On August 27, 2026, I wrote about weird fiction and regional fiction. You can find what I wrote by clicking here.
While I was away, I found a book called What's in a Novel, written by Helen E. Haines (1872-1961) of New York City, later of New Mexico and Southern California. What's in a Novel was published in 1942 by Columbia University Press. It was designed, I think, for librarians, but anyone interested in literature is bound to gain by perusing its pages. What's in a Novel is model of clarity and completeness. It's like a snapshot from more than eight decades ago: I read about novels that have probably long been forgotten but nonetheless sound very interesting and worth a look.
I have a copy from the fourth printing from 1960. I found it at a secondhand store in central Indiana. My copy was withdrawn from the library where I went to college the first time around. It must have been in the stacks while I was going to school there. That's a strange thing to think about. I don't recognize any of the names in the back of the book. These people, mostly nuns, checked out What's in a Novel long before I read from that library.
In Chapter II, Helen E. Haines wrote:
If we no longer keep the formal distinctions between the romance and the novel, it is because "novel" is the term now commonly accepted to denote all prose fiction except the short story.
and:
The romance once wove elaborate tapestries of chivalry and love and heroic combat; in its familiar meaning a romance is still a tale of love. It drew upon the supernatural, turned to fantasy and allegory, invested adventure and peril with glamor, was seeded with horror by the "Gothic tale," and enshrined both passion and sentimentality. Its transmigrations bring us the modern fiction of fantasy, allegory, symbolism, satire, and make-believe [. . .] and of exotic adventure [. . .]. (p. 17)
I think it important to hold onto the distinction between the romance and the novel. That distinction helps us keep our thoughts clear. It's important, too, to remember that what we call "romance"--the love story--is only a subset of the original and much broader category Romance. I was happy to find the phrase "Gothic tale" in the pages of this book.
In Chapter IV, Ms. Haines wrote:
So we approach the domain of regional fiction. [. . .] In the United States the regional has become one of the most extensive fields of modern fiction: a medium for the observation and depiction of natural scene or human habitat, in fauna, flora, topographical characteristics, folk backgrounds, customs, speech, influences and environment, tradition, and processes of growth, in all sections and many localities of the country.
She added:
There has been no such development elsewhere, in mass and variety, although regional novels exist in almost every part of the world. (p. 67)
A long and detailed discussion of regional fiction follows, including mention of a book called American Regionalism (1938), which lists "more than 2,000 regional novels published during the past two decades" (p. 73), in other words, from circa 1922 to 1942. Those years are inclusive of the first two decades (almost) of Weird Tales magazine. The implication here is that Weird Tales, from its first issue in March 1923 until the outset of World War II, was published during a time when American regional fiction was at its peak--if I am right that regionalism declined during and after the war years. I'll add that a teller of weird tales earned mention on that same page:
August Derleth paints a detailed canvas of his native Wisconsin in his sequence of Sac Prairie saga novels, which run, in varying perspective, through regional annals of nearly a century. [Boldface added.] (p.67)
The author closed her chapter with a list of one hundred American regional novels published since 1930. Included in that list is another teller of weird tales, Harry Harrison Kroll (1888-1967), originally of Indiana, later of Tennessee. She devoted later chapters to the Romance--fantasy, the Gothic tale, utopian fiction, and even science fiction--and stories of crime, mystery, and detection, including Edgar Allan Poe's three stories of ratiocination and his detective C. Auguste Dupin.
The last chapter is on reviewing books. In addition to being a writer, editor, librarian, and teacher, Helen E. Haines was a book reviewer. I found a review, dated August 1, 1948, of Strange Ports of Call, edited by August Derleth and published in 1948 by Pellegrini & Cudahy. Ms. Haines' byline is not specifically on this review, but it is on the one preceding it. I would like to think that she was indeed the reviewer, for this may be the only example of her putting H.P. Lovecraft's name into print, this for his authorship of "At the Mountains of Madness," which was included in Strange Ports of Call.
American literature, at least early on, is more nearly romantic than realistic or novelistic. Weird Tales magazine continued in the American Romantic tradition. And, again, its first two decades coincided with a period of Regionalism in our literature. There are, to be sure, non-regional stories in its pages, plus plenty of science fiction or nascent science fiction, a genre that doesn't easily fit into the category of Regionalism, if at all. But it helps to see Weird Tales in the context of American Romanticism and Regionalism.
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
