While Lovecraft was writing tales of the tentacled horror and cosmic bestial dreams, there was much in terms of weird phantasmagoria already whirling about in the literary ether well before Lovecraft

As readers and writers, there are many immediate images that we conjure when imagining the weird tale.

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer from their site Weird Fiction Review give an excellent overview and definition of the Weird and by association the weird tale:

“As a twentieth and twenty-first-century art form, the story of The Weird is the story of the refinement (and destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework but also of the welcome contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions, some only peripherally connected to the fantastic.” (…)

Books suggested:

  • The King in Yellow By Robert W. Chambers

  • Zothique: The Final Cycle - By Clark Ashton Smith

  • The Great God Pan By Arthur Machen

  • The House on the Borderland By William Hope Hodgson

  • The Horla and Others By Guy de Maupassant