"If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!" - Frankenstein (1818, ch 17.) So was the lonely cry from the abomination conjured by Mary Wollstonecraft Goodwin in 1816, the year of no summer.

While large parts of Europe and North America were shrouded in ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora, Indonesia, Lord Byron, Mary, and a handful of associates were entertaining themselves at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva with a writing contest. John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) was also a product of this summer on the lake and was inspired by Byron’s initial literary musings.

Though the roots of horror fiction can be traced back to at least the Inquisition, it was perhaps Edmund Burke’s study on the concept of the sublime in his A philosophical inquiry into the origins of our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime in 1875 which paved the way for the gothic literature that followed.   

For the western world, the cultivation of literary horror began with a fascination with the mysticism of the paranormal, another form of escapism which emerged from 18th century pre-Romantic times. Although Mary Wollstonecraft's deviation from the occult and into the world of science, albiet fantastical, would seem to class her work as more science fiction than horror, it is generally accepted in either genre.

Also In 1818, Jane Austen’s Northhanger Abby was published, followed by the grotesquely terrifying psychological poems of Edgar Allen Poe in the 1840’s. This decade welcomed the appearance of the gothic works of the Bronte sisters Emily and Charlotte as well. Horace Walpole’s eerie novel The Castle of Otranto (1875) was considered a landmark contribution to the gothic horror genre. 1886 saw The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Luis Stevenson, and then Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Oscar Wilde produced the novella The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890 which was followed by H.G. Wells’ The island of Dr. Moreau in 1896. 

Fast forward to the twentieth century and the new king of gothic horror was the well-known Stephen King. He was joined by the likes of Anne Rice and Angela Carter who both wove their passion for feminism into their vampire stories. Rice’s amoral antihero Lestat stands as a deviation from the traditionally presented vampire and set the stage for the introduction of the broodier, more romantic characters found in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.

Today the horror genre is broad but the romanticism and mysticism that was established by the gothic horror heroes has prevailed and distorted to inspire new dystopian terror plots inflaming the imaginations of new generations. 

Mrs Denise Harvey 
School Librarian 
Denise_Harvey@shalomcollege.com