Turtle Reader

Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and
adventurous novels and tales, occasionally attains a high level of
horrific magic. Xelucha is a noxiously hideous fragment, but is
excelled by Mr. Shiel’s undoubted masterpiece, The House of Sounds,
floridly written in the “yellow nineties,” and recast with more
artistic restraint in the early twentieth century. Ibis story, in
final form, […]

Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so
well as the California poet, artist and fictionist Clark Ashton
Smith, whose bizarre writing, drawings, paintings and stories are the
delight of a sensitive few. Mr. Smith has for his background a
universe of remote and paralysing fright-jungles of poisonous and
iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil […]

In The Dead Valley the eminent architect and mediævalist
Ralph Adams Cram achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional
horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description.

Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and
versatile humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent
contains some finely weird specimens. Fishhead, an early achievement,
is banefully effective […]

F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying
quality, now collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. For the
Blood Is the Life touches powerfully on a case of moon-cursed
vampirism near an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South
Italian seacoast. The Dead Smile treats of family horrors in an old
house and an ancestral vault […]

The “inhumanity” mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a rare
strain of sardonic comedy and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight
in images of cruelty and tantalising disappointment. The former
quality is well illustrated by some of the subtitles in the darker
narratives; such as “One does not always eat what is on the table”,
describing a body […]

But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood
and attitude belonged to the age which closed with him, and it is the
spirit of Poe–who so clearly and realistically understood the
natural basis of the horror-appeal and the correct mechanics of its
achievement–which survived and blossomed. Among the earliest of
Poe’s disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman […]

Many of Hawthorne’s shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of
atmosphere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. Edward Randolph’s
Portrait, in Legends of the Province House, has its diabolic moments.
The Minister’s Black Veil (founded on an actual incident) and The
Ambitious Guest imply much more than they state, whilst Ethan
Grand–a fragment of a longer work never completed–rises to […]

Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad
narrative effects rather than in character drawing. His typical
protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy,
intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated,
and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent
circumstances; usually deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly
ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside
from […]

Poet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and
philosopher by taste and mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from
defects and affectations. His pretence to profound and obscure
scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured
pseudo-humor, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice
must all be recognized and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and
dwarfing them […]

A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of
weird literature is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in
obscurity by the sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic
literature, and cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and
Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical inclinations; and the
wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in ghettoes and
synagogues must […]