Raising Goosebumps for Fun and Profit

By suggesting much more than he reveals, T.E.D. Klein has proven himself a master at creating stories capable of creating lingering terrors in the minds of readers for generations. Time and again, in Dark Gods, Reassuring Tales, and The Ceremonies, he has demonstrated his ability to elicit some of the subtlest, yet most enduring shudders this side of Robert Aickman.

Thus when he expresses his opinion about the craft of writing weird fiction, Klein knows whereof he speaks. “The writing in a horror tale is crucial,” he writes. “It must be insidiously persuasive, skillfully orchestrating suspense, building up atmosphere by subtle accretion, one dab at a time.” Drawing on a variety of sources including the studies of aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, and religion, as well as theorists and practitioners of supernatural fiction ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” to his own years as editor of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, Klein weaves a compelling web of evidence to support his contention that the most enduring specimens of weird fiction evoke not the “rawhead and bloody bones” of mortal dissolution, but an emotion closer to Edmund Burke’s 18th-century exploration of the sublime, with its simultaneous apprehension of awe and beauty.

It is a view with which both Poe and Aickman, who characterized the ghost story as “akin to poetry,” would have sympathized. In some hands, such a discussion might seem dry and academic, but Klein wears his erudition lightly, and underscores this with a delightful pendant, “The 25 Most Familiar Horror Plots,” which playfully describes the redundant horrors lurking in the TZ slush pile during his editorship, to which Chiroptera Press adds a further seven witty and hitherto uncollected “Horror Plots.”