Today is Halloween, a holiday whose vibe I dig. Thus, every year for the past several, I exhume a horror classic on or around Halloween so that I can present to you, the reader, an appreciation of the tale on the day itself. The best horror fiction isn’t just scary but also transcendent and timeless and can make for some appropriately ghastly Halloween reading.
This year, it’s Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. The book, which tells the story of a mysterious carnival’s arrival to and malevolence in a small town, is a master class in supernatural suspense:
The carnival, populated by a grotesquerie of characters against whom the boys, at first alone, contest, comes to life in vivid, unsettling descriptions. At the center of it all is Mr. Dark, “the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls.” His designs assail the boys through time-manipulating carousels, witch-piloted hot-air balloons, blood-drenched fists that drip onto boys hiding below a sewer grate, stealthy pursuits through endless stacks of books and infinite mazes of mirrors, and more. (In a 1983 adaptation, Mr. Dark is chillingly depicted by a young Jonathan Pryce.) At first, the boys alone perceive the carnival’s malevolence, as it operates through the town, preying on citizens’ desires and sins while trying to enfold the boys into its plots as a means of shutting them up. Anyone looking for an eerie and gripping Halloween read will find plenty that’s satisfying in Something Wicked This Way Comes.
But he will also find more than that, as I argue in my piece, which you can read here.
Last year, my Halloweentide read was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. In light of reports that Covid-19 almost certainly emerged out of some laboratory accident, I found new relevance in Shelley’s warning about man’s Promethean temptation to defy the laws of nature through science:
To read Frankenstein now, it is easy to connect it to the latest Promethean offense perpetrated by mankind. National Review was notably ahead of the curve in reporting that COVID-19 could have emerged from a virological laboratory in Wuhan, a possibility that lines up with most of the evidence available to us even as the Chinese government has worked furiously for almost two years to cover up any trace of its actions.
Almost in tacit acknowledgment of this, the debate has lately moved on to whether the National Institutes of Health, through the intermediary of EcoHealth Alliance, funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that intentionally heightened the virulence of bat coronaviruses (“gain of function”). This possibility, too, seems increasingly likely. The justification for this research can sound legitimate: to make viruses stronger artificially so that we know how to fight them better. The danger, however, seems far more obvious and concerning. And if such research had anything to do with the pandemic that has afflicted the world, what better “living monument of presumption and rash ignorance,” as Frankenstein refers to his creature, could there be?
In 2020, I turned to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, finding some defects but also much to value. Especially in its stark delineation between good and evil:
In addition to supplying much of the raw material from which later efforts were fashioned, Dracula provided the redeeming moral barometer by which vampire fiction ought to be judged. The vampiric aversion to Christian iconography hints at it, but simply stated, it is that Dracula resides in a clearly moral universe. Its heroes act on the side of good — and God — whereas Dracula and his minions are clearly diabolical. Subsequent vampire fiction, by emphasizing some aspects born in Dracula and downplaying others, often muddy this distinction. But this is a mistake. As frightening as these gothic horror tales are, many of them can, do, and ought to point to the reality of good implied by their depiction of evil.
That last selection links to my first Halloween piece for National Review, a 2019 dual review of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (as well as their respective film adaptations). Though the books and the movies are now old enough to be considered classics, at the time of their release, they were notable for bringing ancient fears into the trappings of modernity.
As I concluded:
Each speaks to contemporary anxieties with stories that place ancient fears in modern settings. And in doing so, each suggests that our ancient fears will always be with us, always manifesting in new ways, and that we shall never escape them completely. In confronting them, we may find more guidance in older beliefs than in the empty platitudes of our supposedly secular age.
I hope these pieces help explain the pull of Halloween’s pall.