FFB Redux: LIVING IN FEAR: A HISTORY OF HORROR IN THE MASS MEDIA by Les Daniels (Scribner's, 1975)

from a 1995 interview with Daniels for Tabula Rasa:

Kyla Ward for TR: Just touching on the other non-fiction book, Fear--

Les Daniels: AKA Living in Fear--

TR: "A History of Horror in the Mass Media."

LD: This followed the first book on comics [Comix, 1971], and once again was based on the fact this was something I was interested in. In a way it's dated and superceded now, there were fairly few books even on horror films back then; but what makes it more unique now is that in addition to discussing most of the significant English-language horror films made up till that time, it also tried to deal with the literature, going back to the Gothic novel and so on. I tried to cover so much ground that there's usually only a couple of sentences about anything that I mentioned, and so much written since that in a way it's superficial.

TR: And it also includes certain stories --

LD: It's partially an anthology.

TR: -- you printed Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder." Thank you.

LD: Well, it's important to me. At that period, I think the concept of the tradition and what had gone before was almost the basis of horror and was of interest to horror writers and people who made horror films; there has been a tremendous leap, it was almost as though I wrote that book at the appropriate time, because since then there has been a big jump in horror in terms of its wide promulgation and acceptance, and at the same time there has been a tremendous difference in the content.

Living in Fear was the first book about (as well as in small part collecting) horror that I encountered, and as a survey it was an excellent indicator that there was a wide world of material awaiting me of which I had only picked up on a small segment so far...albeit with the anthologies and comics I was reading and the Thriller television series playing in repeats locally in Connecticut (even as repeats of the first The Outer Limits series had brightened noirishly my Saturday afternoons in the Boston suburbs a few years before), and the infrequent good films I could see in theaters (tv averaged better, even with all the damned commercials and the cuts in some of the films, at least as often for more commercials...the rare horror film on the PBS stations were a particular treat), I was already aware of quite a range of work.

Daniels, an independent scholar with a continuing love for horror (and a novelist, beginning in the next decade), didn't produce an impeccably researched book, and even I as a ten year old could spot an error or two (he referred to Gene Roddenberry's nonexistent work on The Outer Limits, for example), but the stories recounted and described (of the development of horror as a field of literature and in related media) and the actual fiction collected in the coffee-table book were often excellent, as well as excellent nudges. As an anthology, others were more important to me, but as a key to the highway...

Richard Bleiler holding his anthology.

Certainly Stephen King's Danse Macabre and others which followed Living in Fear never would have such an impact for me, even when written by such well-informed and reflective artists as Ransey Campbell...even now, very few have attempted to match the scope of this one. (Though, for example, E. F. Bleiler's works, among them the first edition of Supernatural Fiction Writers, are always worth the look...even if a look in son Richard Bleiler's 2002 second edition of that compendium, also a Scribner's book coincidentally, would provide one with, among better and worse contributions, an example of my own bit of survey, on Joyce Carol Oates and, in passing, Kate Wilhelm.)

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for further Friday books citations.

And this 2009 entry drew the following comments:

8 comments:

K. A. Laity said...

Somehow I always picture Les in his bathrobe as he "fights" in That Damned Game Show trivia-off at Necon regardless of the situation. Interesting interview. I have this book as well. It did come out at an interesting moment in horror film making. Haven't looked at it in years!

November 13, 2009 at 2:12 PM 

pattinase (abbott) said...

Oh, my gosh, the Outer Limits. I did love that show.

November 13, 2009 at 3:50 PM 

Evan Lewis said...

Wish I'd latched onto this back in '75.

November 20, 2009 at 10:26 AM 

Todd Mason said...

Kate--yep...one of the best ever, THE LAST WAVE, was just starting production as I was reading the book, and I just caught most of it again this morning as I meant to be getting ready for work. But the book's value is that it ranges from Walpole to Alice Cooper, EC Comics to THRILLER (the television anthology series with Boris Karloff, not the later Jackson album and its title song and video, nor even the '70s British series), and I believe it was the first book, certainly the first trade book, to range quite like that.

Patti--given your antipathy for tv horror, I'm surprised you dug the borderline horror/sf of most of THE OUTER LIMITS...or did the fateful incident with that TWILIGHT ZONE episode happen later than the first run of TOL?

Evan--I was certainly glad to see it.

November 20, 2009 at 12:05 PM 

George said...

Some consider THE DEMON WITH THE GLASS HAND written by Harlan Ellison to be the best episode of the original OUTER LIMITS.

November 20, 2009 at 12:36 PM 

Todd Mason said...

Some do; I think Ellison might be as proud of it as any of his other scripting. I think "Nightmare" is better (it was rather badly botched [in remake] by the new OUTER LIMITS series). Considering what an ass I consider the writer of that episode (and coproducer of the series) Joseph Stefano (who attempted to claim all the credit for PSYCHO the script and minimize what he drew from Robert Bloch's novel, an effort that Gus Van Sant attempted to aid him in though Hitchcock slapped him down over it), that's saying something.

November 20, 2009 at 12:46 PM 

Todd Mason said...

And, yes, I do know how to spell series, oddly enough...and Bloch slapped him down even harder, when Stefano attempted to claim complete credit in a professional venue, leading to Stefano funding an ad in which Robert Bloch, "the only author of the novel PSYCHO," congratulated Stefano for his adaptation.

November 20, 2009 at 1:14 PM 

FFB: COMIX, and THE BLACK CASTLE and its sequels, by Les Daniels; DYING OF FRIGHT, edited by Les Daniels

Les Daniels died on 5 November, and I hadn't gotten around to mentioning that on the blog yet...Kate Laity, who's been a congoer to a much greater extent than I have, got to know him as a fixture at Necon, the small horror convention which takes over a college dorm and is often tabbed Camp Necon by its regulars, where Daniels enjoyed taking on all comers in the annual trivia fest in costume. The New York Times obit, and the Locus obit.

His Living in Fear, both a history of evolution of horror fiction and drama and related matters and also an anthology of short fiction, meant a lot to me as a young reader...it wasn't the first item of literary history and criticism that I'd read as a kid, but it was easily the most compelling to date when I came across it not long after it was published, as noted in a previous FFB entry. I read his Comix next, and, when it appeared, the more straightforward anthology Dying of Fright, a fine anthology in similar coffee-table format to Living in Fear (I managed to completely miss his third and last such book, an even better selection in some ways).

Comix wasn't the first history of comic books to be published, but might've been the best book-length study by a single writer published by 1971 (as usual, the Times manages to not quite get it right), and it was certainly the first run through the complete history of comics I was to read, and it did introduce me to Help! magazine and the late '60s underground scene, some of whose participants were, by the latter '70s, moving into more "above-ground" arenas or at least getting some current national newsstand exposure in the likes of National Lampoon and its offshoot, Heavy Metal, among other magazines and collections.

And his Don Sebastian vampire novels, which I would catch up with long after the first publication of the first, The Black Castle, in 1978 (I began reading them a decade later, as I recall), are a fine series of historical horror adventures, not quite the utter literary and pop-culture historian's delight that Kim Newman's later and not altogether dissimilar Anno Dracula series of novels and stories is, but well-written and rather deft at making their point that the evils Sebastian finds himself among, including the invasion of "the New World" by the Conquistadors or the London of Jack the Ripper, are often at least as great as any that can be encompassed by a vampire, no matter how mythically dangerous (and Sebastian is not to be trifled with)(and the Daniels novels are more consistent than the Newmans, where The Bloody Red Baron, recently reissued, is not quite up to the novel it follows nor most of the work which follows it).

Daniels only began publishing short fiction nearly a decade after his first novel, but the stories in such key anthologies of original fiction as Dennis Etchison's The Cutting Edge and Skipp and Spector's The Book of the Dead were witty and, as much as their content would allow, charming.

I'm very sorry I didn't get around to telling him directly how much his work meant to me.

from Tabula Rasa: Living with Fear: An Interview with Les Daniels

Les Daniels Bibliography

Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, 1971.
Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (aka Fear), 1975.
Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre, ed. 1976.
Thirteen Tales of Terror, ed. with Diane Thompson. 1977.
The Black Castle, a Novel of the Macabre, 1978.
The Silver Skull, a Novel of Sorcery, 1979.
Citizen Vampire, 1981.
Yellow Fog, 1988 (this work originated in a novella published as a hardback special edition in 1986).
No Blood Spilled, 1991.
The Marvel Story, 1991.
The DC Story, 1995.
Superman: The Complete History, 1998.
Batman: The Complete History, 1999.
Wonder Woman: The Complete History, 2000.

from ISFDb:

Title: Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre
Editor: Les Daniels
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons

The Adventure of the German Student • (1824) • shortstory by Washington Irving
The Masque of the Red Death • (1842) • shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe (aka The Mask of the Red Death)
Ethan Brand • (1850) • shortstory by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Squire Toby's Will • (1868) • novelette by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [as by J. Sheridan Le Fanu]
The Upper Berth • (1885) • novelette by F. Marion Crawford
Lost Hearts • (1895) • shortstory by M. R. James
History of the Young Man With Spectacles • (1895) • shortstory by Arthur Machen
The Yellow Sign • (1895) • novelette by Robert W. Chambers
The Red Room • (1896) • shortstory by H. G. Wells
Oil of Dog • (1890) • shortstory by Ambrose Bierce
The Willows • (1907) • novelette by Algernon Blackwood
The Voice in the Night • (1907) • shortstory by William Hope Hodgson
August Heat • (1910) • shortstory by William Fryer Harvey [as by W. F. Harvey]
The Exiles' Club • (1915) • shortstory by Lord Dunsany (aka The Exile's Club)
The Call of Cthulhu • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1928) • novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
A Visitor from Egypt • (1930) • shortstory by Frank Belknap Long
The Graveyard Rats • (1936) • shortstory by Henry Kuttner
Rope Enough • (1939) • shortstory by John Collier
They Bite • (1943) • shortstory by Anthony Boucher
Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper • (1943) • shortstory by Robert Bloch
Homecoming • [The Elliott Famil] • (1946) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury (aka The Homecoming)
The House in Goblin Wood • (1947) • novelette by John Dickson Carr [as by Carter Dickson]
The Man Who Never Grew Young • (1947) • shortstory by Fritz Leiber
Born of Man and Woman • (1950) • shortstory by Richard Matheson
Levitation • (1958) • shortstory by Joseph Payne Brennan

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.