Horror: The 100 Best Books Read Free

significantly -- it is that first meeting that claims greatest hold on my affections. I was as ravished by the splendours of the play as Marlowe's Doctor is by magic, which he believes will show him the secrets of the stars, and of men's souls. I had the same hopes of art; still do, in fact. But while a book is readily bought, a play or a painting easily viewed, Faustus -- to gain his magic -- must sign in blood, and give his soul over to Lucifer for all eternity. Not so hard. This is a man who has studied until study can reward him no longer. A man to whom science has become a cul-de-sac, philosophy a dead library, and who wants to drag the walls and the words down and see the world for himself. It's little wonder that Mephistopheles' warnings cannot deter this hungry adventurer from the trip. To evoke the pleasure of what follows, Marlowe uses his prodigious poetic gifts (which were silenced too quickly: he died at twenty-nine, stabbed in the eye in a brawl that may have been staged to conceal an assassination). Here Faustus looks on the beauty of Helen of Troy, raised from the past for his delectation:
    "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss."
    It's the word-music that ensured Marlowe's immortality, not the kisses. (There's a lesson there, damn it.) Later in the play that same genius conjures Faustus' terror as damnation approaches:
    "You stars that reign'd at my nativity Whose influence hath allotted death and hell, Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud."
    He is not drawn up, needless to say. "Ugly hell " gapes, and the Devil claims his due, leaving Faustus' servants and ex-students to pick up the pieces, literally. Whereas Goethe saves his adventurer with love and metaphysics, Marlowe has his Doctor beg for forgiveness --
    "See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul . . ."
    -- but here his pleas go unanswered. The play thus moves through a strikingly diverse series of modes, from the early scenes of debate, to invocation, and temptation; then through masque, high poetry and low comedy as Faustus' years of experience pass; finally into melancholy and despair. Behind it all Marlowe's subversive vision is at work. This is the man reputed to have claimed that "whoso liketh not tobacco and boys is a fool", and who would die as he lived, in a passion. That heat -- that sense of momentum -- turns his version of the Faust story into a headlong plunge, as exhilarating as it is tragic. Goethe's treatment may be more philosophically complex, and arguably contains characters more sensitively drawn; it is certainly the more humane of the two interpretations. But Marlowe's variation values theatricality and poetic dazzle over moral texture, and the kid I was when I first read it liked the choice. He still does. Maybe in my dotage I'll be more profoundly moved by Goethe's brilliantly argued case for the redeemability of the human spirit (indeed, I may need its reassurances), but I'm still too close to Marlowe in age and temper to relinquish my first love. What delights me, finally, is to have a choice of versions. I've even added a few variations to the canon of Faust tales myself. The Damnation Game , "The Hellhound Heart" and "The Last Illusion" are all conscious strivings to make sense of the story for a late-20th-century readership. Hell, I point out in The Damnation Game , is reimagined by each generation. So are the pacts, and the pact-makers. But the story will survive any and all reworkings, however radical, because its roots are so strong. That far-sighted backward glance I spoke of earlier -- the one that leads back to the rocky place -- shows us in the Faust tale one of the most important roads in all fantastic fiction. At its centre is a notion essential to the horror genre and its relations: that of a trip taken into forbidden territory at the risk of