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Early Weird fiction embraces the supernatural, horror, science fiction, fantasy and the Gothic, and was explored with enthusiasm by many women writers in the United Kingdom and in the USA. Melissa Edmundson has brought together a compelling collection of the best Weird short stories by women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to thrill new readers and delight these authors' fans. The thirteen authors include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of 'The Yellow Wallpaper', with her story of a haunted New England house, 'The Giant Wistaria' (1891); Edith Nesbit, best known for her children's fiction by E Nesbit, her horror story 'The Shadow' (1910) is about the dangers of telling a ghost story after the excitement of a ball; Edith Wharton, the chronicler of New World societal fracture and change by new money tells an alarming story of Breton dogs and a jealous husband, 'Kerfol' (1916); May Sinclair, the Edwardian feminist novelist tells the story of 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' (1927), about a love that will never, ever die; Mary Butts, modernist poet and novelist, wrote 'With and Without Buttons' (1938), a story of some very haunted gloves; and D K Broster, best known for her historical novels, tells an unholy story of a mistress's feathery revenge, 'Crouching At The Door' (1942).… (more)
There's a strong moralising streak to this anthology, and it especially comes out in the story by Francis Stevens: Unseen – Unfeared. It’s presented as a sort of anti-Lovecraft tale – but published before Lovecraft.
The story goes like this: a man smokes an evil cigar, and suddenly finds the poor non-Anglo immigrants to New York to be off-putting and malicious-looking. The influence of this cigar also takes him to a dingy lab where a scientist puts a sheet of plant material over a lamp and exposes the protagonist to strange unseen creatures of the world, crawling about like starfish etc. The protagonist is horrified and passes out. Then his friend finds him and together they destroy the plant-material-sheet, so nobody can see those horrors again. And the main character goes out into the street, and the people around him don’t look so evil anymore, and he walks off, to live happily ever after – presumably.
The editor of the anthology presented this as a great story where morality is upheld and racism is shown for what it is: an evil disease. Isn’t it wonderful that the main character turns away from the horrifying hidden knowledge? But the thing is: the fact that Lovecraft’s protagonists don’t turn away and don’t walk off unscathed is precisely what makes his stories compelling; feel-good horror with a nice little moral at the end is just a disappointment for the reader.
Is ‘Women: The Tedious Moralisers of Horror’ really the optimal anthology to release? ( )
Early Weird fiction embraces the supernatural, horror, science fiction, fantasy and the Gothic, and was explored with enthusiasm by many women writers in the United Kingdom and in the USA. Melissa Edmundson has brought together a compelling collection of the best Weird short stories by women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to thrill new readers and delight these authors' fans. The thirteen authors include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of 'The Yellow Wallpaper', with her story of a haunted New England house, 'The Giant Wistaria' (1891); Edith Nesbit, best known for her children's fiction by E Nesbit, her horror story 'The Shadow' (1910) is about the dangers of telling a ghost story after the excitement of a ball; Edith Wharton, the chronicler of New World societal fracture and change by new money tells an alarming story of Breton dogs and a jealous husband, 'Kerfol' (1916); May Sinclair, the Edwardian feminist novelist tells the story of 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' (1927), about a love that will never, ever die; Mary Butts, modernist poet and novelist, wrote 'With and Without Buttons' (1938), a story of some very haunted gloves; and D K Broster, best known for her historical novels, tells an unholy story of a mistress's feathery revenge, 'Crouching At The Door' (1942).
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The story goes like this: a man smokes an evil cigar, and suddenly finds the poor non-Anglo immigrants to New York to be off-putting and malicious-looking. The influence of this cigar also takes him to a dingy lab where a scientist puts a sheet of plant material over a lamp and exposes the protagonist to strange unseen creatures of the world, crawling about like starfish etc. The protagonist is horrified and passes out. Then his friend finds him and together they destroy the plant-material-sheet, so nobody can see those horrors again. And the main character goes out into the street, and the people around him don’t look so evil anymore, and he walks off, to live happily ever after – presumably.
The editor of the anthology presented this as a great story where morality is upheld and racism is shown for what it is: an evil disease. Isn’t it wonderful that the main character turns away from the horrifying hidden knowledge? But the thing is: the fact that Lovecraft’s protagonists don’t turn away and don’t walk off unscathed is precisely what makes his stories compelling; feel-good horror with a nice little moral at the end is just a disappointment for the reader.
Is ‘Women: The Tedious Moralisers of Horror’ really the optimal anthology to release? (