The Modern Weird Tale : A Critique of Horror Fiction

Rating:
Summary: A Lovecraftian Critique
Review: Robert M. Price once called Joshi the reincarnation of Lovecraft, and this wasn't far from the mark. The shadow of Lovecraft is oppressively looming over this study, and Joshi's writing style and criticism is nearly identical to Lovecraft's 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'. Both can be annoying at times, although they don't take away much of the study's merit overall.

Joshi's tries to bring together a canon of modern weird literature, and argues that authors such as Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, and Shirley Jackson are superior to mass marketing writers such as Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Stephen King, W.P. Blatty, and Clive Barker. Some of the latter get a bashing that they will probably remember for a long time.

In doing this, Joshi often sounds arrogant, elitist, and nit picking. While I do think he's overreacting sometimes it is also clear that the praise of best-seller authors is terribly out of proportion with their literary merits, and that Joshi's words deserve their extra impact. On the other hand, hasn't it always been that the literary merit of best-seller authors leaves much to be desired?

Even so, I think Joshi's study is important because of another aspect. It is an easily accessible study that deals with authors whose appreciations usually don't appear outside of fanzines, scattered journals, or OOP hardcovers. It is clearly written for other literary critics as well. All in all, Joshi shows to have a good understanding and grasp of the field and makes important and relevant commentaries.

As noted, Joshi stresses great importance on Lovecraft's theory of effective weird fiction, and every other three pages Lovecraft will make an appearance. This is a good foundation, but also a potential weakness. Much of Joshi's criticism goes to the grave if one simply refuses to see any merit in Lovecraft's own criticism of weird fiction. Therefore, fans of the bashed best-seller authors will more than likely be unimpressed by Joshi's biting remarks, and fans of the marginal authors he handles will learn not much more than what they already knew for themselves.

One thing that bothers me, though, is Joshi's obvious bias against weird fiction that doesn't somehow work with Lovecraft's 'supernatural realism' or harnesses atheism (he admits this in the final chapter and epilogue). This he defends adequately in the chapter on Blatty, deeming his metaphysical background too preachy, but later on it becomes strained. To Robert Aickman's opinion that the ghost story gains in strength in the presence of psychic research and faulty science, Joshi replies 'I hardly know how to respond to this farrago of nonsense', and quotes another extensive example of Lovecraft. But when dealing with Anne Rice's preachy vampires that constantly and sometimes violently assert that there is no God, Joshi comments: 'It is not clear what relevance these theological discussions have to the core of the novel, but they are admirably presented.'

Rating:
Summary: Tiresome and Sanctimonious--Nearly Unreadable
Review: Save your money, but more than that, save your time. Joshi seems to be channeling Dorothy Parker in his vicious "critiques" of modern horror writers. He doesn't just keep his vitriol for the writers either--there's plenty of contempt for the "uneducated" readers. Joshi is apparently the embodiment of "those who can't" gripe about those who do. Check this guy's credits. He hasn't done anything beyond editing and deconstructing. This book is mean-spirited, off-base and laughably pompous. This guy needs to remove the stick.

Rating:
Summary: Critical
Review: The Modern Weird Tale examines the philosophy (or lack thereof) behind the works of Shirley Jackson, T E D Klein, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert Aickman, Anne Rice, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Tryon, William Peter Blatty and Thomas Ligotti, with an interesting chapter on Robert Bloch's Psycho and some of its loving offspring by Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris. Joshi states in the introduction that the exclusion of authors like Richard Matheson and Thomas Tessier (to name but a couple) was prompted by his feeling that his book was already long enough. I cannot agree. Joshi is the most able and articulate literary critic to deal with supernatural horror in literature since the advent of H P Lovecraft, and his carefully argued critiques are desperately needed now that gross-out soap opera has all but pushed the good stuff off the shelves. I was a little disappointed with some of the emphasis in this work - thirty pages on Stephen King and only seventeen on Robert Aickman; an entire chapter devoted to William Blatty's sanctimonious potboilings while writers of the calibre of K W Jeter and Jonathan Carroll are relegated to the "excess length" department - but, after all, however much one may deplore the triumph of bestsellerdom, it's naive at best to ignore it. And even among the bestsellers, Joshi finds items worth bothering with - sometimes, indeed, items we would certainly be much worse off without. Even Joshi's deplored Stephen King is commended for Rage, The Running Man, Gerald's Game and some others. The chapters on the great writers - Jackson, Klein, Aickman, Campbell - are as thorough and rewarding as anything in The Weird Tale, although Joshi's antagonism towards Aickman's (admittedly unenlightening) theoretical views means that Aickman seems to get a little less than his due as a writer. Joshi has, for example, completely missed the point of Aickman's brilliant "Ravissante", and his paragraph on the story ends, in effect, with "so what?" Still, The Modern Weird Tale is at least as good a read as the earlier book, and contains almost as many pointers to interesting material of which the reader may not be aware. Perhaps the best I can say is that, having got through its 260 pages in a day, I immediately went and bought Joshi's critical study of John Dickson Carr - a writer I have never read - purely for the enjoyment of reading what Joshi has to say about him.