S.T. Joshi has gained a reputation as something of an authority on horror and supernatural fiction. He has written a monograph on Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2001). Also in the same year his H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Greenwood), and study A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Times (Liverpool U. P.) appeared. Joshi’s study of The Modern Weird Tale is a sequel to his The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), in which he analyzed “six writers of the ‘golden age’ of the horror tale (roughly 1880‐1940)”. This subsequent study focuses on post‐World War II exponents of the genre. The “most vexing problem” Joshi has “faced is to decide which authors … especially the authors of the horror ‘boom’ of the 1970s and 1980s, many of whom retain a popular following”, to include in his study. In the end he has made 1994 his cut‐off date and has based inclusion on personal preference (p. ix).
There are five chapters. The first focuses on “Shirley Jackson: domestic horror”. Jackson (1916‐1965), with the exception of Ramsey Campbell, Joshi regards as the foremost exponent of the genre of weird fiction since H.P. Lovecraft. The second chapter “The persistence of supernaturalism” encompasses four writers: William Peter Blatty (b. 1928) and The Catholic Weird Tale; Stephen King (b. 1957); T.E.D. Klein (b. 1947) and Urban Horror; and Clive Barker (b. 1952), one of the few British writers in Joshi’s study. Chapter three is devoted to one writer, British, Ramsey Campbell (b. 1946) and The Fiction of Paranoia. Campbell may not be as popular as, for instance, Stephen King or Clive Barker but he is prolific and “perhaps the most precocious”, having had his first volume published when 18 (p. 133). Campbell is obsessed with urban horror, his fullest exploration of those horrors being in his novel The Depths published in 1978. For Campbell “paranoia is … the inevitable outcome of the ceaseless and grinding squalor and decadence of the urban milieu” (p. 151). Somewhat curiously, although Joshi has a section on “Childhood” and indicates Campbell’s concern with “the theme of the vulnerability of children” (p. 158), little is revealed of the events of Campbell’s own childhood and upbringing.
The fourth chapter “The alternatives of supernaturalism” has the sub‐title “Killing women with Robert Bloch, Thomas Harris, and Bret Easton Ellis”. Robert Bloch (1917‐1994) is the exponent of “hard‐boiled horror” (p. 175). Thomas Harris (b.c. 1940), on the other hand, concentrates on “the mind of horror” (p. 181). Bret Easton Ellis, for whom no birth date is provided, is the exponent of “the banality of horror” (p. 185). Other writers included in the fourth chapter are Thomas Tryon (1926‐1991), the author of the bestselling The Other (1971) and other tales of rural horror, and Peter Straub (b. 1943). The latter’s work Joshi finds “rather tiresomely and self‐consciously literary” (p. 203).
Three authors are the subject of the fifth chapter “Pseudo‐, quasi‐, and anti‐weird fiction”. The first, Robert Aickman (1914‐1981), is British and according to Joshi “an exceptionally odd writer”, who was “the founder and chairman of the Inland Waterways Association”. Aickman took to the weird fiction genre later in his career. His output was small and mostly in the short story form but Aickman’s “literary gifts were of an extremely high order” (pp. 217‐18). The second author is Anne Rice (b. 1941), author of the bestseller Interview with the Vampire (1976). The final author discussed by Joshi is Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953), whose “interest is focused more intensely and exclusively on the weird than any author’s in the history of weird fiction” (p. 244).
In his “Epilogue” Joshi re‐states the objectives of his book, which “is to lay down a canon of modern weird writing” (p. 258). The Modern Weird Tale is scrupulously footnoted and contains a most useful primary and secondary bibliography of writers by and about the authors discussed in its pages. Joshi writes about authors about whom there is little, if any, secondary critical study. He is to be commended for writing so clearly and cogently in largely uncharted waters and territory. The study lacks an index; it is clearly typeset with reasonable margins and is highly recommended for modern literature collections in public and university libraries. The price for what is essentially a paperback of not unreasonable length is rather high.
