The typical Northern is a tale of the Gold Rush of 1898 or the lumber camps of the 1910s or even the story of prairie pioneers in days past. Before all of these there were the Arctic explorers, made famous by their desire to be first at the Poles, or to find the legendary Northwest Passage. But a small, select group of Northerns focus on terror…
From the earliest days of Gothic horror, the Arctic has offered us a dark world of frozen horror. Mary Shelley chose it as the opening/final scenery of Frankenstein (1818), with Dr. Frankenstein chasing his creation out among the ice flows. Some critics have taken this to be a metaphor for the non-existence of the creature, that it was all in Frankenstein’s demented mind.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1834) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a lengthy narrative poem that features many nautical horrors but places some of the action in the waters of the Antarctic. Coleridge’s intent with the poem is much more than mere horror using many metaphors in the story including the famous albatross. Gustave Dore’s illustrations are equally famous.
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) gives us a lengthy sea novel that ends in the South Pole. The book is unfinished so we don’t get a clear picture of what he wanted to explore there, though many have suggested it was to be an opening into the center of the earth. Several sequels by other authors will give their own conclusions.
After Franklin’s lost expedition, and works such as Wilkie Collins’ The Frozen Deep (1856), writers had a new interest in the possibilities of Arctic and Antarctic horrors. (Dan Simmons does a wonderful job of showing how that play was created and Charles Dickens’ involvement, in his book, Drood (2009). Simmons, of course, wrote the polar horror/historical novel, The Terror (2007).
“The Captain of the Polestar” (The Temple Bar, January 1883) made good use of A. Conan Doyle’s early years as a ship’s doctor. He tells the story as a diary of the ship’s medic who watches the captain sink into seeming insanity when the vessel becomes frozen in the ice. Craigie is haunted by a woman who is no longer alive. The story ends with the Captain chasing her ghost over the ice flows. Very Mary Shelley.
The Antarctic Mystery (1897) by Jules Verne is a sequel to Pym, sometimes called “The Sphinx of the Ice Fields”. An American naturalist, Jeorling, joins the crew of the Halbrane on their way back to the U.S. They cross an iceberg with a body on it. The man was a sailor on the Jane, the first in a line of clues that Jeorling and Captain Len Guy follow on the path of Arthur Gordon Pym. Eventually they will find the sphinx, a magnetically charged mountain that attracts the iron in ships, causing terrible accidents. They also find the dead Pym, and no entrance to the inside of the Earth.
“In Amundsen’s Tent” (Weird Tales, January 1928) by John Martin Leahy combines South Pole terror with cryptids. A party of men in the Antarctic happen upon a tent in the middle of nowhere. Inside is a mystery: a severed human head and the journal of Robert Drumgold. Drumgold relates how he found the tent as well and his dogs acted strangely afraid of approaching it. Inside they find a dead, weird creature, not of this earth. Only it isn’t dead, and it isn’t going away…
“At the Mountains of Madness” (Astounding Stories, February March 1936) was H. P. Lovecraft’s sequel to Poe’s novel. He doesn’t go in for Pellucidarian entrances into the earth but is a classic of the Cthulhu Mythos. Explorers go to the Antarctic to find an ancient city once occupied by the Old Ones, an ancient interstellar race. The Old Ones are gone but the subservient shoggoths, puddles of living nastiness, remain.
“Who Goes There?” (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1938) by John W. Campbell (as Don A. Stuart) is a classic of Horror Science Fiction that spawned The Thing From Another World (1951), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and the remake The Thing (2011). A group of men are trapped at the South Pole with an alien that can assume any form. The paranoia is unavoidable when any one could be the Thing.
None of these stories are thought of as “Northerns” by most readers. That doesn’t change the fact that they take place in snowy, distant climes. Later writers such as S. Carleton and Sewell Peaslee Wright will write tales closer to what we think of as “Tales of the North” with horrific elements. But in most cases, these stories came first.
