20th century literature | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Women in Horror Month: Of One Blood: The Hidden Self by Pauline Hopkins, edited by Eric J. Guignard and Leslie Klinger, introduction by Nisi Shawl

Of One Blood: The Hidden Self (Haunted Library Horror Classics) by Pauline Hopkins, edited by Eric J. Guignard and Leslie S. Klinger, introduction by Nisi Shawl

Poisoned Pen Press, 2021

ISBN-13 : 978-1464215063

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

This new edition of Of One Blood is part of a series published by Poisoned Pen Press in partnership with the Horror Writers of America. Author Pauline Hopkins was an African-American writer of the early 20th century, and Nisi Shawl introduces the book, originally published in chapters as a serial in The Colored American magazine during 1902-1903, as an early speculative fiction novel combining the popular genre of “society novels” with a “lost world” narrative. revolutionary because the “lost world” is an advanced society consisting entirely of Black individuals, and promoting the thesis, novel at the time, that Africa is where the arts and technology have their origins.

Set in Boston in 1891 (my best guess based on the footnotes), Reuel Briggs is an impoverished medical student passing as white who is obsessed with the hidden forces of the supernatural and how to control them enough to reanimate the recently dead (shades of Victor Frankenstein). He is given the opportunity to put his theories into practice when the beautiful African-American singer Dianthe Lusk is killed in a car accident. While he is successful at bringing her back to life, she has lost her memory, and Reuel, his wealthy friend Aubrey, and Aubrey’s fiance Molly, set out to rebuild her into a new person. Molly becomes close friends with Dianthe, and Dianthe and Reuel fall in love and marry. To support her, he appeals to Aubrey for help in finding work. Aubrey, secretly in love with Dianthe, gets Reuel to sign on to a two year expedition to Africa to get him out of the way so he can marry Dianthe himself.

As Reuel journeys through Africa he sees its greatness, vividly described by Hopkins. The white men he is traveling with are surprised and at first dismayed to realize that African civilizations and peoples are the cradle of culture, as they have always believed that Africans were lesser than white people. Through Aubrey’s machinations, Reuel and Dianthe receive letters informing them that the other is dead, but while Reuel’s supernatural and mystical powers grow, Dianthe feels more and more lost and traumatized, especially as she learns more about her tangled family tree.

There are many books now that deal with the intergenerational trauma, tangled family trees, and family separation caused by slavery, including Octavia Butler’s speculative novel Kindred, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, and Maisy Card’s These Ghosts Are Family. In Of One Blood, we see a fantastical, awe-inspiring world, that contrasts the glories of African civilization rising again with the results of the terrible treatment, taken for granted, of African-Americans. Dianthe in particular goes through unbelievable trauma: she is killed, re-animated, separated from everything she knows, nearly drowned, grieving a friend and a husband, and under tremendous pressure from Aubrey already, when the additional information about her family comes to light. In her case, it only takes one generation to destabilize her and poison her interactions with her environment. Shawl described this novel as science fiction, but to me it seems more to combine the “lost world” utopian narrative Reuel experiences in Africa with the Gothic horror experienced by Dianthe.

Occasional footnotes are helpful in dating the time period of the book and understanding vocabulary and literary references. A brief but detailed biographical note about the author, discussion questions, and a wide-ranging list of recommended further reading follow the story.

This is a good choice for readers interested in the beginnings of Afrofuturism and African-American speculative fiction and horror, Gothic horror, lost world and utopian narratives, and early 20th century African-American and women writers. In addition, Of One Blood would be a unique choice for the increasing number of book clubs focusing on anti-racist titles, which, in my experience, generally avoid genre fiction. Highly recommended.

Contains: incest

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Book Review: Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. by Jess Nevins

Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. by Jess Nevins

Self-published, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1717952257

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Jess Nevins is a reference librarian at Lone Star College in Tomball, Texas and author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. He has written several titles on pulp fiction, Victoriana, and comic books, and annotated much of Alan Moore’s work. In the introduction to Horror Has No Passport, Nevins explains that the book was born our of his frustration at the difficulty of finding a reference book that contained information on non-Anglophone horror and horror writers, as he attempted to write his own book, A Chilling Age of Horror: How 20th Century Horror Fiction Changed the Genre, to be released in 2020. Nevins found that existing reference books on horror writers and supernatural literature were mostly focused on American and British writers, making it difficult to find information on authors and their works in non-English speaking and non-Western societies, with reputable sources such as The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers and even the ambitiously-named three-volume Supernatural Literature of the World, edited by S.T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz(which, yowza, took three weeks to acquire through interlibrary loan from an academic library in another state), are limited in their coverage of authors and works from non-English speaking countries.

So, what’s a researcher to do? While the previously mentioned reference guides are alphabetically organized, generally by author’s last name (although Joshi and Dziemianowicz also include essays on a variety of genre-related topics and some specific works) Nevins’ response was to collate information on authors and styles of writing from countries around the world, and write a capsule narrative of who was writing what at that time in that place, and what their influences were. Since many of the countries he covers developed their horror traditions outside the context of Western literary traditions or had their own literature buried under the traditions deemed acceptable by Western colonizers, Nevins used the broader term fantastika, promoted by John Clute, which includes a wide variety of genres and subgenres that include fantastic elements. These can be but aren’t always confined solely to the horror genre. In the context of this work, Nevins defines horror as “fiction written to evoke fear and dread… including works in which evoking horror was only the secondary or even tertiary intent of the author”. With such a wide definition, the result is that the appearance of certain authors in this work was somewhat of a surprise to me– for instance, having read Nada by Carmen Laforet in a Spanish literature class, it never occured to me that it could be included in the horror genre. However, as was recently pointed out to me, including titles that induce that feeling of unease and dread but aren’t generally considered horror can add a dimension that allows the carving out a space in an area of writing and publishing that is not generally friendly to the “horror” label.

Horror Has No Passport is divided into three parts, each covering a different period of time in the 20th century. Part one covers 1901-1939; part two covers 1940-1970; and part three covers 1971-2000. Each part is then divided into chapters: Africa, The Americas, Asia, Europe, and The Middle East. Each chapter is then broken down into capsule narratives on the countries Nevins was able to find information on. The countries covered in each chapter are not necessarily consistent from one time period to another: as time passes there is coverage of the literature of additional countries. Some countries and authors have better coverage than others.

As previously mentioned, this is not an alphabetical listing of authors’ biographical information and bibliographies. Even though Nevins compiled this volume to give researchers a reference to have at hand, it really doesn’t work as a stand-alone title– it just provides a starting place. Something I liked about this book that I didn’t see as much in Supernatural Literature of the World is the way Nevins drew connections between authors and their influences. For instance, index entries on Julio Cortazar point you not just to a paragraph about his work in the entry of Argentina, but to the names of authors who were influenced by him. This makes it easier to trace the threads of the development of the fantastic through time in that area of the world. However, it is disappointing that Nevins does not provide citations for all of his material. For instance, he provides no citation for his entry on Turkey in Chapter 10. he doesn’t provide a source for his information of Turkish authors Adnan Menderes and Kerime Nadir. While they are just briefly mentioned, there were other times when I looked for a citation so I could trace it and didn’t find a footnote. There is an extensive bibliography at the end, but more specificity in the footnotes would have been appreciated.

Horror Has No Passport overall seems to be relatively easy to navigate. The table of contents is accurate, organized and informative, the purpose and scope of the work are laid out in easy-to-understand language, I was able to find what I was looking for when I consulted the index, and it contains a detailed bibliography. I feel that it could have benefited from more accurate and frequent footnotes and/or in-text citations to refer the reader to specific sources, especially because the bibliography is so long, and as Nevins notes, many of the sources he used are not in English. My biggest quibble with this book is its formatting. Perhaps it is because this is self-published, or maybe it’s to reduce page count, but the cover does not have a name or title on it, the margins were practically invisible, spacing between lines was crowded, and the font size was almost to small for me to be able to read it. As readers, writers, and researchers strive to make horror fiction more inclusive, this inexpensive title, while not comprehensive, packs in a lot of information about 20th century horror outside the U.S. and Britain, and is a good starting point for further exploration of horror around the world. Recommended.