Robert Weinberg - Horror of the 20th Century

[dem bones]

Robert Weinberg - Horror of the 20th Century : An Illustrated History (Collectors Press, 2000)

Dark Roots
Antiquarian Ghosts
Horror Comes to Hollywood
Horror on a Budget
New Outlets
Comics Horrify
Famous Monsters
The Horror Boom
The Downward Spiral
Horror Today
Acknowledgements & Credits
Index

Blurb:
As long as there have been storytellers, audiences have sought stories that make their flesh creep and their blood curdle - stories that slither into the darkest corners of our psyches. These are the tales that have been read furtively under covers or retold in whispers by the light of campfires. From Horace Walpole to Stephen King, the masters of horror have offered us just such tales of the eerie and the spectral.

Author Robert Weinberg has assembled the best of these phantasmal visions in Horror of the 20th Century . Here is a vivid recounting of the writers, illustrators, publishers, actors, and filmmakers who for more than two centuries have fed our hunger for the macabre. As a student of the field whose collection of 25,000 genre-related materials is among the finest worldwide, Weinberg is a uniquely qualified writer whose perspectives span the spectrum of horror.

Horror of the 20th Century begins with English author Horace Walpole who, in 1765, gave birth to the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto. Mary Shelley plundered new depths of darkness with Frankenstein, and late nineteenth-century readers feasted voraciously on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne each cast their unique spell on tales of the weird.

As the modern era unfolded, horror has crept, howled, and slimed its way into the twentieth century on celluloid and paper, and Weinberg reviews the silents and talkies, the comics, the paperbacks, and hardcovers - including such haunting and immortal creations as Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Phantom of the Opera.

This compilation spotlights the creative risk-takers who ensured that no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart, the horror story lives to stir our nightmares.


Got lucky with a much pre-battered, ex-lib copy of this beauty for a very reasonable £7, easily my favourite of these horror art books since Mr. Haining's The Classic Era of the American Pulp Magazine from the same year (Haining's Terror! remains my all-time #1).

Of particular relevance to our readers — or so you'd hope — chapter four, "Horror on a budget" (p 68-111) is the author's potted history of the pulp magazines, with particular emphasis on Weird Tales and his beloved shudder pulps (to whom he devotes equal book space). As with his classic The Weird Tales Story, Weinberg's compelling commentary is often irascible as it is celebratory. Much as he adored "the unique magazine" — at least, he did under Farnsworth Wright's editorship — he was less a fan of many of its competitors, most notably the MacFadden and Culture publications. "The Spicy pulp line was considered risqué for the thirties, and the magazines were never copyrighted. Its covers were the best part .... [they] had little to do with the stories in the magazines .... only Hugh B. Cave, E. Hoffman Price and Robert E. Howard contributed stories worth reading." On Bernarr MacFadden's outré publication. "Ghost Stories .... printed supposedly true ghost stories. The covers were often visibly striking, the stories never were." Less contentiously, perhaps, "Strange Stories ... was a straight fantasy-horror magazine that lasted for thirteen issues from 1939 through 1941. While it featured many of the same contributors as Weird Tales ... most of the stories read like rejects from the more famous pulp. Its passing hardly made a ripple on the horror scene." Among the sadder entries, this re the very brilliant John Newton Howett.

"Covers for all three magazines (Dime Mystery, Terror Tales, Horror Stories) were painted by John Newton Howett, one of the world's finest horror illustrators. Howett had been a well-known landscape and portrait painter in New York state before the Great Depression. Soon realizing that no one had the money to buy landscapes or portraits, the fifty-year-old artist turned to the pulps to earn a living. Howett possessed a unique talent for painting horrifying scenes of women in peril menaced by hordes of lunatics. His covers usually had little to do with the stories inside. Instead, they stood on their own as advertisements of the type of fiction printed within. And, as such, were brilliant advertisements.

When World War II brought new prosperity to the country, Howett, who hated working as an illustrator, burned all of his cover paintings. Only one or two pieces survived. The master of horror artwork was horrified by his own creations."