Scott Rhee's Reviews > The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M R James, Ambrose Bierce, H P Lovecraft

"The true weird tale has 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 of defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of umplumbed space." ---H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

Preeminent Lovecraft scholar and amateur literary critic S.T. Joshi ("amateur" is not intended to be insulting; he admits it in the first paragraph of the introduction) spends a large chunk of his introduction in his book "The Weird Tale" trying to describe what a "weird tale" isn't and ultimately finds himself going back to the above definition. It's as good a definition as any.

Joshi's book is, admittedly, for a niche audience. Only a select group of readers actually know what "weird" fiction is, and not everyone in that group actually likes it, so Joshi's book has a very limited appeal.

If, however, you have actually read---and enjoy---stories by Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, and H. P. Lovecraft (bonus points given if you're actually familiar with at least half those writers), then this might be a worthwhile book to read.

Lovecraft may be the most familiar name on the list and, according to Joshi, the author who is still widely read. Joshi himself is somewhat biased (again, he admits this), as he is a huge Lovecraft fanboy.

Some of the other authors are hardly remembered for their oeuvre, having been relegated to, at best, a literary footnote. Dunsany, for example, essentially invented the "sword-and-sorcery fantasy" genre, which was immediately taken up by, and vastly improved upon by, J.R.R. Tolkein.

Joshi tries to encourage readers to pick up some of these authors, as they were certainly gifted in specific, albeit self-limiting, areas. For example, James was widely regarded as one of the best writers of Victorian-era ghost stories, but that's about all he ever wrote.

While I have read, and love, some of the works of Blackwood ("The Willows" is a chilling horror novella) and Bierce, I have tried to read Machen and Dunsany to varying degrees of success. Machen's style is so overwrought as to almost be unreadable, and Dunsany's fantasy is, while beautifully poetic, just pure silliness. James's ghost stories are, by today's standards, laughably un-scary.

Of course, there is something to be said for reading these old 19th-century gems. Many of them are brilliant and wonderful snapshots of a particular era in our history of a pre-industrial world unsullied by fears of world-wide global destruction. Fears were so much simpler then...