Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

Introduction

To taste the full flavor of these stories you must bring an orderly mind to them, you must have a reasonable amount of confidence, if not in what used to be called the laws of nature, at least in the currently suspected habits of nature. If you believe in the ability and willingness of surgeons to transplant brains from skull to skull with shocking results, these stories may frighten you, but merely in the same way — though hardly to the same extent — that having to take ether in a strange hospital would frighten you. If you believe in ghosts, you can hope to derive from these stories at the very most a weak semblance of the sensation you would experience on being told there was a bogey-man in the closet, or on having the village cut-up wrapped in a sheet jump out of hiding at you. If you believe in werewolves, then it can make little difference to you, except perhaps academically, whether your heroine is eaten by one of them or shot down by a Cicero muscle-man. To the truly superstitious the “weird” has only its Scotch meaning: “Something which actually takes place.”

The effectiveness of the sort of stories that we are here concerned with depends on the reader’s believing that certain things cannot happen and on the writer’s making him feel — if not actually believe — that they can but should not happen. If the reader does not feel that these things have happened, or does not care whether they have happened, then the author has been, in the first case, unconvincing and, in the second, uninteresting, literary faults by no means confined to our present field, and so of no especial interest to us here. If the reader feels that it is nice for these things to have happened, or has no positive feeling that they should not have happened, then the story is, for that particular reader at least, fantasy and lies outside our field.

This business of making the reader feel that what cannot happen can and should not is a tremendously difficult one for the author. Addressing himself, as we have assumed he must, to the orderly minded reader, he cannot count on any native credulity or superstition to be taken advantage of.

Atmosphere may be used to set the stage, but is seldom a great help thereafter and in fact more often an encumbrance than not.

Brutality, often an excellent accompaniment and a means to an end, is never properly more than that in this field, and some of the finest effects have been secured with the daintiest touches. The most authentic single touch in “The Turn of the Screw” — too well known as well as a bit too long for inclusion here — is not when the child sees the ghost across the lake, but when she turns her back to it, pretending interest in some rubbish at her feet, to keep her governess from knowing she has seen it. One of my own favorites is that attributed, I believe, to Thomas Bailey Aldrich:

A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world: every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings.

That has, particularly, the restraint that is almost invariably the mark of the effective weird tale. Usually all the most skilled author can hope for are some shivers of apprehension as his reader feels himself led towards the thing that cannot happen and the culminant shudder as he feels that the cannot has become the should-not. This shudder is almost always momentary, almost never duplicated. Few weird stories have run successfully to any great length. The familiar exceptions are those in which considerable space was devoted to groundwork. The high spot is when the cannot becomes the should-not, and whether this transition is accepted or rejected by the reader, the peak has been passed and the wise author rests.

Dashiell Hammett