Weird Tales Research Articles

Before Creepypasta: Folklore, Newspapers, and the Weird Tale

Before Creepypasta: Folklore, Newspapers, and the Weird Tale

Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century by Kate Marshall (review)

Novels By Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century by Kate Marshall (review)

Медный лик древней Америки: репрезентация мезоамериканских цивилизаций в американском pulp-журнале Weird tales в межвоенный период

In the Interwar period different form of Ancient civilization had been one the most frequent theme in American popular culture. Lost Indian civilization wasn’t exception, but this is-sue is still poorly investigate in the popular culture’s field. The article examines, based on John Cavelti's theory of for-mular fiction and John Saler’s “imaginary worlds”, the repre-sentation of pre-Columbian civilizations in one of the most significant American pulp magazines, Weird tales, and the ways in which their heritage is appropriated by American popular culture. We come to conclusion that representation of pre-Colombian indian civilization was within the general nar-rative of the ancient (like Egypt and Babylon), but had differ-ence in tropes. This concerned attention to the phenomenon of sacrifices. Also, the authors were anxious about issues of race, since the racist view of Latin Americans was a constitu-tive stereotype for many Americans. To prevent this problem from interfering with the appropriation of the Indian ancient heritage as uniquely American, the writers excluded the in-termediary in the person of a modern resident of Mexico. Mexico was represented as a poor, unstable country, just an epigone of its magnificent ancestors.

‘Delicate ironies quite imperceptible on its surface’: Henry S. Whitehead's weird tales and American empire in the Caribbean

AbstractThis article mounts an initial exploratory engagement with the weird fiction of Henry S. Whitehead, framed by American imperial expansion into the Caribbean in the interwar years. It situates Whitehead and his work within the wider historical context and shows how Whitehead himself used and played with history as part of his fiction. The article considers the role of light in Whitehead's fiction and imperial projects, as well as the way that Whitehead's work, as horror fiction, both shapes and seeks to dispel notions of the Caribbean as a space of horror. As well as offering some initial conclusions, the article seeks to open further lines for future investigation.

A Century of Weird Fiction 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell

Reviewed by: A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror by Jonathan Newell Michael Saler (bio) A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell; pp. ix + 241. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020, $60.00 paper. Over the past two decades, scholars have attempted to define the nature of weird literature, seeing it as either a mode of the gothic, a distinct genre, or a marketing gimmick. In A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, Jonathan Newell presents it as a specific genre that commenced in the mid-nineteenth century with Edgar Allan Poe, assumed momentum at the fin de siècle in works by Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson, among others, and culminated in the early-twentieth-century works of H. P. Lovecraft. Based on case studies of these five authors, Newell argues that “the [weird] genre’s key distinction from the gothic” is its “pivot away from the contents of the human mind towards the non-human world in all its horror and wonder” (58). The weird is fundamentally metaphysical, challenging the division in Western philosophy between human subjectivity and ontological reality, the “world-in-itself” (5). Weird tales express the radical alterity of existence that transcends all anthropocentric conceptions. Their narratives convey aesthetically that which cannot be apprehended logically—notably by deploying the affect of disgust. Newell’s linkage of the weird’s preoccupation with an ineffable ontology and its recourse to gross-out techniques nicely resolves the otherwise paradoxical feature of this form of fiction: its frequent combination of disgust and ecstasy, the abject and the empyrean. Writers of the weird use disgust not merely for sensational effects, but to intimate the intermingled, monistic nature of reality. Newell demonstrates that his five authors intuited what recent scholars of emotions have documented: disgust is often elicited when boundaries are violated. By dissolving rigid categories through representations of hybridity, decay, and alien incursions into quotidian reality, writers of the weird are able to evoke, at a visceral level, the fundamentally interconnected, porous nature of existence. Whereas Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s definitions of the sublime excluded disgust and exalted the human subject, Newell argues that disgust is the “sublime’s shadow,” dissolving anthropocentrism while evoking nausea as well as awe at the numinous nature of reality (69). Newell’s focused study should appeal to those who believe that the promiscuous use of the term “gothic” to cover virtually anything related to terror and horror from [End Page 722] the eighteenth century to the present renders that term meaningless. While he starts by defining both the gothic and the weird as “two modes . . . within a larger literary tradition” (5), he subsequently asserts that by the late nineteenth century, weird fiction becomes “a distinct genre . . . not merely a flavour of the gothic” (55). He charts a determinate genealogy for the genre beginning with Poe, who not only popularized the term “weird” but was an acknowledged influence on numerous fin-de-siècle writers who dabbled or specialized in works of fantastic literature. Many shared a common intellectual concern with the metaphysics of the nonhuman, thereby distinguishing the weird from the gothic’s focus on human subjectivity, as well as a recurrent affective strategy based on “the subject-dissolving power of disgust” rather than the gothic’s “subject-affirming power of sublime fear” (5). This argument about the weird supplanting the gothic receives empirical support from James Machin’s Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939; while Machin conceives of the weird as a mode rather than a genre, he observes that, “after the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly (1814), it is difficult to find examples of [the gothic’s] use as a literary term until the early twentieth century” ([Palgrave Macmillan, 2018], 14). Newell’s own study suggests that the pervasive use of the term “gothic” for material produced after the early nineteenth century is anachronistic and may occlude the unique cultural trajectories of modern fantastic literature. This work should also appeal to those interested in the intersections between theory...

Okamoto Kidō’s “Sea Turtles”: An Example of the Japanese Littoral Weird Tale and the EcoGothic

Okamoto Kidō’s “Sea Turtles”: An Example of the Japanese Littoral Weird Tale and the EcoGothic

For Tom Inge (1936–2021)

I met M. Thomas Inge in 1989 at the conference of the Popular Culture Association of the South after I chaired a panel on the antebellum comic writer George Washington Harris. I had tried to put the panel into MLA's national conference but was turned down. Another fan of Harris and his creation, Sut Lovingood, Tom arranged to have the panel added to the regional conference: typical of Tom's generosity. After the panel, he suggested a collection of essays on Harris, which I agreed to work on if he helped; that was one of the best deals I ever made, for it was the start of a collaboration that was part mentorship, part friendship. I doubt my career path would have been the same if I hadn't tried to shoehorn Harris and his rowdy character Sut into MLA. Tom and I also shared a passion for the work of William Faulkner, yet another fan of Harris and Sut.Tom was an indefatigable scholar and author of over fifty books. Twenty-five years ago, I once had a copy of his bibliography, which was then more than forty pages long. It is no exaggeration to say that he was a force majeure in American literature, especially in Southern literature, humor studies, and comic books. He was a founding member of the American Humor Studies Association, started American Humor: An Interdisciplinary Newsletter in 1974 with Larry Mintz, and later was the editor of Studies in American Humor.But it was in the arena of comic books and popular culture that Tom truly stood out. His book Comics as Culture (1990) was foundational for the now burgeoning academic field of comic books and graphic novels. I have this memory of him saying that he had to rent a place to hold his collection of original comic artifacts. I understand Virginia Commonwealth University will be the repository for the collection, making it an instant Mecca for research on comics in American culture. As mentioned in the VCU Libraries tribute to Dr. Inge, “The collection features correspondence from noted artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, Mort Walker, Bruce Duncan, and Harold Foster in addition to manuscripts of Inge's scholarly works. … In 2018, he received the Lynn Bartholome Eminent Scholar Award, the highest honor offered by the national Popular Culture Association that recognizes distinguished scholars who have made significant and lasting contributions to the study of popular and American culture” (“Thomas Inge, Pioneering Comics Scholar and Former Professor, Dies at 85,” VCU Libraries, May 24, 2021, https://www.library.vcu.edu/).Tom's sense of the comic in American literature was large: he once coaxed me into participating in a special issue he was editing on humor by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not the only time I benefited from his projects. Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps more obvious than Hawthorne as a subject for unexpected humor as a theme and a topic, and here Tom's extensive collection demonstrates its impact. Tom gave the Poe Museum thirty-six comic books, including issues of Classics Illustrated, Edgar Allan Poe's Haunt of Horror, Roman Dirge's Lenore, and Weird Tales of Horror. He also donated a page of original artwork for a Zippy the Pinhead comic strip and a Lenore doll based on the character in the Lenore comics. Some of his other comics formed the core of the Poe Museum's exhibit “Poe in Comics.” Similarly, items from his collection created “Mark Twain in the Comics: An Exhibition” for the 2009 State of Mark Twain Studies.In many ways, Tom was a legend in the part of academia that worked on comics and pop culture, or Southern literature, or humor studies in general, but what I will remember most is how approachable Tom was, always friendly and always gentlemanly in his demeanor. I was lucky our paths crossed, for he provided a model of how scholars in the humanities should work and play.

“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

INTERVIEW WITH XAVIER ALDANA REYES

Versão bilíngue

La morte della Gorgone : Shambleau (C.L. Moore, 1933)

This article aims at examining the story Shambleau by C.L. Moore published in «Weird Tales» (November, 1933). The author tries to show that the use of the ancient Greek myth of Medusa combined with a powerful role reversal animates this SF work. The merging of science fiction, ancient mythology and horror has created a memorable tale; furthermore, the elegant and lyrical style of Shambleau has contributed to its uninterrupted success.

Mix and Match Media

Mix and Match Media Tim Horvath (bio) Found Audio N. J. Campbell Two Dollar Radio hwww.twodollarradio.com 170 Pages; Print, $15.99 At 80, Tolstoy purportedly remarked on the power of the cinema and how it would impact writing: "You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life—in the life of writers...[a] new form of writing will be necessary." Whether Tolstoy was prescient or overly credulous is debatable—if there has been a revolution, I'd argue that it has been subtle, visible in how pervasive the cutaway is in contemporary fiction and the ease writers have in ending scenes abruptly or jumping from one to the next. And if anything, it's television that has experienced the more recent revolutionary fervor, the best long-form shows taking their cues from serial novels. That art doesn't progress in a linear way but is recursive, cyclical, and retrospective, is obvious yet worth highlighting. Who would've predicted that the podcast, a hybrid of old-time radio and feature news, storytelling and sampling, would go all sui generis and blow up? N. J. Campbell's debut novel Found Audio feels like it's suffused in podcast aesthetics, built around the rhythms, the found textures and harmonics, and even the ragged, built-in glitchiness that makes podcasts feel organic, that allows us to escape traffic and inhabit them rather than merely throwing them on in the background. Found Audio has the brazenly surreal and bricolage quality of podcast Welcome to Night-vale (2012—), along with the peculiar narrative swerving of a Serial (2014—) or an S-town (2017), where we sense less that we are being propelled forward and more that we are embedded with the narrator as s/he descends into ever-deepening, possibly unfathomable mysteries. And like Radiolab or This American Life, it feels modular—its three individual stories stand on their own, while feeling linked by themes and threads that give it a sense of wholeness. But not perfect wholeness. Like the best podcasts, Found Audio doesn't try to wrap everything up, but makes its lacunae and distortions, its interuptions and corruptions, among its pleasures. The book opens with a canny frame wherein the transcriber, Amrapali Anna Singh, explains that the stories to follow have been personally delivered to her on analog tapes by one Pierre Cavey under mysterious circumstances. As she puts it, "...I determine the authenticity of source materials and other specialized information in audio formats from earlier time periods." Establishing Singh as a sound geek and also a scientist—not readily rankled, impressed, or bullshat—Campbell ramps up the urgency: She feels the need to get these transcriptions out tell me more. Already weirdness is afoot. She says "That life exists at all is an exceptionally bizarre coincidence." And we get some Borgesian flourishes, like the allusions to her published works, The Sound of Time and The Sound of Temperature among them. Such unsteady ground in the guise of scientific rigor forms the atmosphere for the book as a whole—slippery, ethereal, and immersive. The bulk of the novel plunges us into tapes themselves, in which an unnamed American journalist with a midwestern accent tells of his travels to the bayou, the Walled City of Kowloon, and finally to Turkey; each location, however, seems to exist in some zone in between reality and dream. The bayou section centers on Otha Johnson, who legend has it "was born on the swamp, raised on the swamp, and hunted the swamp before the legality of who owned the land came into question..." In a story less self-aware, Otha might be a troubling character—his face is described as "blacker than coal...the whites of his eyes...bright ivory," and is said to "look...like one of those pulp magazine covers from Weird Tales;" the resemblance of his name to "other" is no accident. The narrator is there to sound him from his "lowest note to the top of [his] compass," as Hamlet puts it, but Otha challenges him, declaring, I remembah as a child, a young thing seein' a man come 'round...

Letters to the Editor as a Serial Form

ABSTRACT This article considers modernist-era letters pages as a serial form that enables readers to debate pressing political and cultural topics and to negotiate their relationship to a magazine and other readers. The authors examine two case studies of letters columns: those in the genre-specific pulps Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction and in the radical weekly The New Age. They show that the seriality of letters pages makes them dynamic sites for understanding how readers used modern print forms to fashion themselves as public, political actors and to influence the social, political, and cultural debates of their era.

(Re)encountering monsters: animals in early-twentieth-century weird fiction

ABSTRACTEarly-twentieth-century weird tales occupy an important place in the development of genre fictions. Among the innovations they contribute are new forms of monsters, diverging from earlier Gothic or mythological traditions, which spring, in part, from a strand of post-Darwinian thought that understood any bodily shape to be possible in adaptation to environmental conditions. This paper explores three stories which, by staging human encounters with animal monsters of radical unknown shapes, suggest new ways in which humans and animals might relate to each other: William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1908), Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Horror of the Heights’ (1913) and Will A. Page’ ‘The Air Serpent’ (1911). The encounter between characters and monsters is at root a colonial encounter between humans and the natural world, and often a violent one. By presenting weird animals as monstrous, the stories engage a number of anxieties associated with human–animal kinship and evolutionary superiority. By presenting monsters as strange Others but also as fellow creatures fit for their environments, however, these tales reach towards understanding animals as subjects in their own right with a claim to existing in their own spaces, destabilising the anthropocentric assumptions with which the human characters approach their adventures.

No, everything is not all right: Supernatural horror as pessimistic argument

Abstract Historically, common belief and opinion have not been overly receptive to the tenets of philosophical pessimism. Ideas such as ‘Progress is illusory’, ‘The world is malignantly useless’, and ‘Life itself is perhaps little more than a constant dying’ simply rub most people the wrong way – and understandably so. According to the philosophical pessimist Peter Zapffe, when confronted by pessimistic ideas and argumentation most people have recourse to four ingrained, anti-pessimistic strategies: distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. Collectively, these strategies constitute a group of rhetorical liabilities that go a long way in explaining pessimism’s ongoing rhetorical inefficacy. Responding to that impasse, this article attempts to vindicate pessimism of its apparent rhetorical failing, arguing that pessimism can achieve rhetorical viability by foregoing traditional models of argumentation and opting instead for a less straightforwardly rational mode of argument. Such a mode, we claim, is exemplified by a particular strand of supernatural horror literature, namely, weird fiction. Through an examination of several representative weird tales, we show how weird fiction, by creating a sense of uncanny fear, functions rhetorically to undermine readers’ adherence to anti-pessimistic biases. In so doing, weird fiction fosters the creeping sense that all might not be right with the world.

From the Editor

From the Editor

No Ruins. No Ghosts.

ABSTRACT This article explores anxieties about the unhauntability of the landscapes of New World, expressed in the aphorism “No Ruins. No Ghosts.” I argue first that ruins have material agency and produce destabilizing affects affording the imagination of haunting anthropomorphic figures to animate the landscape. For settler colonials in both North America and Australia, the absence of homely haunted “picturesque” ruins in the “sublime wilderness” of the New World becomes a diagnostic predicament of both folkloric and literary narratives, speaking to a broader colonial anxiety of “unsettlement.” In the final sections I explore how Americans fashioned new kinds of ruin and new forms of haunting, including imagined sublime ruins of vast age that predate European settlement. In these imagined ruins I see the genesis of an aesthetics of haunting materially inspired by New World landscapes: the aesthetics of the American weird tale.

The Unique legacy of Weird tales: the evolution of modern fantasy and horror

The Unique legacy of Weird tales: the evolution of modern fantasy and horror

The Gothic and the carnivalesque in American culture

Introduction: Ballyhoo Chapter One: Theory, Practice and Gothic Carnival Chapter Two: 'The Delight of its Horror' - Poe's Carnivals and the Nineteenth-Century American Gothic Chapter Three: Weird Tales and Pulp Subjunctivity Chapter Four: Ray Bradbury and the October Aura Chapter Five: Hosted Horrors of the 1950s and 1960s Chapter Six: Stephen King, Affect and the Real Limits of Gothic Practice Chapter Seven: Every Day is Halloween - Goth and the Gothic Conclusion: Waiting for the Great Pumpkin

The Emerge(d)nt Weird Tale: A Genre Study

This essay places the weird tale as a genre within the larger historical context of Gothic and fantastic literature, arguing that the weird tale is the rightful heir to those literary traditions.

Weird Weather: Nonhuman Narration and Unmoored Feelings in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

78 Victorians Journal Weird Weather: Nonhuraan Narration and Clnmoored feelings in Charlotte ©ront£’s Villpttp by Czra ©an Feldman Over the last forty years or so, criticism of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853) addressed numerous problems in the novel, including its narrative omissions and unreliabilities, its lack of closure, its multiple constructions of the reading audience, its attention to different kinds of plot, and its participation in both realist and Gothic traditions.1 Much of this criticism arrays the novel’s complexities in defense of the literary and social-critical worth of Bronte’s oeuvre, with the laudable aim of establishing that oeuvre in the canon of British literature and ensuring that it is read and studied. With Villette squarely in critics’ sights, it is now possible to return to the novel from quite different perspectives. Elisha Cohn, for example, recently drew attention to the aesthetic practices represented in Villette and Lucy Snowe’s habits of agitation and repose. Cohn notes her frequent retreats from analysis into slumber and reads them as intervening in a nineteenth-century discussion about how aesthetic contemplation ought to register in the body and mind. My own focus on her withdrawals emphasizes their meta-diegetic qualities: as Cohn also notes, the character withdraws from plot and narration as well as from wakefulness. This withdrawal has echoes in the later narration of “weird” stories, a genre characterized by its combination of supernatural actors (ghosts, strange gods, and the like) with an emphasis on the unsayable, the indescribable, and even the unimaginable. Kate Marshall’s discussion of new weird and old weird narrative techniques in “The Old Weird” is particularly helpful in making sense of Villette's narrative irregularities. Marshall’s work tunes in to the links between contemporary weird texts, like Cormac 1 See Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Buried Life ofLucy Snowe”; Jacobus’s “The Buried Letter”; and Silver’s “The Reflecting Reader in Villette.” Each differently addresses Lucy Snowe’s erratic narrative habits. Victorians Journal 79 McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), and China Mieville’s Railsea (2012), and what she calls “the gothic residues of nineteenth-century American literature” (631). In whatever era, “the weird” balances realism and experimentalism, exemplified by the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, whose narrators so often strive to maintain a banality of realist (even technical) description against the bizarreness and horror of the tales they are constrained to relate. Villette also has something like a gothic residue, seen in its famous ghostly nun (or “NUN”). This figure turns out to be explained, intradiegetically, in terms of human actions and ordinary clothes. However, that explanation does not prevent a formal cross­ contamination between the nun and the narrator. In moments ofnarrative (rather than personal) crisis, Lucy Snowe can be broken down, just as she dismantles the nun. The proximity and the similarity in structure between the narrator and the ghostly nun— two features of Villette that might have been more definitively distinguished from one another—allow the novel to query the ontological and ethical statuses of nonhuman beings. Narrative theory that engages with speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialisms—as Marshall’s does—promises to help rearticulate and reevaluate Vidette's narrative peculiarities so that they count towards, rather than against, the novel’s success as an aesthetic project. Rather than treating Villette's narrative difficulties as a set ofproblems that must be smoothed over, I return to them with the goal of elucidating their ontological implications for Lucy Snowe and examining the ethical demands that they issue from a nonhuman perspective. According to Marshall’s analysis, “[T]he indifferent and the cosmic [are] two of the key perspectival forms central to the arguments linking the new weird to the Weird Tales writers and their nineteenth century proclivities” (642). These forms recur in Villette, most explicitly when Lucy Snowe avows her own indifference to a scene that she recounts. This indifference is even confirmed at times by other characters, as when Ginevra Fanshawe (herself the possessor of a “halfhonest , half-insolent unreserve”) remarks on Snowe’s “strange composure” (Bronte 340, 341). The name “Lucy Snowe” also encourages the image of unruffled equanimity. And...