Horror, The Truth-Teller -

 I read Dracula about 50 years ago, and many parts still stick in my mind. Paramount is how much it differed from the Bela Lugosi movie. It was the first time I learned the distance between a book and a movie. To this day, I do not think any movie has quite gotten into the book, and why this is I think is touched on below. No, I do not read much in the way of horror. When I do read horror, I prefer short stories. Nor do I watch much in the way of horror films; there is plenty enough horrible stuff in my world to take enjoyment in it. 

All the same, I found – as you will notice – much of interest in Alexander Chee's When Horror Is the Truth-teller: It is hard, in the era of the AR-15, to fear a vampire. Enjoy, and give the whole thing a read, too. Much to learn, to think about.

No one is likely to shame you for not having read Dracula, the way they do The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch, though perhaps they should and perhaps that is, ever so subtly, what I am up to now. I was once the sort of person who thought they knew Dracula, and might have spent my adult life without reading the novel until a close friend dropped some very suspect-sounding and yet enthralling literary gossip: Dracula was rumored, he said, to have been inspired by Bram Stoker’s visit to see Walt Whitman with Oscar Wilde. Stoker had seen them kiss. Who inspired Dracula of the two, I asked him. Wilde, he said.

I threw everything aside to read the novel at last and to look up the story to which my friend referred. He had it almost all wrong. Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde had not visited Whitman together, for example. But both men were greatly in love with Whitman’s writing, and both visited him at his home in Philadelphia within two years of each other in the early 1880s. Bram Stoker’s wife, Florence Balcombe, who could so easily have been the model for Mina Harker, had once been romantically linked to Oscar Wilde; Stoker and Wilde had been young writers together in Dublin, friends and then rivals for her attention. But what I suspect from the histories now available to us is that they were rivals for Whitman’s attention as well.

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In 2008, while putting together a class on fiction writing at Amherst College, I decided to teach my students from Anna Karenina, Dracula, and The Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King. I was interested in asking this question: Is there an emerging aesthetic in American fiction that combines the literary aspirations of Anna Karenina with the Gothic aesthetics of Dracula? Because it seems as though there is. And Stephen King is either the progenitor of such a movement or its most visible face. I was also interested in at least two ways of reading these massive, classic novels. Both are approaches to writing about Evil. Both are also novels with main characters known to you even if you’ve never read the books themselves — novels whose characters have become fictional celebrities. Whether or not the novels are immortal, the characters are.

The experiment was as much fun as I suspected it would be. King’s anthology did seem to be about this emergent mix of horror and the literary, and we laughed when we found one Amazon review noting that the characters who die might be the lucky ones. Newer writers like Lauren Groff and Karen Russell, alongside established ones like Jim Shepard and Alice Munro — all working in very different modes — gave us an even stronger sense of that aesthetic.

My students found Tolstoy’s approach to writing about evil to be something of a game, one that sounds a lot like life. No one in the novel is truly evil, they observed, but everyone takes turns being a monster. In Stoker’s hands, Dracula becomes almost heroically evil, not least because everyone else in the novel seems either to lie to themselves or make the most obvious mistakes, letting their guard down at the moment they should not. As a result, my students found themselves siding against his victims. The aesthetic is known to fans of horror as Rooting for the Monster.

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Pop culture has tried to improve upon the monster of Dracula, with not entirely satisfying results. Thanos, the popular Marvel villain, for example, while technically more powerful than Dracula, is boring in his omnipotence. How am I supposed to fear an ecoterrorist — a popular villain in movies, but never seen otherwise — when Trump undid air safety regulations around particulates that now kill 10,000 people a year — likely more now, with Covid — and it doesn’t even rank among the things for which we might prosecute him? How do I get myself worked up over a single murderer, of any kind, as thousands die every night due to governmental terror or neglect in countries all over the world? Trump and Bolsonaro’s destruction of Latin America’s healthcare system, done in the name of fighting Cuban Communism, while Covid spread — while they themselves had Covid — is closer to the scale of the horror I speak of, the horror we must write about.

What is a monster now? What has it always been? What could it be? Why has Dracula stayed in our minds after all of the horrors of the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first? Ask yourself this as you read the novel. Consider the prismatic nature of Dracula, the way so many shades of evil emerge despite the stark black-and-white aspirations of the text. Ask yourself what you might really fear, and why. For all that the characters around Dracula try to insist he is the source of evil in the world, the ways they become vulnerable to him existed before he entered their lives, long before they began to fear him, as if they were waiting for someone like him to release them from polite society. Is he truly evil, or does his evil reveal theirs? Is that why they fear him, even if they cannot discern this?

I have come to think genre allows us to say what is muffled by the literary. Geez, if you think about it Naked Lunch is a horror story.

sch 10/15

Updated 10/29, after reading Thornfield Hall's Expanding the Definition of Horror: Shirley Jackson’s “Biography of a Story,” Aldous Huxley’s “Ape and Essence,” & Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”. I think the horrible is more than slashers and inhuman monsters. I suspect Stephen King does also. A chicken farmer named Himmler seems more monstrous to me. I have not read the Jackson story, have read Crime and Punishment, and think I read the Huxley novel. The post makes a good case for its inclusion.

And then, too, Why ‘The Exorcist’ Still Haunts Us 50 Years Later.