The cover of this book published by Tor, is so typical of the 1970s-1980s novels, with its black background with a predominantly weird image “embossed” (that’s very important) in the cover stock. I have been reading one of his Ox Run Station books, The Grave (1981) and thinking about Joshi’s brave calling-out. While a few older writers such as William Hope Hodgson were able to sustain the pitch of horro for 80,000 words or more, Joshi (and Thomas Ligotti) complains modern writers did this by muddying the waters: (Joshi looks at these in The Weird Tale (1990) Writers like King were able to find a marketing vehicle for longer, more commercial products, like we had not seen since the three-decker novel. In centuries past, horror was predominately a short story or novella-length medium.
Most horror of that period was written in the novel form. He is actually looking at an interesting phenomenon that the 1970s gave us.
Joshi doesn’t single out King over the millions of imitators. But King was still very much alive in 2001, as he is today. If Joshi was living in 2050 perhaps, a time when King had written his four hundredth book and had passed onto Writers’ Valhalla, then Joshi might not be so brave. He even goes so far as to include the biggest bestseller of them all, Stephen King. He has the critical kahunas to state that the mega-bestsellers of the 1970s are not the pinnacle of weird fiction. Joshi in his The Modern Weird Tale (2001) is brave.
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