by
Philip Jenkins
Baylor University
The current fascination with folk horror as a genre began with British contributions in cinema and literature, and that focus is still obvious, despite all the efforts to broaden and globalize the narrative. Even today, the American part of the story is still seriously under-valued, particularly early writings that long precede the British wave of the 1960s. If I was looking for the first ever piece of writing in folk horror, I would make the case for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), while Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948) is an obvious early classic. Here, I want to highlight a work that still stands among the very first full-length novels in this tradition written in any country, and one that already at its early date fulfils all the criteria for the folk horror label. This is The Place Called Dagon, by Herbert S. Gorman, published in 1927. Although it is poorly known today, it still makes for very rewarding reading.
By way o
f background, The Place Called Dagon was one of many literary responses to the theories of Margaret A. Murray, who argued that the historic witch trials were uncovering the actual deeds of a genuine underground cult, which represented a paganism that survived intact beneath the Christian veneer of Early Modern Europe. In this view, witches and their Sabbats really had existed. As John Buchan wrote of seventeenth century Scotland, this was a time “when the rigours of the new Calvinism were contending with the ancient secret rites of Diana.” First published in book form in her 1921 The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, those ideas were reflected in several major British novels and short stories through the interwar years.
Murray’s theories had a special appeal in the United States, where an increasingly urban society was open to dark fantasies about just what was going on in the rural backwaters. A sensationalist media focused on local tales of witches, wizards, and witch-murders, and duly amplified them. In turn, those ideas fueled fictional writings in magazines like Weird Tales (founded 1923), and in the writings of authors like H. P. Lovecraft. Many writings of this time amply justify the “folk horror” description, although remarkably few are noted in the current scholarly literature. For present purposes, the key work was The Place Called Dagon, which Lovecraft described in his 1927 Supernatural Horror in Literature as a story that “relates the dark history of a western Massachusetts backwater where the descendants of refugees from the Salem witchcraft still keep alive the morbid and degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat.” That Lovecraftian endorsement means that the book has received attention from that author’s countless fans, but as far I can see, it has little presence in folk horror scholarship.
Herbert Gorman (1893-1954) was a significant figure in the American literary world of his day. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, he is best known today as a pioneering biographer of James Joyce, whose genius he already recognized by the early 1920s. His Greenwich Village salon hosted such figures as Stephen Vincent Benét, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis. Amazingly, Gorman still lacks a Wikipedia entry in English – although there is one in Spanish (!)
Gorman had multiple interests and passions, and two in particular drew him to the horror genre. First, his intimate familiarity with nineteenth-century France allowed him to draw freely on French speculations concerning the Black Mass. The Black Mass achieved a literary revival in the decadent literature of late nineteenth-century France, and an extensive account appeared in J.-K. Huysmans’ novel Là–Bas (Down There). Gorman knew this literature well.
But he also wrote extensively on nineteenth-century American writers like Longfellow and Hawthorne, and it was precisely in 1927 that Gorman also published his biography, Hawthorne: A Study In Solitude. Now, the Hawthorne link is critical, since Hawthorne too was deeply interested in New England witch persecutions. “Young Goodman Brown” can be read as describing a genuine rural witch-cult, though the standard reading is that the story involves a fantasy or delusion. What Gorman did was to bring that witch-cult idea into the twentieth century, and to take the totally unprecedented step of presenting an occult or Satanic theme in the context of modern-day 1920s America.
In The Place Called Dagon, Gorman argues that the original Salem witches
belonged to a secret and blasphemous order that met all over the world, that they were divided into covens or parishes, that they each had their leader in the shape of a Black Man who represented the devil, and that they attempted to practice magic…. The trappings and the ceremonies and the results might appear supernatural, but that was because the people in those days did not know about such things as thought-transference, auto-suggestion and the impulsion of the will.
But those witches had not vanished after the great persecutions of 1692. Instead, some of the group fled to the remote Massachusetts settlement of “Dagon” where they raised the great altar of the Devil Stone.
By day they were taciturn people, carrying on the quiet masquerade of pioneers, building up homes in the clearing, pushing the forest farther and farther back; but when the moon rose, the madness that was in their blood swept them out of themselves and they became other creatures employing pagan symbols and ancient phallic ceremonials. They existed in a domain out of place and time then, in a land of hallucinations and dreams and primitive urges.
In modern times, a charismatic leader
reinstituted witch meetings, formed a coven here, and made himself the ruling Black Man … These people lead two lives, and one of them is the surface life that we see going on about us. The other is the secret life that centers about the place called Dagon.
Every word of this could be quoted to illustrate folk horror at its purest. It imagines a remote and isolated community practicing a radically deviant belief system, a “secret life,” and one ultimately based on blood and human sacrifice. We discover these subterranean evils through the intervention of an outsider from our own real world – in this case, the physician Daniel Dreeme, who is summoned to treat the cult leader Jeffrey Westcott for a gunshot wound.
At the climax, we see the secret rituals at Dagon, at which Asmodeus is invoked in a kind of Black Mass. The affair culminates in the attempted sacrifice of a woman, which is interrupted when the hero attacks the group’s leader, the Reverend George Burroughs (this was of course the name of the actual minister at Salem in 1692).
The name Dagon evoked some bitter controversies of seventeenth century New England, which suggested that that Puritan society really had had its covert pagan side. The case in question was the notorious incident in 1627-28 in which dissidents erected a maypole of the type familiar from the English countryside, and held a festive gathering under the auspices of the Lord and Lady of the May. The story is recounted in Hawthorne’s “Maypole of Merry Mount” (1836), and is echoed faithfully by Gorman throughout The Place Called Dagon. Aware of its pagan connotations, outraged Puritan leaders denounced the maypole as a Dagon, after an idol mentioned in the Bible. That association offered later writers a template for stories about covert pagan practices lingering in supposedly Christian New England, and that is what Gorman has exploited so enthusiastically. (H. P. Lovecraft also wrote about secret cults of Dagon pursuing their evil actions, although that is beyond my scope here).
If you have any interest in the origins and development of folk horror, then do read The Place Called Dagon, which is available from Hippocampus Press.
Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, where he serves in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has published thirty books, including The Next Christendom: The Coming Of Global Christianity (2002) and Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval (2021). The Economist has called him “one of America’s best scholars of religion.” His books have been translated into sixteen languages. Jenkins has written for Horror Homeroom on a buried folk horror TV episode from 1961, “Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook.” You can read more of Jenkins’ work on folk horror at his website.
