Eric Williams is a writer from Houston, Texas, who recently took on the formidable task of curating the most exemplary among several decades’ worth of short stories from the pulp magazine Weird Tales, an American publication that specialized in horror and fantasy fiction from 1923 until 1954. The fruits of his labor are compiled in Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation, a collection of short stories that draws heavily from the nineteenth-century European storytelling tradition and features tales from canonical writers like Honoré de Balzac and Ivan Turgenev. I sat down with Eric Williams to discuss Night Fears, the etymology of the term “weird,” and the enduring appeal that nineteenth-century European literary luminaries hold for contemporary Weird Fiction writers.
How did this edition—Night Fears—come together?
I knew the publisher— Matthew Spencer, who is himself a translator—from Twitter. We were having a conversation about pulp literature because he has a similar interest in the topic that I do, talking about the kind of interesting, idiosyncratic things that appeared in them, and particularly in Weird Tales. There is a surprising amount of poetry in Weird Tales, for instance, something unique to the magazine. Then, because Matthew is a translator, I mentioned how I’d been struck by how many translations had appeared in Weird Tales, and how neat it was to see “classic” names like Turgenev and Gautier right alongside bona fide pulp legends like Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Matthew thought that an interesting collection could be made out of these. That’s how it came together.
What was Weird Tales?
Weird Tales was the queen of the pulp magazines for a certain set of nerds. It started publication in 1923. The owner and publisher was a fan of Edgar Alan Poe and Ambrose Bierce—at that time, sort of outré literature. He had had some success publishing humor magazines, and used that to finance his dream magazine, one that specialized in horror and fantastic fiction, again in the vein of Poe or Bierce. Pulps were very cheaply made magazines printed on pulp paper that had become a pop-cultural phenomenon in the late nineteenth century, building into the teens and twenties. They were these big magazines, some with gigantic circulations, that just published short fiction. Initially, they would have different genres together in a single magazine—a ghost story with a romance story and a detective story, for example. Then, in the teens particularly, the pulps started to specialize in genres. A lot of crime, a lot of detective stories, and the publisher, J.C. Henneberger, envisioned a magazine that was devoted to what at the time were called “gooseflesh stories.” These included bloody or vicious crime stories with sadistic or psychopathic killers in them, all the way through to ghost stories, supernatural stories, occult stories, etc. Henneberger envisioned this magazine where, in his terms, all these kind of strange, outré stories, the sort of work that was not published in other magazines, could find a home. He decided to call it Weird Tales. The name is interesting because the term “weird,” at the time, had started to become archaic. It had sort of an old-timey flavor to it. There’s an essay by Lafcadio Hearn, the translator of Japanese folk stories, written about how Poe had rescued the word “weird” from the dustbin of the English language. Henneberger was a big fan of Poe, and Poe used that word so many times, famously in different pieces. So Henneberger decided to call the magazine “Weird Tales.” It was envisioned as this sort of outlet for spooky stories, outré stories. Right off the bat, it was put in conflict with the modern school of short story writing: stories that were rejected or forbidden from other publications, with an eye towards supernaturalism, fantasy, and early science fiction before that term was in use. It was cutting-edge, at the time. In some ways, honestly, it was experimental writing, but also couched towards weirdness. Things like monsters, ghosts or supernaturalism, and unusual or uncanny events, were highlighted.
What is the etymology of the word “weird?”
It’s an old Anglo-Saxon word, and it had the connotation of fate. “Weird” would be the fate that you have as the Anglo-Saxon hero of a saga, so there was the sense of it being a numinous or mystical attribute. But then it changed to have a threatening aspect or a strangeness, or something uncanny. In the Hearn essay, he argued that Poe took this word, which by the mid 1800s had come to simply mean “spooky,” and used it to imply an existential strangeness, a ghostliness that had sort of dropped off.
What are the differences between genre and pulp literature, and literary fiction in a more rarefied sense?
On the one hand, “pulp” as a term reflects the material culture of its production, specifically referencing the kind of extremely cheap paper that was used in these magazines as a cost-cutting measure. It’s contrasted with what they called the “slicks” or the “glossies,” which were high end, Harpers or the Atlantic, and printed on much higher quality, shinier paper. Those markets were very different beasts. The slicks paid much better fees to the writers, and that’s where people like Hemingway would publish. Slicks had a reputation for more intellectual, literary output, whereas the pulps were always very pop cultural. You wouldn’t quite call them disposable, but every month you would get 170 pages of these stories, and they were designed to skew formulaic. Sometimes these pulp magazines would have specific formula guides, for example, there has to be a lady in it, she has to be in danger, and there has to be a certain amount of violence. That’s the kind of stuff that they would give to house writers. But the pulps were much more geared towards popular consumption of the short story. And that was attendant with all the sort of moral panic that popular culture always entails. There were lots of essays and editorials in the 1910s about how these magazines were rotting peoples’ brains, about how these poor proletariat workers were, instead of improving themselves, giving in to these base instincts and reading adventure stories or detective stories, or lurid crime stories. It’s the same sort of stuff that happened with cheap paperbacks, the constant appraisal of what is art and what is literature versus what is dreck. The pulp industry was viewed by both people inside and outside of it as popular entertainment. It was meant to be for the masses and also sometimes very anti-literary and was occasionally even discussed as reflecting the difference between an author and a writer. Some pulp guys made the argument that they were writers and not authors, because they wrote for a living as opposed to pursuing lofty artistic goals. That said, even though the pulp magazines were cheaply made, there’s sometimes the assumption that they were cheap to buy, which is actually not the case. Weird Tales was 25 cents per issue, which in the early 1920s was like $8 or something. The idea that a kid was buying a million pulp magazines at a time was not the case because they were not cheap.
Where do the lines start to blur? We’re talking about pulp literature alongside canonized writers like Baudelaire, Maupassant, Balzac.
For most people at the time, there was a hard line between capital-L “Literature” and the pulps. “Literature” had aesthetic value and pursued artistic goals, whereas the pulps were pure entertainment, lurid and punchy and cheap. However, in the pages of Weird Tales, particularly under the editorship of Farnsworth Wright, who came into the job in 1924 and who stuck around until 1940, the idea of this division between high art and the pulps was something that he actively pushed back against. Wright was very cognizant of the fact that Weird Tales was basically defining a new genre, and part of that work, as he well knew, was delineating antecedent literature, stuff representing the important influences and aesthetics of weird fiction historically. This is where the translations came in – Wright, who was a translator of French and German and who had, in college, been an Esperantist and had translated classic literature into Esperanto for magazines, was acutely aware of the importance of defining a canon. And so, in Weird Tales, he made sure to introduce the readership of this pulp magazine to examples of writing that were both important to the genre as well as examples of “good” literature. Writers like E.T.A. Hoffman, Maupassant, Pushkin, major figures in classic European literature who also wrote strange, ghostly, weird stories. He made a very conscious effort to try to pull that literature into the modern weird genre. In an editorial essay of Weird Tales, he wrote dismissively of the “sordid realism” of modern literature. He was very antagonistic to these grim and gritty tales of real life. Contrast that with imaginative stories by Maupassant or Poe, stories which have literary merit but are also gesturing back towards this grand tradition of imaginative, fantastic storytelling, which he viewed as a major thread through the history of literature. He felt that that history was being dismissed. Farnsworth Wright envisioned Weird Tales as a place for weird literature to be revived in the public consciousness.
If you’re going to move between the Pulps and Glossies, you need to purge your writing of the supernatural, right?
That was certainly the view at the time, and that was something that Farnsworth Wright was strongly reacting against. He viewed the weird fiction genre to include everything from supernatural stories—what we would call science fiction today—to psychological criminal stories and things of that nature. Some of the stories included in Night Fears are psychological stories, and that’s the material that Wright was afraid was getting pushed aside for the stark, sordid realism that he saw as the dominant mode of literature in the early twentieth century, in the Anglophone world.
Is it fair to say that translation opens richer possibilities for Pulp Literature?
That’s exactly right. Farnsworth Wright was interested in including those translations. He was offering them up as examples of this a literary tradition that he saw as the essence of the Weird Tale. He found it in Balzac, in Turgenev, in Goethe. He was picking these stories out and saying, “Write more like this,” to the readers of Weird Tales. Because of course a lot of the readers would become writers, and that’s another part of the Pulp Tradition—this very porous fan community that produces writers who end up submitting and becoming major contributors. To give Farnworth Wright his due, he was also interested in the intellectual content of these stories, their styles and aesthetics. Moreso, he was interested in not having to pay anyone, especially for the stories that he was functionally stealing from collections from the late 1800s. The translations were also cheap. My view is that “Weird Fiction” as a genre didn’t exist until this magazine was created. And so, Wright was interested in building a corpus of Weird Literature that included pre-generic antecedents that were out there. That’s a third reason why he included them in the magazine: there was an historical aspect to their inclusion, a monetary aspect to their inclusion, but also an aesthetic and stylistic and literary aspect that he was interested in communicating.
Why do you think the European tradition tolerates the supernatural?
It’s an interesting question, and gun to my head if you ask me to give an explanation, I’d say it’s probably Poe, it’s Baudelaire. I really think that Baudelaire’s translations of Poe marked a foundational change in a lot of subsequent literature in Europe and on the continent. I was struck when I was assembling this collection and learning more about these authors, just how many of them had been translators of Poe. I feel like Poe comes in and fits into this space that has been made for these wild literary types that were in Europe. And I think that those translations marked a major change in how people viewed short stories, and what they could accomplish and what their subject matter could include.
Do you have a plan for a second edition of Night Fears?
There are definitely enough stories for a second edition, although I do think we probably skimmed the cream of them, for this edition. The nice thing about this edition, too, is that these are all in the public domain. There are others that I think are good stories, but for which there are still estates, and mostly European ones, so that could be complicated battleground to navigate. For example, there is a Belgian writer, Jean Ray, whose first English translations were in Weird Tales, but recently another press has been putting out some new translations of his stories. The Jean Ray estate is aware of these things, and they’re less generously willing to let us take these old translations and publish them.
You’re a writer. Or an author? Does your fiction interplay at all with Weird Tales?
Definitely. My first short story collection that was published in 2022 was entitled Toadstones, with Malarkey Press. It’s explicitly my love letter to Weird Tales, and specifically to the early twentieth century Weird Fiction genre. I definitely am mostly a writer of genre stuff.
Which elements from Weird Tales speak to you as a Fiction Writer?
I really like the paranoid uncertainty that became the hallmark for a lot of the stories in the magazine. Weird Tales stories often used a technique perfected by H.P. Lovecraft, where there are a bunch of fake details peppered in among real places, people, and things. Lovecraft would famously talk about writers or books that had been published, often old and famous names ad titles, and then he would insert his own fictional writers and books into these lists. He would construct his own mythologies that would be connected with real mythologies. That technique forces a reader to stop and evaluate what they’re being told, and to read through what’s real and what’s not. I think Weird Fiction is an interesting place for that because it’s common—maybe to the point of being overdone—but it’s a fun thing to be able to do to a reader, offering parts of the story that are real, and others that aren’t. And it’s not necessarily clear which is which. But beyond that Weird Fiction, before science fiction had become a thing, was very interested in the relationship between science, nature, and the environment. It addressed how humans fit into their environment in a way that I think up to that point no one had really been as interested in interrogating. If you wanted to do a study of the view of nature at the time, in the 1920s and 30s, you could do pretty well just by going through Weird Tales and reading how people were articulating ideas of what was natural versus what was unnatural.
Is there a place for Weird Tales today in the contemporary literary scene?
Yes, and I think the literary scene has been sort of inching into that direction. Straightforward supernaturalism, for instance, has already become a lot more acceptable in major American published novels. In terms of surrealism, I think a lot of weird fiction, you could crank the dial up to eleven and then it would become like a strange, dada-esque experiment. From a pop-cultural standpoint, I think Weird Tales, even though it stopped publication in the 1950s, continues to dominate pop culture to this day. Everything from Lovecraft to all of horror, science fiction, comics, those people all have Weird Tales in their DNA. So much of the pop cultural writing is just wormed-over Weird Tales fiction, in terms of both in approach and style.
Does speculative fiction partake in that?
The “New Wave” of speculative fiction, which came into being in the 1960s, was explicitly drawing on weirdness and Weird Tales. Harlan Ellison was a fan of Lovecraft and includes Lovecraftian stuff. Samuel R. Delany, who I think is probably the most important writer of the twentieth century, was definitely a reader of those magazines and was aware of them. He has Lovecraftian, cosmic-horror, weird fiction touches in a lot of his work. Joanna Russ, one of the great feminist speculative fiction writers, wrote a bunch of essays about Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the inventor of Conan and another Weird Tales guy. In terms of the speculative fiction world, it’s much more weird than it used to be. Post-1960s, a lot of speculative fiction got out of the spaceships and aliens territory to get into a very much more weird, internal, psychological approach, focusing on the sort of cosmic existentialism that had been the bread and butter for a lot of the best writers in Weird Tales.
What do we make of the demographic in terms of most of these authors being white men?
That is a sampling bias based on European literature, and absolutely the history of literature in the United States. Popular literature in particular is going to be an imprint of the larger society. There are heteronormative, racist, and sexist approaches that were codified. I would say though, and it’s an interesting point that for the pulps as a whole, we don’t know who most of the authors are. They wrote four or five stories and then that’s it. There’s no trail back to their identities. They would send in their stories to the headquarters in Chicago, and Farnsworth Wright would say yea or nay and send them a check, and then that’s it. And most of those records, if they ever were preserved, have been lost now. They were stored very poorly and so we don’t have chains of correspondence between these people, if there were any. So pulps were a way for people who were not often allowed to partake in writing and literature to actually publish stuff. Farnsworth Wright did not know who these writers were, and the readers often didn’t. There are some interesting letters in the letters section of Weird Tales, where a favored writer is revealed to be a woman, and there are several letters that come in saying, “Well, you’ve proven me wrong. I didn’t think ladies can write stories, but by God, they sure can.” The pulp world let people publish who were otherwise not able to. With Weird Tales because of its speculative nature, you can start playing some interesting games where you do close readings of these texts for subtext that Farnsworth Wright might not have recognized. Some stories were written by gay writers, employing gay subtext in the stories that most of the readers are not aware of. There were certainly black writers, for instance, who were writing in Weird Tales without anyone knowing they were black. For sure it was a white male heteronormative dominated industry, like all writing. But at the same time, because of its marginal position, there was some room there for people to write in and either discuss topics, or be members of demographics who would otherwise not be allowed to publish. It is a shame that the Night Fears collection is so dominated by white male titans of literature, and Eurocentric, as I mentioned in the introduction. It is surprising to me that none of Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of Japanese stories were ever mined, because he was such a huge figure and obviously Wright was aware of him. It’s strange that those don’t show up, and preference was given to the Orientalist fiction that he definitely loved. To be clear about Farnsworth Wright, he was definitely enamored of that genre. He loved Orientalist stories, so much so that he founded a magazine called Oriental Adventures and it’s just white people having adventures faced by perfidious barbarians of the East. It’s a real strange thing.
Night Fears is available from Paradise Editions. You can order a copy here.
Eric Williams is a writer from Austin, Texas. He has a collection of original weird fiction, “Toadstones” (Malarkey Books, 2022) and selected, edited, and wrote the introduction for the “Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation” (Paradise Editions, 2023). He has a website (geoliminal.com) and can also be found on twitter (@geo_liminal).
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 