Weird
fiction is a subgenre of speculative literature written in the late 19th and
early 20th century. Weird fiction is distinguished from horror and fantasy in
that it predates them. Weird tales often blend the supernatural, mythical, and
even scientific. British "weird" authors, for example, published
their work in mainstream literary magazines even after American pulp magazines
became popular. Popular weird fiction writers included H. P. Lovecraft, Lord
Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James.
H. P.
Lovecraft adopted the term from Sheridan Le Fanu and
popularized it in his essays. In "Supernatural Horror in Literature,"
Lovecraft defines the genre: 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; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness
and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of
the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed
laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and
the daemons of unplumbed space.
The pulp
magazine, Weird Tales, published many such stories in the
Weird
Fiction Authors:
Arthur Machen
Algernon
Blackwood
M. R.
James
Ambrose
Bierce
J.
Sheridan Le Fanu
H. P.
Lovecraft
William
Hope Hodgson (see my paper “Physics in Carnacki's
investigations”)