Booknotes: Horror needs no Passport by Jess Nevins
Finished 10/30/20
It is what it says on the can–a wide-ranging bibliographic essay on Horror fiction outside of its more commonly known “haunts” of the UK and the US.
It’s hard to synthesize a book like this, which is essentially a compendium of regional essays–more of a reference guide than a standard piece of non-fiction (and Nevins is both a fantastic fiction scholar and a librarian, so this makes some sense). What follows are some general notes that I made along the way, things that struck my interest, etc…
The book is organized chronologically, with three main periods: 1900-1939, 1940-1970, and 1970-2000, and then regionally within those time periods. In some regions, discussions stretch backward into the 19th century or earlier–there is an interesting discussion about Chinese and Japanese Horror literature going back hundreds or thousands of years. And some of the sections straddle the periods. But generally speaking, Nevins finds a way to bring coherence to the chronology and geography around which he has organized the book, highlighting broader cultural or political trends that impacted horror fiction or fiction more generally, and locating the authors he documents within the regional/chronological literary milieau he sketches. Within these sections, Nevins provides critical biographical sketches of significant authors.
It was fascinating to me to see what an impact the translation of Edgar Allen Poe outside of English or Romance languages had on global horror writing. Poe’s work pops up again and again as influential when it was translated into local or regional languages, whether this was for early 20th century authors in South Africa, Argentina, Iran, Japan, or much later authors influenced by Poe’s eventual translation into Indian languages in 1985(!) Other interesting inspirations came from the spread of Stoker’s Dracula, which inspired early vampire novels in Honduras (Turcios El Vampiro, 1910), Turkey (Gecesi’s Night of Terror, 1958), or India (the anonymously-authored Pischacho ki Mallika, 1997). In each case, local authors took these western sources as an ingredient in their own work, mixed with local folklore, political events, or cultural formations.
Nevins takes a wide view of what constitutes horror, relying on John Clute’s term “fantastika” to encompass a range of fiction with the promotion of fear or dread as a primary or secondary authorial goal. He ends up including everything from dark magical realism to modernist ghost stories to folklore tales rooted in indigenous traditions. This makes for a wide-ranging survey, and eradicates standard distinctions between “High” and “low” literature.
Much of 20th century American horror is rooted in pulp magazines and other popular periodicals. It was fascinating to read about the equivalents to these in other regions, as they too formed a locus of early horror writing. For instance, the “Indian state railways magazine” was an astonishingly widely read periodical (Nevins suggests in the “millions or tens of millions” in the 20s and 30s alone) that routinely featured stories of horror and the supernatural, though often by anoymous authors who brought together British horror forms with Indian folklore.
There is a critical bibliography of scholarship on various authors, regions, and time-periods, but I do wish that Nevins had included an author bibliography for the authors he documents, and with a particular focus on whether the works have been translated into English or not. As a fan of horror, it’d be nice to know beforehand whether I’ll have to learn a second language to enjoy an author whose work he champions.
The book is ultimately a great reference, but ended up being a bit bewildering to read in one sitting. It’s clear that the non-Anglo world of 20th century horror is astonishingly rich, diverse, and complicated, to the point where I felt like I was losing the thread by the end. Having said that, there are several authors whose works I had never heard of and will investigate, thanks to this volume, and for that, I’m glad I read it.
