The Necromancer, or The Tale of the Black Forest; Founded on Facts (original: Der Geisterbanner: Eine Wundergeschichte aus mündlichen und schriftlichen Traditionen gesammelt) was written by “Lorenz Flammenberg,” the pseudonym of Karl Friedrich Kahlert (1765-1813), about whom little information is available. He may have been an antiquarian or a bookseller who wrote Gothics on the side, or he may have been a full-time writer and dramatist. The Necromancer is a crude amalgamation of several different mismatched Gothic narratives which are only barely connected by the framing story.

Wolfe is the ferocious leader of a gang of vicious thieves who lair in the Haunted Castle of the Black Forest of Germany. Wolfe’s fifty-three bandits are so fearsome that they rob and slaughter all in their path, up to and including entire towns. The area’s peasants believe that the Haunted Castle is the residence of various evil ghosts, and Wolfe’s gang makes use of this superstition by venturing forth at night wearing the skins of goats. The gang are usually taken for demons by the peasants, and this allows Wolfe and his gang to rob houses and villages without opposition. Wolfe has as allies a number of innkeepers who assist him in exchange for not being victimized by the gang. Another of Wolfe’s allies is Volkert, the necromancer, who has no magical abilities but uses trickery and misdirection to make Wolfe and the peasantry believe that he is more powerful than he is. Eventually Wolfe and Volkert are defeated and captured, and The Necromancer is Volkert’s memoir, dictated as he awaits execution. God spares the executioner the effort, however, and sends a lightning bolt to kill Volkert.

The Necromancer was one of the seven “horrid” Gothic novels satirized by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1817). The Necromancer’s origins are unknown; it seems originally to have been a German anthology of legends and horror stories—one of the stories, “Der Verbrecher,” was stolen from Friedrich Schiller (see: The Robbers)¹—which the English Gothic publisher Minerva Press purchased and packaged as one novel, almost incompetently translated and accompanied by a hastily- and badly-written framing sequence. The end result is one of the most incoherent of all Gothic novels. Presumably Austen selected The Necromancer as one of the novels to mention in Northanger Abbey because she wanted to use the most excessive example of the German schauerromane (see: The Gothic) possible.

In more capable hands the individual elements of The Necromancer might have been enjoyable. Wolfe is no heroic bandit (see: The Räuberroman), but the novel otherwise has many of the more entertaining Gothic and schauerroman tropes: “midnight rides and riders, demons’ dens, warlocks’ conclaves, blood-trailing shadows, driverless carriages speeding through the night, spook-crowded cottages, silhouetted ruins, and horizons studded with gibbets; and nearly every page is packed with the grim and gruesome flora and fauna of the Gothic landscape that the Minerva clientele had come to demand.”² And the individual stories clearly had the potential to be entertaining schauerromane before they were compressed and mangled by the Minerva Press editors and translators. But what the modern reader is left with is incomprehensible mess.

It is possible that Volkert and Wolfe were based on real people. From the 1730s until 1779 a large band of thieves calling themselves the “Buxen” (“bogeymen”) terrorized large sections of Germany, including Limburg, Lorraine, and Treves. Their members were rumored to hold Black Masses in remote locations and to initiate new men into their ranks through the desecration of churches. The leader of the Buxen, Leopold Leeuwerk, claimed to be a Satanist who possessed occult powers. His ferocious chief accomplice was Abraham Nathan. Both men were tortured and killed in September, 1772. The destruction of the Buxen was celebrated across Germany, and Kahlert may well have based Volkert on Leeuwerk and Wolfe on Nathan³—or, alternatively, on one of the numerous real-life bandit chiefs plaguing Germany during the eighteenth century (see: The Robbers).

Interestingly, there is some evidence that Mary Shelley had read Schiller’s “Der Verbrecher,” one of the stories in The Necromancer, before writing Frankenstein. The story is about Wolf, an honest but physically repulsive man who is forced by an unkind society to turn to crime. There are similarities in plot, language, and specific passages and episodes between “Der Verbrecher” and Frankenstein.

Finally, and intriguingly, there is a gay subtext running through The Necromancer, as Jeffrey Cass notes, with necromancy standing in for the horror of sodomy in the German army⁴ and with “Hellfried (the principal narrator) [loving] an Austrian officer who he calls ‘the darling of my heart’ and who he dotes on long after they’ve parted.”⁵ Queer theory, when applied to the Gothics, has yielded some fruitful results:

Queer theory is a comparatively recent supplement to the critical approaches customarily applied to Gothic. This central aspect of contemporary theory, though, has gained prominence both in its relevance to the work of authors who practiced— openly or covertly— a homosexual lifestyle, and in its broader implication of the “queer” as an outsider, a liminal person, one excluded from the discourses of power and identity.

As a genre, Gothic is without doubt “queer.” It is balanced uneasily between a frequently superficial adherence to the literary orthodoxies of plot and characterization, and the almost invariably unpalatable nature of its subject matter. The Gothic Hero is often queer in a metaphorical sense, even when his heterosexuality is scripted as sure and credible within the individual fiction. Characteristically isolated and often contemplating his own inability to meet cultural expectations or to control his allegedly antisocial desires, the Gothic Hero effectively interrogates the definition of what it is to be normal in both the genre and its surrounding culture more generally. Likewise, those who come into contact with him— the threatened heroines and manly, virtuous hero of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, or the victims of the central predators in Dracula by Bram Stoker or The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh —are compromised and contaminated, becoming queered in their own right and being forced, fearfully, to seek reintegration into the wholesomeness of conventional culture.

If every Gothic narrative, with its patterns of isolation, definition and redefinition, and developing strangeness, is arguably capable of interpretation through queer theory, then certain canonical texts within the genre are especially accommodating with regard to the explicit queerness of their characters or the literal homosexuality of their authors. Among these might be noted Vathek by William Beckford, with its atmosphere of sensual Orientalism, and indeed The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, which also features the indulgence of Eastern drugs. The double life led by Wilde’s eponymous hero— which has been revisited in the AIDS-era metafiction of Dorian: An Imitation (2002) by Will Self (1961–)—is anticipated by that of the doppelganger hero of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, itself a standard work in both queer and Gothic studies.⁶

Print: Karl Friedrich Kahlert, The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest, transl. Peter Teuthold. Richmond, VA: Valancourt Books, 2011.

¹ “Lorenz Flammenberg’s The Necromancer copied the plot of "The Ghost-Seer" while changing the names of its protagonists, and its second part even plagiarized Schiller’s narrative ‘The Criminal from Lost Honor.’” Stefan Andriopoulous, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013), 97.

² Douglass H. Thomson and Frederick S. Frank, “Jane Austen and the Northanger Novelists,” in Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank, eds., Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographic Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 40.

³ Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest—A History of the Gothic Novel (London: Russell and Russell, 1964), 85.

⁴ Jeffrey Cass, “Queering The Necromancer,” in Kahlert, The Necromancer, transl. Peter Teuthold (Richmond, VA: Valancourt Books, 2011), xiii-xxx.

⁵ Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800, 121.

⁶ Hughes, Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature, 207.