In
The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, John Clute wields his considerable talents to give us an insight into the Horror genre, into what the genre does and why it is important. It's a significant book, small in dimensions but large in voice and captivating in content.
But how does a book that analyses the Horror genre come to be written?
"In the beginning, there was no book like this in view," said Clute. "For a year or so I'd been grappling, in the end unsuccessfully, with a contract I'd signed with Scarecrow Press to do a short
Historical Dictionary of Horror, which was intended by Scarecrow to make up a set with the two they commissioned from Brian Stableford, and which have both now been published, one on science fiction and one on fantasy.
"Both of these latter regions of discourse, had, of course, already been traversed and their practical limits defined and the basic descriptive terminologies established, and Brian ploughed right into the task with the Will of Brian, and - though I thought his discourse on the nature of fantasy was pretty airhead - did a thoroughly competent short-dictionary-like job of his remit. I wasn't as lucky, nor am I Brian.
"I found the assortative discourse on horror both boring and inutile, and found that the entries I was beginning to write, quite a few of them in the end, were hugely too long for the dictionary format Scarecrow needed, and full of exploratory neologisms. At the same time, I found myself beginning to draft theme/motif entries in order to make some sense of the exploratory lunges and lurches of those author entries. By the beginning of 2006, however, I saw the handwriting on the wall: the motif entries I was writing were totally inappropriate to the remit I'd been given, and the author entries were, as I said, hugely too long to fit into the wordcount requirements Scarecrow had reasonably laid down, so I cancelled the contract.
"A few months later Brooks Peck asked me if I had anything fairly short and unusual that might conceivably fit into the list he and Jacob McMurray were constructing for the small firm, Payseur and Schmidt, they had begun to operate.
"On impulse I looked at my motif entries from the aborted project, about 11,000 words of material, and bundled them off, with the suggestion that I could add another 8,000 or so words of connecting definitions, which might make a plausible little book. Brooks said yes. So I rewrote those 11,000 words to liberate them from any surviving rigidities of context, and added (in the end) another 15,000 words of new material – the mostly definitional entries of HORROR, AFFECT HORROR, SIGHTING, THICKENING, REVEL, AFTERMATH, DOUBLES, SERPENT'S EGG, etc. And that is
The Darkening Garden.
"Another answer as to why I put the book together was to get horror, as a genre or mode (I've been excoriated by, I think, Richard Bleiler, for using both terms in a single sentence, but tant pis, frankly), into my working vocabulary. And pass that vocabulary on, mercilessly, to anyone who reads me."
It takes a deep knowledge of a genre to create the kinds of definitions in
The Darkening Garden, but it also takes a special kind of brain. "I don't advocate what I call my thinking process, or the mental process chez moi that comes as close to thinking as I come," said Clute modestly. "It is a very lateral-thinking, metaphor-driven kind of cognition. Some of the terms in The Darkening Garden, like HORROR, obviously pre-exist this process; others, like THICKENING - which came to me as a pretty obvious opposite process to the THINNING which I made a central descriptive/grammatical/definitional term in
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) - are close to neologism.
"In fact, HORROR, was probably the most difficult definition. It was written almost at the end of the process, and needed to work as a centre from which other entries could depend, a compact home base from which other entries could be understood. By the way, the only use in the book of any form of its title comes in the final sentence of HORROR. Which means (to me) that the final sentence of that entry is the point from which the whole book unfolds...."
Another important point in the book is the year 1750. "It is 1) an arbitrary date, but 2) a rough date used by quite a few writers to designate a point when it all begins to change," said Clute. "It is a bit earlier than Horace Walpole's Otranto (1764), or the inception of the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany, but Voltaire's Candide (1759) is only a few years away. So, as I said, the precise date is an arbitrary convention, but the times were a changing.
"It is from this point that what Nick Gevers calls "the utter inclemency" of the world begins to show its face in us. I love Gevers's phrase: it says exactly what I meant to talk about in
The Darkening Garden in a nutshell."
The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror is out now at all good book stores.
