The Black Spider - Folk Horror Avant La Lettre
The Black Spider (1842) Jeremias Gotthelf I have a general rule that, once I have started to read a book, I must continue with it to the end before I can claim the right to comment on it. In the case of The Black Spider , I was beginning to get depressed by page 20 of this classic early nineteenth century Swiss horror novella. One fifth of the tale gone and I had been treated to a lengthy, rather dull and wholesome account of a christening feast for the child of a prosperous Swiss peasant in the first half of the nineteenth century. But Gotthelf knows what he is doing. He has set the reader up for a multi-layered morality tale that loosely bases itself on pre-modern folk interpretations of the causes of the plague. He weaves, from the security of the first section, a genuinely horrific and disturbing tale of a demonic black spider that punishes all those who have defied God and who have tried to short-circuit authority with an appeal to the Devil. The spider, a truly nasty