Weird fiction

For instance, the Scottish Review in an 1859 article praised Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Walter Scott by saying the three writers had the "power of weird imagination".

[7] The Irish magazine The Freeman's Journal, in an 1898 review of Dracula by Bram Stoker, described the novel as "wild and weird" and not Gothic.

[1][2] In the late nineteenth century, a number of British writers associated with the Decadent movement wrote what was later described as weird fiction.

[9] Other pioneering British weird fiction writers included Algernon Blackwood,[10] William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany,[11] Arthur Machen,[12] and M. R.

[13] The American pulp magazine Weird Tales published many such stories in the United States from March 1923 to September 1954.

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.S.

Many horror writers have also situated themselves within the weird tradition, including Clive Barker, who describes his fiction as fantastique,[19] and Ramsey Campbell,[20] whose early work was influenced by Lovecraft.