Borderlands and Otherworlds & Sphinxes and Obelisks | review by Rafe McGregor

Borderlands and Otherworlds by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, limited edition hardback, £45.00, 17 June 2025, ISBN 9781912586684

Sphinxes and Obelisks by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, paperback, £17.95, 12 November 2021, ISBN 9798764096322

I’ve been meaning to write a review of one of Mark Valentine’s collections of essays for some time now, but when the previous one was released, I was right in the middle of my own six-part essay, “Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between” (which you can find here, if you’re interested). That was less than a year ago and the next one is already available so I decided I’d better get on with it before I have to admit that he can write essay collections faster than I can read and review them. While ordering the recently released Borderlands and Otherworlds, I realised I’d somehow managed to miss Sphinxes and Obelisks and ordered it in paperback at the same time. This is review of both volumes.

Valentine is best known as a short story author, an editor and an essayist, but is also a biographer and poet. He has been publishing short stories and essays for more than four decades, although these have only relatively recently been collected in book form (In Violet Veils, in 1999, is – I think – the first) and more recently still (with – again, I think – The Collected Connoisseur, in 2010) made more widely available in paperback. Much, perhaps even most, of Valentine’s output has been published by Tartarus Press, a highly successful independent publisher famous for their limited edition sewn hardbacks (usually 350 and signed, if publication is not posthumous) with distinctive yellow dust wrappers and silk ribbon markers. If you are a collector as well as a reader, these are well worth the price at £45, with free postage and packaging in the UK. While I’m on the subject, Tartarus paperbacks have similar production values, but are probably overpriced at £17.95 (their Kindle editions appear to go for between £7 and £9; I prefer paper or audio books so I have no idea whether this is reasonable). Although I enjoyed Valentine’s The Collected Connoisseur, co-authored with his long term collaborator John Howard, a great deal, I have always preferred his work as an essayist and editor to his short fiction (my review of The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths, which he edited in 2008, was published in TQF24).

As an essayist, most websites list Valentine as specialising in book collecting, but his scope is much wider than that and includes undistinguished, forgotten and obscure authors from the first half of the twentieth century and before, many of whom were writers of speculative fiction. Borderlands and Otherworlds is his sixth collection of essays published by Tartarus, the first five of which are all available in paperback: Haunted By Books (2015), A Country Still All Mystery (2017), A Wild Tumultory Library (2019), Sphinxes and Obelisks (2021), and The Thunderstorm Collectors (2024). I’d be exaggerating if I said every essay in every collection is worth reading or that one or more of the collections shouldn’t be missed by speculative fiction fans, but I don’t regret the time or money spent on any of them. Rather than browsing their often diverse and always idiosyncratic tables of contents, I recommend watching this interview with Valentine, which gives a very good sense of the man, his interests, and even his prose style.

Sphinxes and Obelisks consists of 32 essays, 10 of which have been previously published, and a substantive introduction. It is worth noting, for both volumes, that the periodicals in which the essays previously appeared have often either ceased publishing or were privately issued, meaning that many readers are, like me, unlikely to have encountered them before and that they are simply no longer available anywhere else (both of which makes these collections all the more valuable). A summary of each essay would not only be tedious to compile, but almost certainly fail to do the collection justice and my intention is to expand Valentine’s readership, not reduce it, so I shall restrict commentary to those I enjoyed the most. The one on my shortlist that will probably appeal the most widely is “‘The Wonder Unlimited’: Hope Hodgson’s Tales of Captain Gault” (9 pages). William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) is now recognised as one of the original pioneers of the weird as a distinct genre within speculative fiction more generally and is possibly best known for his serial occult detective, Thomas Carnacki (first collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder in 1913), though he was also the author of The House on the Borderland (1908), The Night Land (1912), and various tales of the sea. Valentine discusses a group of the latter, which featured the serial character Captain Gault and were some of Hodgson’s most commercially successful work, while reflecting on the curious decline of the nautical tale as a genre of its own. For me, the other highlights of the collection are: “‘Change Here for the Dark Age’: Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins” (12 pages), about a precursor to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973); “Sombre Gloom: The Macabre Thrillers of Riccardo Stephens” (8 pages), about an early mummy novel; “Cricket in Babylon”, about the (surprisingly many) varieties of what I’m going to call armchair cricket (6 pages); “Three Literary Mysteries of the 1930s” (6 pages), about three talented authors – Robert Stuart Christie, Petronella Elphinstone, and Seton Peacey – for whom almost no biographical information exists; and “Passages in the West” (8 pages), an autobiographical account of a book hunting expedition in the West Country.

Borderlands and Otherworlds also consists of 32 essays, 8 of which have been previously published. My favourites are the first and last. In the former, “Borderlands and Otherworlds: Some Supernatural Fiction of the Early 1920s” (17 pages), from which the collection takes its title, Valentine discusses the uncanny fiction of Edward Frederic (E.F.) Benson (1867–1940), Mary Amelia St Clair (May Sinclair, 1863-1946), Forrest Reid (1875–1947), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), Lesley Garth (who was probably Lesley West Garth: born in 1900, married to William Ball in 1927, died in 1988), and George Oliver Onions (1873–1961). This is Valentine at his most typical and at his best, unearthing hidden – or, more accurately, forgotten – treasures. I am assuming, of course, that, like me, most TQF readers will be familiar with no more than half of these authors (Benson, De la Mare, and Onions in my case, although I have yet to read Benson). The last essay, “In the Attic” (5 pages) is, as the title suggests, an (all-too-brief) rummage through Valentine’s attic, which is full of all the forgotten treasures his regular readers will expect. My other highlights are: “At the House of Magic: Mary Butts’ Modernist Novels of the Occult” (6 pages), about Mary Franeis Butts (1890–1937), a collaborator of Aleister Crowley who was praised by T.S. Eliot; “Priestess of the Inner Light: The Magical Novels of Dion Fortune” (11 pages), about Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946), founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light; “The Last, Lost Novel of Phyllis Paul” (4 pages), about a novelist who retains a cult following in spite of next to nothing being known about her life (1903–1973); and “The Serpent at Ashford Carbonell” (3 pages), about a mystery encountered during a book hunting expedition in the Welsh Marches.

So far, The Thunderstorm Collectors is my first choice of the six – I don’t recall a single essay where my attention drifted for even a moment – but Borderlands and Otherworlds is a close second. Regardless of precise preference, the same can be said of all the volumes: Valentine’s essays are simultaneously fun and fascinating, clever and chimerical, enlightening and exquisite.

The Spectral Link | review by Rafe McGregor

The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti

Subterranean Press, 94pp, £11.80, June 2014, ISBN 9781596066502

 

This review was first published in November 2014, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49, following what I hope will be my longest ever absence from the magazine (a three-year hiatus).

If Thomas Ligotti is not the only contemporary practitioner of weird fiction, the genre that emerged as an epiphenomenon of literary modernism, then he is certainly the most accomplished. This slim volume comprises a two-page preface and a pair of short stories which, like his entire oeuvre to date, resist interpretation and exemplify the recondite. Ligotti’s acquaintance with the perennial problems of the disciplines constituting the Western tradition of philosophy – logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics – is striking and his work exploits the failure of repeated attempts to answer crucial questions about existence, knowledge, and morality. The suicidal narrator of “Metaphysica Morum” might be speaking for the author when he registers his ‘scorn for the saved and their smug sense of how perfectly right things were in the universe’ because Ligotti appears convinced that all is not right in the universe and continually revisits the fearful consequences of this conviction in his strange, singular, uncanny stories. There is a strong impression, for example, that “Metaphysica Morum” is nothing more than a slow, sustained unravelling of the meaning of the word ‘demoralization’, which is exposed as having implications beyond personal concerns with the terminal.

Despite its innocuous title “The Small People” is perhaps the more philosophical of the two tales, exploring one of the most pervasive questions in metaphysics, the difference – if any – between things as they really are and things as we perceive them; or, alternately, the extent to which human concepts reflect the reality of the natural world. Here, the narrator finds disturbing evidence of a mismatch and realises that he is one of the few possessed of ‘a type of instinct that actually forced me to see things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I could get by in life.’  He experiences a systematic disintegration of reality when the ‘small country’ he perceives is contrasted first with the ‘normal country’ and then the ‘big country’ until the border between small and big is breached by ‘halfers’. If neither “small” nor “big” map on to the world, do “self” and “other”?  As the narrator penetrates deeper into the mystery of small and half-small people, he is less and less able to “get by” and runs the risk of that ultimate undoing…demoralization. Ligotti is a writer of weird tales and these two will not be to everyone’s taste: their weirdness overflows and unsettles.

 

The Spectral Link sold out almost immediately on publication and is unfortunately now only available at exorbitant prices on the used books market ($99 and £189 respectively on Amazon US and UK at the time of writing).

Rediscovered! Lost tales by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker | review by Rafe McGregor

Rediscovered! Lost tales by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, Newell & Newell, paperback (saddle stitch binding), £13.99, 6 April 2025

Newell & Newell is a small press run by husband and wife Adam and Sharon Newell in Penrith in Cumbria. The press is located in their secondhand bookshop, Withnail Books, which I found via The Book Guide, a website I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone who still enjoys the experiences of travel, old-fashioned browsing, and being able to hold books in your hands before you buy them. As far as I can tell (because I’ve not had the opportunity to visit yet), Newell & Newell publishes limited editions of 250 chapbooks every few months, which can only be ordered via the Withnail Books website and which sell out very quickly. Rediscovered! is my second purchase, following The Croglin Vampire: England’s Earliest Vampire Legend? in November last year. I think The Croglin Vampire sold out before its publication, but at the time of writing there are still a few dozen copies of Rediscovered! available. Rediscovered! is a pair of chapbooks from two of the three (or four, depending on whom one asks) masters of Gothic fiction in general and Victorian horror more specifically: Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897). Along with Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), these two novels complete the trilogy of quintessential Gothic horror, with either Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) or Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895) sometimes expanding the trilogy to a quartet.

With such a pedigree, there is bound to be a great deal of interest in anything and everything Shelley and Stoker wrote and Stoker’s short stories, several of which I reviewed way back in TQF24, have aged surprisingly well. Stoker published about 50 in total and “Gibbett Hill” is not available anywhere else either in print or online. It was published in the Dublin edition of the Daily Express on 17 December 1890 and is 11 pages long in its chapbook form, accompanied by a print of J.M.W. Turner’s “Hind Head Hill” (1811), the etching that inspired the story. “Gibbett Hill” describes the unnamed narrator’s three encounters with a trio of sinister children on the road between London and Portsmouth and is a beautifully written weird tale, albeit not one of Stoker’s best. My main interest was the extent to which it anticipates The Lair of the White Worm (1911), which I regard as his unfinished masterpiece and has fascinated me for many years. “Gibbett Hill” shares several of the flaws of the novel, including Orientalism and a lack of internal logic, but is nonetheless well worth reading.

Shelley published about half as many short stories as Stoker, most of which appeared in The Keepsake, The London Magazine and The Liberal. “The Ghost of the Private Theatricals: A True Story” was published in The Keepsake at the end of 1843 and remained unavailable to the public until it was released by Newell & Newell in a limited edition of 100 in 2019. The chapbook, which includes the 23-page short story and an afterword by Adam Newell, is accompanied by a print of “Heidelberg” (1845), an engraving after Turner that may have been Shelley’s source of inspiration. “The Ghost of the Private Theatricals” is narrated by the aristocratic Ida Edelstein and set in Schloss Trübenstern, a fictional castle in Germany. Ida travels to the castle with her brother to attend the wedding of her sister and the story evinces all the typical and much-loved Gothic Romantic preoccupations with tortured family relationships, brooding ancestral homes, and unexplained deaths. The private theatrical of the title is an unnamed play that the characters agree to stage, a ghostly tale within a ghostly tale which serves as the engine of what is ultimately a delightful and suspenseful exemplar of its genre.

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between VII: Appendix – Rafe McGregor

The seventh of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post provides notes on a new series from the British Library, the cases of Kyle Murchison Booth, and the Southern Reach Quartet.

 

The Weird Tale: The British Library Tales of the Weird

Somewhat to my shame, I only discovered the British Library series while researching this series of posts. I really should have seen it sooner as it has been going since 2018 and published fifty-three titles to date (roughly one a month). The books are all sturdy paperbacks, with colourful, imaginative, and attractive covers and spines and cost £10 or less, depending on where and how one buys them. Each instalment includes a ‘Note from the Publisher’, which serves as a combined trigger warning and ethical rationale and which I reproduce here as exemplary practice:

The original short stories reprinted in the British Library Tales of the Weird series were written and published in a period ranging across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the stories selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience. With this series British Library Publishing aims to offer a new readership a chance to read some of the rare material of the British Library’s collections in an affordable paperback format, to enjoy their merits and to look back into the worlds of the past two centuries as portrayed by their writers. It is not possible to separate these stories from the history of their writing and as such the following stories are presented as they were originally published with minor edits only, made for consistency of style and sense.

My only complaint, which prompted me to include this part of the appendix, is that there are no numbers on or in the books, meaning that it isn’t easy to read them in order. I’m sure there is a sound reason for this editorial decision, but all collectors and some readers will want a chronological list. There’s one on Medium compiled by Owen Williams, which is easier to navigate than the British Library’s and which I used as a guide in compiling my own:  

1. From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea 
2. Haunted Houses: Two Novels by Charlotte Riddell 
3. Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories
4. Mortal Echoes: Encounters With the End 
5. Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings
6. The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways
7. The Face in the Glass and Other Gothic Tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
8. The Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson
9. Doorway to Dilemma: Bewildering Tales of Dark Fantasy
10. Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic
11. Promethean Horrors: Classic Stories of Mad Science
12. Roarings from Further Out: Four Weird Novellas by Algernon Blackwood
13. Tales of the Tattooed: An Anthology of Ink 
14. The Outcast and Other Dark Tales by E.F. Benson
15. A Phantom Lover and Other Dark Tales by Vernon Lee
16. Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City
17. Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain
18. Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird
19. Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season
20. Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird 
21. Heavy Weather: Tempestuous Tales of Stranger Climes
22. Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth
23. Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird 
24. Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End 
25. I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist
26. Randalls Round: Nine Nightmares by Eleanor Scott 
27. Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights 
28. The Shadows on the Wall: Dark Tales by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
29. The Ghost Slayers: Thrilling Tales of Occult Detection 
30. The Night Wire and Other Tales of Weird Media 
31. Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles 
32. The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan
33. Spectral Sounds: Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird 
34. Haunters of the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights
35. Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World’s Ends
36. The Flaw in the Crystal and Other Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair
37. The Ways of Ghosts and Other Dark Tales by Ambrose Bierce
38. Holy Ghosts: Classic Tales of the Ecclesiastical Uncanny 
39. The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird 
40. The Lure of Atlantis: Strange Tales from the Sunken Continent 
41. Dead Drunk: Tales of Intoxication and Demon Drinks 
42. The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
43. Roads of Destiny and Other Stories of Alternative Histories and Parallel Realms 
44. Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites
45. Doomed Romances: Strange Tales of Uncanny Love 
46. The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension by Jessie Douglas Kerruish
47. Fear in the Blood: Tales from the Dark Lineages of the Weird 
48. Out of the Past: Tales of Haunting History 
49. The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson
50. Deadly Dolls: Midnight Tales of Uncanny Playthings
51. The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood
52. Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen
53. The Haunted Trail: Classic Tales of the Rambling Weird

 There are three more titles due for publication, all by the end of this year:

54. The Weird Tales of Dorothy K. Haynes 
55. The Haunted Vintage by Marjorie Bowen 
56. Summoned to the Séance: Spirit tales from Beyond the Veil 

 

The Occult Detective Story: Kyle Murchison Booth

 In parts III and IV of this series, I praised Sarah Monette’s Kyle Murchison Booth occult detective stories and mentioned that some are, unfortunately, difficult to find. The eighteen stories have been published over a period of twenty years (2003-2023), during which two books have been published: The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth (2007; second edition, 2011), a collection of ten short stories, and A Theory of Haunting (2023), a novella and the most recent story. This is a chronological list of all eighteen, with the original date of publication in parenthesis and my suggestion for the easiest way to find them… 

1. The Wall of Clouds (2003) – The Bone Key
2. The Venebretti Necklace (2004) – The Bone Key
3. The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox (2004) – The Bone Key
4. Bringing Helena Back (2004) – The Bone Key
5. The Green Glass Paperweight (2004) – The Bone Key
6. Wait for Me (2004) – The Bone Key
7. Elegy for a Demon Lover (2005) – The Bone Key
8. Drowning Palmer (2006) – The Bone Key
9. The Bone Key (2007) – The Bone Key
10. Listening to Bone (2007) – The Bone Key
11. The World Without Sleep (2008) – Somewhere Beneath Those Waves
12. The Yellow Dressing Gown (2008) – Apex
13. The Replacement (2008) – Sarah Monette
14. White Charles (2009) – Clarkesworld
15. To Die for Moonlight (2013) – Apex
16. The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth (2018) – Uncanny
17. The Haunting of Dr. Claudius Winterson (2022) – Uncanny
18. A Theory of Haunting (2023) – A Theory of Haunting 

…I only hope that there are many more to come.

 

The Ecological Weird: Absolution

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy – consisting of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all published in 2014 – becomes a quartet tomorrow, with the UK release of Absolution in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and Audible. My original intention for this appendix was to provide a synopsis or summary of the trilogy for those who might not want to reread all three books before starting the fourth, but nonetheless need a reminder of the sequence of events. (This is what I wanted, in spite of having read the trilogy several times and having no doubt that I would return to it and the quartet in future.) To cut a long story short, I failed dismally, and will poach Mac Rogers’ reason: ‘There’s really no way to give the Southern Reach pitch without sounding high, so I won’t try.’ I do, however, recommend the first part of Adam Roberts’ review of the trilogy, which provides the best summary I could find with limited spoilers. (The second part is also worth reading, although it’s more interpretative than descriptive.) There was chatter some time ago about a prequel to the Southern Reach and it’s not quite clear whether Absolution is a prequel, sequel, paraquel, or some combination of these categories (reminding me of Heat 2, which nearly ruined one of my favourite films). Here is what VanderMeer himself has to say on his website:

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s blockbuster Southern Reach Trilogy.
When the Southern Reach Trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.
And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?
Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

I’m not sure that either more closure or more exposition are required or will enhance the trilogy as it stands, but I am confident that VanderMeer won’t ruin the masterpiece he created a decade ago. So far, there have been surprisingly few advance reviews: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Scientific American.

 

More Recommended Reading

Fiction

John Hall (ed.), Five Forgotten Stories (2011).

Rafe McGregor, Eight Weird Tales (2024).

Rafe McGregor, Six Strange Cases (2024).

Nonfiction

Stephen Ellcock & Mat Osman, England on Fire: A Visual Journey through Albion's Psychic Landscape (2022).

Mark Valentine, The Thunder-Storm Collectors (2024).

Timothy Murphy, William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark (2025).

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between II: Weirding the World We Know – Rafe McGregor

 The second of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the mismatch between conception and reality.

 

Weird Tales

I concluded part I by endorsing literary critic S.T. Joshi’s definition of the weird tale as essentially rather than superficially philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview and identifying the canon of weird fiction as the work of: Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), Edward Plunkett (1878-1957, writing under his aristocratic title Lord Dunsany), and H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Joshi’s definition also restricts the weird tale to fiction published within a sixty-year period that begins in 1880 and ends in 1940 and he deals with subsequent publications in The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction. The ‘modern’ or ‘new’ weird and its relation to the ‘ecological’ weird will be discussed in part V. Benjamin Noys and Timothy Murphy concur with Joshi’s dating and identify the source of the name of the genre as the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Before introducing this magazine, I want to mention three of Lovecraft’s less-talented contemporaries. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950, writing under the penname Norman Bean) is best known for Tarzan of the Apes (serialised in The All-Story in 1912), but also authored the John Carter series, which began with Under the Moons of Mars (serialised in The All-Story in 1911). Similarly, Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) is best known for Conan the Barbarian (short stories published in Weird Tales from 1932), but is also the creator of Solomon Kane (short stories published in Weird Tales from 1928). Finally, Fritz Leiber (1910-1992), is best known for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (short stories published in Unknown from 1939), but published some outstanding weird fiction, beginning with the collection Night’s Black Agents (1947).

Weird Tales was founded in 1922, during the peak of the pulp era and two years after its famous crime fiction counterpart, Black Mask (which launched the career of Raymond Chandler). Its first issue (pictured) was published in March 1923 and within a decade the magazine was publishing the Lovecraft Mythos, Solomon Kane, Conan, and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, an occult detective series that would run to nearly one hundred instalments. The first Lovecraft Mythos story published was ‘The Hound’, in February 1924. Aside from the significance of the magazine in naming and consolidating the type of narrative we now refer to as the weird tale, it is also significant in indicating the need for a supplement to Joshi’s definition. Weird fiction not only explores, expresses, and experiments with the worldviews of its authors, but is also essentially rather than superficially hybrid in character, crossing, slipping, and bending between and among genres. The Carter, Kane, and Fafhrd and Mouser series are all weird fiction, but Fredric Jameson regards Carter as the origin of American science fiction, Fafhrd and the Mouser are (along with Conan) acknowledged as inaugurating fantasy fiction, and Kane is as much history as fantasy. The pulp era died a slow death after the Second World War, initiated by first a wartime paper shortage and then the rise of television as the dominant medium of light entertainment in the nineteen fifties. Weird Tales published its final issue in September 1954.

In-Between Old and New

The five decades between the folding of Weird Tales and the coining of the label ‘New Weird’ (by John M. Harrison in 2002 or 2003) are complex when it comes to the development of weird fiction and I make no pretence to insider knowledge or even of being able to produce convincing evidence of my take on this period. That take has two key features: the influence of August Derleth and a second division of the genre into US and UK traditions. Derleth was a pulp fiction author and correspondent of Lovecraft who, along with Donald Wandrei (another pulp fiction author and Lovecraft correspondent), founded Arkham House in 1939 in order to publish Lovecraft’s work posthumously and self-publish their own work. Joshi is particularly critical of Derleth, who invented the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, and his misrepresentation of Lovecraft’s work and worldview. I am once again largely in agreement, but we must also accept that if Derleth had not appropriated Lovecraft’s legacy he would be as unknown now as, for example, Quinn is. While Lovecraft imitators thrived on both sides of the Atlantic following the Weird Tales era, I think it helpful to identify two traditions of canonical weird fiction, understood as having unquestionable literary merit (however one chooses to define that quality).

In the UK, a tradition influenced less by Lovecraft and more by Machen and Blackwood – as well as Walter de la Mare – emerged in the work of John William Wall (1910-1989, writing under the penname Sarban) and Robert Aickman (1914-1981). Wall published very little and is best known for his novella, The Sound of His Horn (1952). Aickman is best known for the forty-eight stories he referred to as ‘strange’ tales, the first three of which were published in We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (1951, the other three in the collection were by the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard). To these two, I shall add J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). Although Ballard, to whom I shall return in part V, is usually considered to be a literary rather than popular fiction author (a dichotomy I regard as not only erroneous, but malicious), he began his career as a science fiction writer, part of the ‘New Wave’ of experimental and political science fiction in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The novella The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and the collection The Terminal Beach (1964) are exemplary weird fiction. 

In the US, a tradition more obviously influenced by Lovecraft and either explicitly part of his mythos or self-consciously an extension or revision thereof emerged in the work of Thomas Ligotti (b.1953), Caitlín R. Kiernan (b.1964, pictured), and Victor LaValle (b.1972). Ligotti has published relatively little and I return to his work in the next section. In contrast, Kiernan has published a vast oeuvre since 1995, including more than ten novels and over two hundred and fifty works of shorter fiction. Their Tinfoil Dossier (2017-2020) trilogy of novellas is my favourite at the time of writing, but The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012) demonstrates an all-too-rare ability to extend the weird tale to novel length without stretching either quality or credibility. LaValle has published a dozen or so novels, novellas, graphic novels, and short story collections since 1999. His novella, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), is a magnificent reimagining of Lovecraft’s ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (first published in Weird Tales in January 1927) and, in my opinion, far superior to Matt Ruff’s similarly-themed Lovecraft Country, published in the same year.

 

Conception and Reality

In my review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (2016), I described Ligotti as exploring, expressing, and experimenting with a worldview that could be called deconstructive, after the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004, pictured). There has been a great deal of nonsense written about (and some would say by) Derrida, who developed the approach in the nineteen sixties and was a global public intellectual by the time of his death, but the basic idea behind deconstruction is simple: human beings (subjective experience) can only gain access to the real world (objective reality) through concepts, which are articulated through language. The worry, which stems from curiosities such as the fact that languages not only use different words for the same concept, but have different concepts that cannot be translated in their entirety, is that no human language and therefore no human conception maps perfectly onto reality. There is obviously plenty of overlap – otherwise we would not be able to build bridges, cure diseases, invent the internet, and fly to the moon – but there is no identity relation between concept and reality. This insight about the limitations of language, the way in which words fail to make the concrete and abstract objects they identify present, originated with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Derrida’s innovation was to demonstrate that the system of signs constituting a particular language (such as Modern English) is unstable because that system is inconsistent over both space (such as the differences between contemporary UK and US English) and time (such as the difference between Shakespeare’s early Modern English and contemporary Modern English in the UK).

The upshot of this is that there is a difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it really is, where aspects of the latter remain permanently inaccessible to us. I shall have more to say about this inaccessibility in part IV. In consequence of language failing to provide direct access to reality, the world in which we live is co-constructed by human intelligibility and inaccessible reality, a dichotomy very roughly equivalent to the distinction between culture and nature. This space between the world we create for ourselves and the real world is both frightening and liberating. If much more of our reality than commonsense suggests is a question of culture rather than nature, then much more of our reality can be changed for the better. I emphasised this emancipatory potential in my own introduction to literary theory, but Ligotti focuses on the fear and disgust the mismatch between conception and reality evokes. He scrapes away at the difference between subjective perception and objective reality to make it larger and more frightening and this is the worldview that emerges in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002), Teatro Grottesco (2006), The Spectral Link (2014), and his other work. Ligotti’s short stories are not only the most disturbing I have ever read, but distil and hone something was present to a lesser extent in Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson, Plunkett, and Lovecraft. With Ligotti in mind, I propose a further amendment to define weird fiction as: philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. This latter quality is precisely what the references to the uncanny or unhomely mentioned in part I are trying to convey, but ‘weird’ seems a much more accurate description to me.

 

Recommended Reading 

Fiction

Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco, Durtro Press (2006).

Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, Roc Books (2012).

J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World, Jonathan Cape (1966).

Nonfiction

H.P. Lovecraft, Notes on Writing Weird Fiction, Amateur Correspondent (1937).

Alan Moore, Preface, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Folio Society (2017).

Mark Bould & Steven Shaviro (eds.), This is Not a Science Fiction Textbook, Goldsmiths Press (2024).

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between I: The Weird Tale – Rafe McGregor

The first of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by framing first the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the weird tale.

 

Wyrd, Weyrd, Weird

‘Weyrd’ came to Middle English in the fifteenth century from the Old Norse urðr via the Anglo-Saxon wurd and Old English ‘wyrd’. Its meaning in the ancient languages was twofold, denoting both personal destiny and the personification of personal destiny in the three deities that tended Yggdrasil (the Norse tree of life), who were known as the Norns. A thinly-disguised version of the Norns appears in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (first performed in 1606), where they are called the ‘weyrd’ or ‘weyward’ sisters, i.e. witches (like his contemporaries, Shakespeare had little interest in consistent spelling, including the writing of his own name). The Oxford English Dictionary identifies four distinct but related meanings of ‘weird’ in Modern English:

1.     Having or claiming to have the power to control the fate or the destiny of human beings.

2.     Suggestive of unearthly character or strangeness that is unaccountable or uncomfortable.

3.     Having a strange or unusual appearance.

4.     Out of the ordinary, odd, fantastic.

We can summarise these by conceiving of ‘the weird’ as supernatural rather than natural and uncommon rather than common, but this isn’t particularly helpful when it comes to identifying a category or genre of fiction. Almost all speculative fiction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune series (2021, 2024), could be described as supernatural and/or uncommon.

A popular route out of this impasse is to identify the weird with the uncanny. Writing for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman compares King, Lovecraft, and Kafka: ‘Still, when you’re in the presence of the genuine, uncanny article, you know. Stephen King is tremendously imaginative, but H.P. Lovecraft is weird; Kafka is probably the ultimate weird writer.’ The concept of the uncanny as it is commonly used today, particularly with respect to literary criticism, is a translation of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche, which was introduced in an essay published in 1919. Directly translated, ‘unheimlich’ means ‘not from the home’ and some critics prefer to use the more direct ‘unhomely’. In Freud’s essay, the uncanny is the return of the repressed and he explains it by means of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, ‘The Sandman’ (1817), and Otto Rank’s The Double (published in 1925, but written in 1914), a psychoanalytic exploration of the doppelgänger. The core of Freud’s conception of the unhomely is that something can be simultaneously familiar and alien. In his authoritative The Uncanny (2003), Nicholas Royle identifies Martin Heidegger as providing the most intense philosophical exploration of the concept. The very premise of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), is that what we take to be ordinary is in fact extra-ordinary and uncanny. Dasein (which can be translated as ‘being-here’ or, to use less abstruse terminology, ‘agency’ or ‘selfhood’) is fundamentally ‘not-at-home’ in the world and Dasein itself is thus uncanny, in consequence of which we experience Angst (anxiety). Like China Miéville and Mark Fisher, however, I don’t think that the uncanny gives us the answer to what weird fiction is.

Romanticism to Modernism

Unlike Miéville, I do think that the origins of weird fiction can be found in Gothic Romanticism. In medieval art, Gothic style was distinguished from Classical style by its abandonment of restraint and subtlety, deploying caricature and exaggeration to evoke strong emotions and created with the intention of expressing the artist’s emotion rather than representing the reality in which the artist lived. As an artistic movement, the Gothic survived the transition from the medieval to the modern in the form of architecture, specifically the Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic that became popular in the seventeenth century. The Gothic focus on emotion, expression, and evocation meant that interest was revived once again with the development of Romanticism a century later. The Romantic movement elevated the significance of emotion, expression, and individualism and prioritised the natural over the industrial and the medieval over the modern. Unsurprisingly, the Romantic movement saw the development of the English novel from an experimental to an established art form and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is regarded as the first work of Gothic fiction. The genre reached its apotheosis with Shelley’s Frankenstein which, in turn, influenced two distinct sets of nineteenth century precursors to weird fiction, one on each side of the Atlantic. I should mention at this point that this series will focus exclusively on the Anglophone weird, in consequence of the combination of my own ignominious monolingualism, the consolidation of the genre in America’s pulp magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, and the continued dominance of English as the preferred language of its authors. This restriction means that I exclude at least one exemplary author of weird fiction, Franz Kafka (1883-1924). As one of the leading lights of Modernist literature, Kafka is rarely linked to pulp, popular, or genre fiction, but I agree completely with Rothman’s characterisation.

In the US, the crucial link between Gothic Romanticism and weird fiction is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849, pictured). Poe was one of the first masters of the short story and I regard his ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841) as the origin of both crime fiction and weird fiction. Poe was succeeded by Ambrose Bierce (1842-c.1914), Madeline Yale Wynne (1847-1918), and Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933). The tradition in the UK (actually Ireland, which was part of the UK at the time) emerged with the work of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), who retains a reputation as one of the greatest ghost story writers in English. Le Fanu was succeeded by Violet Paget (1854-1933, writing under the penname Vernon Lee, pictured), Conan Doyle (1859-1930), and M.R. James (1862-1936). Doyle is often underrated as a writer of horror and I have attempted to redress this imbalance in The Conan Doyle Weirdbook (2012). Ramsay Campbell claims that H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) united and advanced the traditions in which Poe and Le Fanu were working and Lovecraft acknowledged his debt to both traditions in his literary criticism. Campbell regards Lovecraft’s Mythos (which he prefers to call the Lovecraft rather than Cthulhu Mythos) as evidence of his lifelong attempt to perfect the weird tale, which involved an experimentation with prose comparable to his more lauded contemporaries in Modernist literature, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Kafka. If not a part of Modernism, the weird tale is, at the very least, an epiphenomenon of it.

Weird Worldviews

I still haven’t answered the question of what weird fiction is or what it was Lovecraft spent his life trying to perfect. There was little critical or academic interest in the weird until the turn of the century and that interest is largely the result of the efforts of literary critic S.T. Joshi, who spent the last decade of the twentieth century pioneering the field of weird fiction criticism. In 1990, he published The Weird Tale, which was the first of his many monographs on the genre and remains the most authoritative critical study published to date. Joshi identifies the weird tale as a retrospective category of speculative fiction that was published from 1880 to 1940 and is essentially rather than superficially philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview. Although alternative definitions of the weird in terms of the sublime, the uncanny, and the disgusting have been proposed, Joshi’s remains the most compelling. Lovecraft was a prolific – perhaps even compulsive – letter writer and defined his own oeuvre as cosmic horror, in which ‘common human laws and interests are emotions that have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large’. What distinguishes Lovecraft from his contemporaries, such as Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951, pictured) and Edward Plunkett (1878-1957, writing under his aristocratic title Lord Dunsany), is thus the absence of the supernatural. Lovecraft’s monsters are not werewolves, vampires, or ghosts, but aliens (although humanity is unable to distinguish the two). In his out-of-print biography of Lovecraft, L. Spraque de Camp referred to the worldview on which Joshi places so much emphasis as ‘futilitarianism’. Lovecraft denied that he was a pessimist in another of his letters: ‘I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist – that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process.’

With the exception of James, Joshi argues that each of the six exemplars of the weird tale – Bierce, James, Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Blackwood, Plunkett, and Lovecraft – had their own worldview, which was explored, expressed, and experimented with in their weird tales. I have already suggested that Bierce and James are more accurately considered as precursors to the weird and I think Joshi errs in omitting William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) from his list. My adjustment thus presents the canonical weird tale as being the work of: Machen, Plunkett, Blackwood, Hodgson, and Lovecraft. Although the prototypical weird tale and the genre of weird fiction more generally are almost always associated with Lovecraft above all others, the best weird tale itself is widely acknowledged to be Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, which was first published in his collection of short stories, The Listener and Other Stories (1907, Alfred A. Knopf). I came to Lovecraft much later than most – in my thirties – and have read his work in three cycles in the last two decades. In the first, I was amazed, enthralled, and even shocked by his singularity, innovativeness, and complexity. My second reading was much more critical, identifying flaws in both his form (structure and dialogue) and content (pathological racism and casual sexism) and wondering how and why he remains so popular. More recently, I’ve come to see him as a genius for all his moral and artistic flaws, a literary equivalent of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: two awkward, unhappy, and rather unpleasant men whose talent was unrecognised while they were alive, but whose posthumous influence is too great to calculate with any accuracy.

 

Recommended Reading

Fiction

Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Graham’ s Magazine (1848).

Algernon Blackwood, The Willows, The Listener and Other Stories (1907).

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, Weird Tales (1928).

Nonfiction

S.T. Joshi, The Weird Tale, Hippocampus Press (1990).

Kate Marshall, Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century, The University of Chicago Press (2023).

Michael Dirda, Introduction, Weird Tales, The Folio Society (2024).