Horror: The 100 Best Books by Kim Newman, Stephen Jones

same time in a rival Paris newspaper). The Wandering Jew has got, as the form demands, everything: an heiress falsely accused of madness and incarcerated in a lunatic asylum; a destitute hunchbacked seamstress of the highest moral character hopelessly in love with a blacksmith (who is a patriotic poet on the side); bloodthirsty panthers, telepathic twins, debauchery, murder, suicide, duels, supernatural manifestations, blazing passions, wild mobs, a plague of cholera, scenes in Java and the Arctic, the two best Reading-of-the-Will scenes that ever were, and towering over all these attractions, the nastiest crew of villains ever brought together in one book, presided over by the fiendish, the insidious, the wholly diabolic Jesuit priest and arch-hypocrite, Pere Rodin, who is hell-bent on becoming the next Pope. My first acquaintance with Sue's genius came at about age 10 when, like stout Cortez upon his peak in Darien, I stared in wild surmize at the Classics Illustrated comicbook of The Mysteries of Paris , wherein the hero had been trapped, among frantic rats, in a cellar rapidly being flooded to the rafters. Here was an absolutely Basic Truth about human destiny that no other Classics Illustrated author had ever revealed to me. It was to be another ten years before I found the Modern Library Giant of The Wandering Jew (no longer in print, alas) and consumed its 1,337 pages of faded purple prose like so many kilograms of popcorn, since when I have remembered its main outlines and best scenes with the seared after-image recall that some few paintings of the same era achieve -- Gericault's Raft of the Medusa or Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People , paintings that could be dismissed as cliches if they had not established themselves as archetypes. While that part of the novel-reading public that includes some classics as a staple in their diet can usually enjoy the glorious excesses of painter and composers, they tend to shy away from books that purvey the equivalent pleasures of Too Much and Far Out. Melodrama and an eye peeled for box office success are accounted mortal sins by academics, and it is academia that has been left in charge of which books of the past are to be accounted classics, taught, and kept in print. Yet I doubt the neglect of Sue's novel can be ascribed entirely to highbrow snobbery, since any number of comparable novels by Scott Hugo, Dumas, and Wilkie Collins have managed to stay in print without much assistance from academia. Nor need the book's length tell against it, for in the great pageturners, from Clarissa to The Godfather , length becomes a positive virtue: no one wants the fun to stop. I suspect that the root of the problem may be that The Wandering Jew is a vehemently anticlerical parable ("vituperative", one reference book calls it), while the tenor of the last forty years has been towards that brand of genteel ecumenicism whose first article of faith is that religion and politics should not be discussed -- or if they are, every effort must be made to be fair and impartial. But melodrama is seldom fair: fair isn't fun. Besides, Sue wasn't writing in the age of Bing Crosby but at a time when the Roman church was in the vanguard of political repression. Which is not to say he doesn't stack the deck. Besides the Machiavellian Pere Rodin and his Jesuit minions, the book's crew of Catholic villains includes a venal Mother Superior whose convent is a prison in disguise, a gluttonous bishop who is regaled by an ultramontane (i.e., rich and right wing) dowager with a lenten repast that includes "little Calvaries of apricot tartlets", and "a superb crucifix of angelica with a crown of preserved barbaries", together with such lay assistants as sweat-shop operators, wild animal tamers, and Indian thugees. There is not, this side of Melmoth the Wanderer (the most lurid of the Gothic novels and my second choice for an anthology of favorite horror novels; it was one of Sue's prime sources), another work of