Few figures have shaped the modern understanding of weird fiction as decisively as S. T. Joshi. For more than four decades, Joshi has been one of the genre’s most rigorous historians, a critic and advocate, producing an extraordinary body of scholarship that has helped define what the weird is, and just as importantly, what it is not. Through works such as The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), I Am Providence (2010), and Unutterable Horror (2012), he has insisted on aesthetic seriousness, historical continuity, and critical discrimination in a field often prone to vagueness and overexpansion. Many readers will first meet him through H. P. Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (coll 2001) and The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (coll 2004), both edited with an introduction by Joshi for Penguin Classics.
Joshi’s influence, however, extends beyond criticism and biography. As editor and publisher (notably through Hippocampus Press and journals such as Penumbra), he plays a central role in preserving, contextualising, and disseminating both classic and neglected works of weird fiction, while also fostering serious critical discourse around the genre.
In this interview, Joshi reflects on the origins of his lifelong engagement with weird fiction, from his early encounters with Lovecraft to his sustained efforts to map the genre’s boundaries. He discusses the necessity of the supernatural to the weird and examines how it has evolved from Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Machen to Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, and Thomas Ligotti. He also examines the New Weird and the mist which has arisen around the genre from attempts at modernisation. What emerges is a portrait of a critic and editor, deeply committed to the exploration and promotion of literary excellence.
James Machell
JM: Firstly, why did you choose to make weird fiction the focus of your career?
STJ: I have no idea why I was led to read and then study weird fiction. I came to the US from India when I was 5, settling in the Midwest. I didn’t even like reading until my sister dragged me to the public library in Muncie, Indiana, and ordered me to read something—anything. My thirst for reading was initially triggered by C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, but I soon switched from fantasy to horror—the anthologies of Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Sterling, the work of Poe and Bierce—and then (at about the age of 14) Lovecraft. It was Lovecraft who, through his treatise “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), led me to explore many other writers—Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, etc. I then felt the need to examine weird fiction of the post-Lovecraft era, ranging from Shirley Jackson to Stephen King (who did not inspire me) to Ramsey Campbell (who very much did so) to Thomas Ligotti and many others.
JM: The term “weird” has been used to describe a wide range of work. China Miéville, for example, places M. John Harrison, Mervyn Peake, and Philip. K. Dick among the authors of his favourite weird fiction. As an expert on the subject, what parameters would you use to define the genre?
STJ: I don’t think the writers mentioned by Miéville are weird except in an incidental sense. Some boundaries have to be established if weird fiction is to be regarded as a coherent genre rather than as something that enters works tangentially or peripherally. My belief is that the supernatural is critical to the weird, although a certain number of notable works of non-supernatural horror (some of the tales of Poe and Bierce; Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959); etc.) are weird. But pure fantasy (of the Dunsany or Tolkien sort) and science fiction have to be excluded.
JM: I’ve often felt that works associated with the new weird, such as Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) are not so much modernised takes on the weird but rather speculative fiction that happens to encompass strange, surreal, or uncanny elements. What is your response to this?
STJ: You are quite right. There is a recognised tradition of weird writing that proceeds from the Gothic novels to Poe to Bierce to the Victorian ghost story writers to Bram Stoker and then to the great outpouring of the weird in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating with Lovecraft. Then, after World War II, we have Richard Matheson, the early Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, and others, leading to Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, and others up to Caitlín R. Kiernan, Adam Nevill, and others. The works you mention do not seem to me to fit into this paradigm.
JM: You are the editor of Penumbra, a journal published by Hippocampus Press, which has featured contributions from Ramsey Campbell, John Shirley, and Scott J. Couturier. Can you tell us a little about your time at the helm?
STJ: Penumbra was started because I wished a venue for the criticism of weird fiction after I ceased being editor of the Weird Fiction Review (Centipede Press). The focus of the magazine is really on the criticism, which usually takes up at least two-thirds of the issue. I added original fiction and poetry as a means of attracting readers, and I believe I have published a fair amount of good fiction that represents what I feel is prototypically “weird.” But I am always on the lookout for good pieces of criticism, as I feel that this genre is still not as widely studied or analysed as it should be.
JM: H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, your 1996 biography of the author, is an extensive exploration of the author’s life. How much of the information was known prior to its publication and how much was brought to light by your research?
STJ: L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) was the first full-length biography of Lovecraft, but it suffered from numerous flaws: many factual errors, an insufficient placement of Lovecraft within the social, intellectual, and cultural movements of his era, and a kind of schoolmasterly approach to Lovecraft’s perceived failings. I am not sure that a great deal of new documentary evidence had emerged in the twenty years following de Camp’s biography, but there was some. But I undertook the work because I felt that a greater integration of Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought was needed, as well as a contextualisation of Lovecraft within his time. H. P. Lovecraft: A Life was actually an abridgement of the work that I wrote in 1993–95; the full version appeared later as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010), and is still in print.
JM: I discovered many of the weird writers, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood for example, from the epigrams in Lovecraft short stories as well as from Lovecraft’s essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”.
How important to you think Lovecraft is to weird fiction as a recognisable genre?
STJ: Yes, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is a wonderful gateway to weird writing up to the 1920s. Some have criticised his lack of enthusiasm about, say, J. Sheridan Le Fanu or the English ghost story writers of the later 19th century; but, as I discussed in my own study, Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012), I think Le Fanu is greatly overrated and the Victorian writers don’t really amount to much.
JM: Le Fanu never did a great deal for me either.
What is the earliest text you would describe as weird fiction?
STJ: This is a tough call. In Unutterable Horror I maintained that weird fiction (if it is to be associated with the supernatural) can only have emerged at a time when there was a tolerably viable distinction between what is (scientifically) “natural” and what is “supernatural.” Such a distinction appeared only in the 18th century, and so we are forced to regard the first Gothic novel—Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)—as the first work of weird fiction. That said, some of the antecedents of this work—going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and carrying on through Homer’s Odyssey and random works by other Greco-Roman writers—are significant in themselves.
JM: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912) is set in the 17th century, and yet the action takes place within a nightmarish vision of the far future with metal pyramids and a dead Sun, all described with antiquated language. Do you think that subject matter defines weird fiction as weird or is it tied into approach and stylisation?
STJ: The Night Land might be considered a melding of weirdness and science fiction, with perhaps a greater emphasis on the latter. But another apocalyptic work of roughly the same sort, M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), strikes me as more quintessentially weird because it is set in the present day, although nothing strictly supernatural occurs in it. So, I think the choice of subject is central to the weird, more so than style, since a given prose style can be put to the use of fantasy or weird fiction or science fiction.
JM: Modern fantasy has largely moved away from the uncanny worlds of Clark Ashton Smith to ones with defined lore in the way of J. R. R. Tolkien. I’ve wondered if this is because it requires less from the imagination of the reader so I’d be interested to hear your take on this?
STJ: I have long pondered why the tales of Clark Ashton Smith (and, before him, of Lord Dunsany) have not inspired the legions of devotees in the way that the work of Tolkien and his successors has. My conclusion is that readers of imaginary-world fantasy tend to prefer full-length novels in which they can immerse themselves imaginatively. Short stories—even if they occur in the same imaginary realm, such as Smith’s Zothique (coll 1970)—do not have the capacity of engaging readers in this same way. I regard Dunsany’s short stories as generally superior, aesthetically, to his novels (with the possible exception of The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), a superlative work), but, if anything, it is Dunsany’s novels that command attention today, for this same reason.
JM: What do you think of post-Lovecraft contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, such as Ramsey Campbell’s The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (coll 1964)? Do they detract from Lovecraft’s original vision and deliberate opacity, or enhance it with added detail and further exploration of the Old Ones and Elder Gods?
STJ: Campbell’s Inhabitant of the Lake is the work of a bright teenager. He has gone on to write much more profound and searching elaborations of Lovecraft’s work, especially in The Darkest Part of the Woods (2002) and the more recent Daoloth Trilogy (2017–18). A great many Lovecraft imitators have done a disservice to Lovecraft by misinterpreting his bleak cosmic vision (August Derleth, his self-proclaimed disciple and publisher, was among the worst of them); but creditable work has been done in the Lovecraft idiom, by such writers as T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, Jonathan Thomas, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and numerous others. These writers use Lovecraft as a springboard for the expression of their own aesthetic concerns, and are far beyond mere pastiche.
JM: I agree with your statement that art is not a democracy but an aristocracy of excellence. What three works of literature, weird or otherwise, do you feel are among the pinnacles of this excellence?
STJ: Very difficult! But I’d have to say: the best tales of Edgar Allan Poe (“Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” etc.); Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931); and Ramsey Campbell’s story collection Demons by Daylight (1973). But there are numerous other contenders!
JM: What are you working on at the moment?
STJ: I have just finished a full-length biography of Clark Ashton Smith, The Star-Treader, which will be published by Hippocampus Press in the summer of 2026. I have also completed the compilation of a six-volume edition of Algernon Blackwood’s complete weird fiction; three volumes have appeared so far. Entirely outside the work of weird fiction, I hope I may be allowed to mention a long history of atheism, The Downfall of God (2024–25).
JM: Weird fiction is almost exclusively associated with western writers. Are there any works from outside Europe and America which you feel achieve the same goals as the classic writers of the weird?
STJ: I myself am not as well read in weird literature outside of the US and Europe—and, indeed, even outside of Anglophone literature—as I should be. While I understand that some works from Asia (such as the novels of Haruki Murakami) are weird in some sense, I do not believe they would be fully recognised as “weird” in the Western sense. This is no criticism of such works, merely an acknowledgement that they emerge out of very different cultural and aesthetic backgrounds.
JM: Which of your books would you recommend our readers start with as an introduction to your career?
STJ: I still like The Weird Tale (1990), a study of some of the leading writers of the later 19th and early 20th centuries, written as a conscious dialogue with Lovecraft and embodying my brand of aesthetic criticism—something that is apparently entirely out of fashion, as critics nowadays seem solely concerned with the race, class, and sexual orientation of writers rather than the actual substance of the work these writers produce. Unutterable Horror is a very long work that took me five years to research and write; but I think it holds up reasonably well as a broad history of the field, although no doubt there are omissions.
JM: American evangelist, Billy Graham once said, “I’d love to meet an angel, but not yet.” Do you feel the same way about Lovecraft’s deities?
STJ: The figure of Nyarlathotep—who at times presents himself as a pharaoh out of ancient Egypt, and at other times in very different guises—strikes me as a fascinating creation whom it might be interesting to meet. But most of Lovecraft’s other “gods” are not ones one could have a genial conversation with!
JM: I now have a couple of questions suggested by weird fiction fans.
When Ligotti was still a relatively unknown writer, you criticised him rather heavily for the fact that Ligotti, “by design, [does] not care about the complete reconciliation of the various supernatural features in a given tale.” You went on to explain that, to join the ranks of the weird masters, Ligotti would have to produce more stories in the style of “Nethescurial,” i.e. in the style of supernatural realism. I’d like to know what you think about Ligotti now that he has become one of the most acclaimed among weird writers without compromising his surreal style. Do you stand behind your statements from back then and do you still think supernatural realism constitutes the pinnacle of weird writing styles?
STJ: Writers such as Ligotti (and, before him, Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman), who write in this sort of ambiguous idiom whereby the weird or supernatural elements are thrown out (many times with a high degree of artistry) are certainly important, but I do believe their impact is not as strong as the impact of writers such as Poe, Bierce, Machen, Blackwood, Lovecraft, Campbell, and others, whose work is a bit more comprehensible. In any case, all these writers (de la Mare, Aickman, Ligotti) have written works of a more orthodox sort, and I can’t help feeling that it is these works that are chiefly responsible for their acclaim.
JM: I’d love to know if you know of any hidden gems from the post-gothic novel but pre-Poe era of the very late 18th and early 19th century. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published a ton of early horror fiction in that period. There were sporadic shorts from people like John Polidori and Irving Washington in English, and we had E. T. A. Hoffmann on the continent, but a lot of this stuff has been neglected and remains in the dark.
STJ: I have not done extensive work on the period in question; no doubt some enticing gems could be found. But this period still strikes me as a sort of prologue to weird fiction, which truly did not get underway until Poe revolutionised the field by focusing solely on the short story and by emphasising the psychology of fear as opposed to stale Gothic properties such as the ghost, haunted house, and so on. Interestingly, some of my recent research has led me to re-evaluate the work that appeared in the pulp magazines of the early 20th century, especially Weird Tales, which had more creditable items (by such authors as Anthony M. Rud, John Martin Leahy, Dorothy Quick, Arlton Eadie, and others) than I had previously believed. At a minimum, these works make for entertaining reading, even if they do not rise to the level of high literature.