S.T. Joshi | Musings of the Monster Librarian

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.

Thirty Hours With a Corpse and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol by Maurice Level, introduced and edited by S.T. Joshi
Dover Publications, 2016
ISBN: 9780486802329
Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

S.T. Joshi has collected thirty-nine of Maurice Level’s conte cruel, or “cruel tales,” in one volume. Level, a French writer from the early twentieth century, whose specialty was short stories of the macabre, was a contributor to the Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris, known for staging gory dramas. His tales deal with the human condition and moral frailty, rather than anything supernatural.

I was enthralled with all of the stories in this anthology, but a few stood out more than others. As mentioned above, some stories focus on moral frailty. In “The Debt Collector”, a clerk turned thief takes his spoils to a solicitor’s outside town, leaves the funds under a false name, and travels back to town in order to turn himself in. Of course, he is promptly arrested, found guilty at trial, and jailed for five years. Upon release, he heads to the solicitor’s to pick up the money. The trouble is that, in the meantime, he forgot the false name he used. The story “Blue Eyes” culminates in a young woman having certain business transactions with the last man she would ever want to see. In “The Last Kiss,” a man takes revenge on the woman who blinded him.

Other stories deal with madness or psychoses. The need for peace and quiet occasionally drives us all a little mad sometimes: unfortunately for the nagging mistress of the man in “Fascination”, he takes that a step too far, and shoots her for the sake of a night in. “In the Light of the Red Lamp” is a tragic tale of a husband who develops photographs of his deceased wife, only to find something he was not expecting. In “Poussette”, a highly religious woman is betrayed by her cat, Pousette, who is only following instincts when she escapes the house to be in the company of yowling male cats. When Pousette returns, the woman’s affection for her formerly loyal pet has turned to anger and paranoia. A man’s suspicions and paranoia conclude in a familial tragedy in “The Bastard”.

Several tales take place during wartime. “Under Ether” tells the story of a patient/prisoner who discovers through conversation that his doctor comes from the same town, and that they knew each other’s mothers. What the injured man says under ether, however, is unexpected. “At the Movies” finds a mother telling her son about what is taking place on a newsreel, only to find a familiar face, one she believed to have been killed during the war.

The scariest part of these short stories is that none of them have any supernatural explanation as to why things happened. They are all driven by humanity and the wrongs that we have the capability of inflicting on each other. I highly recommend this collection, but you might need a good strong drink or cup of tea to calm your nerves.

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker