We are having the time of your death! Time has always been a focus for unusual tales, even before H. G. Wells’s masterpiece “The Time Machine”. Ghost story writers have used clocks as predictors of approaching doom or channels through which spirits travel. Every haunted house has to have an old grandfather clock near the stairs. This is a Gothic holdover from the days of Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe. In detective stories there may be a clue or a dead body or secret passage in the clock.
Suspense Clocks
Suspense writers are probably the closest thing we have now to Gothic writers today. Nobody can top Cornell Woolrich for Noir suspense. His “Three O’Clock” (Detective Fiction Weekly, October 1, 1938) has a man find himself in the cellar of his house where he planted a bomb to kill his wife at 3 o’clock. Can he escape in time? Truly the time of your death.
The Big Clock (1946) by Kenneth Fearing has been filmed three times, the most recent being the Kevin Costner film, No Way Out. The clock here is metaphorical, representing that time is running out. Jacques Barzun said of it: “a truly brilliant story, laid in a large mass-communications organization … Tone and talk are sharp and often bitter—the whole business is a tour de force worthy of the highest praise.”
Mythos Clocks
Weird Tales and H. P. Lovecraft didn’t like their clocks to be metaphors. They go back to the Gothic tradition. HPL and his wife of two years, Sonia Greene wrote “Four O’Clock”. It appeared long after their divorce in the Arkham House miscellany Something About Cats & Other Pieces, 1949. At the appointed hour, demons flock to claim their victim with Poeque flourishes.
“Through the Gate of the Silver Key” by H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price (Weird Tales, July 1934) is a longish collaboration between HPL and his friend, E. Hoffman Price. The clock of the story isn’t that important until the end when it is used as a kind of time and space machine. The T. A. R. D. I. S. is still thirty years away.
“The Ormolu Clock” by August Derleth (Weird Tales, January 1950) was a late Derleth pastiche that received a Matt Fox cover. A movie reviewer named Hatcher is haunted by a scene of violence because of the clock he purchased. He tries to hunt down the source of the clock but eventually gives it to a clocksmith, who later throws himself out a window.
Science Fiction Clocks
Classic SF after H. G. Wells includes “Thirteen O’Clock” by C. M. Kornbluth (Stirring Science Stories, February 1941). Peter Packer finds a secret room with a clock that has thirteen hours instead of twelve. He winds up the device and when it strikes thirteen he is transported to a parallel dimension that is filled with witches and demons. This version of America is ruled by a despot named Almarish. Packer must lead an army to victory against the dictator.
No one touched that title again until “thirteen o’clock” by David Gerrold (F&SF, February 2006). This story was highly controversial as it follows a stream-of-consciousness journey after an attempted gay-bashing. The no-holds-bar approach offended some readers and they cancelled their subscriptions. Gerrold expanded the story into a series.
TV and Movie Clocks
Filmmakers and TV producers certainly like clocks. They are easy props. Rod Serling used one in “Four O’Clock” based on a story by Price Day (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, April 1958). The Twilight Zone episode appeared on April 6, 1962. It starred Theodore Bikel as Oliver Crangle. The plot has a psycho who believes he sees evil everywhere and reports it to the FBI. He believes if all evil people are shrunk to two feet tall, everyone will know them for what they are. He gets a surprise when he shrinks…
“Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson (F&SF, November 1963) was a short story that John Carpenter turned into the film, They Live (1988). George Nada is accidentally “woken up” by a hypnotist. He can now see that some people are actually aliens living among us. He tries to warn everybody by taking over a TV station. Carpenter adds a sillier camp feel to the idea by casting Rowdy Roddy Piper to the cast. Still, a fun film.
Some people have accused Stephen King of stealing the plot from Nelson for his “The Ten O’Clock People” by Stephen King (Nightmares & Dreamscapes, 1993). A man discovers some people are bat-monsters. Nelson was not the first to use this idea. Daphne Du Maurier wrote “The Blue Lenses” (Ladies Home Journal, May 1959) in which a woman who has given birth finds herself seeing all the people in the hospital looking like animals when she wears the blue lenses. I suspect this story may have inspired Rod Serling to write the famous “Eye of the Beholder” episode with the pig-faced nurses (November 11, 1960).
The most recent adaptation of clocks and horror is the children’s novel The House With the Clock in the Walls by John Bellairs (1973), which became a film in 2018 starring Jack Black and Cate Blanchett. This is a favorite book series of mine. The film left me a little cold. (Probably because of the inevitable Harry Potterisms. I thought the film should have looked like Edward Gorey’s original covers.) Lewis Barnavelt goes to live with his eccentric (magic-using) uncle and must help find the hidden magic clock in the walls of the house. It is a Gothic funfest of the highest order. The ticking down clock is a harbinger of doom, keeping the hunt lively.
