THE MODERN WEIRD TALE: A Critique of Horror Fiction [Paperback]

S. T. Joshi (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 078640986X | ISBN-13: 978-0786409860 | Publication Date: May 2001

This is a critical study of many of the leading writers of horror and supernatural fiction since World War II. The primary purpose is to establish a canon of weird literature, and to distinguish the genuinely meritorious writers of the past fifty years from those who have obtained merely transient popular renown. Accordingly, the author regards the complex, subtle work of Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Aickman, T.E.D. Klein, and Thomas Ligotti as considerably superior to the best-sellers of Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, and Anne Rice. Other writers such as William Peter Blatty, Thomas Tryon, Robert Bloch, and Thomas Harris are also discussed. Taken as a whole, the volume represents a pioneering attempt to chart the development of weird fiction over the past half-century.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Joshi (Lovecraft: A Life), an accomplished critic and independent scholar, follows up his earlier The Weird Tale (1990) with this provocative examination of more recent exemplars of the genre. Again he adopts the concept of "weird fiction" as championed by H.P. Lovecraft in the latter's capacity as a critic, namely horror that upsets the reader's assumptions about the nature of reality itself. This usually involves the supernatural, though some psychotic killer fiction (Thomas Harris, Bret Easton Ellis) can also fit the bill. Here Joshi conducts a sort of comparative study of those late 20th-century authors he deems best (Shirley Jackson, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti) with those whose books sell best (William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Clive Barker). Though he never suffers gladly the pandering that can prevail among the big commercial names, he leaps to give credit where due, even declaring that "no praise can be too high" for King's Richard Bachman novel, The Running Man. As always, Joshi eschews pretentious academic jargon and fatuous theoretical constructions. The lack of an index or coverage of fiction published after 1993, however, is regrettable. In addition, Joshi delights in saying that certain authors aren't as good as they think they are, to scant evidence or relevance, while occasional political asides only remind us that he's a literary commentator and not a political one for good reason. But throughout, this volume shouts brilliance and diligence and belongs on the bookshelf of every thinking horror reader. (Dec.)Forecast: Despite the high price, the lack of publicity and promotion, the datedness (it evidently took Joshi years to find a legitimate press willing to accept such an iconoclastic work), the somewhat arbitrary selection of authors for inclusion (for treatments of Dennis Etchison, Les Daniels and David J. Schow one must turn to the two-volume, unabridged German edition), and the absence of a firm editorial hand, this study rivals in importance Lovecraft's classic survey of the genre, Supernatural Horror in Literature. It will be read long after many of the authors Joshi discusses have been forgotten. For now expect paltry sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Researcher, writer and editor S.T. Joshi lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: McFarland & Company (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078640986X
• ISBN-13: 978-0786409860
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #682,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

S. T. Joshi (Seattle, WA) is a freelance writer, scholar, and editor whose previous books include Documents of American Prejudice; In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women; God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong; Atheism: A Reader; H. L. Mencken on Religion; The Agnostic Reader; and What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays by Mark Twain.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Lovecraftian Critique, March 31, 2002

By 

D. De Gruijter (Leiden) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: THE MODERN WEIRD TALE: A Critique of Horror Fiction (Paperback)

Robert M. Price once called Joshi the reincarnation of Lovecraft, and this wasn't far from the mark. The shadow of Lovecraft is oppressively looming over this study, and Joshi's writing style and criticism is nearly identical to Lovecraft's 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'. Both can be annoying at times, although they don't take away much of the study's merit overall.

Joshi's tries to bring together a canon of modern weird literature, and argues that authors such as Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, and Shirley Jackson are superior to mass marketing writers such as Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Stephen King, W.P. Blatty, and Clive Barker. Some of the latter get a bashing that they will probably remember for a long time.

In doing this, Joshi often sounds arrogant, elitist, and nit picking. While I do think he's overreacting sometimes it is also clear that the praise of best-seller authors is terribly out of proportion with their literary merits, and that Joshi's words deserve their extra impact. On the other hand, hasn't it always been that the literary merit of best-seller authors leaves much to be desired?

Even so, I think Joshi's study is important because of another aspect. It is an easily accessible study that deals with authors whose appreciations usually don't appear outside of fanzines, scattered journals, or OOP hardcovers. It is clearly written for other literary critics as well. All in all, Joshi shows to have a good understanding and grasp of the field and makes important and relevant commentaries.

As noted, Joshi stresses great importance on Lovecraft's theory of effective weird fiction, and every other three pages Lovecraft will make an appearance. This is a good foundation, but also a potential weakness. Much of Joshi's criticism goes to the grave if one simply refuses to see any merit in Lovecraft's own criticism of weird fiction. Therefore, fans of the bashed best-seller authors will more than likely be unimpressed by Joshi's biting remarks, and fans of the marginal authors he handles will learn not much more than what they already knew for themselves.

One thing that bothers me, though, is Joshi's obvious bias against weird fiction that doesn't somehow work with Lovecraft's 'supernatural realism' or harnesses atheism (he admits this in the final chapter and epilogue). This he defends adequately in the chapter on Blatty, deeming his metaphysical background too preachy, but later on it becomes strained. To Robert Aickman's opinion that the ghost story gains in strength in the presence of psychic research and faulty science, Joshi replies 'I hardly know how to respond to this farrago of nonsense', and quotes another extensive example of Lovecraft. But when dealing with Anne Rice's preachy vampires that constantly and sometimes violently assert that there is no God, Joshi comments: 'It is not clear what relevance these theological discussions have to the core of the novel, but they are admirably presented.'

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Critical, June 4, 2001

By 

Philip Challinor - See all my reviews

This review is from: THE MODERN WEIRD TALE: A Critique of Horror Fiction (Paperback)

The Modern Weird Tale examines the philosophy (or lack thereof) behind the works of Shirley Jackson, T E D Klein, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert Aickman, Anne Rice, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Tryon, William Peter Blatty and Thomas Ligotti, with an interesting chapter on Robert Bloch's Psycho and some of its loving offspring by Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris. Joshi states in the introduction that the exclusion of authors like Richard Matheson and Thomas Tessier (to name but a couple) was prompted by his feeling that his book was already long enough. I cannot agree. Joshi is the most able and articulate literary critic to deal with supernatural horror in literature since the advent of H P Lovecraft, and his carefully argued critiques are desperately needed now that gross-out soap opera has all but pushed the good stuff off the shelves. I was a little disappointed with some of the emphasis in this work - thirty pages on Stephen King and only seventeen on Robert Aickman; an entire chapter devoted to William Blatty's sanctimonious potboilings while writers of the calibre of K W Jeter and Jonathan Carroll are relegated to the "excess length" department - but, after all, however much one may deplore the triumph of bestsellerdom, it's naive at best to ignore it. And even among the bestsellers, Joshi finds items worth bothering with - sometimes, indeed, items we would certainly be much worse off without. Even Joshi's deplored Stephen King is commended for Rage, The Running Man, Gerald's Game and some others. The chapters on the great writers - Jackson, Klein, Aickman, Campbell - are as thorough and rewarding as anything in The Weird Tale, although Joshi's antagonism towards Aickman's (admittedly unenlightening) theoretical views means that Aickman seems to get a little less than his due as a writer. Joshi has, for example, completely missed the point of Aickman's brilliant "Ravissante", and his paragraph on the story ends, in effect, with "so what?" Still, The Modern Weird Tale is at least as good a read as the earlier book, and contains almost as many pointers to interesting material of which the reader may not be aware. Perhaps the best I can say is that, having got through its 260 pages in a day, I immediately went and bought Joshi's critical study of John Dickson Carr - a writer I have never read - purely for the enjoyment of reading what Joshi has to say about him.

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Without Merit, But..., February 5, 2008

By 

John Noodles (A Field in ND, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: THE MODERN WEIRD TALE: A Critique of Horror Fiction (Paperback)

I agree with much of what Joshi says about writers such as Anne Rice and Stephen King--their success is no testament to the quality of their work. Also, he champions good writers, like TED Klein (although sometimes for questionable reasons--such as their having a world-view he approves of).

That said, Joshi is an unnecessarily harsh critic. His tirades extend way beyond the pale of unbiased criticism. He is gratuitously nasty, and this makes him sound weak-minded, which perhaps, after all, he is.

His credibility is called into further doubt when he dismisses writers because they believe in God. He is far from the first atheist I've read--or listened to--who is unable to deal with others' religious beliefs in a reasonably objective, rational manner, but that hardly excuses it.

Curiously, too, Joshi never even mentions reliable workhorse authors like Michael McDowell or Charles Grant. McDowell may have been overly prolific, but at his best he is as good as any of the other modern writers whose virtues Joshi extols.

Joshi is very widely read in the genre of weird fiction, but this reading does not seem to have helped him develop his chops as a scholarly critic. At best, this is a book of pop-criticism, not a work of serious academic merit.