Irene Pagano
Lonely, unwanted or neglected children often star as main characters in fantastical narratives. In the case of children’s horror, as Justine Gieni highlights in Punishing the Abject Child, this tendency originally derives from the entanglement of a proposed pedagogical intent and a willingness to challenge the strictures imposed by the former via the catharsis of fear. Nevertheless, most modern children’s horror books seem to have moved away from frightening children into obedience. Jessica McCort underscores, in reference to Neil Gaiman’s seminal dark tale Coraline, how the author “asks his readers to go into the book seeing the terrifying as something that, with a lot of pluck and a little luck, can be soundly defeated”, therefore empowering the audience by making them the monster-slayer (17). Reassuring children that they can overcome life’s challenges is important, but I believe in the necessity of delivering opposite messages as well: dragons can’t always be successfully annihilated; and sometimes, once they are, the weapons that used to protect us reveal themselves to be just as dangerous as the beast itself.
By developing around “repeated patterns of inexplicable violence” , Leander Deeny’s Hazel’s Phantasmagoria (2007) and the first two installments of Chris Priestley’s Tales of Terror series (Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror, 2007; Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, 2008) convey that instances of brutality often transcend the causality principle and that what is traditionally codified as retribution is more dependent on pure happenstance than on an alleged transgression of rules enforced by adults(Vránková 60). These texts also center the protagonist’s coming to terms with sources of terror rather than triumphing over them. Without hope of achieving a wholesome ending, the characters are led to acknowledge their vulnerability to traumatic circumstances of the past and present, as well as their ability to react.
Figure one: Uncle Montague and Edgar, illustr. by David Roberts
In every volume of Priestley’s Tales of Terror series, the titular tales of terror are introduced by frame stories with a repeated set-up: the young protagonists are separated from their parents and find themselves in company of a mysterious storyteller who delights them and terrifies them with his tales. The latter tends to follow a formulaic structure: a weird child encounters supernatural peril and succumbs to an excruciating death. The tales’ main characters range from simply unlikeable to disturbing and downright homicidal children. Nevertheless, the children aren’t categorically othered, their indulgence into evil-doing often identified as a form of retaliation against the abuse or indifference of their peers and caretakers. The text “explicitly addresses itself to the frightened child figured in children’s fairy tales and “bogeyman” stories, while making full use of the figure of the frightening child so popular in adult horror texts”, therefore destabilizing the dichotomous depiction of children as either monstrous or inherently innocent (Buckley 242).
In Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror, we follow young Edgar’s visit to his Uncle Montague, who lives a solitary life in a dilapidated mansion. Montague is a collector: his house is crowded with creepy antiques, whose frightful stories he compulsively recounts. His obsession for the haunted artefacts and the children whose demise they caused stems from the need to atone for the suffering he brought onto a child under his supervision. Once a gambler and the headmaster of a boarding school, Montague caused the suicide of one of his pupils by stealing money from his peers and laying the blame on the student instead. After this event left him in ruins, Uncle Montague becomes willingly entrapped in the double role of caretaker for the ghosts of young children and narrator of their stories, keeping their memory alive and with it, a warning: sometimes we are struck by horror so intense that it defies all explanation. It is through this mechanism that the cautionary intent of children’s horror tales is rejected in favour of a consolatory, albeit pessimistic one.
Indeed, the victims’ demise isn’t portrayed as rightful punishment and, no matter how unruly or antisocial their behaviour is, the reader is never invited to withdraw their sympathy. Even when directly resulting from the character’s misconduct, their end is framed as tragic and the despair the child and their loved ones suffer are described in close (and sufficiently gruesome) detail. Macabre fatality exudes from the tales since the very beginning: when a runaway boy is stalked and thrown off a mountain path by a projection of his own scrambling disfigured corpse, or when a jealous little girl is turned mad and murderous by her enchanted reflection in an ancient mirror, one is quick to determine that no different course of action could have spared the victims from meeting their fate. Nevertheless, while the children are freed from judgement, they are not deprived of agency: their ghosts haunt Montague’s mansion and, by offering to him the malicious objects that brought terror into their lives, they finally demand to be looked after and not forsaken. Persevering as unnatural, liminal creatures, they are allowed to redirect the living’s attention from their mangled bodies and empty eye-sockets to the truest source of horror – fate, entropy, destructive chaos – and to induce in Edgar and in the audience the abject realization that they could have very well been in the children’s place themselves.
Figure two: Ethan and Catherine, illustr. by David Roberts
In the sequel anthology Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, young Ethan and Catherine live with their abusive innkeeper father, who turns to drinking after their mother passes away (although it seems he has always been a neglectful and violent parent, despite the children’s willingness to defend his reputation). After the siblings suffer a bout of intense sickness, their father leaves the inn, carelessly in the stormy weather, to fetch a doctor. As their symptoms start to fade, a spectral mariner finds shelter at the inn to wait out the storm. Immediately noticing the children’s passion for horror stories, he entertains them with an assortment of legendary sea monsters, from flesh-eating snails to malevolent faes, but also goads his young listeners into self-reflection. They are thus slowly guided towards the awareness that their father has finally lost his mind and has not only deserted them but also poisoned them. Even more tragically, the children’s ghosts have been stuck in a loop, reliving the night of their killing for years. After listening to this final, incredibly grim tale, the siblings accept their death and go to sleep, just to be confronted by one more ghastly story: their father’s ghost, returned to them in reciprocal haunting, begging for forgiveness and understanding. Their father tells them about the traumatic event at the root of his madness: the slaughter of his whole family by a carnivorous mermaid doppelgänger of his departed first love. Despite this, the children reject his apology:
“I feel sorry for the life Fate handed you, Father. […] But I do not see that any of that meant you had to murder us, your children.” “My mind was damaged, Ethan,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.” Our father clenched his eyes shut and shook his head mournfully. But I could feel no sympathy for him. (263)
He offers to stay a bit longer, to tell them new thrilling stories, yet the siblings refuse once more. It’s almost as if the function of horror has forever shifted for them: those fictional terrors that were previously welcomed as a thrill-inducing distraction and coping mechanism from parental neglect can’t help but lose their charm once such a brutal act has been processed. The only horror the children are interested in is their own, the only monster the one they chose not to let in. In this case, horror is real in the way trauma is, in Lacanian terms, in that it functions as a limit of signification beyond which the efficacy of symbols is nullified. Now that Ethan and Catherine are fully at peace with their fate, they no longer need the structure and stimulation provided by narratives. The endless cycles of storytelling and hauntings are finally dispelled by the access to a dimension of silence and stillness that do not coincide with healing. Peace is thus established to be possible even in a territory of botched reconciliation, of damage beyond repair. What is interesting here is that horror becomes the locus in which reconciliation can be denied, the redemptive narrative subverted without transgressing genre conventions. For the ghostly siblings, failing to obtain a perfect happy ending turns into a chance for deliverance.
In Hazel’s Phantasmagoria, we see the weird children hand-craft their own horrors and wield them against the adult who torments them. Like many of the children in the Tales of Terror series, the titular Hazel is an insufferable child. She is portrayed as temperamental, unsociable, ungifted academically and aggressive. Her aunt Eugenia, who she stays with while her parents take a month-long holiday, often likes to remind her of her dullness and lack of charisma, and Hazel seems to accept these remarks as accurate. Her cousin Isambard is quieter, but not less bizzarre. Apart from being socially awkward, he appears extremely remissive and, at times, almost numb as a result of his mother’s psychological abuse. He is a supernaturally clever, darkly imaginative boy with the ability to practice grotesque surgery on animals with little side effects (for example, he installs a wooden head on his dog’s neck to replace the one he lost during an unspecified accident). Both kids are mistreated by Eugenia, who at one point locks Hazel in a greenhouse full of rotting plants as punishment for disobeying her. There, the little girl has to endure the increasing heat, swarming insects and nauseating smells as well as her hunger, thirst and dread. Despite the novel not shying away from dark humour and frequently making light of horrifying situations, this particular scene is described with a chilling tone, with Deeny conveying the same sad resignation when Isambard does not react to Hazel’s aggression because of how accustomed he is to violent outbursts. Their reaction to her abuse is symmetrical as much as it is different: unbeknownst to Hazel, Isambard has long been organising his vendetta, as he holds his mother responsible for the death of his father Podbury (Eugenia allegedly tripped and pushed him into a zoo’s tiger pit). Thanks to his father’s contacts, he manages to collect animals he then surgically combines into hybrid beasts, which he calls “nightmares”, whose function is to torture Eugenia in her sleep so as to eventually “scare her to death.” Hazel meets the group of creatures in the woods while trying to escape the house and starts working alongside them to craft the perfect nightmare that shall ultimately break Eugenia.
Figure three: Hazel, Isambard and his monsters, illustr. by David Roberts
The act of storytelling, specifically through the medium of theatre, plays a key role in the narrative’s depiction of how trauma torments us and propagates itself across relations. For example, Hazel and Isambard re-enact the scene of Podbury’s death on two distinct occasions. While Hazel works around the real events, her objective is ultimately that of re-traumatizing her aunt by generating in her intense feelings of grief and guilt comparable to those she felt when her husband died: in the nightmare she scripts for Eugenia, she kills him once more by losing a bet with the Devil which would have allowed him, if won, to be resurrected. In a heartbreaking dialogue with her husband, played by the gorilla-leopard hybrid Geoff, she is forced to confront both her responsibility in his death and, paradoxically, her helplessness before misfortune. Isambard is unsuccessful chiefly because he underestimates the liberating potential of storytelling: he uses props, a set and a forcefully disguised Hazel to stage Podbury’s fall into the tiger pit, unaware that confronting the traumatic event once more will trigger Eugenia’s attempt to change the narrative. This time, she has the possibility to act in order to rescue her husband/Hazel from being devoured. This allows her to reach a catharsis that, paired with the intense emotional release she experienced in the previous nightmare, leads her to finally address her loss with clarity unclouded by violence.
But Hazel’s Phantasmagoria is most of all a story about monsters. Isambard’s creations can’t help but sit uncomfortably in their designated role. They crave cookies and compliments, enjoy giving him presents and panic about their insecurities. Upon meeting them, Hazel quickly realizes they are helpless without her guidance. They are aware of the inherent monstrousness of their hybrid bodies (Noel is a piton-porcupine, Francis a frog-ostrich, Geoff a leopard-gorilla) and of the purpose behind their creation. Nevertheless, they don’t seem to understand how monstrosity – or fear – works. Before Hazel’s scripting and directing of the nightmares they stage for Eugenia, their efforts produce ridiculous effects at worst and annoying ones at best.
When Isambard’s plan fails and they rebel against his orders to kill Eugenia, he runs away and they trail after him. While Hazel befriends the monsters, and eventually Eugenia too, he ignores their true nature and exploits them to get back at his abuser; this causes their bond to become unstable and unsafe, making the creatures turn against him, not to seek revenge but to take accountability. By the end of the book, Isambard is still gone but the monsters (and his monster-mother) won’t stop looking for him, because the only hope they have left is that of facing up in solidarity to the horror they all participated in. Monsters might be scary, but one can’t just leave them behind. They must be embraced.
Works Cited
Deeny, Leander. Hazel’s Phantasmagoria. Quercus, 2008.
Germaine Buckley, Chloé.“‘You Don’t Think I’m Like Any Other Boy. That’s Why You’re Afraid’: Haunted/Haunting Children from The Turn of the Screw to Tales of Terror.” Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel, Palgrave MacMillan, 2019, pp. 233–245.
Gieni, Justine. “Punishing the Abject Child: The Delight and Discipline of Body Horror in Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter.” Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture, edited by Jessica R. McCort, University Press of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 37–60.
McCort, Jessica R. “Why Horror? (Or, The Importance of Being Frightened).”Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture, University Press of Mississippi, 2017, p. 4-36.
Priestley, Chris. Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007.
Tales of Terror from the Black Ship. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008.
Vránková, Kamila. “The Gothic Supernaturalism and the Search for Identity in Chris Priestley´s Tales of Terror.” A Search for Identity, edited by I. Mišterová and E. Skopečková, Západočeská Univerzita v Plzni, 2013, pp. 55–63.
