that Voldemort has somehow returned and that he
is looking for a magical artifact hidden somewhere
in the school, so he decides to beat him to it with
the help of his friends and despite the interference
of some of his fellow students.
This charming first novel won the National
Book Award, the Smarties Prize, and the Chil-
dren’s Book Award and became a best-seller, and
in 2001 it was brought to the screen as an im-
mensely popular and quite loyal motion picture.
The sequel is HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER
OF SECRETS(1999). The series is projected to end
with the seventh title.
“The Haunted and the Haunters”
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton(1859)
Lord Lytton was known primarily as a writer of so-
ciety novels, but he was deeply interested in occult
matters, conducted considerable research into var-
ious aspects of magic and supernaturalism, and
wrote two interesting but badly dated novels about
the search for magical immortality, Zanoni(1842)
and A Strange Story(1861). He also wrote this, one
of the earliest and best stories about a haunted
house, which also sometimes appears under the
title “The House and the Brain.”
The first half of the story compresses much of
what would become the traditional formula for
such tales. The protagonist hears of a supposedly
haunted house in which no one can stay for more
than three nights, a place haunted by day as well as
night. He decides to visit it to investigate and se-
cures permission to do so, after which he gathers
weapons, his servant, and his dog. Upon arriving
they immediately make an effort to explore the
property, during which time they hear or observe a
variety of uncanny phenomena including footsteps
that materialize out of nothing, odd sounds, the
touch of an immaterial hand, and furniture that
moves of its own volition. They are temporarily
locked in the room that seems the origin point of
the disturbances, then are released inexplicably.
The dog is too frightened to move and is eventually
found with its neck broken, and the servant flees in
panic after seeing something never described.
The narrator is determined to stick it out and
does so, despite a horrendous manifestation, an at-
tack of paralysis, the theft of some of his property,
and the extinguishing of his candles. Letters he
had found earlier, hinting of murder and illicit love
years before, are reclaimed by a spectral hand. He
does manage to survive and keep his sanity until
day breaks, primarily because he is convinced that
what he is seeing are not the spirits of the dead,
but actually magical projections created by a living
mind. If so, they may take a different form depend-
ing on the fears of the individual. Most writers
would have ended the story at this point, but Lyt-
ton carries it further.
The effects of the “haunting” might be dis-
persed by eliminating the room that is their focus,
so the narrator encourages the owner to tear it
down, since it is a late addition and doing so will
not damage the house proper. In the process of
doing so, they discover a secret room beneath it, a
small chamber that contains, among other things, a
drawing of the man who cursed the place using the
same magical talents that have given him a greatly
prolonged life. The narrator tracks down Richards,
the only character to actually bear a name in the
story, and eventually brings about his doom. The
story is also filled with discourses on occult philoso-
phy that reflect the author’s own researches, but
they serve only to dilute the suspense.“The Haunter of the Dark”H. P. Lovecraft
(1936)
Many of the writers for the weird magazines dur-
ing the 1920s and 1930s knew each other person-
ally, through correspondence if not by actually
meeting one another, and a very close fraternity
developed among them. Authors such as H. P.
LOVECRAFT, the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos,
openly invited or even encouraged other writers
to set stories within their created universes and
sometimes incorporated versions of their friends as
characters, as Lovecraft did with the creation of
Klarkash-Ton, a nod to Clark Ashton SMITH, and
Robert Blake, the protagonist of this chilling story,
which is dedicated to Blake’s prototype, the writer
Robert BLOCH.
Blake is described as a writer of occult stories
who recently moved to an apartment in Providence
that faces the Federal Hill district, then largely an156 “The Haunted and the Haunters”