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The early short story ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924) is recognized as the best of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction prior to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, but this story is also non-cosmic and therefore (for some) not truly ‘Lovecraftian’. In conjunction with dense prose and seemingly throwaway references, this view has made ‘Rats’ arguably the most inadequately read of Lovecraft's major works. This article proposes that we read ‘Rats’, Lovecraft's first tale within an unofficial ‘witch cult’ trilogy, as a story of the path not taken in modern weird fiction. Using Henry James's ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) as a companion piece, I argue that the international weird forms a major component of Lovecraft's text. Far from portraying horrors merely personal in scope, Lovecraft uses the Delapore family and their geographical dislocations between two distinct nation-states, America and England, to signal what he sees as the historical rise and fall – or evolution and de-evolution – of culture itself.

Although Poul Anderson is best known for his prose, he dabbled in poetry all his life, and his historical interests led him to become a major—if unacknowledged— contributor to the twentieth-century alliterative revival. This revival, most often associated with British poets such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, attempted to adapt medieval Germanic alliterative meter into modern English. Yet Anderson, a firmly libertarian Enlightenment-style writer, imbued his alliterative poetry with a rationalistic spirit that implicitly accepted (with appropriate qualifications) a narrative of historical progress. This article analyzes the alliterative verse that Anderson wrote and uncovers how the demands of the pulp market shaped what poetry he could produce.

Stephen R. Donaldson is a major modern writer of speculative fiction for whom the issue of sexed violence, including rape, plays an important role. This article examines "Reave the Just," the keynote story in his award-winning collection Reave the Just and Other Tales, as a gateway into how Donaldson examines sexed violence in his long-form fiction. While the story reflects a strong feminist commitment to gender equality and individual agency, I argue that Donaldson's liberal individualist conception of the law, which retains wide contemporary cultural and juridical support, has also become problematized through recent radical and postmodern feminist discussions on victim blaming. After assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal position articulated by "Reave," I suggest that Donaldson's story helps revive a link between agency and victimization-first advanced by second wave feminists-that, by the time of the story's composition in the 1990s, had generally lost feminist support.