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INTRODUCTION

Once upon a time, all stories were told rather than being written. They had tellers rather than authors, who posed as mere transmitters of tales whose authority was based on their antiquity. They were set in a past that was qualitatively different from the present rather than merely displaced in history—as they had to be, because oral cultures, by definition, have no history. The past of “once upon a time” is a mythical past, in which magic worked, supernatural beings interacted with humans on a routine basis, and which might be subject to other fanciful embellishments, such as animals that talk. The people who told such tales, and listened to them, sometimes believed in the possibility of some of or all these things, but were very conscious of the fact that they no longer happened ordinarily. The tacit assumption of tales of the mythical past is that that the world has been—and still is—subject to a process of “thinning” that has leached the supernatural out of the mundane and banished it to the edges of experience.

Whenever and wherever oral cultures were displaced by literate ones, the early phases of literary development began with written versions of oral tales: the mythical past was recorded, not merely as history but as pseudo-history. Once there were documents, however, the raw material of actual history began to be produced, and the possibility developed of transforming pseudohistory by degrees into actual history, and of replacing stories set in the mythical past by stories set in the historical past.

The history of literature is largely the history of that process of replacement, not merely in the settings of stories but in their narrative methods: the unsteady but inexorable growth of narrative realism, and the replacement of what Plato called the diegetic mode of narration by the mimetic, as enshrined in the central mantra of all modern handbooks on writing (“show, don’t tell”). To many writers and almost all literary critics this has always seemed to be a progressive sequence, a matter of sophistication and maturation—but it was never completed, for the simple reason that fiction is not history, and has no need to be its handmaiden. The recent history of literature has been complicated by a massive, but not unproblematic, resurgence of mythical elements.

In the realm of history, the thinning of the mythical past came close to complete, at least in the sense that the supernatural was banished from the explanatory roles it had once monopolized, but even the most scrupulous history has never quite shaken off the pseudohistorical burden it inherited from oral culture. In the realm of literature, the supernatural inevitably proved to be far more stubborn, and also far more perverse. It not only refused erasure as an explanatory resource, but actually became rebellious, defiantly reasserting its claim on the imagination in a series of ingenious ideological campaigns. The labels employed as banners under which such reassertive crusades might be undertaken have been many and various, but one of the most significant—if only because of its unrepentant flamboyance—is “Gothic.”

The term was initially borrowed from architecture, but its first literary use was to denote the dark underbelly of Romanticism: a spirited re-examination and sophistication of the aesthetics of horror. The term has acquired many other nuances of meaning since then, but the core significance remains the same: “Gothic” fiction is calculatedly, arrogantly and ingeniously perverse. It is far more interested in the aesthetics of the sublime than the aesthetics of beauty, because its principal function is to disturb and horrify rather than flatter and comfort. It often refuses to employ the same strategies of closure as more conventional forms of fiction, refusing normalizing and rewarding endings in favor of tragic and ironic subversions of such narrative conventions. It sometimes also refuses to grant the superiority of the mimetic narrative mode over the diegetic, and routinely prefers a more even balance than naturalistic fiction will nowadays allow.

The original Gothic novels—whose supernatural apparatus now seems sadly crude to connoisseurs who have had two hundred years to sophisticate the aesthetics of horror—could not offer a straightforward reversion to fiction that referred to a mythical past rather than a historical one. Even recycled fairy tales (which Nathan Drake characterized as “sportive Gothic” fiction) could not do that, no matter how hard they pretended. Once history exists, it cannot be ignored, let alone unlearned. What the first wave of Gothic fiction did, however, was to insist that the explanatory coherence of history was fragile, and perhaps false: that the supernatural elements rendered liminal by thinning had not been deprived by their marginalization of the power to alarm, but had in fact been perversely re-empowered by the denial of their actual possibility.

In the mythical past of oral tales and imitations thereof, human characters confronted by the supernatural may be terrified, but they are never required to doubt their sanity. In the historical past of written stories, human characters confronted with the supernatural have to battle not merely the implicit supernatural menace itself, but also the corrosive skepticism that insists on ruling their experience insane. This necessity recomplicates their anxiety and redoubles their potential distress; the double bind in question was to become the imaginative bedrock of modern horror fiction and the powerhouse of its aesthetics.

Other aspects of the interaction of the historical and mythical pasts have also been vitally important to the sophistication of modern Gothic fiction. The most important harks back to one of the earliest side-effects of the development of the historical past: the invention of scripture-based religion. In oral cultures the mythical past is not only largely taken as given—it does change, but it changes slowly, subtly and invisibly, bogged down by the inertia of its seemingly-passive transmission—but is also essentially nebulous; its contents and limits cannot be clearly specified and maintained. The invention of writing, which made the development of history possible, also permitted much more sweeping, arbitrary and decisive revisions of the mythical past; the particular form of pseudohistory that adopted the form of religious scripture took full advantage of this facility. Indeed, the advantage acquired by these calculated rewritings of the mythical past was so immense that they remain powerful adversaries to history even today, continuing to fight fierce ideological battles against the calculated thinning of their most cherished delusions.

Gothic fiction is, in consequence, not merely rebellious against the corrosions of history but also against the crystallizations of religion. The mythical past it champions is a fluid one that retains all its flexibility and imaginative potential, which resists faith even more determinedly than it resists emaciation. Like the tales of oral culture, Gothic fiction accepts as a fundamental assumption that “thinning” has taken place and is continuing; it does not deny the fundamental assumptions of history as a matter of empirical fact, but contradicts them on the far more sophisticated grounds that fiction, unlike history, need not and should not confine its ambition to the strict reproduction of starveling mundanity. For the same reason, it flatly denies—or, at least, ought to deny—the imperialistic and totalitarian claims of any dogmatic version of the mythical past based in sacred writings.

In consequence of this logic, another of the key assumptions of Gothic fiction is that nothing is, or ever could be, sacred. This essential sacrilegiousness is a subcategory of its perversity, but it is a specific corollary of sufficient importance to be worth emphasis. Contrary to superficial appearances, Gothic fiction is not anti-scientific, although it is often anti-scientistic. Quite the reverse; Gothic fiction not only admits but rejoices in the fact that it deals in the substance of myth, madness and mendacity. It claims, proudly and insistently, that such artful dealing is one of the things that fiction is for. Gothic fiction is not anti-religious either, in the broader sense of the word although it is implacably anti-faith; it is entirely sympathetic to the kind of tolerant paganism promoted by neo-Platonic philosophers like Iamblichus, who preached that all the religions of the decadent Roman Empire had something to recommend them except Christianity, which had disqualified itself from such sympathy by denying that very precept.

The ten stories collected here are all contes cruels, not so much because they have “unhappy endings”—although all but two of them do—but because they attempt to count the cost of “happiness” with the kind of scrupulous accuracy that people with no talent for moral arithmetic call “cynicism.” They also make more use of variant of the diegetic narrative mode than is currently fashionable, even in the commercialized and commodified fringes of neo-Gothic fiction. Most readers do not like stories of that sort, and editors desirous of appealing to large audiences invariably take the view that there is no point in writing or publishing them, but I make no apology for them. I am glad that there are perverse readers in the world as well as perverse writers, and even a few perverse publishers—a fact for which there is no earthly reason to thank God—but I hope that I would be sufficiently stubborn in my perversity to keep writing stories like these even if there were no perverse readers and publishers to lend them heroic endorsement.