An Annotated Bibliography of Weird Fiction Short Stories New and Old from Masters in the Genre
What is Weird Fiction?
Weird Fiction is in short, a genre which defies many staid conventions of its cousin genres, like Fantasy, Horror, or Science Fiction. At the same time, it mixes and matches conventions in unusual and inventive ways. It may, for instance, evoke the Gothic, as in earlier tales from such masters as Lovecraft, or Machen; but it does not purely stick to Gothic concerns like the transgressive or the sublime. It may have elements of Horror, but yet presents otherworldly creatures from other dimensions who are, for the most part, products originating deeply from Lovecraft’s troubled and abundant imagination, reinterpreted since by many Weird Fiction authors after him, as you will see below.
Weird Fiction, apart from presenting narratives populated by gelatinous, slimy, tentacled otherworldly beings, diabolical cults bringing about humankind’s doom, or reflecting on our precarious existential position in the cosmos, goes beyond just evoking dread in the reader. For Lovecraft, one of the genre’s earliest pioneers, who began writing at the turn of the…
