Horror: The 100 Best Books by Kim Newman, Stephen Jones Page B

Stoker had a horrifying nightmare of a vampire king rising from the tomb. In due course, Vlad became Dracula (dracul means dragon or demon) and Vambery became Van Helsing. It is obvious to any reader that without Van Helsing, the all-knowing expert on the supernatural, the book would be a failure. (Conan Doyle showed the same artistic insight when he created Professor Moriarty as a foil to Holmes.) What seems so extraordinary is that Stoker failed to learn the lesson of Dracula , and that his other books are so oddly flaccid and feeble. When Dracula appeared in 1897 it was immediately recognized as the most powerful novel of the supernatural written so far; it has remained in print ever since, and intrigued generations of psychologists, who have speculated how anyone as "square" as Bram Stoker could create such a horrific rape fantasy. For that is quite obviously what it is all about. These women whose blood Dracula drinks are archetypal symbols of the helpless and violated female. On stage in the Lyceum Theatre, Stoker saw an endless series of Victorian heroines, "womanly women" who yielded sweetly to manly men at the end of the last act. But in Dracula , the gentle Lucy Westenra is not only destroyed by the long-dead Count; she herself becomes a vampire, who has to be destroyed by having a stake hammered into her heart. It seems obvious that strange fires smouldered below the dependable and trustworthy surface of this upright Victorian gentleman. It is because of this touch of paradox -- one might almost say this whiff of sulphur -- that Dracula remains one of the most oddly disturbing novels ever written. -- COLIN WILSON
    22: [1898] HENRY JAMES - The Turn of the Screw

    At Christmas, a group of friends are telling ghost stories. One of the company reads from a manuscript penned by a governess. The anonymous narrator arrives at an isolated house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. She learns that the children have recently been under the unwholesome influence of Miss Jessell, their former governess, and of Peter Quint, a sinister servant. Both Jessell and Quint are mysteriously dead, and both seem to be extending their influence from beyond the grave, perhaps to take possession of the children. While struggling with Quint's spirit for the soul of Miles, the governess accidentally causes the death of her charge. A classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw has been adapted into an opera by Benjamin Britten, into a play, The Innocents , by Dalton Trumbo (filmed in 1961 by Jack Clayton) and spuriously "prequelized" by screen-writer Michael Hastings and director Michael Winner with The Nightcomers (1971). It is the most outstanding of James' handful of ghostly stories. The eponymous "turn of the screw", the involvement of children in the supernatural, might be seen to be at the root of a whole flood of post- Exorcist horrors unleashed in the 1970s.
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    Courage -- real courage -- is the ability to see horror on the far side of a crowded room and still have the presence of mind to ask for another cup of tea. The governess in Henry James's fantasy tale saw the shade of the defunct valet looking down from a tower and was still able to detect that he was not a gentleman. He gave her the sense of looking like an actor -- but never -- but no never! a gentleman. I find that after reading this story many times over the years it is extremely difficult to take a firm stand. Did the ghosts of the handsome but base-born valet Peter Quint and the beautiful lady governess Miss Jessel really exist, or were they merely figments created by the unnamed narrator's imagination? It would appear that James intended them to be accepted as evil entities for he wrote to F. W. H. Myers, his brother's fellow researcher into spiritualism, that he had wanted to create the impression of "the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger -- the condition on their part being as exposed as we can humanly conceive