C. L. Grant – In the Shadow of Udolpho

I always applaud the brave. S. T. Joshi in his The Modern Weird Tale (2001) is brave. He has the critical kahunas to state that the mega-bestsellers of the 1970s are not the pinnacle of weird fiction. He even goes so far as to include the biggest bestseller of them all, Stephen King. If Joshi was living in 2050 perhaps, a time when King had written his four hundredth book and had passed onto Writers’ Valhalla, then Joshi might not be so brave. But King was still very much alive in 2001, as he is today. Like I said “critical kahunas”.

Joshi doesn’t single out King over the millions of imitators. He is actually looking at an interesting phenomenon that the 1970s gave us. Most horror of that period was written in the novel form. In centuries past, horror was predominately a short story or novella-length medium. (Joshi looks at these in The Weird Tale (1990) Writers like King were able to find a marketing vehicle for longer, more commercial products, like we had not seen since the three-decker novel. While a few older writers such as William Hope Hodgson were able to sustain the pitch of horro for 80,000 words or more, Joshi (and Thomas Ligotti) complains modern writers did this by muddying the waters:

It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of weird novels written in the last two decades are subject to Ligotti’s complaint that they are merely mystery or suspense tales with or without supernatural interludes. Some of these are nevertheless very successful, even though—especially with purely nonsupernatural work—it sometimes becomes problematical to classify them within weird fiction at all… It is, however, in those novels that are theoretically based upon a supernatural premise, but in which that premise that does not always function in a systematic way, that the “banalization” of horror is particularly evident. In many of King’s or Straub’s novels there is not even a mystery or suspense foundation for the weird but merely long stretches of irrelevant character portrayal and melodramatic human conflict. This tendency reaches its nadir in the soap-opera supernaturalism of Charles L. Grant.