GHOST STORIES

The term "ghost story" has been widely employed to denote an entire range of literary works that suggest the existence of supernatural entities, whether they be actual ghosts or other creatures such as vampires, were-wolves, witches, or revenants (the dead revived to a semblance of life); the term has even been used, over the objections of some theorists, to denote works embodying supernatural scenarios of a broader kind, such as haunted houses, fantastic voyages, or speculative tales of the future. In recent years the terms "super-natural fiction" or "weird fiction" have been proposed as more representative of the wide range of conceptions exhibited by such literature, but whatever genre designation one uses, the works to be studied here have in common the suggestion of at least a single departure from mimetic realism, whether that suggestion is ultimately explained away naturalistically or is made for symbolic, metaphorical, or allegorical purposes.

In the United States, the shadow of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) loomed large in this domain for a century after his death. Although relatively few of Poe's works could be considered ghost stories or even super-natural tales in the strictest sense, he effected a radical revolution of the conventions of gothic literature that had already become stale in the two generations after their initiation in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). The gothic novels of that period were almost entirely a British phenomenon, and the lone American representative of any consequence, Charles Brockden Brown, did not attain widespread recognition. American writers were faced with a curious historical dilemma in translating British gothic fiction to their shores: since most of that fiction was set in the medieval age (in order to render the exhibition of supernatural phenomena more plausible by a patina of remoteness and primitive superstition), how does one write gothic fiction in a land that had no medieval period? Poe solved the problem by transferring the locus of terror to the baffling workings of the human mind ("The Tell-Tale Heart"; "Ligeia") or by setting his tales in a nebulous never-never-land ("The Fall of the House of Usher") or by transferring his characters to remote settings (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). But what Poe established for a century and a half by his meticulous example was the radical superiority of the short story as a conveyer of fear, so that the novel of the supernatural became a rare exception.

Poe—and to a lesser degree his younger contemporary Fitz-James O'Brien, whose promising career as a supernaturalist ("What Was It?"; "The Diamond Lens") was cut short by his death in the Civil War—did not garner disciples immediately. It took a generation or two for successors to emerge, but when they did so they not merely developed his intense investigation of aberrant psychology but, curiously, adapted the ghost story to the purposes of regionalism. Accordingly two distinct schools, one on the West Coast and the other on the East Coast, emerged as inheritors of Poe's legacy.

THE WEST COAST SCHOOL

The most distinguished of the West Coast school was Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?). His taste for the super-natural developed early in his career, if the satirical squib "The Discomfited Demon," a dialogue between a devil and a ghoul included in The Fiend's Delight (1873), is any indication. But the bulk of Bierce's tales of psychological and supernatural horror were produced when he became William Randolph Hearst's chief editorial writer for the San Francisco Examiner in 1887. During the next six years he generated one of the most impressive bodies of short fiction in all American literature, most of it collected in two landmark volumes, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891, but actually issued in February 1892) and Can Such Things Be? (1893). The former volume, of course, also contained his gripping tales of the Civil War, many of which can themselves be considered works of psychological horror by the grim, at times bitterly cynical investigation of their characters' emotional traumas as they face the horrors of war. But the latter volume—especially as Bierce revised it for the third volume of his Collected Works (1909–1912)—is exclusively devoted to stories of the supernatural, ranging from the spectacular supernatural-revenge tale "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" (Examiner, 17 August 1890) to the ambiguous "The Death of Halpin Frayser" (Wave, 19 December 1891), perhaps the pinnacle of his supernatural output in its appalling suggestions of mother-son incest and the death of that son by the "lich" (soulless revenant) that his mother has become. A later tale, "The Moonlit Road" (Cosmopolitan, January 1907), displays a trilogy of narratives—by Joel Hetman Jr.; his father, Joel Hetman Sr. (now going by the name Caspar Grattan); and his mother, the late Julia Hetman, "through the medium Bayrolles." Each of these figures is missing a vital piece of information that could have averted tragedy; instead, the misunderstandings cause Julia's death at the hands of her own husband.

It is difficult to deny that Bierce's tales of the Civil War and of psychological horror are considerably superior to his supernatural tales. The latter are almost always ghost stories, such as the lackluster and unimaginative "Beyond the Wall" (Cosmopolitan, December 1907), and in many cases the climax of the tale is merely the confirmation that something supernatural has actually occurred. The satire that is at the very heart of Bierce's work finds its most piquant expression in those non-supernatural tales, whether of soldiers or civilians, that display human beings psychologically crushed by the weight of fear—whether it be the fear of death as embodied by a corpse ("A Tough Tussle," Examiner, 30 September 1888; "A Watcher by the Dead," Examiner, 29 December 1889), or the fear of being thought a coward in battle ("George Thurston," Wasp, 29 September 1883; "Killed at Resaca," Examiner, 5 June 1887).

Bierce's achievement, in such tales as "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" and "The Boarded Window" (Examiner, 12 April 1891), was to convey the latent horror to be found in the deserted mining camps and boomtowns of the West, where spectacular wealth, decadence, and lawlessness could be followed by the sudden departure of its generally crude and ill-educated denizens for greener pastures. This was the dark side of the settlement of the West whose more wholesome facets had been presented by Bierce's early colleague Bret Harte. These ghost towns could then serve as potently as the focus of supernaturalism as the hoariest castle of old Europe.

Almost by accident Bierce produced a few pioneering tales that looked forward to future developments of the form. "Moxon's Master" (Examiner, 16 April 1899), although possibly derived in some degree from Poe's "Maelzel's Chess-Player" (1836) effectively exhibits a robot gradually developing quasi-human emotions and can be thought of as a work of proto–science fiction. Even more significant is "The Damned Thing" (Town Topics, 7 December 1893), although it may owe something to Fitz-James O'Brien's "What Was It?" In this account of an invisible monster, Bierce probes the notion of "colors that we cannot see" (i.e., infrared and ultraviolet rays); as his protagonist proclaims melodramatically at the end: "And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a color!" The influence of this tale on such later stories of invisible monsters as Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo" and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Colour out of Space" and "The Dunwich Horror" is patent.

Bierce gradually gathered around him a band of like-minded colleagues and disciples who both vaunted his own work and strove to capture something of his psychological insight and sense of place. Perhaps the most distinguished of these is W. C. Morrow (1854–1923), son of slave-owning parents in Selma, Alabama, who came to California in 1879. For the next twenty years he wrote voluminously for the Argonaut and other San Francisco papers, publishing dozens of short stories as well as the acclaimed novel Blood-Money (1882), a scathing exposé of the ruthlessness of the railroad industry in the state. The piquantly titled The Ape, the Idiot, and Other People (1897) contains only fourteen stories, and not necessarily his best ones. The great majority are tales of psychological suspense, but his most famous story, "The Monster-Maker" (Argonaut, 15 October 1887), is a gripping account of a crazed surgeon who, when a despairing man wishes to be euthanized, uses the body for an experiment in creating a headless but animate entity. It may perhaps be misleading to refer to Morrow as merely a disciple of Bierce, for the chronology of his tales suggests that he himself may have influenced Bierce or that they mutually influenced each other. Another colleague, Emma Frances Dawson (1851–1926), included some ghost stories in The Itinerant House and Other Stories (1897).

THE EAST COAST SCHOOL

The East Coast school of supernatural writing might itself be said to have split into two branches, one centering around the New England regionalists and the other coalescing around the imposing figure of Henry James. A quartet of women writers—Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930), Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), and Olivia Howard Dunbar (1873–1953)—emphatically drew upon the craggy landscape and history of New England as a means of simulating the hoary medievalism that in Europe facilitated the introduction of the supernatural. Freeman's volume of ghost stories The Wind in the Rose-Bush (1903) does not necessarily represent her at her best; the tales, all written for Everybody's Magazine in the year prior to their book publication, focus almost claustrophobically upon the pinched lives of New Englanders trapped by archaic notions of decorum and propriety, leading to cruelty, neglect, and outright savagery that entail inevitable supernatural vengeance. The title story of this collection, for example, features the ghost of a neglected child, while "The Southwest Chamber" features a malevolent old woman whose hatred survives her death.

If Freeman's supernatural tales are set in an increasingly urbanized milieu, Jewett's tales draw poignantly upon the wild and unforgiving landscape of the untenanted Maine woods to evoke fear. Although she produced no single volume of ghost stories, Jewett throughout her career employed the supernatural as a means of adding depth to her portrayal of character and landscape. Her most celebrated work, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), contains only one incidental supernatural episode, but several short stories tread the borderline between psychological and supernatural horror. Perhaps her most successful tale in this regard is "In Dark New England Days" (Century Magazine, October 1890; in Strangers and Wayfarers, 1890), in which two sisters, Betsey and Hannah Knowles, after a long, hard life, lose a fortune in silver coins and curse the right hand of the man they suspect of the crime, Enoch Holt; subsequently three members of the Holt family, including Enoch, lose their right hands. Ambiguity is maintained to the end as to the perpetrator of the crime and whether the supernatural has genuinely come into play, but the story is an unforgettable depiction of the cheerless poverty of an aging New England family. "The Foreigner" (Atlantic Monthly, August 1900) is a powerful portrayal of a French-born woman who marries a New England sea captain but is never accepted by the community; on her deathbed she and her one friend see the ghost of her mother, who comes to bear her spirit away.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote relatively little fiction in the midst of a busy career as magazine editor and crusader for women's rights, but she did produce several ghostly tales. "The Giant Wistaria" (New England Magazine, June 1891), is a seemingly lighthearted but ultimately grim story of a ghost of a woman who had had a child out of wedlock—and who, it is suggested, was murdered along with her baby by her own shame-stricken family. Gilman's signature piece, however, is "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (New England Magazine, January 1892), which has become emblematic as a feminist tract; its central scenario is reflected in the title of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's pioneering study of literary feminism, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). And yet it has not been widely observed that this tale of a woman who, suffering from postpartum depression, is all but imprisoned in the attic of an old house in New England to which her husband has taken her for a "rest cure," is in fact a tale of the supernatural, and not merely one of progressive madness. The tale provides numerous clues that the attic was not a place where, as the protagonist initially believes, children were housed but where a madwoman, or perhaps even a succession of mad-women, has been confined, and that the protagonist is insidiously possessed by the spirit of one of these until at the end she identifies herself with one of the previous occupants. This supernatural interpretation need not in any way contradict the feminist message of the text, where the infantilization of women and the condescension of male physicians in regard to women's ailments are emphasized; in many ways the reinterpretation of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" as an authentic ghost story enhances the feminist message by hinting at generations of psychological abuse of women.

Another feminist, Olivia Howard Dunbar, wrote a handful of ghost stories that similarly underscored her sociopolitical concerns. "The Shell of Sense" (Harper's, December 1908) is a remarkable ghost story narrated in the first person by the ghost of a woman whose husband has married her sister, and whose fluctuating emotions—love, jealousy, resentment, pity—are effectively captured by Dunbar's elegant prose. Perhaps Dunbar's greatest weird tale is "The Long Chamber" (Harper's, September 1914), in which a woman who had subordinated her life to that of her husband sees a ghost who inspires her to achieve independence and emotional fulfillment. Dunbar's ghost stories are marked by exquisitely orchestrated prose, delicate character portrayal, and skill at employing the supernatural as a symbol for profound thematic concerns.

From the cramped quarters of the New England regionalists to the social expanse of Henry James's Europe and America would seem a significant shift, but James too could invoke the claustrophobia of ghosts and haunted houses almost in spite of the flaccid orotundity of his prose. Of The Turn of the Screw (1898) it is difficult to speak in small compass, and many scholars have accepted Edmund Wilson's thesis that the tale is by design irresolvable: there is an insufficiency of clues as to whether the events depicted—a governess tending to a man's two small children believes herself haunted by the ghosts of Peter Quint, the man's former valet, and Miss Jessel, the governess's predecessor—are supernatural or psychological in origin. The supernatural interpretation appears to dominate at the start, but as the narrative proceeds the reader's increasing suspicions about the reliability of the governess's account throw the matter into doubt—a doubt that is maintained to the end. Some scholars of the genre, most notably Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic (1970), have found this tale so compelling as to vaunt it as the prototypical fantastic narrative, although this kind of ambiguous weird tale is in fact quite rare: the great majority of horror tales resolve fairly clearly into the supernatural or the psychological mode. James of course wrote an abundance of other weird tales—collected by Leon Edel in The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (1949)—but his most innovative venture might have been his final work, the unfinished novel The Sense of the Past, depicting a man who falls into the past and fears that he will remain there.

James's fellow expatriate F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909) was considerably less subtle in his horror tales, and it is of some significance that, although immensely prolific and popular, he himself never bothered to collect his scattered tales of the supernatural; they were assembled only posthumously in Wandering Ghosts (1911). It certainly cannot be said that Crawford showed any inclination to follow James in the meticulous dissection of the shifting psychological states of his characters; nevertheless, his most celebrated weird tale, the much-reprinted "The Upper Berth" (1886), is a triumph of cumulative horror. This account of a cold, wet, oozy entity that haunts the upper berth of a passenger ship is made the more effective by its narration by a bluff, no-nonsense protagonist named Brisbane. Of "The Dead Smile" (Ainslee's, August 1899) it is impossible to speak without a smile: this venture into unrestrained, "oh my god" horror is nonetheless effective in its very excess of lurid prose and its suggestions of incest.

More in line with James's style and methodology was the work of his friend Edith Wharton (1862–1937), the final representative of the conventional ghost story. Wharton collected her earlier supernatural tales in Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) and more definitively in her last volume, Ghosts (1937), which includes an illuminating essay on the ghost story. And yet even her most artfully crafted weird tale, "Afterward" (Century Magazine, January 1910), is nothing more than a skillful portrayal of supernatural revenge. Another, more distant colleague of James's, the Californian Gertrude Atherton (1857–1948), could be said to have effected a union between the East Coast and West Coast schools of ghostly writing. Her principal collection of supernatural tales, The Bell in the Fog (1905), is dedicated to James, and its title story (Smart Set, August 1903) features a lonely writer, clearly based on James, who believes that a little girl he encounters near his ancestral estate in England is the revenant of a girl whose portrait hangs in his home.

What is surprising is the degree to which, during this period, the most unlikely writers made forays into the weird, either for the space of a single story or perhaps an entire volume. The architect Ralph Adams Cram produced a slim body of ghost stories, Black Spirits & White (1895), including the masterful tale of a haunted locale "The Dead Valley." Julian Hawthorne, although laboring under the shadow of his celebrated father, Nathaniel (himself a highly skilled manipulator of supernatural imagery in novel and tale alike), regularly included at least one token ghost story in nearly every one of his story collections of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, although his greatest contribution was the ten-volume Lock and Key Library (1909), a still-valuable anthology of mystery and super-natural tales from world literature. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, William Dean Howells, the reigning dean of American letters, filled two entire volumes, Questionable Shapes (1903) and Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907), with a series of somewhat attenuated supernatural tales. At the turn of the twentieth century several popular magazines, such as Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, and Ainslee's, opened their pages to the weird, and leading short-story writers of the period did not fail to supply them. Although O. Henry skirted the supernatural in several tales, only one, the much-reprinted "The Furnished Room" (1904), can be considered an authentic ghost story.

LOOKING FORWARD

A scattered array of novelists and short-story writers around the turn of the twentieth century produced, almost by accident, a body of work that carried the supernatural tale into new directions, directly influencing the generations that followed them. These writers either abandoned or so radically modified the conventional ghost and haunted house that they became pioneers in spite of themselves. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century the standard literary ghost had in some quarters become an object of derision and mockery. The advance of scientific knowledge rendered increasingly unlikely the reality of ghostly manifestations, and such writers as John Kendrick Bangs and Frank R. Stockton had no compunction in poking fun at the form. Bangs's much-reprinted "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" (in The Water Ghost and Others, 1894) is prototypical: a female ghost who creates a nuisance by dousing the phlegmatic owner of a decrepit old house with water is finally dispatched by being led out into the bitter cold of a Christmas Eve and being frozen. In Stockton's best-known supernatural tale, "The Transferred Ghost" (Century Magazine, May 1882), a ghost is assigned to haunt a house even though the ghost's body is still living.

A highly surprising contributor to the new trend in supernatural writing was Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933)—surprising because, although he wrote some scintillating weird tales early in his career, he later prostituted himself with an unending succession of shopgirl romances that ensured his material comfort but spelled his aesthetic undoing and ultimate oblivion in the Gehenna of outdated bestsellerdom. And yet The King in Yellow (1895), his second volume, drawing a bit affectedly upon his early experiences as an art student in Paris, is nonetheless remarkable in the nightmarish intensity of some of its tales. "The Repairer of Reputations" depicts a New York of the 1920s that has arisen white and austere from the horrors of Victorian architecture and in which euthanasia chambers are available to assist those who wish to slough off the burden of a tiresome existence. "The Yellow Sign" potently describes an artist pursued by a hideous hearse driver who himself seems to be not merely dead but rotting. Later works by Chambers mingle humor and horror in increasingly ineffective ways, the nadir being reached in Police!!! (1915), whose interesting conceptions—mammoths in the glaciers of Canada, a group of "cave-ladies" in the Everglades, a school of minnows the size of railroad cars—are spoiled by flippancy and a meretricious love interest.

In Robert W. Chambers's In Search of the Unknown (1904), the narrator, an employee of the Bronx Zoo, travels to a place in Canada known as Black Harbor and, in the company of Burton Halyard (a local resident) and his nurse, encounters the hybrid amphibian entity known locally as the harbor-master.

"What's that soft thumping?" I asked. "Have we run afoul of a barrel or log?"

It was almost too dark to see, but I leaned over the rail and swept the water with my hand.

Instantly something smooth glided under it, like the back of a great fish, and I jerked my hand back to the tiller. At the same moment the whole surface of the water seemed to begin to purr, with a sound like the breaking of froth in a champagne-glass.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Halyard, sharply.

"A fish came up under my hand," I said; "a porpoise or something—"

With a low cry, the pretty nurse clasped my arm in both her hands.

"Listen!" she whispered. "It's purring around the boat."

"What the devil's purring?" shouted Halyard. "I won't have anything purring around me!"

At that moment, to my amazement, I saw that the boat had stopped entirely, although the sail was full and the small pennant fluttered from the masthead. Something, too, was tugging at the rudder, twisting and jerking it until the tiller strained and creaked in my hand. All at once it snapped; the tiller swung useless and the boat whirled around, heeling in the stiffening wind, and drove shoreward.

It was then that I, ducking to escape the boom, caught a glimpse of something ahead—something that a sudden wave seemed to toss on deck and leave there, wet and flapping—a man with round, fixed, fishy eyes, and soft, slaty skin.

But the horror of the thing were the two gills that swelled and relaxed spasmodically, emitting a rasping, purring sound—two gasping, blood-red gills, all fluted and scolloped and distended.

Frozen with amazement and repugnance, I stared at the creature; I felt the hair stirring on my head and the icy sweat on my forehead.

"It's the harbor-master!" screamed Halyard.

Robert W. Chambers, In Search of the Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904), pp. 32–33.

Chambers's In Search of the Unknown (1904), however, introduces the notion of hybridity that a number of other writers also developed. Its opening chapters—originally published as a story, "The Harbor-Master" (Ainslee's, August 1899)—terrifyingly depicts a creature that appears to be half-human and half-fish, with the suggestion that an entire colony of such entities dwells under the sea. The popular Irvin S. Cobb (1876–1944), chiefly known as a humorist, utilized this same conception in "Fishhead" (All-Story Cavalier, 11 January 1913), about a rustic mixed-blood fisherman who has an anomalous affinity to the enormous catfish that populate the Kentucky lake near which he dwells. Gouverneur Morris (1876–1953) also enjoyed tremendous popularity as a short-story writer, and in "Back There in the Grass" (Collier's, 16 December 1911) he continues the theme of hybridity in presenting a colony of foot-high half-human, half-snake entities on a Polynesian island. The early work of Edward Lucas White (1866–1934) can also be cited in this context, for many of the horror tales in The Song of the Sirens (1919) and Lukundoo (1927) were written in the first decade of the twentieth century but not published until their book appearance. "The Snout" (written in 1909) concerns a band of thieves who come upon a half-man, half-pig in the rich mansion they seek to rob.

There is considerable evidence to suggest that this theme of hybridity was a response both to concerns regarding the biological integrity of the human species in light of Darwinian evolution and to fears of miscegenation in the wake of the immense influx of immigrants in the period 1890–1920. Another horror story by Cobb, "The Unbroken Chain" (Cosmopolitan, September 1923), is openly racist in its premise. A Frenchman whose ancestry can be traced back to an African slave experiences an access of "hereditary memory" when he cries out in an obscure African language as he is run over by a train—an echo of his ancestor's death by a rhinoceros. Robert W. Chambers's later novel The Slayer of Souls (1920) clumsily mingles super-naturalism with the "yellow peril" topos, depicting a band of Asians, descended from the "devil-worshipping" Yezidis of central Asia, threatening to overthrow the U.S. government.

Cobb's "Fishhead" was published in one of the numerous magazines of Frank A. Munsey's publishing empire. Munsey, whose first magazine, the Golden Argosy, began issuance in 1882, was very accommodating to stories of fantasy, terror, and proto–science fiction (notably the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose stories of Tarzan began appearing in 1912), but these forerunners of the pulp magazines tended to cater to the poorly educated by purveying contrived, shoddily written tales generated by a cadre of hack writers who could write stories of any given genre almost at will. They—along with such other early magazines as the Black Cat (1895–1923) and the Popular Magazine (1903–1927), issued by Street & Smith—may have had a role in the eventual banishing of weird material from the standard "slick" magazines, a tendency radically augmented by the full-fledged emergence of the pulps in the 1920s.

The horror fiction of this period, diverse as it is, is united by its demonstration that the use of the supernatural, whether it be a ghost, a haunted house, or some less classifiable phenomenon, need not result in mere shudder-coining. The supernatural was shown to enhance the portrayal of character, the probing of aberrant psychology, and the depiction of landscape in all its historic and cultural richness. That some of the leading writers of the period chose this venue to express their literary concerns confirms the viability of the ghost story as art form no less worthy of critical attention than its congeners in mimetic realism.

See alsoPseudoscience; "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bierce, Ambrose. Can Such Things Be? New York: Cassell, 1893.

Bierce, Ambrose. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. San Francisco: E. L. G. Steele, 1891 [1892].

Chambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow. New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895.

Cram, Ralph Adams. Black Spirits and White. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895.

Crawford, F. Marion. Wandering Ghosts. New York: Macmillan, 1911.

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903.

James, Henry. The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End. New York: Macmillan, 1898.

Morrow, W. C. The Ape, the Idiot and Other People. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1897.

Wharton, Edith. Ghosts. New York: Appleton-Century, 1937.

White, Edward Lucas. Lukundoo and Other Stories. New York: George H. Doran, 1927.

Secondary Works

Daniels, Les. Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media. New York: Scribners, 1975.

Grenander, M. E. Ambrose Bierce. New York: Twayne, 1971.

Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Joshi, S. T. The Weird Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Lovecraft, H. P. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1927. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000.

Moskowitz, Sam. Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

Moskowitz, Sam. "W. C. Morrow: Forgotten Master of Horror—First Phase." In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, pp. 127–173. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1992.

Penzoldt, Peter. The Supernatural in Fiction. London: Peter Nevill, 1952.

Ringel, Faye. New England's Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural from the Seventeenth through the Twentieth Centuries. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.

Robillard, Douglas, ed. American Supernatural Fiction: From Edith Wharton to the Weird Tales Writers. New York: Garland, 1996.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973. Translation of Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970).

Weinstein, Lee. "'The Yellow Wallpaper': A Supernatural Interpretation." Studies in Weird Fiction 4 (fall 1988): 23–25.

Wilson, Edmund. "The Ambiguity of Henry James." Hound and Horn 7 (1934): 385–406. Reprinted in Wilson's The Triple Thinkers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938.

S. T. Joshi