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Writing about H.P. Lovecraft in the Review’s October 31, 1996, issue, Joyce Carol Oates took a brief digression to discuss “the first American novelist of substance, Charles Brockden Brown,” whose “major novel Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) is…a nightmare expression of the fulfillment of repressed desire, anticipating Edgar Allan Poe’s similarly claustrophobic tales of the grotesque. Wieland is a disciple of the Enlightenment who is nonetheless driven mad by ‘voices’ urging him to destruction.”

With six days until Halloween, we have put together a chorus of voices to drive you mad: nine essays about horror writers and the ghosts, creeps, wraiths, vampires, monsters, demons, and Cthulhus that bedevil them.

Michael Dirda
‘Devilish Agencies at Work’

Walter de la Mare, a poet and writer of weird tales, once counted T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene among his admirers, and now his ghost stories persist with an underground influence.

—March 9, 2023

Stephen King
The Edge of Horror

William Sloane might have become a master of the horror genre, or created an entirely new one. Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery.

—September 18, 2015

Marilynne Robinson
On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares figure prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

—February 5, 2015

Charles Baxter
The Hideous Unknown of H.P. Lovecraft

From generation to generation the cult of Lovecraft grows.

—December 18, 2014

Michael Dirda
One of America’s Best

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

—May 10. 2012

Joyce Carol Oates
The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson

“Shirley Jackson has struck every essential note of her Gothic tale of sexual repression and rhapsodic vengeance; as it unfolds in ways both inevitable and unexpected, We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a ‘happy ending’ is both ironic and literal, the consequence of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice—of others.”

—October 8, 2009

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.

—November 19, 1987

Thomas R. Edwards
Gulp!

“I would judge that Stephen King believes in what he does, that he writes not just to make money but to exorcise demons, his and ours.”

—December 18, 1986

S. Schoenbaum
EEK!

We are now undergoing a revival of horror in popular culture. Michael Jackson’s Thriller cassette was at the top of the charts. Stephen King’s novels predictably become best sellers and film vehicles. The Bronx—not previously unknown to horror—in 1977 had an exhibition at its Museum of the Arts of “Images of Terror and Fantasy,” the descriptive catalog of which was published and widely distributed in paperback. Children are indoctrinated with “Count Chocula” and “Frankenberry” breakfast cereals. Shortly before midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, youthful audiences queue up, in costume and makeup, for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. These fans have their own newsletter, The Transylvanian, and an official poster book. I only recently learned from a back issue of People magazine that we were about to have a new Bride of Frankenstein, this one directed by Franc Roddam, and offering a feminist revision of the tale; Baron Frankenstein now declares, “I might make the New Woman—independent, free, as bold as a man.” Why not? (This film, released as The Bride, came and rapidly went the past summer.)

—January 30, 1986

For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.

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