The existence of New Weird has always implied the existence of Weird, but given I’ve never explored genre fiction from the first two or three decades of last century, and what few books I had read I’d never thought of as “weird”… Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels, for example. HG Wells. Robert Howard. Even early science fiction magazines, such as Amazing or Astounding. Not really weird, I would have said. 

I’d heard of Francis Stevens, had even read a couple of stories by her, and knew it was a pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a hugely popular writer of science fiction and fantasy in the years after World War I. Again, not really weird.

Recently, Penguin published a short series of Weird Fiction books – an anthology, and novels by Bennet, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson and Robert W Chambers. A couple of months ago, they were on offer as ebooks, but I only bought the Bennett. I was, I admit, expecting something like the Francis Stevens stories I’d read years before, even though the book’s blurb made it sound more like HP Lovecraft…

If anything, Claimed! (1920, USA) reads like a tale from some horror anthology television series, The Curse of the Monkey’s Paw or something. A doctor is called to the house of the richest man in the town, even though the man is not his patient. But the doctor was available and lived close by. The rich old man has suffered some sort of shock, and is put to bed. He has in his possession a small box made of a  strange green stone. It has red writing in an unfamiliar alphabet on the top, but whenever anyone looks away the inscription transfers to the bottom of the box. Although clearly made to be opened, no one has succeeded in learning what’s inside.

The old man is afraid someone is after his box, someone not entirely natural. He persuades the doctor to move into his house and minister directly to – keep watch on – him. The doctor agrees, chiefly because he fancies the old man’s niece.

After a series of strange events – an illusory sea seeps into the old man’s bedroom, the town is flooded several times – they learn the box was found on an island formed during a volcanic eruption near the Azores. So the old man, doctor and niece charter a ship and head for the island. But the old man and niece are kidnapped by the crew of a mysterious clipper. The doctor gives chase in the steamer chartered by the old man…

Claimed! is pretty much Lovecraft without the eldritch horror. The prose is also less overwrought. Perhaps it drags out the mystery a little too long, and then wraps it up far too quickly, but it was entertaining enough and not at all the chore to read I was expecting. 

And yes, it probably was weird after all.