The (Not) Horror of the Great War

W. Scott Poole's Wasteland fails to connect World War I and genre fiction

Modern horror was created by the experience of the Great War.

That’s an interesting thesis, right? I thought so, which was why I was excited to read W. Scott Poole’s Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. World War I was a massive traumatic nightmare, which sliced Western history in two from skull to crotch. I had never thought of it as the fat, fleshy birthplace of the horror genre, but it makes sense that it would be. I was ready to be convinced.

-

Unfortunately, though, Poole is not very convincing. He pitches his book to a popular rather than academic audience. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in itself, but his definitions are lax, his readings unambitious, and his consideration of counter-evidence nearly nonexistent. The book turns into little more than a chronicle of creative types who have some connection either to the war or to the horror genre. There’s little effort to distinguish pre-war horror from post-war horror, which you’d think would be a baseline necessity for demonstrating that the War made a difference to the genre.

Poole’s handling of Lovecraft is indicative of the problems with his approach. Lovecraft volunteered, but was rejected because of poor health; he did not fight in World War I. Nor is there much indication that he thought about the war much, nor that it was a major inspiration for his fiction.

Poole builds the case that the war influenced Lovecraft on the use of phrases like “war weary” and “a season of political and social upheaval” in some of his early works, and on Lovecraft’s reading of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, which presented World War I as indicative of Western decline. Poole also notes that Lovecraft was interested in surrealist artists like Breton and Dali who were influenced by the war.

On those foundations, Poole reads “The Call of Cthulhu” as a war allegory that “owed much to the apocalyptic feeling of the times.” According to Poole, “The planet had seemingly lurched off its axis during the Great War, and Lovecraft’s vision of a world hastening toward its destruction made the changes the war had wrought all the more disturbing to him.”

The problem with this is that it’s all complete bunk. There’s no indication in “The Call of Cthulhu”, or in Lovecraft’s work in general, that the war is at the center of his disgust with modernity. On the contrary, Lovecraft’s fears about progressive degeneration are focused on terrors of miscegenation and racial decay that predate the Great War. His fiction is in line with H.G. Wells stories like The Time Machine, which portray human beings devolving into beasts and monsters, or the shockingly racist The Island of Dr. Moreau, which envisions non-white people devolving into animals. Lovecraft’s fiction would barely be different if the Great War had never happened. It wouldn’t even exist without Wells.

The real tell here is the way in which Lovecraft portrays actual war in his work. He never envisions the trenches or senseless stalemated slaughter. Instead, war in “Call of Cthulhu” or “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” involves righteous, genocidal violence against non white people. White sailors in “Call of Cthulhu” set upon Cthulhu’s non white worshippers with what Lovecraft portrays as pure and noble instincts. “There was some peculiarly abominable quality about [Cthulhu’s followers] which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry.” This is the ideology of colonialist warfare and American lynch mobs; it’s war as righteous racist cleansing. There’s nothing specifically informed by World War I there.

More broadly, Poole tends to skip over, or downplay, the extent to which post-war horror relied on pre-war narratives. The movies Nosferatu and James Whale’s Frankenstein are two of Poole’s touchstone works, for example, and both are retellings of pre-war classics. Poole makes much of the bolts in the neck of the creature in Whale’s Frankenstein—but that seems more like generalized anxiety about industrialization than like a specific reference to World War I.

Poole sees Nosferatu as an allegory of a depopulated, war ravaged Germany. There’s something to that—but Poole also dismisses the idea that the film plays on antisemitic stereotypes. If you take Stoker’s influence seriously, though, you have to acknowledge that hatred of foreigners and Jews was built into the original novel. The film takes Germany’s trauma, and interprets it in terms of old horror tropes about the predation and seduction of evil foreigners. Which is also what Hitler did.

Poole does talk about fascist’s use of horror. But he doesn’t grapple with the fact that the horror tropes they used—the blood libel, monster rape narratives focused on black troops, apocalyptic conspiracies—all predated World War I. The Great War did not invent horror, but it was often perceived, or interpreted, through horror tropes about the uncanny and the gothic.

Poole quotes Robert Graves’ poem “A Dead Boche”, for example, which revels in the ugliness and putrid luridness of a German corpse,

With clothes and face a sodden green….
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

You can hear echoes there of horror tales past, like Coleridge’s

they all dead did lie; And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

Corpses with all their ooze and bloat; they stalked the imagination before World War I, and poets and writers resurrected them, in all their tactility, to describe an experience that didn’t fit into the narrative of courage, sacrifice, and valor familiar from earlier war poetry.

This isn’t to say that the war had no effect on the horror genre. Poole draws a suggestive line from Max Ernst’s clearly WWI inspired artwork to H.R. Giger’s designs in Alien, as just one example. But the most provocative thing about Poole’s evidence is its weakness. The Great War was one of the most sweeping, devastating events in history; it unleashed an extremity of violence never before seen on earth. But its very newness and unassimilability led people to try to assimilate it through familiar stories, ideas and genres. We face the unknown only with the stories we have, and from even the worst disasters, we often learn only what we knew before. There’s horror in that, too.