CONTEST RESULTS
The winner of last month's cash prize contest is William Sykora, 35-51 41st St., Long Island City, New York. Here is his answer to "Why do you read fantasy fiction?"
"Why do I read fantasy fiction? I often wonder. The occult, the fantastic, have always held me with supreme, almost unholy, fascination. I have found that by constant practice, an all-excluding, all-consuming concentration bonds stronger than the strongest steel to all dismally horrible tales of the supernatural. The earthly ties that hold me mentally and morally to a workaday existence, are hypnotically rent asunder by a mesmerism born of steely sharp concentration. Thus do I thrill—quake—and shudder with the delightful ecstasy of bizarre adventure through the awful expanse of the inconceivably terrible unknown universe, and I love it."
Because of lack of support, we will not present another cash prize contest, until enough readers ask for one. If we receive enough petitions, we will take great pleasure in featuring another in the near future.
SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
by H. P. Lovecraft
(Copyright, 1927 by W. Paul Cook)
1. Introduction
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition, the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since, of course, these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalism, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper of the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.