The Cask of Amontillado

Fortunato (left) and Montresor (Wikimedia)

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Sorry, Stephen King: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) still reigns as America's all-time greatest horror writer. And we're not just talking "ghost stories," but the horror that lies in the depths of the human soul. Case in point: the 1846 story "The Cask of Amontillado," in which an obviously-mad narrator named Montresor--"my treasure," reminding us of Gollum and his "precious"--takes revenge for some unnamed insult on his inaptly-named "friend," Fortunato ("Lucky").

The form of the revenge itself is horrifying enough, but the manner of Montresor's behavior chills the reader to the bone. He is devious, clever--and heartless, to the point where he actually pauses in his work to take pleasure in Fortunato's distress. And, he gets away with it; unlike the conclusion of, say, "The Tell-Tale Heart," there is no Justice here. There is no guilty conscious, but rather a boastful satisfaction.

Yikes.

Note: Items in [square brackets] and the notes were added by yours truly.

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Monsters in the Odyssey

Odysseus tells his story to King Alcinous and his wife Queen Arete. (Wikimedia)

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Homer's book The Odyssey begins in medias res, "in the middle of things," with Odysseus's son Telemachus setting out to find his lost father. We pick up the story with Odysseus captive on Calypso's island--one of the last stops in the journey--and then visiting the land of the Phaeacians, where the hero recounts his journey thus far. This is the pith of Odysseus's odyssey. It's in Books 9-12 (of 24), near the middle of The Odyssey. (The remaining books are about Odysseus's return to Ithaca and the challenges he faces there.)

There's good reason to think of this King of Ithaca as "clever Odysseus," because he had to be mighty clever to overcome the trials of that 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. (It was he who devised the "Trojan Horse" as a means to bring that war to an end--clever indeed!) Drawing on his name, his journey is how we got the English common noun for a long, eventful journey: "an odyssey."

When we think of his odyssey, we can see it largely as a series of encounters with one monster after another.

Note: Items in [square brackets] and the notes were added by yours truly.

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"Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"

The creature (Wikimedia)

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Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a medieval scholar at Cambridge College, covering some of the same academic ground as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis did later at Oxford. His knowledge of medieval culture and its artifacts provides a starting point for the ghost stories he tells, which are uniformly chilling.

His usual technique has been dubbed "Jamesian": as in this story, he typically starts with a fairly realistic contemporary situation: here a rather quirky professor is planning a sort of working holiday. The protagonist then finds an object which somehow draws the attention of a supernatural menace. After the encounter (or sometimes slightly before it) there is (usually) a "swerve" and the protagonist escapes danger.

It works! He wrote well over 30 ghost stories (in addition to his voluminous academic output); virtually all of his tales can be found free online.

Treasure Island

N. C. Wyeth's cover of the 1911 edition of Treasure Island (Wikimedia)

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The Pirates of the Caribbean series of films--and many, many other books, films, and TV shows besides--trace their origins to a common ancestor, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 novel Treasure Island, with its captivating villain, a pirate named Long John Silver.

Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Scotland but traveled the world before he died at the young age of 44. In his brief life he wrote over a dozen novels and many other works. Aside from Treasure Island, perhaps his most famous book is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, about a man with two personalities: one good and one evil.

This is interesting, because in Long John Silver, we see a man who is both good and evil. This charming rascal is more than just a "bad guy"; Stevenson's skill as a writer makes it seem possible that this pirate leader might have a soft heart after all.

If you think pirates speak a certain way, or that they have parrots, or that they drink rum, or that they "walk the plank"--well, thank Robert Louis Stevenson!

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Childe Rowland: An English Fairy Tale

The Dark Tower, by Thomas Moran (Wikimedia)

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The justly-famous Brothers Grimm were not the only collectors of fairy tales before the 20th century. Charles Perrault did the same with French stories, though he spruced them up quite a bit more than the Grimms did, creating literary fairy tales out of the earlier folk tales; the Grimms left the ones they published more-or-less "raw." Perrault brought us stories like "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," and "Sleeping Beauty"--over two centuries before the Grimms.

And in England there was the Australian-born Joseph Jacobs (1854-1916), who returned to his father's country--England--at the age of 18. His English Fairy Tales appeared in 1890, several decades after the Grimms. It was the first of a half-dozen books of fairy tales among the dozens of other books he wrote or edited, and it brought us the best-known versions (though not necessarily the first published) of such stories as "Jack and the Beanstalk," "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," and "The Three Little Pigs."

In English Fairy Tales he also published a story which, while not as famous as those three, is probably my favorite fairy tale of all time, one which has had an enormous influence on literature far beyond its genre.

"Childe Rowland" tells a simple story with many recognizable themes: the third brother (this time with a sister); "low literature" remnants of King Arthur stories; the mystical advisor; the One Forbidden Thing; a famous sword "that never struck in vain"; a literal battle between Good and Evil; and much more!