The Development of the Weird Tale

In this wide-ranging collection of his essays on weird fiction, S. T. Joshi spans two centuries of work in the field of supernatural horror. Beginning with the work of Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Théophile Gautier (“One of Cleopatra’s Nights”), Joshi moves on to study the life and work of such prominent writers as W. W. Jacobs (author of “The Monkey’s Paw”), Algernon Blackwood, Thomas Burke, and D. H. Lawrence. Weird poetry has been a particular interest of Joshi’s, and he supplies extensive discussions of the verse of George Sterling, Samuel Loveman, Clark Ashton Smith, and Donald Wandrei. Moving to the work of the past half-century, Joshi studies Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial (1958), three novels of the unjustly forgotten writer L. P. Davies, and the fusion of Lovecraftian elements and atheism in the films of Guillermo del Toro. The book concludes with an analysis of nine novels of the supernatural that were appreciated by H. P. Lovecraft. In all, Joshi again demonstrates the richness, variety, and aesthetic significance of the weird tale.