Women's Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 (Handheld Classics)

There's a strong moralising streak to this anthology, and it especially comes out in the story by Francis Stevens: Unseen – Unfeared. It’s presented as a sort of anti-Lovecraft tale – but published before Lovecraft.

The story goes like this: a man smokes an evil cigar, and suddenly finds the poor non-Anglo immigrants to New York to be off-putting and malicious-looking. The influence of this cigar also takes him to a dingy lab where a scientist puts a sheet of plant material over a lamp and exposes the protagonist to strange unseen creatures of the world, crawling about like starfish etc. The protagonist is horrified and passes out. Then his friend finds him and together they destroy the plant-material-sheet, so nobody can see those show more horrors again. And the main character goes out into the street, and the people around him don’t look so evil anymore, and he walks off, to live happily ever after – presumably.

The editor of the anthology presented this as a great story where morality is upheld and racism is shown for what it is: an evil disease. Isn’t it wonderful that the main character turns away from the horrifying hidden knowledge? But the thing is: the fact that Lovecraft’s protagonists don’t turn away and don’t walk off unscathed is precisely what makes his stories compelling; feel-good horror with a nice little moral at the end is just a disappointment for the reader.

Is ‘Women: The Tedious Moralisers of Horror’ really the optimal anthology to release? show less

Disappointing to find that most women at the time were writing ghost stories as indifferently as most men, and often with no appreciable difference in tone or theme. The standout entries are by authors (Sinclair, Butts) who many aficionados have already read, while the best-known writers (Gilman, Nesbit, Wharton) are not at their best. The remaining obscurities make it clear why they're obscure. "The Haunted Saucepan" is about just that object, and as silly as it sounds; the Stevens story is notably awful.