This study is, in part, a reaction to the view that the story of weird fiction is ‘the story of the rise of the tentacle’ and ‘the group of writers surrounding Lovecraft’ that ‘represented a revolution of sorts against old ideas about supernatural fiction’ (A. VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2012a, xvi). This account effectively puts the output of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the 1920s and 1930s—especially the work of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961), and Robert E. Howard (1906–1936)—at the centre of our understanding of the mode and its history. The following discussion is not meant to rebut this account, but rather blur the periodic boundaries put in place that serve to co-opt weird fiction for a ‘modern’ era and imbue it with a sheen of modernist respectability. Since the term ‘pulp modernism’ was coined by Paula Rabinowitz (in relation to Noir), refracting popular culture through the prism of Modernism has been a source of productive and insightful scholarship (Rabinowitz 2012). However, making such associations with what is understood as high culture inevitably, even if only inadvertently, involves some animus to legitimize texts that have traditionally been seen as outside the purview of scholarship. China Miéville, for example, achieves both with his comment that weird fiction and high Modernism are ‘exactly linked’ and are ‘a differently inflected statement of the same concerns, the same anxieties, the same attempted solutions’ (Venezia 2010, 5).
In their introduction to The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012a, b) , Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer contrast this ‘modern era’ of weird fiction to ‘prior eras’ and aver that a break took place: ‘The best and most unique supernatural writers from prior eras, like Arthur Machen (his best short fiction written before 1910), would leave their mark on this newer weird, but not a boot print’ (xvi). The parenthetical remark is a necessary one to the argument: Machen (1863–1947) outlived Lovecraft by a decade. It is also indicative of the refusal of lives and texts to conform to our desire to retroactively impose order on, and identify process in, the teeming jumble and babel of culture and history.
However, the point of disagreement elaborated upon in what follows is the specific claim that Machen, and his generation of writers, did not leave a ‘boot print’ on ensuing weird fiction. It is my attempt to reinsert weird fiction back into its wider continuum, taking as my starting point the nineteenth century, and as my end point the iterations of the nineteenth century still very much present and persistent in the ‘modernist’ Weird Tales of the 1920s and 1930s. Reviewing Machen’s 1895 novel The Three Impostors, H. G. Wells lamented that Machen had ‘determined to be weird’ (Wells 1896, 48).1 My argument in this book is that Machen was not alone in this endeavour.
In Lovecraft’s influential survey , Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), he defined the weird tale as one consisting of
The ongoing durability of this delineation is perhaps as indicative of Lovecraft’s impact on the mode as it is on the perspicacity of his analysis. It seems doubtful that there is any credible definition of weird fiction which is not in some respects a permutation or elaboration of Lovecraft’s conceit here. It has certainly been reiterated regularly ever since, and has become (as here) a formula from which most if not all discussions of weird fiction ensue, and with good reason: it manages to limn the mode while deftly avoiding any inaccurately reductive rendering of weird fiction as a rigidly prescribed genre.2 As Roger Luckhurst observes, the Weird was ‘never tied to a fixed typology and continually slipped category’, due in no small part to Lovecraft’s largesse in his own application of the term (Luckhurst 2017, 1043). Attempting a category fix for weird fiction, therefore, seems tautologically self-defeating when dealing with a mode of writing that is so determined to resist just such ossification into formula.something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space . (Lovecraft 1985, 426)
An ensuing challenge of undertaking a study such as this is, therefore, to resist overstating the case. The following should not be construed as either any particular advocacy of the term ‘weird fiction’ or a promotion of its use, or an implied criticism of related terms such as Gothic, uncanny, supernatural, horror, strange, and so on. In what follows I will discuss ‘weird fiction’ in relation to some of these terms but the objective is simply to understand why people use the word ‘weird’ in relation to fiction at all, and if its deployment can implicitly tell us something about the sort of fiction that provokes such use. I hope, therefore, that (subsequent to this Introduction) repeated use of the term ‘weird fiction’ (and ‘the Weird’ more generally) without cautiously reiterating acknowledgements of its difficulties will be tolerated. Writing critically on weird fiction obviously necessitates use of the term, and any such use below should not imply an un-interrogated or complacent assumption of what the term means (the discussion of which is, in part, one of the tasks of the study as a whole) and how it is used.
These difficulties may in part also explain the term’s persistence and its provocation; its slipperiness and its suggestion of generically interstitial writing that willfully evades and complicates procrustean critical readings. It also makes it difficult to position any particular author as definitively a writer of weird fiction (even Lovecraft’s fiction has a variety of other adumbrations: ‘cosmic horror’, science fiction, Dunsanian fantasy, etc.). Whenever a particular writer is adduced to my argument, I have attempted to present at least some documentary evidence that their work has been described as ‘weird fiction’ either by their contemporaries or in subsequent criticism, preferably presenting examples of both. I have sought to avoid getting sidetracked into extensive justifications for considering a particular writer to be admissible as this would become an ultimately tedious and repetitive diversion from, rather than a contribution to, the discussion. Rather, I have attempted to imbricate documentary justification for a particular author’s inclusion within the discussion itself.
My choices are also informed by the ‘connoisseur culture’ I delineate in Chap. 3, but which informs much of the discussion throughout: the notion that weird fiction is a mode defined, at least in part, by a process of distinction whereby connoisseurs use the term as an imprimatur for identifying texts of variegated genres deemed to achieve the requisite aesthetic qualities to differentiate them from formulaic genre writing. This is particularly applied to horror texts and often specifically used to differentiate between what John Buchan described as ‘mere horror [… and …] legitimate art’ (see Chap. 4). Indeed, the issue of the relationship between literariness, artistic legitimacy, and genre, is—as I will argue—intrinsic to the function of the term ‘weird fiction’, and as such is revisited repeatedly throughout what follows.
For Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy, the weird can be ‘inflationary’ (after Carl Freedman)—exposing the reader to the omniferous universe (see Chap. 3)—or deal in ‘impoverishment’ (after Samuel Beckett), offering harrowing glimpses of the ‘shivering void’ at the heart of things (Noys and Murphy 2016, 118). Noys and Murphy also observe that both effects can be accommodated within S. T. Joshi’s claim that the weird fiction has a capacity for ‘refashioning of the reader’s view of the world’ (Joshi 2003, 118). The British weird fiction discussed in this book certainly tilts to the former, the ‘inflationary’, rather than the latter, which reflects the post-Lovecraftian nihilism of writers like Thomas Ligotti (1953–). According to Freedman, this ‘inflationary’ valence of weird fiction (or, specifically, ‘the genres that compose weird fiction’) inclines ‘in various ways, to suggest reality to be richer, larger, stranger, more complex, more surprising—and, ind...