H P Lovecraft
and the Weird Tale

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890. He died in the same town in 1937, poverty-stricken and unaware how widely-admired and influential his short tales of cosmic terror would shortly become.

Dr James Machin on ‘the weird’: ‘Weird fiction’ is a slippery literary term most closely associated with H.P. Lovecraft, and Weird Tales magazine during its 1920s and 30s heyday. Lovecraft conceived of ‘the weird’ as a register of writing that engages primarily with the horrific – but rather than a horror inspired by gore or violence, it is a horror precipitated by existential crisis. As a convinced atheist, Lovecraft had little time for ghosts, werewolves, and vampires; spooks which, regardless of the thrills provided along the way, ultimately only confirm a reassuring Judeo-Christian worldview. In his most celebrated stories, Lovecraft dispensed with the supernatural altogether and replaced it with science-fictional antagonists: alien lifeforms that are utterly incomprehensible and indifferent to the futile plight of the human species.

In his 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft writes that 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 dæmons of unplumbed space.”