Weird Fiction to Consider

For a reader to understand much of the genre of Weird Fiction one must accept that as a genre it has few limits, few barriers and those who wrote within the Weird Fiction genre, also wrote in other genres, simultaneously.  It allowed fantasy and horror to be considered, at the same time, within the same work. Science fiction was able to be space fiction or space horror.  All genres could be considered, or rejected.

My four favorite writers of Weird Fiction are Lord Dunsany, Robert E Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.  The reason I liked their works is a matter of taste, of course, but the four were nothing like each other in their writing.  They also all wrote poetry as well as prose, so I appreciated them for that as well.
 

"That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken, and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must never venture within those realms again." H.P. Lovecraft

“Horror is the removal of masks.” Robert Bloch

“Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.”

Clark Ashton Smith

"But while our parting was mutually acceptable and even expedient, still it was painful. And I would like to think it hurt both of us, for I certainly felt it: a wrenching inside, like some small but improbably necessary organ was no longer in there, that it was missing, torn or fallen out. And at the time I'd thought that was the end of it; what was missing was gone forever..." Brian Lumley