Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European Gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.
Definitions
John Clute defines weird fiction as a term "used loosely to describe fantasy, supernatural fiction and horror tales embodying transgressive material". China Miéville defines it as "usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic ('horror' plus 'fantasy') often featuring nontraditional alien monsters (thus plus 'science fiction')". Discussing the "Old Weird Fiction" published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock says, "Old Weird fiction utilises elements of horror, science fiction and fantasy to showcase the impotence and insignificance of human beings within a much larger universe populated by often malign powers and forces that greatly exceed the human capacities to understand or control them."
Jeff and Ann VanderMeer describe weird fiction not as a genre of fiction, but rather as a mode of literature (i.e. a style or mood) usually appearing within the horror fiction genre.
History
thumb|upright|[[M. R. James, ]]
thumb|upright|H. P. Lovecraft, pictured in 1934
Although the term "weird fiction" did not appear until the 20th century, Edgar Allan Poe is often regarded as the pioneering author of weird fiction. Poe was identified by Lovecraft as the first author of a distinct type of supernatural fiction different from traditional Gothic literature, and later commentators on the term have also suggested Poe was the first "weird fiction" writer. 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. Weinstock has suggested there was a period of "Old Weird Fiction" that lasted from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Other pioneering British weird fiction writers included Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, and M. R. James.
The American pulp magazine Weird Tales published many such stories in the United States from March 1923 to September 1954. The magazine's editor Farnsworth Wright often used the term "weird fiction" to describe the type of material that the magazine published. The writers who wrote for the magazine Weird Tales are thus closely identified with the weird fiction subgenre, especially H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch. and Unknown Worlds (edited by John W. Campbell).
H. P. Lovecraft popularised the term "weird fiction" in his essays.
Although Lovecraft was one of the few early 20th-century writers to describe his work as "weird fiction", and Ramsey Campbell,
Notable authors
The following notable authors have been described as writers of weird fiction. They are listed alphabetically by last name, and organised by the time period when they began to publish weird fiction.
Before 1940
- Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
- Algernon Blackwood
- Robert Bloch
- Marjorie Bowen
- John Buchan
- Mikhail Bulgakov
- Leonora Carrington
- Robert Murray Gilchrist
- Stefan Grabiński
- Alexander Grin
- Nikolai Gogol
- Sakutarō Hagiwara
- L. P. Hartley
- Lafcadio Hearn
- Georg Heym
- William Hope Hodgson
- E. T. A. Hoffmann
- Robert E. Howard
- Alfred Kubin
- Henry Kuttner
- Vernon Lee
- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
- Frank Belknap Long
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Arthur Machen
- Daphne du Maurier
- Abraham Merrit
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Eric Frank Russell
- Bruno Schulz
- Francis Stevens
1940–1980
- Kōbō Abe
- Philip K. Dick
- Gene Wolfe
- Laird Barron
- David Beauchard
- K. J. Bishop