(Original Review, 1981-04-17)
“The Mysterious Stranger” by Mark Twain which presented a very bleak
and troubling vision of humanity. It had some Huck Finn style youthful
frolicking too but this was swamped by that sense that human history and the
consequences of moral decision making are a horrible dream that the narrator
may be able to escape from but we cannot. I was expecting some jolly
progressive waffle about the stupidity of religion but the book went far deeper
than that especially when Satan started compassionately bumping people off
because he could foretell how awful their lives would be if he didn't. That
similar theme in the book of Double Indemnity that didn't make it into the film
also chilled me.
I tend to find macabre short stories more terrifying than novels
which contain plenty of other textures beyond melancholy or terror. “The Voice
in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson, “Barbara of the House of Grebe” by
Thomas Hardy and “A Rose For Emily” by William Faulkner are three memorable
tales of this kind. Guy De Maupassant is probably the king of the terrifying
and psychologically probing short story.
My general response to famously explicit shockers like “120
Days of Sodom”, “Juliette”,
“Crash” and “The Wasp Factory” tends to be laughter. I regard the first two
particularly as a form of sexual surrealism rather than a depiction of actual
atrocities. And the misanthropy of “The Wasp Factory” is even somewhat bracing.
“American Psycho” is sooo tame and obviously a comedy too and James Herbert is far
more of a comic genius than a master of terror.
Perhaps reading The Bible and the historians of Ancient Greece and
Rome during my childhood made me somewhat immune to brutal descriptions in
novels (I am not immune to the display of emotion in them though and often end
a particularly beloved or tragic book in tears). The descriptions of the
atrocities of the Assyrians kept me up for nights and the image of that guy who
took part in the assassination of Domitian and had his sexual organs cut off
and shoved in his mouth haunted me for ages. And these events supposedly
happened.
Apollinaire's “11,000 Rods” is the only classic of extreme erotica
that has particularly troubled me; it was full of psychological nastiness. And “The
Story of O” was pretty bland and suburban; the novel was written for comparing
the carryings on of O to slaves wanting to keep their masters in the Caribbean
made me feel an urge to vomit.
[2018 EDIT: I haven't read McGrath's "Asylum" yet but thought "Port
Mungo" and "Martha Peak" were fantastic. And “The Little Friend” was far more
terrifying than "The Secret History." Sarah Waters' "The Little Stranger" was also
quite chilling as was Susan Hill's "The Man in the Picture"; Venice is always a
good setting for a tale of terror (Vernon Lee and Daphne De Maurier thought so
too). "The Athenian Murders" and "The Art of Murder" by Jose Carlos Samoza come to
mind too. “The Kindly Ones” and “2666” are also great novels but the use of
real life atrocities was more of a reminder of how awful the world can be
rather than of how shocking they are as literature.]
