Class and Horror Fiction During the Early Twentieth Century

Working from Paul Kincaid’s recent suggestion in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (2012) that “Weird Fiction is a decidedly American Form” (44), this second chapter explores the development of the Gothic in the shape of Weird Fiction and the pulp magazines that originally published such material. The chapter argues that the work carried out by a host of often culturally derided pulp and popular writers, exemplified by H.P. Lovecraft, was defined by the issue of class. Class was an issue both in terms of the ideology of those involved on the creative side of such magazines (publishers, editors, writers) but also filtered through to the content of the fiction that was published; in the process giving voice to a set of anxieties and fears concerning the emergent, literate working class, and the changing nature of US identity.