Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative

by Roger B. Salomon

In a compact, readable, and accessible book, Roger B. Salomon explores the nature of horror in literature and in life. Rather than minimizing horror by narrowly associating it with psychological drives, persecution, or extremism, he approaches horror through the medium of narrative as a significant and enduring physical and metaphysical reality. Salomon focuses on fictions of horror, including eighteenth-century Gothic and nineteenth-century ghost stories. He does not, however, isolate literary examples from more general human issues, including religious belief. Mazes of the Serpent takes up examples of horror from historical and personal narratives―including battle memoirs and Holocaust testimonies―as Salomon identifies certain common themes and qualities that cross the boundary between fiction and actual human experience.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2002

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

The final line of this book ends with the word 'problematic', and that's the only way to describe this book.

There are interesting aspects here, and there is the germ of an interesting study here, but the overall conceit is riddled with theoretical contraditions. My issues are three-fold.

1. Ignorance of Todorov's work on the 'Fantastic' (what we often call the Gothic). Salomon's introduction argues for the same split of marvellous and uncanny as Todorov, but does not invoke it, and therefore has to reinvent the wheel. Without Todorov, though, the use of other work on the Gothic feels misread. He's also missed Rosemary Jackson's equally influential book on Fantasy, which feels, again, very odd when he uses so much work that invokes both of these integral texts of Gothic theory. I expect this is to do with a confusion over their titles, but someone professing to work in genre should not make this mistake.

2. I am probably the last person to take issue with approaching a genre ahistorically, but, as was the case with the absence of Todorov, not even looking at some of the historical influences that shaped the Gothic in Europe (and the parallel if different influences seen in America) feels like a partial understanding of the genre at best. This seems most problematic when the author deals with Holocaust testimony and fiction, but we'll get to that later. It is unintentionally contradictory when dealing with Vic Sage's book on Protestantism and horror - because that book is *so* much about historicity. There are parts of the book that might be useful to the present author, but without the historical background, they lose their power and feel not so much cherry-picked as quoted at random.

3. I actually like the idea of looking at Holocaust fiction/testimony as a kind of horror. I think that's a fascinating intersection of genres, and having worked on both, I can see the connections. I feel, however, there are two issues here. First, I am not clear on the reasoning behind this comparison. I think it could be very useful, for both sub-disciplines (and Holocaust historians as well), but I am not entirely sure if the author knows why he wants to work on the two together. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I think there are some really knotty problems regarding fictional ontology and the complex relationship between the actual world and the described world of testimony that need to be considered before one can even begin to look at these texts as similar.

TL;DR: An interesting but fatally flawed book that hamstrings itself.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting literary analysis that lets its examples grow repetitious into tedium, largely (it feels like) in order to pad a word count.

There are plenty of interesting ideas in here about how horror deconstructs other genres, though the observation that horror seeks to undermine the only-kind-of-true things we find psychologically reassuring is not exactly a revelation. But the examples of horror stories (including Mark Twain) put up alongside Holocaust narratives is a good beginning in trying to understand what it is that can scare us in the written word.

I count this book as a good launching point for scholars wants to do some deeper thinking about horror literature, but only a launching point - both the gaps and, quite frankly, the misidentifications (the text refers to Lovecraft as a Gothic author) practically invite better-researched and reasoned responses.