Weird Tales Magazine's Literary Legacy

Weird Tales Magazine's Literary Legacy

This article relates to The Bewitching

In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Bewitching, Minerva refers often to stories published in a literary magazine called Weird Tales. The magazine was launched in 1923 "to showcase writers trying to publish stories so bizarre and far out, no one else would publish them," according to its website. It was that very mission statement that led to Weird Tales publishing writers who profoundly influenced the genres of horror and speculative fiction. H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith are its most enduring exports.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890. In addition to writing original fiction, Lovecraft was also a ghostwriter and rewriter of others' work. His short stories and novels evince a fascination with the uncanny and a deep knowledge of New England.

Lovecraft is considered the originator of "cosmic horror," a genre also known as Lovecraftian horror. Cosmic horror fiction usually features a pessimistic worldview, and its disturbing content usually involves more isolation and abandonment than violence. Lovecraft honed these principles into his most famous thematic elements like Cthulu and the Necronomicon. While his work stands up today as a unique voice in horror, his values do not. Lovecraft's racism is extremely prevalent in his work, even when he is writing about supernatural elements.

Another writer who got his start in Weird Tales is Robert E. Howard. His cultural background was quite different from Lovecraft's: born in 1908, he was a Texan inspired by the oil boom of the early 20th century. As a child, he traveled the state with his father, who was a doctor. In the oil boom towns, Howard saw the seedy underbelly of society alongside the gory injuries and illnesses of his father's patients. He also developed a love of boxing, a skill he often gave to his male characters.

Howard began publishing in Weird Tales while still a teenager. He was the originator of a genre known as "sword and sorcery," which combines fantasy and horror. Over the course of his career, he wrote over 400 stories, which evolved to include elements of mythology and religion. In 1932, in a depressed state while visiting more oil boom towns, Howard created his own fictional town, Cimmeria. Cimmeria's most notable inhabitant was a man as lawless and dark as the land itself: Conan the Barbarian. Howard's writing career was fast-paced as he turned out more Conan stories alongside commissioned work from various pulp magazines dealing in fantasy, horror, and historical fiction. Tragically, the despondent worldview that inspired his writing was something he never overcame. In 1936, after learning his ill mother would not awaken from her coma, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The third of the most impactful Weird Tales writers is Californian Clark Ashton Smith, born in 1893, who is perhaps best known for his influence on other authors. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Scott Bradfield drily observed that "for more than a century, Smith has been unfairly disregarded as a poet, a short story writer, a painter, and even a sculptor; had he perhaps enjoyed just a little professional good fortune during his lifetime, he might have gone on to spend his twilight years being unfairly disregarded in numerous additional endeavors: prose poetry, novel writing, drama, screenwriting, you name it."

While Smith wasn't as outgoing or self-promoting as other writers, he did make valuable connections. Originally hired to illustrate Weird Tales, Smith began publishing his work there and struck up a voluminous correspondence with Lovecraft, who became his champion. After Lovecraft's passing, Smith's output suffered. He'd always moved as far from realism as possible, and his work could be intellectually challenging as well as bizarre and hallucinatory. His prose was dense and hyperbolic as he described the landscape he created, a godless place with necromancers, eternal demons, and Martian ruins. While Smith never had the name recognition of the other two, his writing reached a vital audience that included some of the most legendary names in science fiction and fantasy, such as Ray Bradbury and George R. R. Martin. Smith died in 1961, and, while there are many fans of his work, it has yet to see a full-scale revival.

Since Weird Tales's start in 1923, readers have been given countless strange stories that don't sacrifice artistry. These three men are nearly synonymous with the magazine that fostered their groundbreaking work. It has ceased publication and been brought back multiple times over the decades, changing its format, publication frequency, and masthead. What has never changed is its commitment to the wild stories that inspired its creation.

Weird Tales magazine cover from 1942, art by Hannes Bok, courtesy of AdamBMorgan and Wikimedia Commons

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This article relates to The Bewitching. It first ran in the July 30, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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