Abstract
In this chapter, Foley explores the soundscapes of horror literature, from the Gothic Romance to modern and contemporary fictions. In so doing, he argues that representations of the voice are central to the sound worlds of literary horror. His argument considers stagings of the “presymbolic” or excessive voice across key passages from Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Bloch’s Psycho (1959), Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). Alongside film adaptations of Psycho (1960) and The Exorcist (1973), Foley also considers the intermedia appropriation of Süskind’s Perfume (1985) in Nirvana’s “Scentless Apprentice” (1993) and suggests the continuing importance of horror podcasting to the aesthetics of sonic horror through a reading of “The Black Tapes” (2015–present).
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Notes
- 1.
I draw from many of the most recent of these studies in the chapter that follows. The origins of the current critical interest in Gothic sound studies may be traced back to Isabella van Elferen’s influential monograph Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012).
- 2.
In his reading of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533), Jacques Lacan argues that the skull that reveals itself anamorphically at the front of the painting invites a radical shift in perception so that the percipient becomes gazed upon by the skull itself: there is, then, a moment of objectification of the viewer (Lacan 1979, pp. 85–89) .
- 3.
Suggesting this sustained attention to sonic adaptations of horror, Danielewski’s sister, the recording artist Poe, also penned or co-wrote a number of accompanying songs to the novel that are collected on her parallax second album Haunted (2000). The novel itself is conscious of its engagement with a broad range of burgeoning (the Internet) and established (typewriters, video cameras and CDs) technologies.
- 4.
For an enlightening account of splatterpunk horror literature and its emergence in the 1980s, see Xavier Aldana Reyes’s reading of the genre in his monograph Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), 28–51.
- 5.
Bloch was a prolific writer of both the fantastic and psychological horror literature. Deeply interested in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, in the 1930s and early 1940s, Bloch wrote several stories for the cult magazine Weird Tales in a Lovecraftian style. From the mid-1940s onward, his writing became concerned with more human horrors, and his work began increasingly to focus upon stories of criminality.
- 6.
The Slovenian school’s theoretical interest in ventriloquism is emphasized further by the cover image of Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, which uses a promotional image of the ventriloquist and his doll from “The Dummy,” a tale that formed the final part of the 1945 horror anthology film Dead of Night.
- 7.
See Matt Foley, “Voices of Terror and Horror: Towards an Acoustics of Modern Gothic,” in Sound Effects: The Object Voice, eds. Jorge Sacido-Romero and Sylvia Mieszkowski (Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2015), 217–42.
- 8.
For a reading of the acousmatic object voice in Radcliffe and Maturin, see Matt Foley, “ʻMy voice shall ring in your ears’: The acousmatic voice and the timbral sublime in the Gothic romance,” Horror Studies, 7.2 (2016), 275–91.
- 9.
I am thinking here of three recent journal articles: Joan Passey, “Sound and silence: The aesthetics of the auditory in the novels of Ann Radcliffe,” Horror Studies, 7.2 (2016), 189–204; Angela M. Archambault, “The Function of Sound in the Gothic Novels of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Charles Maturin,” Etudes Epistémè, 29 (2016). Available online: https://episteme.revues.org/965; Frances Clarke, “Gothic vibrations and Edgar Allan Poe,” Horror Studies, 7.2 (2016), 307–18.
- 10.
The lyrics of the opening verse to “Scentless Apprentice” read: “Like most babies smell like butter / His smell smelled like no other / He was born scentless and senseless / He was born a scentless apprentice.”
- 11.
In a 1993 interview in Seattle with the Canadian Much television network, Cobain can clearly be heard to say that Süskind’s novel “just affects me. It makes me want to cut my nose off” (Much (2014), “Our Last Time w/ Kurt Cobain (1993),” Youtube, 0:34–0:38, available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDgP4hN4OA4. Last accessed: 26.02.2017).
- 12.
I refer here to two articles from the “Sonic Horror” (2016, ed. by Isabella van Elferen) special issue: Amanda DiGioia, “A cry in the dark: The howls of wolves in horror and heavy metal music,” Horror Studies, 7.2 (2016), 293–306 and Danielle Hancock, “Welcome to Welcome to Night Vale: First steps in exploring the horror podcast,” Horror Studies, 7.2 (2016), 219–34.
- 13.
An unofficial transcript of episode three “The Unsound” is available online: http://theblacktapestranscripts.weebly.com/episode-103-the-unsound.html. Last accessed: 26.02.2017.
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Foley, M. (2018). Toward an Acoustics of Literary Horror. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_35
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