SOURCE: Penzoldt, Peter. “The Pure Tale of Horror.” In The Supernatural in Fiction, pp. 146–90. New York: Humanities Press, 1965.

In the following excerpt, originally published in a 1952 edition, Penzoldt offers a psychological analysis of Lovecraft's horror tales.

It is not the highest, but only the pedant and the prig will deny that he enjoys being thrilled, and our superior attitude towards sensational fiction is adopted largely because the blatant and crude fail to produce this effect.

—Forrest Reid

If the short story of the supernatural is often considered as an ‘inferior’ literary genre, this is to a great extent due to the works of those authors to whom preternatural was synonymous with horror of the worst kind. To many writers the supernatural was merely a pretext for describing such things as they would never have dared to mention in terms of reality. To others the short story of the...