The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies:
LOST SOULS...continued...
Welcome to our Lost Souls page.... continued; as ever, dedicated to resurrecting the neglected & underrated personages of Horror. We begin this section with essays on the American author, Ira Levin, the 19th-Century Australian novelist and writer, Guy Boothby, Click HERE to return to our earlier Lost Souls page.
IRA LEVIN
by Bernice M. Murphy
It may seem strange to devote a space dedicated to resurrecting “lost and neglected” personages who have made an unsung contribution to the Gothic and Horror genres to a writer whose work frequently topped the bestseller lists and whose death earlier this year occasioned warm tributes in most major newspapers. And yet, whilst Ira Levin could hardly be called obscure, his immense contribution to genre fiction has yet to be fully appreciated; the breadth of his fertile imagination perhaps inevitably overshadowed by the lasting resonance of his two most famous fictional creations – Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972).
Levin, who died at the age of 78, could, with considerable justification be called the father of the modern popular thriller. His oeuvre included works of Science Fiction (This Perfect Day, 1970), supernatural horror, and suspense, and he often combined elements from all of these genres (as in The Boys from Brazil). Levin was particularly good at coming up with resonant “high-concept” style premises for his novels, most of which can be summarised in a single intriguing sentence:
An arrogant young college student decides to murder his wealthy girlfriend when her unplanned-for pregnancy jeopardises his future plans (A Kiss Before Dying, 1952).
A young mother-to-be suspects that her unborn child may be the Anti-Christ (Rosemary’s Baby)
A holocaust survivor discovers that the Nazis have successfully (and repeatedly!) cloned Hitler (The Boys from Brazil)
A suburban housewife grows to believe that the women in her new suburban community have been replaced by submissive androids (The Stepford Wives).
in the classical gothic. Though Roman Polanski’s film version is better known today, Levin’s novel remains as readable as ever, and should be considered a significant precursor to the block-busting work of horror writers such as Stephen King and Peter Straub in the 1970s. Along with William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby helped convince publishers that there was a genuine appetite for mass-market horror fiction. Furthermore, Levin’s spare prose style and tight plotting – none of his novels run much over 200 pages – could teach a thing or two to the kind of horror authors who won’t say in two words what they can drag out to a full paragraph.
of some men to come to terms with the then burgeoning women’s rights movement, The Stepford Wives remains one of Levin’s finest achievements, if only for the way in which it slyly dramatises elements of Betty Freidan’s famous 1963 tract The Feminine Mysique.
until Thomas Harris’s insultingly shoddy Hannibal Rising, had the dubious distinction, in my eyes at least, of being the most ill-advised literary sequel ever published. The novel also concludes with a cop out ending to beat all cop-out-endings… One can only hope that Levin was at least paid well for this monumentally unnecessary act of wanton shark jumping. Still, despite the odd blip on his C.V., Ira Levin still deserves a great deal of recognition for his ability to bring horror and unease into the contemporary, every day world with a deftness and slyly acute sense of social observation that puts many of those who followed his lead to shame.
Having started his career as a television writer whilst barely out of college, Levin published his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1952), when he was only 23. The novel is almost as good a portrait of a greedy, socially ambitious sociopath as Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and has been twice adapted for the screen (most recently in a rather dire 1991 film starring Sean Young and Matt Dillon), despite the fact that the narratives major highlight – a devastating and audacious mid-story plot twist – could only be successfully carried out in print because it involves an audacious piece of authorial misdirection. Though the novel was fairly successful, Levin first came to major public prominence as a playwright, author of “No Time for Sergeants” (1955), “Drat! The Cat” (1968) and, most famously, of all, the fiendishly constructed thriller “Death Trap” (1978).
Levin made a triumphant return to popular fiction in 1967 with the publication of Rosemary’s Baby (1967), a taut, intelligent and genuinely compelling variation upon the “paranoid female in genuine peril” trope so often employed
In The Stepford Wives (1972) Levin was, superficially at least, treading familiar ground: once more, a trusting wife is fatally deceived by the murderously self-centred man in her life. Two factors make the basic premise of The Stepford Wives concept so resonant. The first is the way in which, as Robert Beuka has observed, the story dramatises contemporary anxieties regarding the changing role of women in the home and in society at large. The second is the manner in which this aspect of the novel is intertwined with a savage critique of consumerism and materialism as it relates to the suburban way of life. The novel’s premise also reflects a recurring preoccupation of 1970s popular culture: whilst the 1950s and 60s had frequently seen films and television shows in which people were ‘taken over’ or ‘replaced’ by hostile alien life forms, during the seventies aliens had in many cases been usurped by the products of man-made technology, just as Levin’s typically sympathetic heroine, Joanna Eberhart, will, by the end of the novel have been murdered and replaced by her own robotic double. Part blackly comic satire, part genuinely affecting mediation on the lot of the disillusioned suburban housewife and the inability
Another novel which sounded vaguely ridiculous in outline but was actually quite compelling was The Boys From Brazil (1976), in which Levin once again combined outright Science Fiction and the conspiracy thriller. The film version, in which Gregory Peck starred as Joseph Mengele, and Sir Laurence Olivier starred as a similarly decrepit Nazi-hunter is probably better known, if only for proving that whilst aging Golden-Age actresses (Crawford, Davis, De Havilland) could only find work during old age portraying homicidal grotesques (or their victims,) their male counterparts could always find employment as Nazi’s. Levin’s last published novel, 1991’s disappointing Sliver, if decidedly uneven, was at least yet another typically prescient paranoid thriller which critiqued the decades growing surveillance culture.
As Sliver demonstrated, Levin’s work could on occasion be below par. His follow up to Rosemary’s Baby, a pseudo-Orwellian dystopian SF novel entitled This Perfect Day (1970) is deeply derivative, overly simplistic, and very mediocre. Worse again is the absolutely dreadful follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby entitled Son of Rosemary (1997), which,
.
GUY BOOTHBY
by Ailise Bulfin
‘The Creator of Dr Nikola.’
(The Windsor Magazine, Dec 1896)
Though he was one of the most popular authors of his own period, Guy Newell Boothby’s reputation did not survive much beyond his early death in 1905. This prolific writer produced a staggering fifty-three novels in the short decade of his writing career, all characterised by a breathless, lightweight, plot-driven style, with many elements of the gothic blended into this heady mixture. Following his arrival in London from the then British colony of South Australia in 1894, the rise of his literary career was meteoric. His first book, On the Wallaby (1894), was an account of his peregrinations through South East Asia and Australia, after running out of funds on a prior attempt to reach London and having to work his way home. According to family legend, the dire poverty he faced on this journey led him to accept any kind of employment he could get: ‘This meant working before the mast, stoking in ocean tramps, attending in a Chinese opium den in Singapore, digging in the Burmah Ruby fields, acting, prize fighting, cow punching…’ * and finally ending up as a pearl diver off the north Queensland coast, before making an arduous overland trek home across the Australian continent. All of which formative experience provided Boothby with a stock of colonial adventures and assumptions that informed most of his writing.
By October 1895, Boothby had completed three further novels, including A Bid for Fortune, or Dr Nikola’s Vendetta, which introduced Dr Nikola, his most memorable character, and the one which launched his career. Nikola captured the popular imagination from the publication of the first instalment of the series, with his picture on the billboards, the novels on the bestseller lists, theatre productions on the London stage, even a racehorse named Dr Nikola running by the late 1890s. By the end of 1896 Boothby was comfortably established as a rising popular author as an interview in the Windsor magazine attests. Here Boothby made the startling revelation that after only two years as a professional writer, he was now working on his seventeenth novel, and gave tips to aspiring young writers.
possibly brought on as a result of overwork. The following sardonic 1899 poem from the Academy magazine attests to the impression Boothby had made upon the literary profession during his short career:
Lamenting the declining interest in more serious work, it wryly concludes:
Nor do I presume to suggest which is greater: George Meredith – King, or Guy Boothby – Dictator.Boothby’s oeuvre is pervaded by an array of intriguing and subversive villains whose larger than life characters eclipse the unremarkable English protagonists. They range from the classic supernatural fiends of fin-de-siècle gothic, to deformed freaks (a particular penchant of Boothby’s), to sophisticated international master criminals that anticipate the adversaries of Ian Fleming’s Bond character. Nikola, the best known of these, is a distinctive combination of proto-typical Bond villain and Mephistophelean mad scientist, encapsulated in a refined, debonair and disconcertingly foreign exterior. He graced the pages of a series of five novels, each essentially turning upon the extraordinary machinations of the devilish doctor in pursuit of his arcane and nefarious schemes, with a hapless English dupe in tow, against a variety of international backdrops. Suave, striking, cosmopolitan and accompanied by his familiar, a fiendish black cat named Apollyon, Nikola’s debut appearance is memorable, and ably reinforced by the illustrations of Stanley L. Wood, who emphasises the brooding, arresting quality of Nikola’s eyes, and habitually depicts him with the great black cat poised upon his shoulder, glaring at the reader with similar malevolent intensity.
As well as commanding a global network of dedicated, ruthless agents, Nikola is revealed to be a devotee of the occult and master of an array of extraordinary mental talents, including mind-reading and mesmerism. The mid-point of A Bid for Fortune provides a rare glimpse of Nikola in a home setting, a kind of laboratory-museum hybrid which he has established in Port Said, Egypt. The remarkable contents of his room include oriental weaponry, implements of black magic, a living collection of human freaks including a ‘Burmese monkey-boy’, and a dissecting table where Nikola, in Moreau-ian fashion, is busy dismembering ‘an animal strangely resembling a monkey.’
Once again, the illustrations amply represent the foreign villain in all his threatening degeneracy.
Like much contemporary fin-de-siècle gothic, the revenge motif dominates Boothby’s works. It is the unifying theme of the Nikola novels, in which a series of complex, vengeance-driven schemes are unleashed by Nikola against his adversaries, among whom colonial governors figure prominently – interesting given that several members of Boothby’s family were senior Australian colonial officials. And it pervades Pharos the Egyptian which contains one of the largest-scale and most successful revenge plots enacted against England in contemporary fiction. It is possible that despite his success, the Anglo-Australian Boothby may have suffered from feelings of colonial inferiority, of not being fully accepted in the imperial capital, and that these sentiments fuelled such fantasies of revenge upon its citizens and its dominions. Pharos makes a landmark contribution to the vengeful mummy narrative which was emerging in this period in opposition to narratives of mummy romance, hitherto the dominant mode of fictionalising these supernatural entities. The vengeful mummy was such a compelling trope that it transcended the popular fiction of the fin-de-siècle period to become a recurrent cultural icon of film in the twentieth century. Similarly, the international master criminal, of whom Boothby’s Nikola is the prototype, became a stock figure of twentieth century film. Thus as well as acting as a veritable index to the social and cultural concerns of their own period through their transparent rehashing of current events, prevailing theories and popular themes, Boothby’s novels were influential in establishing two key tropes of the cinematic age, which persist long after the novels themselves have faded into obscurity.
* Cited in Paul Depasquale, Guy Boothby: His Life and Work (Seacombe Gardens, South Australia: Pioneer Books, 1982), p. 17
The author gratefully acknowledges a Government of Ireland Scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
The old order passes, the new order comes,
And Fiction to-day as a trade simply ‘hums’ …
The public, who pay, name the tunes of their choice,
And the novelist-merchant, by heeding their voice,
By pouring his tales in the phonograph’s ear,
At the rate of four six-shilling thrillers a year,
Attains …
A mansion (by Maple), with everything fitting,
And once every week a photographer’s sitting…
His height was considerably below the average, his skull was as small as his shoulders were broad. But it was not his stature, his shoulders, or the size of the head which caused the curious effect I have elsewhere described. It was his eyes, the shape of his face, the multitudinous wrinkles that lined it, and, above all, the extraordinary colour of his skin, that rendered his appearance so repulsive. To understand what I mean you must think first of old ivory, and then endeavour to realize what the complexion of a corpse would be like after lying in an hermetically sealed tomb for many years. Blend the two, and you will have some dim notion of the idea I am trying to convey. His eyes were small, deeply sunken, and in repose apparently devoid of light and even of life.
‘Mr Guy Boothby on his favourite pony.’
(The Windsor Magazine, Feb 1901).
A later interview is accompanied by photos of a stouter and more affluent Boothby engaged in country pursuits in his impressive, new, forty-acre Thames-side residence. As the contemporary literary press observed, ‘Boothby … found story-writing not only easy and pleasant, but a rapid means of providing for the hobbies of a country gentleman.’
At the height of his career, Boothby was one of the most financially successful novelists of the time, earning an estimated £20,000 a year. It was not, however, enough to sustain the lavish lifestyle he had adopted. He was forced to keep writing at a tremendous rate to maintain it, dictating his novels onto a phonograph for transcription by a team of secretaries, while the quality of his output steadily declined. His career was cut short when in February 1905, at the early age of 37, he died suddenly of pneumonia, quite
‘The black cat looked through the smoke at the three men.’ A Bid for Fortune
(London, 1895).
Boothby’s most gothic character is the eponymous, undead, ancient Egyptian high-priest of the 1899 bestseller Pharos the Egyptian, which presents one of deadliest threats to white European civilisation to be found in late-Victorian gothic fiction. After inheriting a collection of artefacts including a magnificent sarcophagus from his Egyptologist father, mild-mannered English artist, Cyril Forrester, becomes enmeshed in the designs of a seemingly modern-day Egyptian, Pharos, who turns up on his doorstep intent on obtaining the sarcophagus. Unsurprisingly Pharos turns out to be its original occupant, and his attempt to retrieve it only the personal part of a wider quest to exact vengeance on all Europe for its interference in Egypt. Pharos has been cursed with eternal life by the ancient Egyptian gods and designated the architect of their revenge against those guilty of plundering modern Egypt. Falling under the sway of Pharos’s powerful mesmeric will, Forrester is lured to Egypt where Pharos infects him with a virulent plague. On their return journey, under Pharos’s direction, he spreads this plague westwards from Constantinople across Europe to London, leaving millions dead in his wake. Pharos’s malevolent character is evident from the novel’s opening, in which Forrester witnesses him enjoying the spectacle of a nocturnal suicide in the Thames. This incident also provides the reader with their first description of Pharos, a classic Boothbian combination of supernatural invader and misshapen monstrosity:
Dr Nikola in his laboratory in Port Said. Frontispiece of A Bid for Fortune
(London, 1895).
‘So distorted was his countenance that I instinctively recoiled from him in horror.’ Pharos the Egyptian
(London, 1899).
...
BILL GAINES
by Graham Tugwell
A rotting corpse stalks through the night, animated only by the desire to exact vengeance upon the lovers who murdered him...
An obnoxious sweatshop boss is left to burn alive, his lips sewn shut, his hands sewn together...
An old man is slain, and when his murderers return to dispose of the body, they find him armed and waiting, for it wasn’t him they killed, but his identical Siamese twin...
These chilling tales of irony-laden revenge are characteristic of the horror stories published by the Entertainment Comics company in the early years of the 1950s. The architect behind these tales of bone-chilling terror was Bill Gaines, who together with Al Feldstein and a stable of young artists produced a series of comics that exploded the boundaries of graphic art and define the horror comic to this day. Born in 1922 William M. Gaines was the son of publisher M.C. Gaines, who had been instrumental in bringing characters such as Superman and Wonder Woman to the attention of the world, and to whom the invention of the modern format comicbook is attributed. After his father’s untimely death in 1947 Bill Gaines inherited “Educational Comics”, a company established by the elder Gaines two years before to promote literacy and learning through titles such as Picture Stories from the Bible and Picture Stories from American History. These titles proved more popular with education-conscious parents than children and by the time of the elder Gaines’ death were haemorrhaging money.
Bill Gaines had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps. He had trained to be a high school teacher, but his mother insisted he take over the failing family business. From the outset he showed little interest in the comics business, rarely reading his father’s output and as publisher attending the office only once a week. However, education’s loss would prove to be comics’ gain. Bill Gaines would achieve something that his father had been unable to do—he made EC comics a success.
Gaines’ conversion from comics novice to comics’ greatest fan was swift. Finally convinced to sample his comics, Gaines became an advocate of the medium virtually overnight, convinced that more could be achieved than the rather tepid fare previously offered by his father’s company. Dry pedagogical works were replaced with comics devoted to fun and enjoyment. Under Bill Gaines, Education Comics were recast as Entertainment Comics.
Gaines was unwilling to conform to the image of the publisher embodied by his father and his contemporaries, a profession that Gaines satirised in MAD #5 (July, 1953) as composed of illiterate and uncultured peddlers of smut that were prey to a gamut of repressed perversions. The article did not win him many friends among the industry. In many ways Gaines was simply playing at being a publisher; it was a role he self-consciously assumed with satirical intent. The comic magazine remained one of the few pleasures a person could buy for a dime and for Gaines the ideal comics were produced when the aim was not profit, but fun and entertainment, the product of an endeavour that should always be 95% creative, 5% business. Gaines assembled around him a staff composed of precocious artists and writers including his creative partner Al Feldstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Graham Ingels, Johnny Craig and Wallace Wood. With the avuncular yet rebellious Gaines at its heart this group would become, innocently, yet earnestly, the bad boys of 1950s comics publishing.
EC comics flourished at a time when most publishers focussed exclusively upon exploiting the most popular genre, whether this be crime, cowboy, romance or hero comics. It was standard practice to flood the market with cheap imitations to maximise sales before the readership moved on to pastures new. Indeed this was the model that Gaines followed in his early years at the helm of EC; the comedic Happy Houlihans became Saddle Justice (1948) which was soon transformed into Saddle Romances (1949).
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gaines took immense pride in what he was publishing, and as the months passed he became motivated by a desire to break new ground rather than simply follow fickle trends. In what would become known as the ‘New Wave’, EC began in early 1950 to focus upon producing a small handful of titles where both the writing and art were of high quality. The heart of the ‘New Wave’ line was a trio of experimental horror comics: The Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear. Gaines, and particularly Al Feldstein, were both inspired by the eerie radio dramas of Arch Oboler, and the horror radio series Witches Tale (1931-8) and Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1941-1952). Witches Tale in particular, hosted by the recurring character of ‘Old Nancy’, anticipated the format of the EC horror comics with their trio of “ghouLunatic” hosts: the Old Witch, the Crypt Keeper and the Vault Keeper.
Fuelled by the drug Dexedrine, a form of speed prescribed for weight loss, Gaines devoted the resulting sleepless nights to searching for basic ideas— ‘springboards’— that could be developed by himself and Feldstein into short illustrated stories. Many of these were straightforward steals from Lord Dunsany, Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, reformatted and adapted to fit Gaines’ needs. The quintessential EC story takes the form of a ‘suspenstory’, a term coined by Gaines to describe the twinning of a thrilling high concept with a twist ending. This form originated in EC crime comics but soon came the standard format for all stories. Though Gaines’ horror stories were thronged with various shambling corpses, cackling witches and menacing blobs, all tales were written with tongue firmly in cheek. Throughout all the death there remained an infectious vitality. For Gaines and his staff the comics were a conspiracy, a secret and personal communication between the writer and the reader, a meeting of like minds.
An anarchic thread of dark comedy runs throughout the comics. This manifests most obviously in an anti-authoritarian impulse. All of the adults we encounter are adulterers or murderers, crooks or perverts. Figures in power lack any authority; the stories are full of incompetent policemen and maniacal doctors. We are encouraged by the three narrators to laugh at their foibles and petty schemes. Suspicion of the old by the young is prudent: these are not figures that we can ever trust or take seriously. Their theatrical greed and excesses are always punished. Hunters become the hunted, swindlers are swindled in typical contes cruels fashion. EC karma has a dark and nihilistic sense of humour; justice is never delivered by a divine agent, but by an impersonal universe.
In contrast to EC, publishers such as National and All-American typically considered their readership to be composed of young children and mentally-deficient adults; they produced disposable fodder for the kindergarten and the asylum and could see no impetus to increase the complexity or the sophistication of the medium. EC comics was the first company to recognise its readers as intellectual equals and to validate their consumption of comics as an artistically legitimate pursuit. Bill Gaines, the biggest fan of them all, was the impetus behind this movement and in 1953 founded the EC Fan-Addicts Club, which at its height boasted approximately 25,000 devoted members. Some of the very first fan publications ever published were devoted to EC and its horror comics, and a flourishing fan culture has remained at the heart of the EC legacy, providing the model for the creator/fan relationship developed by Marvel comics in the 1960s.
Considering the dark and often chaotic themes at work in EC’s horror and crime comics it is not surprising that they became the focus for many anti-comics protest groups of the 1950s. EC comics in particular would fall victim to the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, comics’ equivalent of the McCarthy trials of the 1940s and 1950s, which convened in April 1954. The expert testimony of the subcommittee was given by Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent (1954), a book which touted the comicbook as a trigger for social and sexual deviancy. Wertham believed that comics were not an art form and that legislation was needed to prevent their sale to impressionable minors. Few writers or publishers wished to legitimise the witch-hunting of Senators such as Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver by appearing at the subcommittee. Wishing to defend his beloved medium and the quality comics he produced, Gaines voluntarily offered a rebuttal to Wertham, staking his claim as the first and foremost publisher of horror comics in America. This was to prove a costly mistake—Gaines’ testimony would simply serve to put a recognisable face upon the figure of the irresponsible and exploitative publisher committed to corrupting the youth of America. Admitting that the limits to what he published were decided not just by saleability but his own ‘good taste’, Gaines was asked whether severed heads and strangled women, images that often graced the covers of his crime and horror titles, constituted this ‘good taste’ . A sheepish Gaines replied that yes, they were in good taste, ‘good taste for horror comics’ at least.
As a result of the hearings, wholesalers refused to handle the potentially seditious EC comics, and this, combined with the establishment of the Comics Code Authority (a self-regulatory body set up to censor comics), meant that the New Wave comics could not be sold; if by luck or after bowdlerisation they were allowed to ship, many sellers would refuse to handle the product. Thus the New Wave made way for the “New Direction”, a ‘clean, clean line’ shorn of any reference to terror, horror or crime, that aimed to resurrect EC’s fortunes. This was not to be. Titles like Psychoanalysis and MD did not have the visceral thrill of the comics they replaced and each new title folded after the fifth issue. Ultimately all but the satirical MAD would perish in the new and hostile market, and Gaines would focus all of his creative energies upon this last remnant of the New Wave.
After the demise of EC horror, comics with words like ‘Creepy’, ‘Eerie’ and ‘Weird’ in the title proliferated for a time before fading away. Horror would return intermittently after that from DC’S House of Mystery to Marvel’s horror comics of the 1970s, and though they owed a great deal to EC’s trailblazing trio of horror titles, they would never achieve the same level of innovation or controversy. Bill Gaines would never return to writing comics. His ordeal with the subcommittee had tainted the endeavour. In the words of Gaines’ creative partner, Al Feldstein, ‘He feels that what he did was entertainment. He was not turning anybody into a juvenile delinquent. He was crucified upon a cross of comics.’ Gaines died in 1992, proud of the impact his work had on a generation of readers and comic creators and vindicated in his belief that in creating comics he was creating art.
?
?
?
