Joshi has spent his life chronicling the history of weird fiction, its beginnings as well as penning the famous biography ‘ I am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Joshi about his views on the importance of weird fiction as a serious literary art. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with supernatural horror literarian and Lovecraft scholar, S.T. With deep-rooted psychological, philosophical, and social implications that are explored in many of these tales, weird fiction does indeed hold a pale bright light as an intellectually stimulating form of literary art. The subject-matter, while greatly underrated in comparison to other literary forms, has held a vast shadowy influence in literary fiction. Bloch and many more have contributed to the immense and weirdly diverse spectrum of supernatural horror fiction. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard Phillips Lovecraft famously said that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.”Īs a literary genre, however weird fiction is a little over two hundred and fifty years old with many well-known names that have persisted to keep its form and material alive. Supernatural horror literature or weird fiction has been around as long as mankind has had the ability to fear those ancient horrors that lurk in the darkness of the night.

I am providence joshi