Joshi (Lovecraft: A Life), an accomplished critic and independent scholar, follows up his earlier The Weird Tale
(1990) with this provocative examination of more recent exemplars of the genre. Again he adopts the concept of "weird fiction" as championed by H.P. Lovecraft in the latter's capacity as a critic, namely horror that upsets the reader's assumptions about the nature of reality itself. This usually involves the supernatural, though some psychotic killer fiction (Thomas Harris, Bret Easton Ellis) can also fit the bill. Here Joshi conducts a sort of comparative study of those late 20th-century authors he deems best (Shirley Jackson, Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti) with those whose books sell best (William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Clive Barker). Though he never suffers gladly the pandering that can prevail among the big commercial names, he leaps to give credit where due, even declaring that "no praise can be too high" for King's Richard Bachman novel, The Running Man. As always, Joshi eschews pretentious academic jargon and fatuous theoretical constructions. The lack of an index or coverage of fiction published after 1993, however, is regrettable. In addition, Joshi delights in saying that certain authors aren't as good as they think they are, to scant evidence or relevance, while occasional political asides only remind us that he's a literary commentator and not a political one for good reason. But throughout, this volume shouts brilliance and diligence and belongs on the bookshelf of every thinking horror reader. (Dec.)
Forecast:Despite the high price, the lack of publicity and promotion, the datedness (it evidently took Joshi years to find a legitimate press willing to accept such an iconoclastic work), the somewhat arbitrary selection of authors for inclusion (for treatments of Dennis Etchison, Les Daniels and David J. Schow one must turn to the two-volume, unabridged German edition), and the absence of a firm editorial hand, this study rivals in importance Lovecraft's classic survey of the genre, Supernatural Horror in Literature. It will be read long after many of the authors Joshi discusses have been forgotten. For now expect paltry sales.
