I’ve made mention before of the Lovecraft Circle, the group of visionary young American writers who, in the early years of the 20th century, contributed their horror stories to pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Black Cat. Whilst Robert E Howard and H P Lovecraft himself would go on to become the most famous of these authors, of all of them Clark Ashton Smith was perhaps the most gifted writer. Smith actually thought of himself primarily as a poet and only turned to prose due to the meagre financial rewards that his poetry had garnered. Even so, his longer work is marked chiefly by an extraordinarily wide and ornate vocabulary, a sort of ‘fleshed out’ version of his poetry, in which plot and characters are subservient to his literary milieu. Individually, Smith’s highly imaginative, genre-spanning visions of worlds of fantasy, horror and science fiction, combined with his profound understanding of the English language, have earned him wide and lasting acclaim. However, it is his collaboration with other members of the Lovecraft Circle to create a shared universe that is perhaps his greatest achievement. Smith, Howard and Lovecraft were the leaders of the Weird Tales school of fiction, and corresponded frequently although they never met (the writer of oriental fantasies, E Hoffman Price, is the only man known to have met all three in the flesh). Together they created and developed the alternate fictional worlds of Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Averoigne and Zothique, as well as the dark, disturbing and unique Cthulhu Mythos. For most of his life, Smith lived in physical and intellectual isolation in Auburn, California, which earned him the nickname ‘The Bard of Auburn’.
Robert E Howard and the Lovecraft Circle
15 Dec
Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an extraordinary writer who achieved achieved more in his short lifetime than many who lived to be two or three times his age. Nowadays he is best known for his character Conan the Barbarian and for virtually creating the sword and sorcery genre, spawning a raft of imitators and giving him an influence in the fantasy field rivalled only by J R R Tolkien. What he is less well known for are the many strange tales of horror and suspense that he penned but these should not be disregarded, especially given that they have earned him comparison with other American masters of supernatural fiction, such as Edgar Allan Poe and his great friend and contemporary H P Lovecraft. The great tragedy of Howard’s short life is that, because he died so young, he never lived to see his works published outside magazines. It is also worth noting that in many ways Howard’s premature death remains a mystery, much like that of Poe and Lovecraft before him.
Top Posts & Pages
Liddell’s Ghost
Click image to read my short story, 'Liddell’s Ghost' in Cygnus, the Journal of Speculative Fiction.
Changed
Click image to read my short story 'Changed' in The Cynic Online Magazine.
First Date
Click image to read my short story 'First Date' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
Ghost Walk
Click image to read my short story 'Ghost Walk' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
M R James
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Ghosts of Christmas Past
‘There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas,’ wrote Jerome K. Jerome in the introduction to his darkly comic collection Told After Supper (1891), ‘something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails’. Dickens would no doubt agree, […]
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M R James’s Suffolk
The macabre beneath the landscape is not dispelled by nearness to the sea. What Henry James knew, and described in English Hours (1905) – the strangeness present on a flattened seashore – M R James (no blood relation, although the two were acquainted) expressed in two of his best-known ghost stories: Oh, Whistle, and I’ll […]
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A Warning to the Curious
Here’s a real festive treat. In 2000 the BBC produced a series called Ghost Stories for Christmas, with Christopher Lee in which Lee played M R James reading four of his own stories. Lee, who actually once met James, obviously enjoyed making this series and A Warning to the Curious is a real highlight – enjoy!
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Lost Hearts
I have been haunted by the writings of M R James since childhood but when asked what is my favourite of all his ghostly tales I’ve never fully been able to answer. Lost Hearts, an early tale which apparently James didn’t much care for, and which only appeared in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to […]
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A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Tractate Middoth
Here’s a real treat to conclude the series of Christmas ghost stories that I’ve been posting for the last few weeks – the BBC adaptation of The Tractate Middoth from just a couple of years ago. Fingers crossed they do another one this year!
Ghost Cities 