Weird Fiction discussion

This topic is created in order to give us a space to discuss Fall (I just discovered Fall goes through December 21, Autumn ends November 30, and I mean the December date, so no more use of the word Autumn for me) 2024's new non-fiction group read. If you want to be in on the discussion, order your book now! I have. We can start discussing the book itself , its editor, the fact it's a collection of essays, etc. now, its contents September 22. Okay?

Great! Oh, I had no idea fall and autumn end at different dates. I like how December marks the beginning of winter, so I'll never use the word fall again, then. Not that I did so in the first place, hah :)

It seems like my copy will arrive between 29th of September and 13th of October.

My copy arrived today from VanderBooks, Tallahassee, FL. We know who that is, right?

Anyhow, the book is beautiful. Brand new. Although hardback, it does not have or come with a dustcover. The Introduction is written by the two editors. It's a helpful overview of the literary environment Weird Tales began publishing in back in early 1923. Hard to believe that was 101 years ago now.

They make a great point of how different Weird Tales was from other magazines. Yet it wasn't published in a vacuum. While it was the first magazine published devoted to a speculative fiction genre, namely weird fiction, it wasn't the first by any means to publish speculative fiction stories. Argosy, All-Story, and Blue Book sometimes published a story of that type. The Black Cat (not a pulp) and Thrill Book (short-lived, poorly distributed) has a lot of supernatural stories. That makes me curious to try to locate some pre-1923 copies of these magazines--online and free, of course--to read those stories. They'd cost hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars to buy today, I imagine. Online is the only practical way to go, I suspect.

The authors they list--all writing proto-weird, though they don't call it that, and the writers from the first year of Weird Tales, make a fascinating list! Anyway, this book is proving a real treat already, and I haven't even started it yet. The introduction has roman numerals for page numbers.

This book is also the eighth in a 9-book series. Here are the others (we might want to keep these in mind for future non-fiction read possibilities):

1) Lovecraft and Influence: His Predecessors and Successors
2) Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys
3) Critical Essays on Lord Dunsany
4) Ramsey Campbell: Critical Essays on the Modern Master of Horror
5) Lord Dunsany: A Comprehensive Bibliography
6) Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy
7) Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror
8) --
9) Richard Matheson's Monsters: Gender in the Stories, Scripts, Novels, and Twilight Zone Episodes

Hark, my copy has arrived! It's a used one, but in a very good condition. Can't wait to learn more about Weird Tales!

And I have some of the other books in that series on my tbr/wish list. Though expensive, they look really interesting :)

I am taking my time with this book and plan to relish it. I finished the Introduction, which basically provides an overview of what the focus of the collection of essays will be. It looks like it will be an overview of the classic Weird Tales period writers and their achievements, which was from 1923 through 1953. They're going to give a lot of emphasis to the big three: Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith. But they're not going to ignore the lesser-known writers. There will even be essays about the obscure writers, those that came at the tail end, like Harold Lawlor, whom I've never heard of before but is apparently under-rated and undeservedly forgotten.

I'm glad they're going to dig into the sword-and-sorcery aspect of weird fiction quite a bit too. We today have forgotten that was a part of the weird genre and treat it today purely as a sub-genre of fantasy. But done right, that is with more emphasis on the sorcery than the sword, it really shouldn't be so divorced from today's weird as it now is.

I'm also glad there are going to be a number of essays devoted to Clark Ashton Smith. Of the big three, his stock is perhaps the lowest, but I personally have started to like his work the best of all weird authors of all eras. I note his Zothique is now available for purchase as an eBook. When we read it years ago in this group, it was available only as a downloadable pdf file, making it a challenge to read, at least on my eReader. Perhaps we might someday consider a first revisit of our shelf.

This book is a collection of fourteen essays on the early Weird Tales issues, their authors, what they were trying to create and accomplish, along with an assessment of their achievements. I'm finding it extremely interesting reading so far.

Chapter One ★★★★★
"Something That Swayed as If in Unison"
The Artistic Authenticity of Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of Modernism
by Jason Ray Carnet

Every word of this extremely short essay was of great interest to me. It was so full of ideas I hardly know where to begin to discuss them. It would take me pages to give all the thoughts generated. One key theme Carney works is how the literary movement known as modernism related to the editor, authors, and readers of the early (1920s) Weird Tales, especially Lovecraft and his circle.

A highlight for me was how Lovecraft assesses modernism. Lovecraft was well aware of Pound, Eliot, Conrad, Joyce, Hemmingway, etc. and what they were writing. He had little to no respect for it. He recognized its intellectual power and could clearly see how intelligent and erudite these authors were. But for Lovecraft their writings are failures in imagination. The works of these authors is too dry to be of much value.

I find myself much in agreement with Lovecraft and his cirdle's critique of mainstream classic literature. A liberal education usually starts with Plato and his statement about the unexamined life being not worth living. Read philosophy and classic works of literature therefore, so that you can know the questions and some of the deepest thinkers' answers. Okay, but what then? Is that enough? Why does liberal education stop at learning to ask the great questions and then think logically and understand the world? That isn't enough!

Human beings must also learn to imagine, to create mental works of wonder, awe, passion, and emotion to truly begin to achieve our intellectual potentials. This is brought forward as a vital principle of a worthwhile life in no undergraduate program ever created anywhere. It's what Lovecraft and others of us believe and have learned outside of or after academic study, never as a result of it. Why is that? It shouldn't be that way!

Here in this group, we read the classics that teach one how to imagine, not think. These are the type classics Weird Tales authors tried to create and occasionally succeeded in writing.

This is just one example of the many thoughts and realizations Carney's essay engendered in me.

Chapter Two ★★★
Weird Modernism
Literary Modernism in the First Decade of Weird Tales
Jonas Prida

This somewhat longer essay was a bit of a letdown after that opening essay. Jonas relates, or tries to compare, a number of classic modernist works to some of the stories being published in Weird Tales in the 1920s. He makes a lot of post-colonial criticisms and comes at the works from that school of literary criticism's perspective. I don't really buy all that stuff, and am not that interested even if it is mostly true. People exploited one another in a way they shouldn't have. Okay, that's awful, but how does that affect me today? It really doesn't.

I also felt like Prida was cherry picking modernist works and oversimplifying their messages to make points he wanted to make, that the classic works really said more, and sometimes even made points that were different from what Prida said they were. I don't want to dwell, but I'll provide one example. Prida writes: "Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), a seminal modernist novel, uses Marlow's trip down the Congo to explore the confusion and absurdity of the colonial process." And that's as far as Prida takes it. Really? Have you studied that particular Conrad work? I have. I would never sum it up that way. For me, the story was more about man's near infinite capacity for depravity, interpersonal exploitation being only one of the examples Conrad furnished.

One of the neatest facets of this article was the discussion of so many 1920s Weird Tales stories by less well-known authors. Prida realizes his audience, unlike him, has never read or even heard of these stories. He summarizes them in a way that really piques my interest to start reading some. The only problem is Prida's scope is set for breadth, never depth. I have to wonder if his summary was only for the point he felt most relevant about a story, but that the story is really about something else entirely, as in Prida's "Heart of Darkness" comment. There's only one way I can find out, I guess, which is to read the 1920s stories themselves instead of just about them.

Chapter Three ★★★★
The Lovecraft Circle and the "Weird Class"
"Against the Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller"
Daniel Nyikos

This essay centered on Lovecraft and the circle of writers around him that created stories for publication in Weird Tales. Nyikos's main point was that this circle derived and then articulated its own set of aesthetics for what a good weird tale consisted.

I agree with Nyikos that this aesthetic is valuable. My only problem with the article is that I feel he only started to articulate what that aesthetic was. What exactly separates a weird story from any other? What makes it more worthwhile than any other? What makes for a great weird story as opposed to a merely good one? Nyikos points out the direction Lovecraft's aesthetic provided, but he doesn't nail it down as much as I hoped he might.

Two sources he lists for me perhaps doing that for my own benefit is by carefully reading Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature, and by reading the letter column of 1920s Weird Tales issues, called "The Eyrie," in which the editors and readers hashed out aesthetic principles, basically teaching how to read and write weird fiction.

Follow-up: That first essay above, Carnet's. He mentioned a Lovecraft written poem based on T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." Lovecraft titled his version "Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance." I had to read it, of course. I's a hoot, especially if you have read the source, Eliot's original. I did, because it was assigned in my American Literature undergraduate survey class, the only reason anyone would read it, I imagine (no pun intended). Check it out: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/...

I just started reading this book today. Better late than never!

That introduction already was excellent and educational, and I am thoroughly convinced that I will get my money's worth.

I see you've rated it four stars, Dan. Do you have any other comments about chapters/essays 4-14? I always enjoy reading your thoughts on these things. I tend to learn quite a lot.