95 years ago, there was the publication of a horror anthology. The book was titled Creeps by Night, and the editor was none other than Dashiell Hammett. Now, Hammet was not a horror writer; rather he was arguably the finest crime writer of his generation, and maybe even when compared to the generation that followed. Hammett did, however, have an eye for good fiction, and moreover he respected what was then the burdgeoning pulp market, seeing as how his short stories and even a couple of his novels (most famously The Maltese Falcon) first saw print in those same pulp magazines. By and large the stories chosen for Creeps by Night were recent, published between 1910 and 1930, and by and large these stories were originally published in the pulps. Hammett is less concerned with the exact literary merit of the stories and more with their effectiveness as weird fiction. As he says so well in the introduction:
The effectiveness of [weird fiction] depends on the reader’s believing that certain things cannot happen and on the writer’s making him feel—if not actually believe—that they can but should not happen. If the reader does not feel that these things have happened, or does not care whether they have happened, then the author has been, in the first case, unconvincing, and in the second, uninteresting, literary faults by no means confined to our present field, and so of no especial interest to us here.
The “present field” in question is horror, and more specifically short horror as appearing in often cheap periodicals. Hammett, himself an accomplished author, recognized that there was a truckload of garbage when it comes to these periodicals, but he also recognized the merits of what was at the time a not very respected field of writing. The pulp horror story, or the weird tale in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, was not like the more mannered and openly appreciated supernatural horror by the likes of M. R. James, Henry James, Arthur Machen, etc. Weird Tales and its rivals patronized a small but passionate group of writers and readers, who in turn huddled around lurid and often violent weird stories like moths around a lantern. In a way this new breed of horror story took after the precedent set by the Jameses and their ilk, but they also pointed the way for a new and uniquely American kind of horror.
Creeps by Night was published right in the middle of that boom of pulp horror, and in the 95 years since there has been, if anything, more freedom afforded to writers who would prefer to specialize in the short story over the novel, even if the novel utterly dwarfs the short story in popularity. Short-form horror literature has also become a lot more sophisticated on average since the 1930s. For all the changes that have happened, though, the central conceit of the weird tale has remained steadfast, namely that a good weird tale ought to make the reader feel that something can but should not happen. There is also the emphasis on how the reader feels rather than thinks, which may be the key difference between weird fiction and, say, dystopian SF—not that the two are mutually exclusive. Whereas dystopian SF is meant to light a flame under one’s intellect, horror leans more towards the irrational. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in ghosts (as I don’t—at least not literal ones), a good ghost story should make you feel, if only temporarily, that such things can be. That’s the magic of it.
Obviously since October is here, we have all weird and strange stories for this month’s review forecast, spanning nearly a century in content but hopefully showing something of a continuity in the short-form horror tradition. Of course, it helps that I always get into this exact mood when October comes around, even though autumn seems to start a bit later with each passing year as the climate becomes more erratic.
Well, it can’t be helped.
We have one story from the 1930s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1970s, three from the 1980s, one from the 1990s, and one from the 2020s. I didn’t go in intending for there to be a focus on horror from the ’80s, it sort of just turned out that way.
Now, for the stories in question:
- “The Opener of the Way” by Robert Bloch. From the October 1936 issue of Weird Tales. Bloch was born in 1917, and would’ve been all of 18 when he wrote this story—yet by this point he was already an established author in the pages of Weird Tales. He evntually became famous for writing Psycho, but he started out as one of Lovecraft’s many correspondents and imitators.
- “In the Arcade” by Lisa Tuttle. From the May 1978 issue of Amazing Stories. Like Bloch, Tuttle was something of a prodigy, writing her first professional story when she was in her teens. She collaborated with George R. R. Martin on the SF novel Windhaven, but Tuttle’s true calling always seemed to be horror. While she’s written several novels, she’s far more prolific with short stories.
- “Greenface” by James H. Schmitz. From the August 1943 issue of Unknown. Schmitz would forge a respectible career as an SF writer about a decade down the line, with maybe the most notable recurring feature of his stories being his sympathy for his female characters. “Greenface” is an unusual debut for him, being horror and printed in Unknown, and being his only story for six years.
- “The Medusa” by Thomas Ligotti. From the Winter 1991 issue of Fantasy Tales. While he has not written a great deal over the past four decades or so, even seemingly having gone into hibernation as of late, Ligotti stands as one of the undisputed living masters of horror. He takes some cues from Lovecraft, no doubt, but the cadance of Ligotti’s prose style is very much his own.
- “Family” by Joyce Carol Oates. From the December 1989 issue of Omni. Over her very long career, Oates has won multiple literary awards and is typically considered a literary author (and tweeter), but her fascination with horror goes back to pretty much the beginning. Most of Oates’s horror output has been through short stories and collections, and even then she’s been startlingly prolific.
- “The Night of White Bhairab” by Lucius Shepard. From the October 1984 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Shepard only started writing as an adult when he was pushing forty, so in that way he was a late bloomer; but when he did debut in 1983, he emerged in the field more or less fully formed. A lot of Shepard’s work blurs genre lines, and this is probably no exception.
- “She Sheds Her Skin” by Raven Jakubowski. From the November 2023 issue of Nightmare Magazine. “A tailor by trade and writer by vocation,” Jakubowski is an NYC denizen who technically made her debut back in 2014, but she only started writing consistently again (after a false start) around 2021. According to an interveiew, “She Sheds Her Skin” was inspired by COVID lockdowns.
- “Remembering Melody” by George R. R. Martin. From the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Martin is one of our most famous living writers, although he’s far more known for his fantasy than his SF and horror. Despite this, Martin has remarked on more than one occasion that he considers himself instinctively a horror writer more than anything, and honestly it shows.
Now let’s get in the mood and read some spooky stories.
