Weird Fiction and the Gothic

One reason why the Gothic can be difficult to pin down as a genre is that over the years, it has spawned and overlapped with many different genres. I have touched briefly on the role that the Gothic played in the development of modern horror and explored in some depth how we can credit it as the foundation of the detective novel. Today, I want to explore one of the Gothic’s more nebulous offspring: weird fiction.

What is weird fiction? Well, it’s sort of right there in the name. Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction, usually in the form of short stories, that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It often blends horror together with science fiction and fantasy, giving its horror elements a weird and unusual twist. The genre is most famously associated with the author H.P. Lovecraft, and due to the popularity of his Cthulhu Mythos is tends to be represented by tentacle imagery.

Weird fiction developed in the second half of the Victorian era, which was a particularly fertile period for new literary genres. The timeline of weird fiction almost exactly overlaps with the golden age of the ghost story, and in fact you’ll see many of the same authors—such as Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Vernon Lee—listed under both categories. It’s important to note, however, that in order for a story to be considered “weird,” it must bring something to the table that makes it different from the typical ghost story. In his 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H. P. Lovecraft differentiates weird fiction from the classic Gothic tales and ghost stories, saying: “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.” That “something more” can involve extra-dimensional beings, alien life-forms, or monstrous creatures outside the usual canon of vampires and werewolves—or it can be left entirely ambiguous, just a vague and unsettling sensation left open for the reader to interpret.

Some scholars consider Edgar Allan Poe to be the progenitor of weird fiction, although such terminology would not have been used at the time of his writing, in the 1830s and ’40s. The term has also been applied to Ambrose Bierce, writing just a few decades later. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, however, that authors really began to identify their own works as being in the “weird” genre. The most prominent of these were the network of authors since dubbed by critics as the “Lovecraft Circle.” H.P. Lovecraft actively sought out other authors writing weird fiction and would strike up a correspondence with them, introducing them to each other and trading ideas. One of these authors was Clark Ashton Smith, who occasionally wrote stories within or adjacent to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos as well as inventing several of his own fictional worlds. Another Lovecraft Circle author was Robert E. Howard, who alternated between writing weird fiction and fantasy adventures. Like Smith, Howard played in Lovecraft’s sandbox and contributed a few original characters to the mythos. These three writers tended to dominate the pages of Weird Tales, a pulp magazine started in 1923, where most of this era’s weird fiction could be found.

But weird fiction wasn’t just an American genre! In fact, it was quite popular across the pond in Great Britain, and there was plenty of literary exchange among the British and American writers. Lovecraft cited many of his British predecessors and contemporaries as among his major influences, including Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and M. R. James. And though many of the big names that scholars associate with weird fiction are men, Melissa Edmundson has made a strong case in her two volumes of Women’s Weird that there are many female writers of the weird who are equally as deserving of study, including Edith Wharton, Vernon Lee, E. Nesbit, and Mary Butts.

Weird fiction often contains many of the same themes and motifs as the Gothic, though used in a slightly different way. For example, many stories feature exotic settings and distinctive architecture, but rather than the trope-ified haunted moors or medieval castles of the Gothic, weird settings are generally unfamiliar and incomprehensible in some way—either nebulously outside of time and space or featuring strange, non-Euclidean geometry—yet hidden within our normal world. Similarly, weird tales may feature supernatural beings like ghosts or monsters, but in a form not recognizable as their Gothic counterparts. A major theme that is more specific to weird fiction is the concept of atavism—a sort of backwards evolution, in which society or individuals revert back to a primal state. You’ll find many stories that feature pre-human hominids, primitive societies, or modern people rediscovering the animalistic nature at their core.

Although the era of weird fiction is generally considered to have ended with the advent of World War II, there are still many authors today who are strongly influence by the writers and themes of this era. Some of these authors, such as China Miéville, have been described as forming the New Weird—a twenty-first-century riff on this older movement. Indeed, the recent relaunch of Weird Tales magazine this year suggests that the weird is about to have a resurgence.

Have you read any weird fiction? What are some of your favorite stories or authors? Let me know in the comments!