January 2026 Group Read: Unutterable Horror > Likes and Comments
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Now I’m wondering how I can take a photo of my publishing history bookshelf to make a mass suggestion (or just show off some cool books)….
Steven wrote: "Now I’m wondering how I can take a photo of my publishing history bookshelf to make a mass suggestion (or just show off some cool books)…."Close your eyes, run your hand along the shelf, and stop at random--then nominate that one!
Or let dice decide.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...Been a few years since I read this one and it’s good to remember that Carter’s nonfiction was a lot better than his fiction
Steven wrote: "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...Been a few years since I read this one and it’s good to remember that Carter’s nonfiction was a lot better than his fiction"
So nominated!
Imaginary Worlds
Five days left to add another nominee!What say you all?
Okay, the 15th is here--look for the poll!
Who will cast the tie-breaking vote…?Vote, y'all!
Okay then, this month we read Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi.Looking forward to diving into this one for sure!
First: at times I am confused how this Goodreads platform for groups even works. And now I get a note that there won’t be personal correspondence. Oh well. Now. Why is there a preface to this Unutterable Horror? I want to read the guts of the story, not some author explaining (whining) about how he decided to write his rendition. I would rather read that at the end. When I have finished and feel like I want more. Then I read about the author and their opinions.
That being said. This is the first words I have felt helped me.
The intersection of science fiction and supernatural horror would seem to be paradoxical, since science fiction (like mystery fiction) is a mode manifestly based upon the use of reason, whereas the essence of supernatural horror is the incursion of the irrational into an objectively real setting.
Perhaps he should have begun this with his circles of how the genres connected with each other. That intrigued me.
Maybe I’m just too critical or slow on the uptake.
I love that quote and just started reading it this morning. Ditto from me on the unnecessary preface, but I'm strapped in for the rest of the ride!And, like you, I'll leave quotes I especially like or especially disagree with here for discussion.
Joshi references Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Fiction" as one of his primary sources. That can be found in its entirety here:https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/...
And other good HPL essays:
"Notes on Writing Weird Fiction"
https://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com...
And more from me on HPL's "Five Definite Elements":
https://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com...
"I will maintain that the establishment of Weird Tales itself was the definitive beginning of “supernatural horror” as a distinct genre, just as the establishment of Amazing Stories in 1926 canonically introduced the genre of science fiction."I agree--the various genres as we know them today were codified in the era of the American pulp magazines, about the first four decades of the 20th century.
Not wanting to start fights, but here I am disagreeing...This is my problem whenever I read Joshi--he likes to make broad sweeping statements within the scope of the immediate work he's writing but it doesn't hold up under scrutiny beyond that single work. I'm sure his premise works so long as we focus on Weird Tales and after that, but we shall see.
Claiming Weird Tales definitively starts "supernatural horror" ignores the existence of a LOT of material that fits that bill--the majority of Algernon Blackwood's novels (most of which predate 1926) and all of JS LeFanu. Also, the summary text on the book says it covers supernatural fiction as far back as Gilgamesh, so it's an odd position for Joshi to make.
I'm sure he'll have reasons to define things that way or make it specifically regarding genre identification, but I'm leery of what he's going to try and sell me as facts based on a (to my mind) flawed taxonomy
The first chapter does get into the fact that supernatural fiction--though maybe not "horror," per se--makes up the oldest known extant writing. So he covers "supernatural" going back as far back as we go.The question of what constitutes "horror" is the sticking point. Though there are characters in Homer who are afraid of the monsters (etc.) that they run across, on balance I tend to agree that the Odyssey (etc.) are more in line with "epic fantasy" and not "horror."
But yeah, Joshi pretty much admits in the preface that his bias is toward Lovecraft, while still recognizing that Lovecraft himself talked in letters and essays about the authors and stories that inspired him, including an awful lot of supernatural (though not necessarily "cosmic") horror.
We can certainly see supernatural horror way before Weird Tales (1925). For instance: Dracula (1897). And that's only the one most obvious example.
Through Part I, Chapter III, he's jumping quickly forward in time, and touching on the appearance of various supernatural things (mainly ghosts) appearing in literature from Ancient Greece up through Shakespeare… but there's still no sense that these are horror stories, per se--more like fantasy stories with some gory or unsettling bits, but not meant primarily to scare you. It seems as though at least through the Elizabethan period, horror as a genre is yet to have been invented.
Time to nominate our next group read, this one to be read in January. We'll have until Monday the 15th to nominate books, then the poll will go up to end on the 31st.
This time, let's try something a little different. Let's read a book on the history of SF/F/H publishing or the genre(s) in general.
I'll lead us off with…
Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction