We next looked at The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral which was written by M.R James in 1911. M.R James used to write these stories to scare his friends and he used to read them aloud. The story began with a notice from the obituary section of a gentleman’s magazine, it talks about the death of somebody called Archdeacon Haynes. As the story moves on you find out that Archdeacon Haynes had actually planned the murder of the previous Archdeacon, Archdeacon Pultney. The first piece of horror in the story is where we first find out about the carvings. There are three carvings in total, one of them is described as “an exquisitely modelled figure of a cat, whose crouching posture suggests with admirable spirit the suppleness, vigilance of the craft of the re-doubted adversary of the genus mus”.
The second is a figure seated on a throne and it is described as “his feet are studiously concealed by the long robe in which he is draped; but neither the crown or the cap which he wears suffice to hide the prick-ears and curving horns which betray his tartarean origin, and the hand the rests upon his knee is armed with talons of horrifying length and sharpness”.
The second piece of horror is when one of the carvings (the cat) moves when the Archdeacon has his hand on it. “My hand was resting on the back of the carved figure of a cat which is nearest to me of the three figures on the end of my stall. I was not aware of this, for I was not looking in that direction, until I was startled by what seemed a softness, a feeling as of rather rough and coarse fur and a sudden movement, as if the creature was twisting his head to bite me”.
The final piece of horror is where we find out that the Archdeacon has died. Before he died he states in his diary “I must be firm” many times. I think that the author was trying to make the Archdeacon seem braver as he say’s that his friends noticed no difference in his behaviour in the days leading up to his death.
The Archdeacon also died on exactly the same day as Archdeacon whose murder he has planned himself. He also died in the same way, falling down the stairs. This suggests maybe something supernatural going on and maybe Archdeacon Haynes getting his comeuppance.
The final story we looked at was The Tell Tale Heart which was written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1843. The story is about two men who live together in an apartment of some sort. One of the men is young and one old. The young man is paranoid because of one of the old man’s eyes and he believes it to be an evil eye. “I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture – a pale blue eye with film over it.”, the younger man talks about how he looked in on the old man every night to see if his evil eye was open.
One night looks in and it is pitch black. He opens a tiny hole on his lantern and the beam of light fell straight upon the evil eye. The eye was open and the young man grew furious when he saw it. The old man suddenly sat up and said “Who’s there!?”. The younger man describes how he waited there for hours until the man fell back to sleep. “I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed, listening; just as I have done night after night hearkening to the death watches in the wall.” This brings a lot of suspense into the story because it makes the reader think that the younger man is going to be caught. The old man finally lie’s down and starts comforting himself that I was just a small animal that made the noise. This is when the younger man strikes and kill’s the older man by turning the bed over onto him. When he first strikes the old man screams but that is all he says for he is dead in an instant. After he has killed the old man I think that the author say’s that the younger man cuts the old man into pieces and puts the pieces into bags before hiding them beneath the floorboards in the old mans bedroom. Later on that night the police call round and say that a neighbour heard a man’s scream come from the house. When the police turn up the young man is very confident and he shows them around the house. They even sit down in the old man’s room for a cup of tea and the young man himself sat right over where he hid the old man. As they got into their conversation the younger man heard a beating. The police men kept talking and the beating kept getting louder and louder as if it was coming from the young man. The young man was incensed and he wondered how the policemen could keep drinking their tea and chatting away will this insane beating was going on. Eventually the younger man cracked and screamed “I admit the deed! Tear up the floorboards! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
In conclusion I would say that each of the authors use very different types of ways to create suspense and horror in their writing. I think that Bram Stoker uses external horror in the way that he describes everything physically in his story, an example being where the women entice Jonathan. I think that M.R James uses both external and internal horror examples being external where he feels the statue of the cat move beneath him and internal when he is in his house hearing people on the stairs. Finally I think that Edgar Allen Poe uses internal horror because the old man does nothing to threaten the young man, the young man builds it up inside his own head that the old man’s eye is evil and that he must be killed.
