Matt's blog

Théophile Gautier was born France in 1811. He gained much acclaim as a critic, journalist and novelist, as well as producing several poems and plays. He is probably best remembered for his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), whose preface about art for art’s sake became a sort of credo in the nineteenth century. In his later years, Gautier was offered a sinecure as Princess Mathilde Bonaparte’s librarian. She was the cousin of Napoleon II. Alongside his other work he also wrote a number of great supernatural stories, some of which we’ll look at here.

This has been a very hectic month and I am behind on having an article to post for this month. I still hope to keep my streak of at least one article a month going, so I'm going to try and post something before August end.

Manly Wade Wellman was born in Portuguese West Africa in 1903, but eventually settled in North Carolina, America. He started out as a reporter before quitting to become a full time writer. He wrote in multiple genres’ including horror, science fiction, adventure, crime, comic books, and mainstream novels. Wellman won the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award in 1946, beating out fellow contender William Faulkner. Faulkner took offense to the slight, writing the magazine’s editor, calling himself the most important American writer in Europe. Wellman would win several other awards during his long and prolific career, including the World Fantasy Award twice.

Edith Wharton (originally Edith Jones) was born in 1872 in New York City, New York to an upper class family. Her long marriage to Edward Wharton was an unhappy one that ended in divorce in1913. She enjoyed much mainstream success as a writer, publishing The House of Mirth in 1902, Ethan Frome in 1911, and became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1920 for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was good friends with many luminaries of the times, most notably being writer Henry James.

During Robert Bloch’s long career as a writer, he produced several decades’ worth of great fiction that spanned a variety of genres, including horror, crime, pulp and science-fiction. Born in Chicago, IL in 1917, he became enraptured by the stories he found in Weird Tales Magazine. It was there he discovered legendary author, H.P. Lovecraft, and was inspired to write to him. From then on the two began an ongoing correspondence. Lovecraft encouraged the young Bloch to keep writing. Soon afterwards he published his first work. Bloch eventually became a regular contributor to Weird Tales.

Oliver Onions was born on November 13th, 1873. He was an English artist who later turned to writing. He began doing artwork for posters, books and magazines and even did cover art for some of his own books after becoming a writer. He produced several novels as well as short stories. His collection of ghost stories Widdershins (1911) contained some of his best, including his novella “The Beckoning Fair One”, which has been named one of the greatest ghost stories ever written by a number of horror masters such as H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Aickman, and Editor E.F. Bleiler. Onions himself did not believe in the supernatural which may account for his propensity to make his tales subjective as to weather or not anything truly paranormal was occurring.

Carnacki the Ghost Finder is the creation of author William Hope Hodgson. He was a sort of paranormal super-sleuth who recited the events of each case to a group of friends who regularly gathered at his house to hear them. Carnacki would employ pseudo-science as well as arcane magic rituals, often mixing the two, to identify and combat these forces. Some of these investigations turned out to be elaborate hoaxes, but a number of them pitted him against terrifying supernatural entities. The device he used most often was the electric pentacle, which he invented. It was used as protection against otherworldly forces (most often dark spirits he referred to as Saiitii). Most of the Carnacki stories appeared in The Idler magazine in 1910.