Weird Fiction - History

History

H. P. Lovecraft adopted the term from Sheridan Le Fanu and popularized it in his essays. In "Supernatural Horror in Literature," Lovecraft defines the genre:

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 or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

The pulp magazine Weird Tales published many such stories in the United States from March 1923 to September 1954. S. T. Joshi describes several subdivisions of the weird tale: supernatural horror (or fantastique), the ghost story, quasi science fiction, fantasy, and ambiguous horror fiction and argues that "the weird tale" is primarily the result of the philosophical and aesthetic predispositions of the authors associated with this type of fiction.

Although Lovecraft was one of the few early 20th-century writers to describe his work as "weird fiction," the term has enjoyed a contemporary revival in New Weird fiction. For example, China Miéville often refers to his work as weird fiction. Many horror writers have also situated themselves within the weird tradition, including Clive Barker, who describes his fiction as fantastique, and Ramsey Campbell, whose early work was deeply influenced by Lovecraft.