Countless hacks sought to capitalise on the craze for horror by churning out novels by the hundreds-with the result that the “boom” died from this surfeit of mediocrity. The horror “boom” of the 1970s and 1980s was itself largely a pop culture phenomenon, and few of the endless array of novels generated during this period-even by such notables as Stephen King, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, and others-have any hope of surviving much beyond our time. Cave, and so on ad infinitum), Dennis Wheatley, and others. Reynolds, the pulpsters of the 1920s and 1930s (Seabury Quinn, Hugh B. This tendency continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with such writers as Thomas Rymer ( Varney the Vampire, 1847), George W. Lewis, Mary Shelley, and Charles Robert Maturin. We can, if we like, trace the origin of “popular” weird fiction to the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a motley crew of hacks, wannabes, and imitators produced hundreds of utterly forgettable novels and tales that mimicked the genuine contributions of a few noteworthy writers, specifically Ann Radcliffe, M.
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