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4 Horror Fiction in the 20th Century Biological horror stories were a reaction to the development of the life sci- ences, especially the fear of evolution. Vampires, zombies, and werewolves “are physical terrors which embody in their beings the struggle of human- ity to re-imagine its relationship with the animal kingdom and the natural world. These entities are the horrors of evolution, beasts in the literal and metaphysical senses.” 3 A more recent tradition is what Colavito calls “spiritualist horror,” stories of ghosts, which began appearing in earnest during and after the American Civil War (1861–1865) and continued through 1920: The rapid technological development and concurrent development of pseudoscience before the First World War was refl ected in horror’s preoc- cupation with ghosts and hauntings—a particular theme refl ecting a discontent with scientifi c progress and the negative consequences of uncov- ering “forbidden” and “unnatural” knowledge. Photography and spiritual- ism contributed to the development of horror in this era as the genre incorporated and colonized the new sciences to produce its unique art. 4 Lastly, there was the tradition of general excellence in stories. From the start of horror’s golden age, the horror story reached “a mature form, a consistent quality, and a literary complexity that had been promised but not (or at least not consistently) achieved earlier.” 5 There had been earlier works of excel- lence, of course, but the British writers of the 1880s and afterward had shoulders to stand on and predecessors to learn from. Despite the weight of these traditions and the number of writers contrib- uting to them, a kind of revolution took place in the form of the horror litera- ture created by Machen, Blackwood, James, and Dunsany. The Machen Quartet The revolution of these four writers was not simply against the “classical” traditions. Machen, James, Blackwood, and Dunsany wrote as much in favor of particular innovations in horror fi ction as they did against the prevailing trends. Machen’s bête noire was the rise of the secular scientifi c method at the cost of what Machen liked to call the “ecstasy” of literature, religion, and the nat- ural world. Inspired by his own personal pre-Victorian ideology, literary Romanticism, and the medieval life of the mind, and heavily infl uenced by the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, Machen produced an array of horror fi ction that combined his interests and faith in innovative ways. His best story, “The White People” (1904), is sui generis , unique. But his The Great God Pan (1894) and The Three Imposters (1895) combined the Stevensonian