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Started reading
July 13, 2024
A ‘weird tale’, as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale,
As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale ‘has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains’. Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane – a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread’ or ‘malign and particular suspension or defeat of… fixed laws of Nature’ – through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.
The Weird can be transformative – sometimes literally – entertaining monsters while not always seeing them as monstrous. It strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges failure as sign and symbol of our limitations. Usually, the characters in weird fiction have either entered into a place unfamiliar to most of us, or have received such hints of the unusual that they become obsessed with the weird.
They remain universal because they entertain while also expressing our own dissatisfaction with, and uncertainty about, reality.
When common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance;