Weird Tales

Weird fiction is the horror of things that should not be: forbidden books, haunted houses and cosmic dread. Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow (1895), stories haunted by a play that drives its readers mad and by the lost city of Carcosa, was one of Lovecraft's own inspirations. Arthur Conan Doyle, better known for Sherlock Holmes, wrote his own tales of terror: a monster in the upper air, a cat in a locked room, a creature in a Derbyshire cave. Weird Tales, founded in 1923, gave Lovecraft and his circle their home, and later printed The Shunned House, his story of a haunted house on Benefit Street in Providence. Its pages also gave Robert E. Howard's heroes to the world: the Puritan avenger Solomon Kane in Red Shadows (1928), and Conan the Cimmerian, whose The Devil in Iron ran in August 1934. The magazine printed "weird-scientific" tales too, such as Edmond Hamilton's space opera of the Interstellar Patrol, Corsairs of the Cosmos (1934).