New York Review of Books

“Why do we find ghost stories more pleasurable than frightening?” asked John Banville in the Review’s February 2, 1995, issue. For Marilynne Robinson, discussing Edgar Allan Poe in 2015, the effect of a ghost story was to “horrify us—with truth.” And for the Irish novelist Forrest Reid, on the subject of Walter de la Mare’s eerie fiction (as quoted by Michael Dirda in his recent essay about de la Mare), “It is not the ghost but the person who sees the ghost that matters.” Or perhaps what constitutes a scary book is a simpler matter: it is one thing to read fiction bound in paperboard and cloth and imagine the horror contained in its pages; it is another thing entirely to read an “anthropodermic book”—one bound in human skin—of the kind Mike Jay wrote about in our November 5, 2020, issue.

Below, a collection of horror from our archives.

Mike Jay
The Hide That Binds

“Paris seems to have been where the phenomenon took hold. One of the legends persistently recycled in anthropodermic histories is that during the French revolutionary terror in 1793–1794, bodies were taken from the guillotine to a human-skin tannery set up outside the city at a former royal castle, the Château de Meudon.”

Michael Dirda
Devilish Agencies at Work

“De la Mare’s visions of otherness and the supernatural take myriad forms. In ‘A Recluse’ Mr. Bloom has apparently summoned dark forces he cannot control. What, for instance, happened to his former secretary, whose last diary entry reads, ‘Not me, at any rate: not me. But even if I could get away for—’ and then breaks off, except for an indecipherable smudge.”

Christopher Carroll
Far from the Realm of the Real

“Kwairyo’s genteel hosts, whom he at first takes for displaced nobility, are revealed to be demons whose heads detach at night and, with long contrails, swim about in the air in search of human flesh.”

Marilynne Robinson
On Edgar Allan Poe

“Poe’s great tales turn on guilt concealed or denied, then abruptly and shockingly exposed. He has always been reviled or celebrated for the absence of moral content in his work, despite the fact that these tales are all straightforward moral parables.”

Stephen King
The Edge of Horror

“In William Sloane’s To Walk the Night, we discover that a disembodied brain—perhaps an alien from space, perhaps a human intelligence from another time-stream or dimension—has inhabited the body of an ‘idiot’ girl named Luella Jamison, transforming her vacuity into coldly classical beauty.”

Claire Tomalin
Frankenstein’s Mother

“Mary Shelley’s lucid, rational, and straightforward prose makes the surreal horrors of her story much more effective than the inflated rhetoric of her contemporaries’ Gothic tales.”

Richard Holmes
The Fantoms of Théophile Gautier

“Gautier soon achieved something much more daring by combining the German ghost story with the French erotic tale. He can claim to have created, in Clarimonde, one of the earliest female vampires: a distinguished line that stretches right down to the engaging, slinky cartoon-character Vampirella.”

Michael Wood
Horror of Horrors

“Carrie’s distress and rage are what anyone but a saint would feel. But then she has her powers. The difference is not in the rage but in what she can do about it, and this is where contemporary horror stories, like old tales of magic, speak most clearly to our fears and desires.”

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