured rapture. Only had I been obliged to read the yellowing pages by the light of a whale oil lamp could my anachronistic reading experience have been more exquisitely atmospheric.

  I was so lucky.

  Today most of us find it almost impossible to recapture the sepiatoned world that best conducts horror from the page to the soul. Twenty-first-century readers, spoiled by spectacular special effects of the cinema, demand instant gratification from the written word—explosive shocks and gore-splattered attacks upon the senses. We no longer allow ourselves time to refine the rapture of terror. We wolf down the junk food snacks of violence and carnage when, with just a little patience, we could leisurely savor a rich and soul-satisfying banquet of elegant horror. We are missing so much.

  That summer with Poe and my newly awakened love for the written word would eventually have profound effects upon my life, the most obvious being my eventual career as a writer. Writing is not only what I do for a living, it is my art, my joy, my voice, my meditation, my prayer, my confession, my declaration of independence, my act of worship, my song of self-awareness. My profession, however, has taken many years to evolve and develop. My 1957 boyhood love affair with horror had more immediate and dramatic consequences. Simply put—I woke up.

  Poe's narrative voice clearly revealed to me that I possessed my own narrative voice. That hot summer morning, my consciousness instantly expanded. I no longer just passively saw or heard or smelled or felt the things around me. I woke up and became consciously aware that I was seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling the things around me. I became at once the observer and the observed of my own movie, and like the voice-over narration in a film-noir detective story I began to tell myself the bedtime story of my own existence, and the narration continues to this moment.

  Thank you, Edgar Allan Poe. Thank you, horror literature.

  The genre of classic horror has also changed the world. It can be argued that horror is the mother of science fiction—and that science fiction has molded the future and touched the consciousness of countless millions of fans who now have given themselves permission to dream like gods. In its way, horror is the grandmother of theoretical mathematics, quantum physics, and the mutation of intelligence in this corner of the galaxy. But it all had to start somewhere, and the editors of this anthology have labored lovingly to pay homage to the founding fathers of art form. Some of them, like Edgar Allan Poe, or H.P. Love-craft, or Bram Stoker, or Sir Arthur Conan Do
yle, require little or no introduction. But others are perhaps less familiar to you. We have provided the briefest of biographical sketches for all our authors at the beginning of each selections, but I would like to take this opportunity to write a few extra words about three of the stars of our production who also deserve, in my opinion, to be recognized as founding fathers of horror:

  Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who I believe should be credited with establishing early in the nineteenth century the archetypal form and devices of the horror genre;

  Robert W. Chambers, who late in the nineteenth century broke the space-time membrane of gothic horror and smashed open the doors of our subconscious—the same doors from which H.P. Lovecraft's primordial “Old Ones” would ooze out, forcing us to cower before our shadow souls;

  and Aleister Crowley, a real-life, unapologetic black magician who early in the twentieth century rolled up his sleeves and did battle with those shadows to turn demons of darkness into angels of light.

  Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873)

  Have you ever heard these phrases?

  “It was a dark and stormy night...” or,

  “The pen is mightier than the sword...” or,

  “Pursuit of the almighty dollar”?

  These familiar clichés first poured forth from the pen of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the prolific English playwright, poet, and novelist. As might be expected of a gentleman of his breeding, the noble Lord Lytton pursued these literary diversions as an amateur while he busied himself with the serious duties of serving his Queen (Victoria) as Secretary of State for the Colonies and a wide assortment of other stiff-collared diplomatic and political responsibilities. He published his first book of poems in 1820, and in 1828, when his semi-titillating essay on the whimsical subject of nineteenth-century dandyism was released, it was clear to the reading public that here was a fellow who could be wryly entertaining as well as erudite.