Great Weird Tales: 14 Stories by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen and Others

Bibliography

Introduction

The Golden Age of Anglo-American weird fiction—roughly the period between 1880 and 1940—saw not merely a tremendous outpouring of work from many hands, including several writers not primarily known for the weird, but also the development of a variety of subgenres that display the full breadth and richness of this literary mode.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) will always remain the grandfather of the field, and his pioneering work in advancing the weird tale beyond the stale conventions of the Gothic novel gives him a place of eternal honor in this realm. Realizing that terror and mystery work best in short compass, and that psychological realism must be the foundation for a tale, however outré its actual events, Poe united an intensely morbid vision with a style of deliberately tortured artificiality to produce his imperishable masterpieces. In Ireland, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1814–1873) both displayed the continuing vigor of a reconstituted Gothicism in such a gripping novel as Uncle Silas (1864) and advanced the psychological acuity of Poe with Green Tea, Carmilla, and other shorter works.

These and other writers set the stage for a tremendous burst of superb weird writing in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In many ways this recrudescence owed its existence precisely to the fact that weird fiction as such was not a well-defined genre; indeed, we designate much of this work as weird only by a kind of retrospective co-option.

Writers of all types engaged in the most widely utilized subset of weird fiction, that of supernatural horror. In this mode, the supernatural phenomena are presented as such, with little explanation as to their origin or manifestation. Although there is frequently an emphasis on the characters’ emotional responses to the phenomena, such tales can nonetheless not be referred to as instances of psychological horror, for there is really no question that the supernatural has come into play (as there is, for example, in many of Poe’s tales as well as in that prototype of ambiguity, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw [1898]). The American architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942) might be thought a highly unlikely individual to produce a weird masterpiece, but his fabulously rare collection Black Spirits and White (1895) contains several gems, none better than that triumph of atmosphere, The Dead Valley. The Scottish writer William Sharp (1855–1905) maintained a kind of literary split personality, writing sober critical works and poetry under his own name while producing wild tales and fantasies under the female pseudonym Fiona Macleod. The Sin-Eater draws upon that ancient Celtic bit of folklore, the sin-eater—the person who, by eating a cake left upon a corpse, takes away that corpse’s sins so that the deceased’s soul can ascend to Heaven. Many will recall the superb dramatization of this story on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) is a figure of importance in the field for being one of the first to write actual horror novels. The House on the Borderland (1908) is a potent short novel, while The Night Land (1912), although hampered by flaws in diction, is of astounding imaginative scope in its account of the pitiful remnants of the human race in the far future. Of his short stories, The Voice in the Night is perhaps the most celebrated, and a good example of Hodgson’s specialization in horrors from the sea. He had himself served as a sailor in his youth, and his untimely death in World War I cut short a career of great promise.

Poe, as mentioned, had already pioneered the tale of psychological horror in such works as The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. In these stories there is ambiguity retained to the end as to whether the supernatural comes into play or is merely an illusion engendered by a disturbed mentality. Other stories fall into a class of non-supernatural horror, where from the beginning there is no question of the naturalness of all the recorded events. Some critics— most notably H. P. Lovecraft, who remains a towering figure both as a fictionist and as a theoretician in the field—have denied that such works belong within the realm of the weird at all; but such a categorical assertion must be tempered by a more flexible outlook. It is true that tales of this type tread perilously close to the suspense or mystery story; and it is also true that the mundane fear of murder or torture is very different from the transcendental fear of witnessing some appalling violation of natural law, as in supernatural fiction; but to deny such works—ranging from Poe’s A Cask of Amontillado to Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) and Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988)—a place in weird fiction would seem, at the very least, uncharitable.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) clearly followed Poe in emphasizing the terrors of an aberrant consciousness, and many of his best tales are wholly non-supernatural. Even his famous narratives of the Civil War can legitimately be incorporated within the domain of the weird for their grippingly intense portrayal of psychological terror. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), as finally arranged in his Collected Works (1909–12), does not contain a single supernatural story, these all being relegated to Can Such Things Be? (1893). But that latter volume in its original edition contained works of varying types, including such a piece of macabre humor as My Favorite Murder. The whole of Bierce’s writing-fiction, essays, journalism, poetry—is driven by a satiric vision bordering on misanthropy, and his four tales of The Parenticide Club (of which My Favorite Murder is the first) carry outrage to conventional morals about as far as it is possible to carry it.

Bierce’s friend W C. Morrow (1853–1923) produced a somewhat more orthodox, but scarcely less compelling, tale of non-supernatural horror in His Unconquerable Enemy, a potent vignette from his rare collection, The Ape, the Idiot and Other People (1897), which is perhaps best known for its inclusion of the proto-science-fiction story The Monster Maker.

Weird fiction at its best transcends the chilling emotion of horror and attains something akin to religious awe. Horror, disgust, and repulsion dampen the spirit; awe raises it to a kind of mystic union with the universe. Two of the towering figures in classic weird fiction—Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) and Arthur Machen (1863–1947)—sought in their best work to achieve that sense of awe, and in many cases did achieve it. Machen’s The Inmost Light (in which a scientific experiment aims at nothing less than the extraction of a human soul) and Blackwood’s The Man Whom the Trees Loved (in which a man’s spirit is ultimately absorbed by the trees surrounding his estate) are two of the most ethereal and intangible works one could ever read, and in themselves justify the very existence of weird fiction. Only in this mode can such delicate effects be attained; only by the abandonment of conventional realism of setting, character, and incident can such delicate emotional and imaginative sensations be evoked.

It is difficult to speak in small compass of the work of Machen and Blackwood. The former, a Welshman, wrote prodigally in every literary mode from short story to treatise; but the works by which he will be remembered are his tales and novels of horror—The Three Impostors (1895), The House of Souls (1906), The Terror (1917), and others—his exquisite novel, The Hill of Dreams (1907), and his three autobiographies. Blackwood also wrote voluminously, and concentrated more in the weird than Machen; indeed, the conjoined quality and quantity of his output may make him the greatest weird writer in literary history. One only need recite a few of his collections and novels—The Listener and Other Stories (1907), John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908), The Centaur (1911), Incredible Adventures (1914)—to suggest the breadth of his achievement.

The fantasy tale is perhaps the most nebulous of all the subsets of weird fiction. In the strictest sense, a fantasy involves the wholesale creation of an imagined realm that may or may not have any resemblance to the known world—such things as the Pegana of Lord Dunsany or the Middle-Earth of J. R. R. Tolkien. In a looser sense, however, fantasy refers to any fictional work where the bounds of realism are transgressed but where little effort is made—as in supernatural horror—to convince the reader of the actual existence of the unreal. Such works are frequently very close to fairy tales, parables, or allegories, but they can be no less powerful for all that. The King’s Messenger by F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909)—a story curiously omitted from his posthumous collection of weird tales, Wandering Ghosts (1911)—features a delicacy of touch prototypical of fantasy, even where, as in this instance, the outcome is known far ahead of the conclusion. Crawford’s two Arabian fantasies—Zoroaster (1885) and Khaled (1891)—exhibit a somewhat similar atmosphere.

Of the work of Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), it is similarly difficult to speak without lapsing into transports of ecstasy; for this Irish writer is unquestionably the most significant fantasy writer in all literature, not excluding Tolkien. The stupendous imagination revealed in his early tales—collected in The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), and other volumes—would itself be sufficient to give him a revered place in the field; but Dunsany went on to write a dozen novels, two score plays, and hundreds of stories, essays, and poems, all endowed with that ethereal touch of fantasy that seems to come naturally to the Irish. The fact that nearly the whole of his work is out of print is a tragedy of the first order.

M. P. Shiel (1865–1947) also wrote bountifully, but much more unevenly than Dunsany or Blackwood. Perhaps his greatest work is the novel The Purple Cloud (1901), the ultimate last man on earth story. Lovecraft referred to Xélucha as a noxiously hideous fragment, and each term of that expression is fitting. This piece of morbidity has no other purpose than the evocation of bizarre images in the most tortured of prose-poetry, and as such, it admirably fulfills its intention.

Two tales by disciples of Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long (1901–1994) and R. H. Barlow (1918–1951), complete the section of fantasy tales. The Eye Above the Mantel is a sonorous prose-poem written while Long was still a teenager, and demonstrates how much weird fiction relies upon verbal witchery for its effects. It is rather sad to note that Long rarely exceeded this early effort in all the novels and stories he subsequently wrote in his lengthy career. Barlow’s A Dim-Remembered Story displays a mastery of diction and conception that is similarly impressive for a teenager. Although several of his other stories were clearly revised by Lovecraft, all the documentary evidence points to Barlow as the sole author of this brooding masterpiece, in spite of its dedication to Lovecraft. We shall never know what dark jewels Barlow might have written had he not cut short his life by suicide.

If, from one side, the weird tale comes close to the mystery or suspense story, from another side it finds itself cheek by jowl with the science fiction tale. Of course, science fiction as a distinct genre only came into existence around the 1920s, but it had a variety of precursors and predecessors. When a weird tale is based upon some scientific principle or some extrapolated advance of science, or when scientific justification for the weird phenomena is supplied, then it can be said to be a proto- or pseudo-science-fiction story. Fitz-James O‘Brien (1828–1862), although writing decades earlier than most of the other writers in this volume, produced several tales of this sort. What Was It? anticipates by many years several later accounts of invisible monsters (Bierce’s The Damned Thing, Blackwood’s The Wendigo, Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror). As for The Diamond Lens, this compelling novelette shows how often beauty and terror can be linked, each enhancing the other. O’Brien’s death in the Civil War cut short a career that might have rivalled Poe’s or Bierce’s.

It would be difficult to compile an anthology of Golden Age weird fiction without including the work of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who in many ways subsumed the best features of his predecessors while at the same time pointing the way to future development. Indeed, Lovecraft’s central contribution was the fusion of conventional supernaturalism with the burgeoning field of science fiction, the result being an indefinable compound that we can designate only as a Lovecraftian tale. Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1921) is an early precursor of such later ventures as The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Shadow Out of Time. Lovecraft’s dominant achievement—not so much evident in Arthur Jermyn, with its emphasis on anthropological horror, as in his later novelettes and short novels—was the transference of the locus of fear from the mundane world to the illimitable gulfs of space. His chosen term for this tendency—cosmicism—unites horror, repulsion, and awe into an inextricable amalgam.

The half-century that has followed the Golden Age of weird fiction has certainly seen its share of masters: Robert Aickman with his strange stories; Shirley Jackson, with her haunting tales and novels of emotionally disturbed personalities; Robert Bloch and his psychological thrillers; and the contemporary work of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, Dennis Etchison, and—preeminently—Ramsey Campbell, who in his wondrous prolificity is challenging even Algernon Blackwood for supremacy in this realm. These writers form a worthy Silver Age to the titans they have succeeded, and their work would perhaps be the more compelling if they drew somewhat more upon the great legacy of weird writing than most of them are now doing. Many readers and writers have a sadly truncated memory and fail to take note of the tradition in which they operate; but the rich legacy of weird fiction over the last century and a half should not only provide welcome nourishment for future generations of writers but untold pleasures for readers of the present and future. All that is required is that it be brought to their attention.

S. T. JOSHI

New York City

July 1996

I. Tales of Supernatural Horror

The Dead Valley

Ralph Adams Cram

I have a friend, Olof Ehrensvärd, a Swede by birth, who yet, by reason of a strange and melancholy mischance of his early boyhood, has thrown his lot with that of the New World. It is a curious story of a headstrong boy and a proud and relentless family: the details do not matter here, but they are sufficient to weave a web of romance around the tall yellow-bearded man with the sad eyes and the voice that gives itself perfectly to plaintive little Swedish songs remembered out of childhood. In the winter evenings we play chess together, he and I, and after some close, fierce battle had been fought to a finish—usually with my own defeat—we fill our pipes again, and Ehrensvärd tells me stories of the far, half-remembered days in the fatherland, before he went to sea; stories that grow very strange and incredible as the night deepens and the fire falls together, but stories that, nevertheless, I fully believe.

One of them made a strong impression on me, so I set it down here, only regretting that I cannot reproduce the curiously perfect English and the delicate accent which to me increased the fascination of the tale. Yet, as best as I can remember it, here it is.

"I never told you how Nils and I went over the hills to Hallsberg, and how we found the Dead Valley, did I? Well, this is the way it happened. I must have been about twelve years old, and Nils Sjöberg, whose father’s estate joined ours, was a few months younger. We were inseparable just at that time, and whatever we did, we did together.

"Once a week it was market day in Engelholm, and Nils and I went always there to see the strange sights that the market gathered from all the surrounding country. One day we quite lost our hearts, for an old man from across the Elfborg had brought a little dog to sell, that seemed to us the most beautiful dog in all the world. He was a round, woolly puppy, so funny that Nils and I sat down on the ground and laughed at him, until he came and played with us in so jolly a way that we felt that there was only one thing really desirable in life, and that was the little dog of the old man from across the hills. But alas! we had not half money enough wherewith to buy him, so we were forced to beg the old man not to sell him before the next market day, promising that we would bring the money for him then. He gave us his word, and we ran home very fast and implored our mothers to give us money for the little dog.

"We got the money, but we could not wait for the next market day. Suppose the puppy should be sold! The thought frightened us so that we begged and implored that we might be allowed to go over the hills to Hallsberg where the old man lived, and get the little dog ourselves, and at last they told us we might go. By starting early in the morning we should reach Hallsberg by three o’clock, and it was arranged that we should stay there that night with Nils’s aunt, and, leaving by noon the next day, be home again by sunset.

"Soon after sunrise we were on our way, after having received minute instructions as to just what we should do in all possible and impossible circumstances, and finally a repeated injunction that we should start for home at the same hour the next day, so that we might get safely back before nightfall.

"For us, it was magnificent sport, and we started off with our rifles, full of the sense of our very great importance: yet the journey was simple enough, along a good road, across the big hills we knew so well, for Nils and I had shot over half the territory this side of the dividing ridge of the Elfborg. Back of Engelholm lay a long valley, from which rose the low mountains, and we had to cross this, and then follow the road along the side of the hills for three or four miles, before a narrow path branched off to the left, leading up through the pass.

"Nothing occurred of interest on the way over, and we reached Hallsberg in due season, found to our inexpressible joy that the little dog was not sold, secured him, and so went to the house of Nils’s aunt to spend the night.

"Why we did not leave early on the following day, I can’t quite remember; at all events, I know we stopped at a shooting range just outside of the town, where most attractive pasteboard pigs were sliding slowly through painted foliage, serving so as beautiful marks. The result was that we did hot get fairly started for home until afternoon, and as we found ourselves at last pushing up the side of the mountain with the sun dangerously near their summits, I think we were a little scared at the prospect of the examination and possible punishment that awaited us when we got home at midnight.

"Therefore we hurried as fast as possible up the mountain side, while the blue dusk closed in about us, and the light died in the purple sky. At first we had talked hilariously, and the little dog had leaped ahead of us with the utmost joy. Latterly, however, a curious oppression came on us; we did not speak or even whistle, while the dog fell behind, following us with hesitation in every muscle.

"We had passed through the foothills and the low spurs of the mountains, and were almost at the top of the main range, when life seemed to go out of everything, leaving the world dead, so suddenly silent the forest became, so stagnant the air. Instinctively we halted to listen.

"Perfect silence,—the crushing silence of deep forests at night; and more, for always, even in the most impenetrable fastnesses of the wooded mountains, is the multitudinous murmur of little lives, awakened by the darkness, exaggerated and intensified by the stillness of the air and the great dark: but here and now the silence seemed unbroken even by the turn of a leaf, the movement of a twig, the note of night bird or insect. I could hear the blood beat through my veins; and the crushing of the grass under our feet as we advanced with hesitating steps sounded like the falling of trees.

"And the air was stagnant,—dead. The atmosphere seemed to lie upon the body like the weight of sea on a diver who had ventured too far into its awful depths. What we usually call silence seems so only in relation to the din of ordinary experience. This was silence in the absolute, and it crushed the mind while it intensified the senses, bringing down the awful weight of inextinguishable fear.

"I know that Nils and I stared towards each other in abject terror, listening to our quick, heavy breathing, that sounded to our acute senses like the fitful rush of waters. And the poor little dog we were leading justified our terror. The black oppression seemed to crush him even as it did us. He lay close on the ground, moaning feebly, and dragging himself painfully and slowly closer to Nils’s feet. I think this exhibition of utter animal fear was the last touch, and must inevitably have blasted our reason—mine anyway; but just then, as we stood quaking on the bounds of madness, came a sound, so awful, so ghastly, so horrible, that it seemed to rouse us from the dead spell that was on us.

"In the depth of the silence came a cry, beginning as a low, sorrowful moan, rising to a tremulous shriek, culminating in a yell that seemed to tear the night in sunder and rend the world as by a cataclysm. So fearful was it that I could not believe it had actual existence: it passed previous experience, the powers of belief, and for a moment I thought it the result of my own animal terror, an hallucination born of tottering reason.

"A glance at Nils dispelled this thought in a flash. In the pale light of the high stars he was the embodiment of all possible human fear, quaking with an ague, his jaw fallen, his tongue out, his eyes protruding like those of a hanged man. Without a word we fled, the panic of fear giving us strength, and together, the little dog caught close in Nils’s arms, we sped down the side of the cursed mountains, —anywhere, goal was of no account: we had but one impulse—to get away from that place.

"So under the black trees and the far white stars that flashed through the still leaves overhead, we leaped down the mountain side, regardless of path or landmark, straight through the tangled underbrush, across mountain streams, through fens and copses, anywhere so only that our course was downward.

"How long we ran thus, I have no idea, but by and by the forest fell behind, and we found ourselves among the foothills, and fell exhausted on the dry short grass, panting like tired dogs.

"It was lighter here in the open, and presently we looked around to see where we were, and how we were to strike out in order to find the path that would lead home. We looked in vain for a familiar sign. Behind us rose the great wall of black forest on the flank of the mountain: before us lay the undulating mounds of low foothills, unbroken by trees or rocks, and beyond, only the fall of black sky bright with multitudinous stars that turned its velvet depth to a luminous gray.

"As I remember, we did not speak to each other once: the terror was too heavy on us for that, but by and by we rose simultaneously and started out across the hills.

"Still the same silence, the same dead, motionless air—air that was at once sultry and chilling: a heavy heat struck through with an icy chill that felt almost like the burning of frozen steel. Still carrying the helpless dog, Nils pressed on through the hills, and I followed close behind. At last, in front of us, rose a slope of moor touching the white stars. We climbed it wearily, reached the top, and found ourselves gazing down into a great, smooth valley, filled half way to the brim with—what?

"As far as the eye could see stretched a level plain of ashy white, faintly phosphorescent, a sea of velvet fog that lay like motionless water, or rather like a floor of alabaster, so dense did it appear, so seemingly capable of sustaining weight. If it were possible, I think that sea of dead white mist struck even greater terror into my soul than the heavy silence or the deadly cry—so ominous was it, so utterly unreal, so phantasmal, so impossible, as it lay there like a dead ocean under the steady stars. Yet through that mist we must gol there seemed no other way home, and,, shattered with abject fear, mad with the one desire to get back, we started down the slope to where the sea of milky mist ceased, sharp and distinct around the stems of the rough grass.

"I put one foot into the ghostly fog. A chill as of death struck through me, stopping my heart, and I threw myself backward on the slope. At that instant came again the shriek, close, close, right in our ears, in ourselves, and far out across that damnable sea I saw the cold fog lift like a waterspout and toss itself high in writhing convolutions towards the sky. The stars began to grow dim as thick vapor swept across them, and in the growing dark I saw a great, watery moon lift itself slowly above the palpitating sea, vast and vague in the gathering mist.

"This was enough: we turned and fled along the margin of the white sea that throbbed now with fitful motion below us, rising, rising, slowly and steadily, driving us higher and higher up the side of the foothills.

"It was a race for life; that we knew. How we kept it up I cannot understand, but we did, and at last we saw the white sea fall behind us as we staggered up the end of the valley, and then down into a region that we knew, and so into the old path. The last thing I remember was hearing a strange voice, that of Nils, but horribly changed, stammer brokenly, ‘The dog is dead!’ and then the whole world turned around twice, slowly and resistlessly, and consciousness went out with a crash.

"It was some three weeks later, as I remember, that I awoke in my own room, and found my mother sitting beside the bed. I could not think very well at first, but as I slowly grew strong again, vague flashes of recollection began to come to me, and little by little the whole sequence of events of that awful night in the Dead Valley came back. All that I could gain from what was told me was that three weeks before I had been found in my own bed, raging sick, and that my illness grew fast into brain fever. I tried to speak of the dread things that had happened to me, but I saw at once that no one looked on them save as the hauntings of a dying frenzy, and so I closed my mouth and kept my own counsel.

"I must see Nils, however, and so I asked for him. My mother told me that he also had been ill with a strange fever, but that he was now quite well again. Presently they brought him in, and when we were alone I began to speak to him of the night on the mountain. I shall never forget the shock that struck me down on my pillow when the boy denied everything: denied having gone with me, ever having heard the cry, having seen the valley, or feeling the deadly chill of the ghostly fog. Nothing would shake his determined ignorance, and in spite of myself I was forced to admit that his denials came from no policy of concealment, but from blank oblivion.

"My weakened brain was in a turmoil. Was it all but the floating phantasm of delirium? Or had the horror of the real thing blotted Nils’s mind into blankness so far as the events of the night in the Dead Valley were concerned? The latter explanation seemed the only one, else how to explain the sudden illness which in a night had struck us both down? I said nothing more, either to Nils or to my own people, but waited, with a growing determination that, once well again, I would find that valley if it really existed.

"It was some weeks before I was really well enough to go, but finally, late in September, I chose a bright, warm, still day, the last smile of the dying summer, and started early in the morning along the path that led to Hallsberg. I was sure I knew where the trail struck off to the right, down which we had come from the valley of dead water, for a great tree grew by the Hallsberg path at the point where, with a sense of salvation, we had found the home road. Presently I saw it to the right, a little distance ahead.

"I think the bright sunlight and the clear air had worked as a tonic to me, for by the time I came to the foot of the great pine, I had quite lost faith in the verity of the vision that haunted me, believing at last that it was indeed but the nightmare of madness. Nevertheless, I turned sharply to the right, at the base of the tree, into a narrow path that led