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The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, or to the drama of the everyday world of common man and society. But, like a malign and insidious beckoning of demon piping heard faintly from under unknown and forbidding eaves, there is an actual lure and charm to that unknown and that unfathomed which has its embodiment in the mind, as well as in the soul, of humanity. The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.