by Matt Cardin
Another Englishman, Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), also did much of his best work about this time, producing the psychic-detective sequence John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) and such collections as The Empty House (1906) and The Lost Valley (1910). Blackwood is notable for his nature mysticism and his use of outdoor settings, as is seen in his most famous stories, “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” H. P. Lovecraft rated the former as the finest weird story in the English language. The great Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron Dunsany, 1878–1957) published his first book, The Gods of Pegana, in 1905. While most of his work would be classified as fantasy or even as comic, he could be eerie or horrifying when he chose, and his influence on subsequent writers, particularly Lovecraft and his school, is tremendously significant. Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) published a supernatural novel, The Return, in 1910 and became notable for such short stories as “Seaton’s Aunt” and “All Hallows,” which blended the ghostly and the psychological powerfully and subtly.
The literary impact of the First World War (1914–1918) extended well beyond killing off such talented writers as William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), who excelled at both cosmic and nautical horror stories (such as The House on the Borderland, 1908), and Saki (the pen name of H. H. Munro, 1870–1916), whose short, ironic horror stories are found scattered through his larger collections. Effectively, the twentieth century begins in 1919, in the wake of the war. One of the most important social changes of this transitional period was a blurring of class distinctions, and this is reflected in literature, both in Britain and in the United States. Thus the polite, elegant ghost story for upper-class audiences—and featuring upper-class characters—began to merge with something a bit earthier and less sophisticated. In Britain this meant the appearance of such lowbrow anthologies as Charles Birkin’s Creeps series (1932–1936), as well as novels of occult horror such as Dennis Wheatley’s (1897–1977) The Devil Rides Out (1934). In America, it meant pulp magazines.
“Pulp” is a technical term that refers to the quality of paper used, in which flecks of wood pulp are visible, but it became synonymous with cheaply printed and often luridly illustrated popular magazines. Pulps soon began to specialize in particular genres, with magazines featuring detective stories, Westerns, sea stories, and the like. The first weird fiction magazine was actually German, Der Orchideengarten (1919–1921), but the first in English, and the most important, is Weird Tales (1923–1954 plus several revivals, with the most recent issue published in 2014).
The earliest issues of Weird Tales may have seemed none too promising to readers at the time, since much of the contents were crude, material horror that was badly written by any standard. However, the magazine persisted and began to develop important writers, so that much of the story of English-language horror, particularly in the second quarter of the twentieth century, is the story of Weird Tales.
By far the most important Weird Tales writer was H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), whose popularity and influence made him the central figure in horror fiction for much of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Lovecraft’s first appearance in Weird Tales was with the short story “Dagon” in 1923. His “The Rats in the Walls” (1924) must have had a tremendous impact on the readership at the time, as it was so obviously superior to most of what appeared around it. The first editor of Weird Tales, Edwin Baird, accepted anything Lovecraft sent him, but Lovecraft’s relations with Baird’s successor, Farnsworth Wright, who edited the magazine from late 1924 to early 1940, were sometimes difficult. Wright was a brilliant editor who not only raised the magazine to greatness, but kept it going through the Great Depression, even when at one point the magazine’s assets were wiped out in a bank failure. However, Wright could be overcautious. For example, he first rejected Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” because he was afraid his readers would not understand it, but then asked to see it again, and published it in 1928. He also published the majority of Lovecraft’s work, including such classics as “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), “Pickman’s Model” (1927), and “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), and singled out “The Outsider” (1926) for editorial praise in the highest possible terms. Wright rejected some of Lovecraft’s longer narratives, including At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” which severely damaged Lovecraft’s self-confidence and slowed down his creativity in his last years. (At the Mountains of Madness was eventually published in another magazine in 1936, the same year that “The Shadow over Innsmouth” was published as a stand-alone book with a miniscule print run.) When Wright published Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” in two successive issues (December 1936, January 1937), it must have seemed that all was suddenly well again, but by March of 1937, Lovecraft was dead.
A Timeline of Horror from 1900 to 1950
1904
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James. First collection.
1906
The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood. First collection.
1907
“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, published in The Listener and Other Stories.
1908
The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.
1912
The Room in the Tower by E. F. Benson. First collection.
1923
Weird Tales founded (March). First Lovecraft story published in Weird Tales, “Dagon” (October). The Riddle and Other Stories by Walter de la Mare published (includes “Seaton’s Aunt”).
1924
Weird Tales publishes Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (March). Farnsworth Wright takes over as Weird Tales’ editor (November).
1926
“The Abominations of Yondo,” first weird story by Clark Ashton Smith, published in The Overland Monthly (April).
1927
Early version of Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” published in The Recluse.
1928
Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” published in Weird Tales (February).
1929
Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” published in Weird Tales (April).
1933
The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore.
1936
Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth published as a limited edition book. M. R. James dies.
1937
Lovecraft dies. To Walk the Night by William Sloane published.
1939
Unknown magazine founded (March).
1940
Dorothy McIlwraith succeeds Farnsworth Wright as editor of Weird Tales. Jack Williamson’s “Darker than You Think” (short version) published in Unknown (December).
1943
“The Wind” by Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales (March). Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife published in Unknown (April). Unknown folds (October). “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” by Robert Bloch published in Weird Tales (July).
1947
Dark Carnival by Bradbury published. First collection.
1948
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson published in The New Yorker (June 26).
1950
“Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Matheson published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Summer).
In the meantime, Lovecraft had managed to gather a whole circle of colleagues around him, including such established contemporaries as Henry S. Whitehead (1882–1932), Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) and Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), as well as a host of newcomers such as Robert Bloch (1917–1994) and Fritz Leiber (1910–1992), whom he encouraged and mentored with great generosity. His influence extended further through his revision clients. Stories in Weird Tales by Hazel Heald, Zealia Bishop, and others read a lot like Lovecraft and even mentioned his forbidden books and elder gods—because Lovecraft had, in fact, ghost-written those stories. Two of Lovecraft’s younger colleagues, August Derleth (1909–1971) and Donald Wandrei (1908
–1987), not only wrote stories in the Lovecraftian tradition, with Derleth more or less taking over the “Cthulhu Mythos” in the 1940s and 1950s and putting his own quite un-Lovecraftian spin on it, but they changed the history of horror fiction profoundly by creating the publishing firm of Arkham House, first to preserve Lovecraft’s work in book form, and then to reprint other Weird Tales writers.
Of Lovecraft’s contemporaries and colleagues, Robert E. Howard is certainly the most popular and widely reprinted, though he is primarily an action-adventure writer, best known for his stories of Conan the Barbarian (who also made his debut in Weird Tales in 1932). Howard could evoke the supernatural and horrific powerfully in his fiction, but it was often tangential to his main interests. Clark Ashton Smith, on the other hand, was a strikingly original writer, obsessed with the grotesque and the cosmic. He often expressed a desire to reach “beyond the human aquarium” in his fiction and to depict alien worlds and beings on their own terms. This led him, as it did Lovecraft, to something approximating science fiction, but he also wrote of vampires, ghouls, and dire sorcery in such realms as Averoigne (medieval France), prehistoric Hyperborea, or Zothique, Earth’s last continent, which will arise sometime in the remote future.
By the early 1940s, Wright had died and his successor Dorothy McIlwraith did her best to keep the magazine going. It slowly declined, but continued to publish fine work, including many notable early stories by Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and numerous others. Bradbury (1920–2012) became one of the dominant figures in twentieth-century science fiction, but he also made significant contributions to horror in his Weird Tales stories, some of which were later collected in the Arkham House book Dark Carnival (1947) and its later transformation into The October Country (1955). Where many of the Weird Tales writers tended to be a bit old-fashioned, even Victorian in their approaches, Bradbury was thoroughly modern and addressed emotions directly through a style derived more from Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe than from pulp fiction. He and other such writers helped give horror fiction a broader appeal, which made the tremendous horror boom of the 1980s and 1990s possible. Many of Bloch’s 1940s Weird Tales stories, including the famous “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943), were widely reprinted and adapted for television in later decades.
In the 1940s Weird Tales began to suffer serious competition from the magazine Unknown (later called Unknown Worlds), which ran thirty-nine issues between 1939 and 1943 and was edited by John W. Campbell Jr. (1910–1971), who is better remembered as one of the great science fiction editors for his work on Astounding and Analog. Campbell’s approach was radically different from Weird Tales: he wanted stories that were thoroughly modern in style and content. Except for a few with historical or imaginary settings, most Unknown fiction was firmly set in the contemporary world. Much was humorous, but Unknown did publish two particularly notable horror novels. Jack Williamson’s (1908–2006) Darker Than You Think (1940; expanded 1948) tells of werewolves, a distinct, shape-changing species that has always coexisted with humankind, but that has gained a terrible advantage now that people no longer believe in them. Similarly, in Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943), set in a college, the faculty wives are all secretly witches who use their spells to advance their husbands’ careers and curse their rivals. Again, skepticism puts the hero in grave danger. Both of these novels, and a good deal of Unknown’s short fiction, are the immediate predecessors of what today is marketed as “urban fantasy.”
Outside of the pulp magazines, horror sank to a low ebb by the middle of the twentieth century, but some continued to appear. William Sloane (1906–1974) published two outstanding novels on the borderline of science fiction and horror. To Walk the Night (1937) concerns an alluring woman who seems to be an alien entity possessing the body of a human idiot, and The Edge of Running Water (1939) is about a scientific attempt to contact the dead. Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber cited To Walk the Night as a particular favorite. Both novels are superbly atmospheric and written in a fully literate style, without any of the crudities typical of much pulp fiction. However, Sloane wrote no more, instead becoming a publisher. The mid-twentieth century also saw the birth of horror comics, most notably those published by EC comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror), which went on to form their own important substream within the larger tradition of purely literary horror fiction.
Horror could still slip into the mainstream on occasion. Shirley Jackson’s (1919–1965) famous story “The Lottery,” about a rural town where one person is ritually stoned every year, caused a sensation in 1948 when it was published in The New Yorker. In 1950, Richard Matheson (1926–2013) published “Born of Man and Woman,” his first story, told from the point of view of a monster child kept chained under the basement stairs. Both of these stories are completely modern in style and approach, remaining subtle and understated, with great psychological depth, but told in deceptively plain prose.
The development of horror in the first half of the twentieth century can be defined as the evolution that went from M. R. James to Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson. Jackson went on to write The Haunting of Hill House (1959), one of the greatest ghost novels ever published. Matheson, for his part, defined horror for the generation of Stephen King and his contemporaries, and has been second only to Lovecraft in subsequent influence.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Comics; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction; Part Three, Reference Entries: Arkham House; Benson, E. F.; Blackwood, Algernon; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; de la Mare, Walter; Derleth, August; Hodgson, William Hope; Howard, Robert E.; Jackson, Shirley; James, M. R.; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Matheson, Richard; Pulp Horror; Saki; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wandrei, Donald; Weird Tales; Wheatley, Dennis; Whitehead, Henry S.
Further Reading
Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Everett, Justin, and Jeffrey H. Shanks. 2015. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Weinberg, Robert. 1999. The Weird Tales Story. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.
HORROR FROM 1950 TO 2000
Between 1950 and 2000 horror literature underwent a major shift in focus and direction that contrasted with approaches to the tale of horror in the first half of the twentieth century. In the immediate postwar years horror fiction shed many of the crudities of style and content that had distinguished pulp horror in favor of more sophisticated storytelling. The second half of the twentieth century also saw the emergence of Stephen King, whose best-selling fiction had an incalculable impact on horror fiction written in the wake of his phenomenal success, including the popularization of the novel over the short story as the most important vehicle for horror fiction.
In the 1940s, wartime paper shortages killed off most pulp magazines that published short horror fiction. Weird Tales, the longest-lived of all pulp magazines that catered to tastes for weird fiction, struggled on into the 1950s and published its last issue in September 1954. By that time not only Weird Tales but the type of horror fare that it offered had fallen out of vogue. As Les Daniels observed in Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media, “The Second World War, climaxing with the explosion of nuclear weapons and capped by the hideous revelations unearthed in a beaten Germany, had temporarily exhausted the public’s appetite for horrors of any kind” (Daniels 1975, 156).
Horror
fiction written by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, and other Weird Tales alumni continued to be published in science fiction magazines (then enjoying a postwar boost in popularity) and in mystery magazines, where it frequently absorbed influences from those very different genres. At the same time, horror stories from Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell, and other writers whose careers were launched in the 1950s began appearing in the burgeoning men’s magazine market, whose publications demanded a higher level of literary sophistication and maturity than the pulps. Their work bore out the perception that, in the aftermath of World War II, the traditional monsters of horror fiction were now irrelevant to contemporary readers. “Sad, but true,” Beaumont wrote flippantly in his introduction to the anthology The Fiend in You, “after centuries of outstanding service to the human imagination, the classic terrors—the ghosts, the vampires, the werewolves, the witches, the goblins, all the things that go bump in the night—have suddenly found themselves unable to get work, except as comedians” (Beaumont 1962, vi). A world contending with the very real anxieties over the dawning nuclear age demanded horror stories that were more believable than fantastic.