It’s a good thing this story from the New York Times Sunday Magazine (dated March 26, 1911) didn’t pan out, or where would the pulps be?
No Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch or countless other authors who appeared in Weird Tales or horror pulps.
The article — posted on Sunday Magazine, a website that posts 100-year-old articles from the Times’ magazine — speculates that “modern science” makes it impossible for spooky stories to scare anyone any more:
It is lucky for us that Poe, Hoffman, Andersen, and other chroniclers of the great unknown lived years ago. For mystery and romance have suffered greatly at the hands of modern science and inventions. Electricity is the worst offender in that respect, as it has killed more goblins than all the grandmothers ever created.
