DIY History | Transcribe | Hevelin Fanzines | Fan, whole no. 4, September 1945

Transcribe
Translate

Fan, whole no. 4, September 1945

Page 9

The third great English weirdist of modern times is the ironic, scholarly antiquary, M.R. James, whose drily simple and realistic tales, available in the Collected Ghost Stories and the recent Tower Book, Best Ghost Stories of M.R. James, are probably the most incomparably original and genuinely horror-inspiring stories in the language. Of equal literary stature, though inclining primarily toward themes of pure fantasy, is the poetic Walter de la Mare, author of hauntingly unreal tales of the unseen in The Riddle, The Connoisseur, On the Edge, and The Wind Blows Over. Back in the middle of the 19th century the melancholy Irish clergyman, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, laid the foundations for the modern English ghost story in his leisurely collection, In a Glass, Darkly, while the sardonic American genius, Ambrose Bierce, was penning his grisly, shocking tales for Can Such Things Be? and In the Midst of Life. Robert W. Chambers began his romantic career with some excellent stories of fantastic horror in The King in Yellow and The Maker of Moons, and his work foreshadowed that of the great modern master of weird fiction in this country, H. P. Lovecraft, whose rich descriptive and awesomely atmospheric narratives in The Outsider and Others, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and Marginalia (the best of which will shortly be found in a forthcoming Tower Book collection) create a darkly fascinating new mythos of alien beast-beings and establish a literary revolution of as-yet-incalculable influence in the genre, replacing medieval superstitions with modern sicence as the basis for man's shuddering suppositions of the unknown. His publishers, Arkham House of Sauk City, Wis., are engaged in publishing the work of the best weird authors in America today and have brought out the following indispensable volumes: Clark Ashton Smith's Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds, luxuriant with flagrantly evil tales of consummate artistry; the Rev. Henry S. Whitehead's narrative of West Indian voodoo in Jumbee; Donald Wandrei's varied and polished yarns in The Eye and the Finger; and August Derleth's disquieting though conventional stories in Someone in the Dark and Something Near. Other collections of weird stories, British and American, that the reader may wish to look into are: H. Russell Wakefield's They Return at Evening and Others Who Returned, F. Marion Crawford's Wandering Ghosts, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's The Wind in the Rosebush, Edith Wharton's Ghosts, Gertrude Atherton's The Bell in the Fog, A. Conan Doyle's The Black Doctor, Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan and Fantastics, E. F. Benson's Visible and Invisible, Oliver Onion's Widdershins, John Metcalfe's The Smoking Leg, W. F. Harvey's The Beast with Five Fingers, Frank Owen's The Wind That Tramps the World and The Purple Sea, Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, and Hugh Walpole's All Soul's Night.

The novel is a much more difficult form in which to treat themes of supernatural horror than the short story, and the list of successful ones is comparatively small. They began over a century ago with the Gothic romances, the best of which are probably Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, William Beckford's Vathek, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and M. G. Lewis' The Monk. But few readers today have the patience to struggle through these minor classics of another day, and they may even find some difficulty with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novels of Rosicrucian occultism, A Strange Story, Zanoni, and Zicci. But H. Rider Haggard's adventurous romances still carry a strong appeal, especially She, Ayesha, Wisdom's Daughter, When the World Shook, The World's Desire, The Lady of the Heavens, and The People of the Mist. His modern counterpart is the popular A. Merritt, whose colorful style and fantastic imagination have made great favorites of his novels, The Moon Pool, The Ship of Ishtar, The Dwellers in the Mirage, The Face in the Abyss, Burn Witch Burn, and Creep Shadow. Of course, every one knows Bram Stoker's vampiric Dracula, but few have heard of Jules Verne's sole venture into weirdness, The Castle of the Carpathi-

Saving...

The third great English weirdist of modern times is the ironic, scholarly antiquary, M.R. James, whose drily simple and realistic tales, available in the Collected Ghost Stories and the recent Tower Book, Best Ghost Stories of M.R. James, are probably the most incomparably original and genuinely horror-inspiring stories in the language. Of equal literary stature, though inclining primarily toward themes of pure fantasy, is the poetic Walter de la Mare, author of hauntingly unreal tales of the unseen in The Riddle, The Connoisseur, On the Edge, and The Wind Blows Over. Back in the middle of the 19th century the melancholy Irish clergyman, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, laid the foundations for the modern English ghost story in his leisurely collection, In a Glass, Darkly, while the sardonic American genius, Ambrose Bierce, was penning his grisly, shocking tales for Can Such Things Be? and In the Midst of Life. Robert W. Chambers began his romantic career with some excellent stories of fantastic horror in The King in Yellow and The Maker of Moons, and his work foreshadowed that of the great modern master of weird fiction in this country, H. P. Lovecraft, whose rich descriptive and awesomely atmospheric narratives in The Outsider and Others, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and Marginalia (the best of which will shortly be found in a forthcoming Tower Book collection) create a darkly fascinating new mythos of alien beast-beings and establish a literary revolution of as-yet-incalculable influence in the genre, replacing medieval superstitions with modern sicence as the basis for man's shuddering suppositions of the unknown. His publishers, Arkham House of Sauk City, Wis., are engaged in publishing the work of the best weird authors in America today and have brought out the following indispensable volumes: Clark Ashton Smith's Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds, luxuriant with flagrantly evil tales of consummate artistry; the Rev. Henry S. Whitehead's narrative of West Indian voodoo in Jumbee; Donald Wandrei's varied and polished yarns in The Eye and the Finger; and August Derleth's disquieting though conventional stories in Someone in the Dark and Something Near. Other collections of weird stories, British and American, that the reader may wish to look into are: H. Russell Wakefield's They Return at Evening and Others Who Returned, F. Marion Crawford's Wandering Ghosts, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's The Wind in the Rosebush, Edith Wharton's Ghosts, Gertrude Atherton's The Bell in the Fog, A. Conan Doyle's The Black Doctor, Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan and Fantastics, E. F. Benson's Visible and Invisible, Oliver Onion's Widdershins, John Metcalfe's The Smoking Leg, W. F. Harvey's The Beast with Five Fingers, Frank Owen's The Wind That Tramps the World and The Purple Sea, Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, and Hugh Walpole's All Soul's Night. The novel is a much more difficult form in which to treat themes of supernatural horror than the short story, and the list of successful ones is comparatively small. They began over a century ago with the Gothic romances, the best of which are probably Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, William Beckford's Vathek, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and M. G. Lewis' The Monk. But few readers today have the patience to struggle through these minor classics of another day, and they may even find some difficulty with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novels of Rosicrucian occultism, A Strange Story, Zanoni, and Zicci. But H. Rider Haggard's adventurous romances still carry a strong appeal, especially She, Ayesha, Wisdom's Daughter, When the World Shook, The World's Desire, The Lady of the Heavens, and The People of the Mist. His modern counterpart is the popular A. Merritt, whose colorful style and fantastic imagination have made great favorites of his novels, The Moon Pool, The Ship of Ishtar, The Dwellers in the Mirage, The Face in the Abyss, Burn Witch Burn, and Creep Shadow. Of course, every one knows Bram Stoker's vampiric Dracula, but few have heard of Jules Verne's sole venture into weirdness, The Castle of the Carpathi-