With its unique blend of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, Weird Tales was the quintessential pulp magazine of the early 20th century. While classic American writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard established the magazine's reputation, Weird Tales also regularly published work from abroad. Its longstanding editor Farnsworth Wright took a keen interest in translation as a literary artform, as did frequent contributors such as Clark Ashton Smith. Night Fears gathers fourteen stories and four poems from the magazine's initial run, showcasing an eclectic mix of voices and genres, from lurid tales of revenge to brooding meditations on mortality, all congealing into a strange new form of literature, into something...weird.

Among the authors included here are Charles Baudelaire, Alexander Pushkin, Guy de Maupassant, Honore de Balzac, Leonid Andreyev, Alphonse Daudet, Fyodor Sologub, Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Hauff, Jean Richepin, Alexander Kielland, Pedro Antonio de Alarcon, Alphonse Daudet, and Clark Ashton Smith.