Weird fiction or horror?

I’m a huge lover of horror of many types. Enjoying stories in written form, films, computer and board games and roleplay games. One of the joys of living with Ivan, is he is a great game runner for TTRPGs and has certainly provided me with some of the creepiest descriptions which stuck with me long after the games had ended.

I recently attended a short course on writing in the horror genre which was really interesting and at times pushed me outside my comfort zone, especially with presenting my work to others for critique. Turns out that my harshest critic is still me! One of the most interesting sections for me however, was the looking at the different types of horror and how they break down and how much of an overlap there can be between the sub-genres. We are familiar with the tropes of Gothic fiction with its florid language, beautiful old settings and oppressive atmosphere. Many ghost stories have gothic settings, many gothic tales include ghosts which leads me to wonder if we need to separate and classify them at all? Which then brings me to the weird tale. Popularised and given a stage by the magazine Weird Tales (which celebrated it’s 100th birthday this year!) weird fiction was a pretty broad term. It encompassed a fair range of speculative and horror fiction usually including the supernatural, but also strange science, and according to Lovecraft “it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane — a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread”

While Lovecraft himself was by no means the first person to be writing in this genre, he may have been one of the first to classify his own work this way. HPL considered Poe to be the pioneer of the weird tale, though others argue that Sheridan Le Fanu was also working in the field around the same time as well as Hope Hodgeson, Machen, Dunsany and others. After Lovecraft’s death, and the end of WWII, there was a real growth in the popularity and prevalence of the weird. Writers like Bradbury, Bloch, Shirley Jackson and Harlen Ellison and Thomas Ligotti, continued and developed the style ensuring it has remained a relevant and living genre today.

One of the main features of weird fiction is the sense of atmosphere that it creates. I feel that this is what draws me back time and again and why it feels so appropriate to be the basis of an immersive experience. When we start crafting an event, before we even start writing the stories, we decide on how we want our guests to feel. It’s important to us that we don’t use any roleplay effects; no-one is told how they feel or what they have just experienced, so it’s vital that we develop the sense of atmosphere through use of characters, objects, sounds, lighting and writing.

We lean in to the literary angle. Storytelling is our primary focus - albeit in a broken up, non-linear fashion and through a range of media. As with written forms, there aren’t any jump scares, no shoggoth is going to jump you as you wander through the grounds. However, we do like to build up tension. There’s nothing like poking around a creaky old manor in the dark with a lantern, hearing people whispering and beginning to wonder if it really was such a good idea to have trusted that character with so much information during the daylight…

Where are the Women?

So many of the big names writing weird fiction in the 1920s and earlier, were men. Whilst obviously a product of the time in terms of popularity and reach, it does not mean that women weren’t writing in the weird tradition. For all that Lovecraft was someone with a problematic outlook, and how much we would distance ourselves from that today, I was surprised by how complimentary he was about female authors working in weird fiction. He praises Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte (seriously you should read his chapter on why Wuthering Heights is a fine example of the weird tale!) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but also many lesser known women who were being published in the same magazines as him; Weird Tales, Astounding Stories and the other pulp-press and amateur journals. He was also known to correspond with many women and to collaborate with female authors as well.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was relatively unknown to me until recently. I was pointed at the Yellow Wallpaper, by my incessant studies of William Morris wallpapers related to Treowen and I loved it. I promptly devoured more of her stories and proceeded to learn about her. She is a fascinating character. Growing up in Providence Rhode Island (seriously what’s in the water out there?), she was an early feminist; outspoken against gender roles and for gender equality - something that was certainly not the norm of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries - and had pretty progressive views on relationships and parenting.

The Yellow Wallpaper, now one of the best selling books of The Feminist Press, was at the time received with mixed reviews, almost certainly down to the challenging nature of the subject. An excellent horror, it is a fictionalised telling of Charlotte’s own experience with post-partum depression and psychosis and her response to the ‘cure’ that was prescribed for her. Unsurprisingly (at least by modern standards) she did not stay with her husband; separating from him only 4 years into their marriage, something rather uncommon for the time. We will certainly be incorporating stories of Gilman’s into the Key of Dreams narrative and I love a character who subverts the norms of the time and knows what they want - expect more on that!

What’s happening here?

We’ve been busy talking mostly! We had a lovely chat with Mairi from The Escape Roomer blog and she posted up our interview here (including a sneaky early discount!)

We also had a great enthusiastic chat with the guys from The Innsmouth Book Club, Rob Poyton and Tim Mendees. We had a real giggle visiting them at the Gilman hotel and the recording of our chat will be going out on their next show.

We will also be meeting with the guys next weekend (30th September) in Innsmouth (also known as Bedford!) for the first Innsmouth Literary Festival. There are still a few tickets left if you fancy a heavy dose of all things Lovecraft. We will be there with our enormous model of Treowen and some lovely new additions (secret for now but I promise to post picture of the social channels while we are there.) We will also have The Seed Collector in attendance, a puzzle box competition and some new ‘artefacts’ for sale. For those of you that can’t make it, they will be available on the website after the festival.

“In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations” - HPL