Horror: The 100 Best Books Read Free Page B

is a Jacobean Revenge Tragedy complete with poisonings, multiple murders, a scheming villain, a tragic villain, ghosts, intrigues, a crime-busting Pope, and a vengeance-crazed pirate. Webster (1580-1634) was also the author of The Duchess of Malfi (1614), an even more gruesome tragedy, and The Devil's Law-Case (1620), a twisted comedy. A gloomy misanthrope who complains in his preface about the rabble's lack of enthusiasm for the play, Webster was characterized famously by T. S. Eliot as seeing "the skull beneath the skin"
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    I have always found your actual werewolves, vampires and devils rather boring. The White Devil is to me true horror because all these creatures are present in it, and ghosts too, but as human beings. It is also full of graveyard humour which is hysterically funny, much of it centering on Flamineo, who is my favourite villain -- witty, neurasthenic and utterly selfish. There are only two "good" characters: Vittoria's brother Marcello, who is too stupid to be otherwise, and the boy Giovanni. All the others go in for quasi-virtuous acts that damn them. At the start of the play Corinna curses her children with a big display of outrage, and the curse works (this is the main undercover supernatural theme). Isabella, with an equal display of virtue, pretends to hate her husband and gets murdered for it -- with justice because she talks witchcraft. The talk is always a giveaway. It nickers by, savage and vivid, subliminally dubbing Isabella a witch, Corinna a witch, invoking arcane herb lore, linking Brachiano with the devil and calling Flamineo wolf, wolf, wolf, until it rises to the spell Corinna chants over her dead son, in which she all but names Flamineo the werewolf he is. Under the influence of Vittoria, the Pope reveals himself fascinated with vice and the Duke of Florence ends up (literally) black. Brachiano, basically a coarse-grained man bored with his wife, commits murder and then dabbles in Satanism by employing a conjuror. His death -- On pain of death, let no man name death to me, It is a word infinitely terrible -- surrounded by imaginary horrors -- Look you, six grey rats that have lost their tails Crawl up the pillow -- is a real spine-chiller. By a bold stroke, Vittoria herself, the vampire woman at the centre, is decidely understated. Her character emerges mostly from the disgusted reactions of the rest, even her brother Flamineo, who behave as if they are trying to detach a leech. But the talk is again a giveaway. As her lover dies, all she can say is I am lost for ever ! Everything else she says is equally self-centred. And vampire she is. Right at the end when she has run out of victims and is about to be killed, she says she is pale from want of blood . And the boy Giovanni? He becomes Duke of Padua at the end and orders the murderers tortured with sanctimonious relish. As Flamineo remarks, his talons will grow out in time, and here we see them sprouting. -- DIANA WYNNE JONES
    4: [1794] WILLIAM GODWIN - Things As They Are; or: The Adventures of Caleb Williams

    Caleb Williams, an honest young man, takes a position as secretary to Ferdinando Falkland, the landowner upon whose property the Williams family resides. Although treated kindly by Mr. Falkland, Caleb is warned to stay away from a certain room in which the master keeps a mysterious trunk. Unable to contain his curiosity, Caleb investigates and learns that Falkland is a murderer. However, their respective social positions ensure that Falkland goes uncharged and Caleb is ruined. Caleb loses his job and becomes an outcast, persecuted by his former master, and is thrown in with thieves and murderers. His ordeal takes him from the melodramatic Gothic horrors of Falkland's gloomy old house with its terrible secret to the all-too-real hell of the underside of 18th-Century England. Godwin, a reformer best known for his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), here prefigures Dickens by straddling the genres of gruesome thriller and