100 Years of Amazing Stories

In April 1926, H.P. Lovecraft returned from Brooklyn to his Providence home. In New York, he had been an outsider. Once in Rhode Island again, he was an insider, at least in his own life and his own home. Weird Tales published "The Outsider" in its issue of April 1926. Lovecraft could easily have read it on his train ride home. If he had, would he have seen any irony in his situation? After all, he had gone out into the world, just like his narrator, and now he was on his way home again. Except that he was happy.

I have written before about "The Outsider." I wrote then about Frankenstein's monster and Kaspar Hauser, two other outsiders who only wanted to be in. But they never could be. And now I think that Grendel could have been an outsider made bitter and murderous by his awareness of his situation. He was a march-stepper, a wanderer along borderlands, like Lovecraft. Could he have once seen himself in a mirror? Could that have driven him away to lurk in fen and fastness? Probably not, for Grendel was not a modern man.*

Lovecraft could have read another magazine on the way home that spring. That one was the first issue of Amazing Stories, published in New York City by Hugo Gernsback. Weird Tales is supposed to have been the first American magazine devoted entirely to fantasy fiction. I'm not sure that that's true. It would take a lot of reading through the first thirty issues of the magazine, published from March 1923 to March 1926, to find out whether it is so. But we can be sure that the first issue of Amazing Stories was full of fantasy and nothing else. It was the first fully science-fictional magazine in America. I wonder if Lovecraft read it at all. He must have. But how early in its history of publication?

Here are the contents of Amazing Stories #1, adapted from the Speculative Fiction Database:

• "A New Sort of Magazine," editorial by Hugo Gernsback
• "Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac," part one of a two-part serial by Jules Verne (1877)
• "The New Accelerator" by H. G. Wells (1901)
• "The Man from the Atom" by G. Peyton Wertenbaker (1923)
• "The Thing from -- 'Outside'" by George Allan England (1923)
• "The Man Who Saved the Earth" by Austin Hall (1919)
• "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)

All of these stories were reprints. Wells, Hall, and Poe also had stories in Weird Tales. Note that Hall's story is of "The Man Who . . ." type, while England's is of "The Thing . . ." type. England's story is also about "the outside," just as Lovecraft's story in Weird Tales that month was. I'm sure his was a different type of outside. The cover art and three interior illustrations of that inaugural issue were by Frank R. Paul. F.S. Hynd illustrated Poe's story.

Amazing Stories is still around, although it isn't currently in print but only on line. Unfortunately, it allows its contributors to use AI tools in the writing of their stories. I don't have to tell you that I hate AI in writing and art. Even so, I'll say: 

Happy 100th Anniversary to Amazing Stories!

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*There is another outsider who looks in on and raids the celebrations of men. He is the Grinch. Could his name and Grendel's have come from the same root? Most obviously: grin, from the Old English grennian, "to show the teeth (in pain or anger)," or the Old Norse grenja, "to howl."

Amazing Stories, April 1926, with cover art by Frank R. Paul. Those are skaters, I presume on one of the moons of Saturn. Have they arrived on sailing ships? Update (Apr. 2, 2026): Good old me, comment below, has pointed out that the illustration is for "Off on a Comet, or Hector Servadac" by Jules Verne. Thank you, Good old me.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales and the American Revolution

On July 4, 2026, the United States of America will reach its 250th anniversary. A century ago, in our sesquicentennial year of 1926, Weird Tales magazine was in its third and fourth years in print. I haven't found anything yet by which the publisher and editor acknowledged the sesquicentennial. I'm not sure that I will. I also haven't found and can't think of any weird tale set during the Revolutionary War or with the war as its backdrop. I admit that my title above is misleading. At least it's not clickbait.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the earliest American author to have appeared in Weird Tales. Born during the final year of the Revolutionary War, he died seventeen months before the Civil War commenced. His lifetime, then, stretched between two of our foundational wars. It's possible to think of American history as a fabric held up by the tentpoles of war. Irving's life might illustrate that idea. Another example, and a minor one to be sure: Weird Tales magazine was founded after the Great War had ended and possibly only because there had been a war. The great era of Weird Tales--if we can call it that--ended before the Second World War began, or at least no later than in the course of that war. Like so much American greatness, this one came in an interbellum period.

Weird Tales reprinted four of Irving's stories, the last being "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (Nov. 1928). When I said that I can't think of a weird tale that has the Revolution as its backdrop, that's not quite true. After all, the Headless Horseman is rumored to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier, while a stream in a haunted place in Irving's story flows by the tulip-tree where Major André was captured by three Americans in 1780. The American Revolution also figures in "Rip Van Winkle," which can also be called a fantasy or a weird tale. As for a weird tale of the Revolution written in later years, especially in the twentieth century, I can't think of a one.

The Civil War is closer to us in every way. Years ago I met a hog farmer in southeastern Indiana whose grandfather was a twelve-year-old boy when Morgan's Raiders came around and stole some horses from his father's barn. Only two generations separated that hog farmer from the war. Only one more separated me from him. On another farm not far away, a widow in her nineties told me that there were supposed to have been graves on a point of land above the forks of a ravine where escaped slaves had been buried. I looked where she asked me to look. Did I see, or did I only make myself see, several grave-sized areas of sunken soil on that point? Although I have an ancestor who served in the Revolutionary War--his name was William Hall--I have nothing comparable to tell about it. It really was so very long ago, closer to the English Renaissance and William Shakespeare's time than it is to our own.

I can think right away of a weird tale set during the Civil War. It's called "The Valley Was Still," and it was written by Manly Wade Wellman. Weird Tales published Wellman's story its issue of August 1939, the month before another war began. "The Valley Was Still" was adapted to film in an episode of The Twilight Zone. It was broadcast in November 1961, one hundred years and a few months after the war began. Ambrose Bierce wrote stories about the Civil War. So did Jack Matthews. Some of these are straight war stories. Others, such as Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," have certain weird elements or show the influence of weird in our lives. I recently read some of the late Mr. Matthews' stories in his collection Tales of the Ohio Land (1978). Like H.P. Lovecraft and Washington Irving, Jack Matthews had a well-developed sense of place. I have been to some of the places about which he wrote. The author Fitz-James O'Brien was killed in the Civil War. Both he and Bierce had stories reprinted in Weird Tales.

Men in Revolutionary times wore breeches and stockings, gorgets and ruffles, tricorn hats and even wigs. Although they had long rifles, most carried muskets--all were muzzleloaders. The men who fought the Civil War wore trousers and kepis and fired factory-made rifles, some of which were breechloaders, as well as the first machine guns. They went up in balloons, rode on railroad trains, and communicated by telegraph. We have photographs of them in camp and in the aftermath of their battles with each other. We have images of their fresh corpses. These have immediacy and tragedy that no engraving or drawing of the eighteenth century can match. Although there weren't any movie cameras just yet, watching The General--released on New Year's Eve 1926 and starring Buster Keaton--is like opening a window into the past, a really astonishing experience when you get down to it. As we watch, it's hard to believe that we are not in fact seeing film footage from 1862. When that movie was made, there were countless thousands still living who vividly remembered the war and its events. That was only one hundred years ago. There are people still living who were alive then.

I can propose an explanation as to a lack of weird fiction set during the Revolutionary War or with the war as its backdrop. It goes something like this: the American Revolution occurred during the Age of Reason and before the Romantic Era and the return of weird. Weird, or wyrd, faded as a word and a concept during the middle centuries of the second millennium, only to return during the Romantic Era. For example, the earliest use in verse of the noun weird that I have found is in Robert Burns' poem "Her Answer," from 1795. That was of course after the Revolutionary period had ended. Less significant, I think, but still worth considering is that Americans during the Revolution were less literate as a whole than in later eras (two of the three men who captured Major André could not read), and there wasn't much of a popular press and almost no fiction.

But that doesn't explain why later writers would not have written weird fiction about the Revolutionary War. Or if there is any, maybe I just haven't found it yet.

I should add that, although Gothic fiction got its start in the decade before the Revolutionary War, it may not have traveled very well to America. And although one of our earliest authors, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), wrote Gothic works, his were all published after the Revolutionary period, and, as far as I know, none has the Revolution as its backdrop.

In contrast to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War occurred after Romanticism had swept through western culture. The men and women of the 1860s would have been immersed in it, I think, even if it had by then decayed into a kind of sentimentalism. Weird was present nonetheless, and it was approaching a high period, if there was such a thing. If there was such a thing, maybe the high period of weird fiction ran from the 1870s or '80s until the 1930s or '40s (for a total of threescore and ten years?). And maybe world war brought that period to an end as well. Anyway, I don't sense any Romanticism or sentimentalism in the Revolutionary War. The American Revolution instead seems to have been a sober, serious, practical, and realistic matter, even if it was underlain by and fought for the highest ideals. Maybe that's why it worked so well and continues to do so now, 250 years later.

There is a recently released documentary series on the American Revolution available on pay TV. It was made by a man who gained fame--justly--for his previous series on the Civil War. Again, the Civil War is closer to us and more immediate. It would prove difficult, if not impossible, to treat the American Revolution with the same kind of effectiveness. It would be hard to evoke the same kinds of feelings in the viewer that that long-ago series on the Civil War did. But I also think that no one is really up to this task anymore. The minds of the documentary makers and too many of their experts have been taken over by small ideas and their thoughts misdirected by erroneous belief systems. And as the last episode of that series--specifically a quote: "No one is above the law"--demonstrates, their minds have also been taken over by a peculiar brand of derangement that does them no good at all and in fact causes them great harm. I hope they and the rest of the world will soon get over it, if only for their own sake.

I'll add one more thought, because I can't think of anywhere else it might go right now: one of the outgrowths of the American Revolution is our Bill of Rights. Among our rights is the right to speak freely. That right is enshrined in the First Amendment. Enshrined in the Second is a guarantee for all of the others. Non-Americans and anti-Americans harp on our keeping and bearing of arms. What they fail to understand is that we have guns because the only language that tyrants seem to understand is the sound of lead flying in their direction. Our nation began in violence because violence is very often necessary if human beings are to gain or keep their rights and their freedoms. In foreign nations of the past and today, the people are disarmed so that they might be made powerless before their governments. It's easy to take away the rights of people who can't fight back. That's happening apace in the world, including or most especially in the English-speaking world, which is where the modern concept of liberty was born. We in America don't want violence. We want peace. But we also want to be free. Too often, violence is forced upon us because there are those who will always seek to deprive us of our freedoms. That is as true here as anywhere. And so we have the fabric of our history held up, as I have said, by the tentpoles of war. The expression is that the United States of America is the Empire of Liberty. As such, we will continue and forever oppose the empires of tyranny. So I will say, exactly half a year early, Happy Birthday, America!

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales in 1926

Happy New Year!

Twenty-six doesn't have the ring of twenty-five. For being an even number, it's kind of odd. But in 2026, we will celebrate 250 years since we declared our independence from an Old World tyranny. Although Old World brands of tyranny still threaten us, they threaten more the common, ordinary people of Europe, many of whom are being made into subjects rather than being allowed to remain citizens. Those brands are certain to keep coming back. We will be certain to keep knocking them down. Sometimes this is a deadly activity, as it was in 1917-1918 and 1941-1945. Other times it's fun. For example, the U.S. government recently denied visas to five supreme European censors and scolds. They and their governments stamped their tiny feet in response. Let them stamp. And let's hope this remains fun. Let's hope that the fullest freedoms will soon march unimpeded down the avenues of Europe.

In 1926, America celebrated its sesquicentennial, including at the world's fair in Philadelphia. That doesn't seem to have turned out very well. Our bicentennial celebration in 1976 was much better and more memorable, I think. I remember it at least, including images of the tall ships in New York Harbor, many of which came from our friends in Europe. You can still find bicentennial books and collectibles at secondhand stores. I don't think I have ever seen a collectible or book about the American sesquicentennial.

In 1926, Weird Tales magazine turned three years old. It was the second full year of the magazine, as well as the second full year with Farnsworth Wright as editor. I doubt that the sesquicentennial was on the minds of the publisher, editor, staff, writers, and readers of "The Unique Magazine." At least I haven't found any evidence that it was.

Weird Tales is supposed to have been the first American magazine devoted exclusively to fantastic fiction. But was it really? Part of the problem with this idea is that most people don't really know what weird fiction is. They don't seem to know that weird fiction is not necessarily the same as fantasy or horror. Weird fiction is, I think, its own separate sub-genre. There need not be a fantastic or supernatural element in a work of weird fiction. There should be, however, a weird element. It's not weird if it doesn't have weird.

I haven't read every issue of Weird Tales in the period beginning in March 1923 and ending in March 1926. (The month of March is important for a reason. We'll get to that in a minute.) What I can say is that not every story in the issues that I have read is a tale of fantasy, pseudoscience, or supernatural horror. Without reading further, I can't say which issue, if any, was the very first devoted exclusively to fantasy during that three-year period. However . . .

In April 1926, a new magazine appeared on newsstands in America. Although it had its predecessors, it was "a new sort of magazine." That was in fact the title of the opening essay of Amazing Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback. There were only six stories in that inaugural issue. All were reprints, but all were fantastic. Until we know something different, Amazing Stories will have to remain as a candidate for the first American magazine devoted exclusively to fantastic fiction.

By the way, the first several issues of Amazing Stories were made up of all reprints. One of those was "The Malignant Entity" by Otis Adelbert Kline, originally in Weird Tales in May/June/July 1924.

Something else big happened in April 1926. That was the month in which H.P. Lovecraft returned to Providence after two years of marriage and life in New York City. The exact date was April 17, 1926. Later that year, in the summer in fact, Lovecraft wrote "The Call of Cthulhu," which was published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. And another something else big happened in regards to Lovecraft when Weird Tales published his story "The Outsider" in its issue of April 1926.

August Derleth made his debut in the pages of "The Unique Magazine" in May 1926. His story was "Bat's Belfry." He had just turned sixteen years old when it appeared. Perhaps he submitted it at the age of fifteen, thereby making of himself a prodigy. In July 1926, Bassett Morgan had her first story in Weird Tales. She was a popular but not a prolific author. She lived to see the American bicentennial. In August 1926, "The Woman of the Wood" by A. Merritt was published. It proved to be the most popular story in Weird Tales in the period 1924 to 1938. Edmond Hamilton had his first story in Weird Tales in that same August issue. His was entitled "The Monster-God of Mamurth." In September 1926, Everil Worrell made her debut with "The Bird of Space."

Harry Houdini died on October 31, 1926. He had contributed to Weird Tales as it struggled through the first half of 1924. Cleveland Moffett, who was in a later incarnation of Weird Tales, had preceded him in death, on October 14. Marietta Hawley, aka "Josiah Allen's Wife," died on March 1, 1926. Her poem "The Haunted Castle" was printed posthumously in Weird Tales.

Richard Matheson, Anne McCaffrey, Roger Corman, J.O. Jeppson, Frank M. Robinson, Jeffrey Hunter, and Poul Anderson were born in 1926. Only the late Mr. Matheson was in Weird Tales.

Also in 1926, The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs was published in book form, combining his Moon trilogy of "The Moon Maid" (1923), "The Moon Men" (1925), and "The Red Hawk" (1925). None of those stories was in Weird Tales, but knowing that didn't stop me from writing about them awhile back. The year 2026 is in the Moon trilogy: it's the year that Julian 5th and his crew land on the Moon. As it turns out, the middle book of the trilogy is about a future dystopia in which the Moon Men rule over the people of Earth. Julian 6th, who keeps as a piece of contraband an American flag, leads a revolt against the Moon Men. Unfortunately it fails. Nonetheless, "The Moon Men" is a pro-American and patriotic work. Larger than that, it is pro-human and pro-freedom. Burroughs hardly seems to have been capable of it, but he wrote a visionary work. Writing more than one hundred years ago, he looked ahead to our time, the current year, and in some ways our current situation. Flags and the flying of flags have become controversial, not only in the United States but also in Europe. People should be able to fly the American flag, the Pine Tree Flag, the Gadsden Flag, and, in the United Kingdom, the Union Jack without fear of disapproval and vilification by their own governments and scolds in the mainstream media. But that isn't always true today.

This year I will write about Weird Tales and its authors of 1926, but I also plan to write about other things, including meeting some requests, returning to some unfinished series from the past, and completing some entries that have lingered in draft form for months and years. I invite you to remain, to read and learn, if I have anything to teach you, and to leave comments in the space below. Welcome to the sixteenth calendar year of my blog.

A poster for the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, June 1 to December 1, 1926. Art by Dan Smith (1865-1934). Published by Elliot Brewer. The half-clad woman in this image would seem to be Liberty. Referred to in the caption as "The Voice of the Liberty Bell," she seems to be emerging from the bell as from a cornucopia, bearing the Stars and Stripes and shedding stars as she emerges like a new constellation. The clock in the bell tower of Independence Hall reads 5:12 or thereabouts. I like to think that I'm up on my knowledge of the American Revolution, but I can't think of any significance as to the time. I guess it had to read one time or another, but I'm always on the lookout for secret and hidden meanings in things. 

Citation: "The Sesquicentennial International Exposition, Philadelphia," Smith, Dan, 1926, Library Broadside Collection, 34463, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Tennessee Virtual Archive, https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/broadsides/id/36, accessed 2025-12-27.

Text and caption copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Spear and Fang

100 Years of Robert E. Howard in Weird Tales

No discussion of the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales would be complete without mentioning "Spear and Fang," the first story by Robert E. Howard published in "The Unique Magazine."

Howard was nineteen and a half years old when "Spear and Fang" was published. Because my books are in storage, I will have to rely on online sources of information on Howard and his career to write this. Those sources indicate that "Spear and Fang" was not Howard's first published story but suggest that it was his first professional sale. According to one source, which is always suspect, even on the most well-documented of facts, Howard submitted "Spear and Fang" to Weird Tales in 1924, when he was just eighteen. The new editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright, accepted it and informed Howard as much at Thanksgiving time in 1924. I wonder if that means that Howard submitted his story while Weird Tales was still in hiatus, from about June or July to November 1924. If so, that would make for the most serendipitous of developments for Howard, Wright, and Weird Tales, all three, for the then teen-aged author would prove to be one of the most popular and prolific of those who contributed to a magazine that had almost disappeared in 1924. For his efforts, Howard was paid $16, a nice sum for a beginning pulp author of the 1920s.

"Spear and Fang" is a caveman story, though not the first to appear in Weird Tales. That honor goes to R.T.M. Scott and his "Nimba the Cave Girl" from March 1923. It's not very long, five printed pages in all, but it tells a complete story, essentially of a love triangle, if you can call it that, or the eternal triangle, and the rescuing of a damsel in distress.

"Spear and Fang" is, on its surface, a conventional story, but I noticed some things in my reading of it that I think are worth writing about. First, Howard was well known in his later writings for his identification with barbarians and what some people would call savages. That isn't the case with "Spear and Fang," for the hero is a more advanced Cro-Magnon man, while the villain is a primitive, even bestial, Neanderthal man. It's clear that the Cro-Magnon man, called Ga-Nor, is more civilized. He is, after all, an artist. (More on that in a minute.) He is the man of the future. Both he and A-aea, the woman he rescues, are referred to as "mark[s] of progress." The Neanderthal man, on the other hand, is the man of the past. His days are numbered, even if he still has the power to terrify his enemies. It seems to me that at age eighteen Howard still believed in the idea of progress. This was, after all, a progressive era, even if that era was nearing its end and even if Calvin Coolidge, a conservative, was then president. We should remember, too, that, even if weird fiction is at its heart a conservative or anti-progressive genre, Weird Tales was co-founded by a man, J.C. Henneberger, who had worked for a progressive and prohibitionist newspaper. I would guess that many of the magazine's authors held progressive views, too, including unsavory ones such as eugenics.

Second, there is a racial aspect in "Spear and Fang," though not in the way people now talk about race. The idea expressed in Howard's story seems older and broader, maybe more like an old Anglo-Saxon or even biblical view, expressed pretty well in this sentence:

     Both the girl and the youth were perfect specimens of the great Cro-Magnon race which came from no man knows where and announced and enforced their supremacy over beast and beast-man.

Just as we shouldn't interpret "race" in our contemporary terms, we also shouldn't interpret "supremacy" in those terms. I wonder if Howard thought of the original Cro-Magnon men as being racially pure and that only afterwards was there some kind of degradation or descent: in our pre-civilized state, we were "perfect," or at least near perfection, and only later did decadence set in. I wonder if ideas like those were related in any way to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Maybe those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are at work here, too.

Third, Howard probably catches a lot of flak now for his depictions of women. I don't have anything to say about that. I'll just point out that, although A-aea needs rescuing, she is not a passive character. In fact, she risks disapproval and punishment for going after what she wants, which is to draw the attention of Ga-Nor, the man she loves.

Finally, Ga-Nor, like I said, is an artist, even if he is tall and well built. (That's not a knock at artists. I'm one after all.) I take him to be a stand-in for the author of the story. He seems oblivious to A-aea at first. He's more caught up in his creation of a cave painting. But when she needs rescuing, he's there, and he succeeds where his taller and stronger rival, the reckless, cruel, and proud Ka-nanu, fails. Call it a revenge of the nerds and the fantasy of creative, gentle, or less than adept men when it comes to winning the hearts of beautiful women. This is what so much pulp fiction is about.

Although "Spear and Fang" was written by a teen-aged author (before teenager was a word), it shows some unusual depth and complexity, I think, and is more than a mere tale. It shows that there were larger things behind Howard's writing, larger than just a desire to tell a story or to earn some income. Howard seems to have begun forming a worldview and a foundation for his later writings. And he was just seven years away from "Worms of the Earth" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1932), which can be called one of his masterpieces, if there is such a thing as a masterpiece in pulp fiction.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Great Gatsby

I have been writing about the Weird Tales of one hundred years ago. In February, I wrote about The New Yorker at one hundred and its pretty tenuous connections to "The Unique Magazine." The Daily Cartoonist noticed. D.D. Degg wrote an article called "Reports: The New Yorker at 100" for that website and closed his or her article with mention of my own. You can find "Reports: The New Yorker at 100" by clicking here. I did not find until today an article in The New Yorker about H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. That one is called "The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans." The author is Paul La Farge, and his article was published in The New Yorker on March 9, 2017.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was also published one hundred years ago. The date was April 10, 1925, and so the anniversary came last week. Although it arrived on the scene a century ago, The Great Gatsby is closer to us than it was to anything published one hundred years before it. Fitzgerald's short novel is still very modern. It could almost take place today. There are obsessions with money and status. Advertising, in the form of a billboard, figures pretty prominently. There is also a lot of driving in The Great Gatsby, and in fact the plot turns upon an automobile accident. There is also of course violence. This is after all an American novel and a novel of America. Near the end, the body of a murdered Gatsby is found in a swimming pool, like that of William Holden's character in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

I don't think of F. Scott Fitzgerald at all as an author of genre works, but there is an entry on him in The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. In 1991, Robert Hale, a British firm, published The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Its contents:

• Introduction by Peter Haining
• "Tarquin of Cheapside" (1921)
• "His Russet Witch" (originally "O Russet Witch!" 1922)
• "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1922)
• "The Dance" (1926)
• "A Short Trip Home" (1927)
• "Outside the Cabinet-Maker's" (originally "Outside the Cabinet-Makers" 1928)
• "The Fiend" (1935)

Early on, The Great Gatsby did not sell well. Its readership increased greatly after October 1945 when it was published as an Armed Services Editions. And now H.P. Lovecraft comes up again, for the publishers of Armed Services Editions also issued The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales in June 1945. That was the first of the series with the word weird in the title. The second was The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen, from December 1945. Other tellers of weird tales who were published include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, H.G. Wells, Edison Marshall, Robert W. Chambers, and Wilbur Daniel Steele. By the way, The Great Gatsby was adapted to television in 1955 as an episode of Robert Montgomery Presents, with Robert Montgomery, Phyllis Kirk, and Lee Bowman. That episode was directed by Alvin Sapinsley, who also directed the first television adaptation of a story by H.P. Lovecraft, "Pickman's Model," broadcast on December 1, 1971, as an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery.

Fitzgerald is supposed to have been influenced by Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather in the writing of his novel. There are similarities between The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia (1918), specifically in the first-person narration of a friend of the title character in observation and praise of him or her. My Ántonia is set in the American West, a place far from Europe and depicted as clean and pure. It is also a positive and loving story. The Great Gatsby, of course, is set in the East, a place about as close as you can get to Europe and still be in the United States. That place is shown as being corrupt and even decadent, and the story itself is tragic. But this is an American kind of corruption, I think, based as it is on money, status, and self-improvement. Curiously, the main characters in The Great Gatsby are from the Midwest and the Plains, Gatsby himself from North Dakota, just two states (or one and half) away from the Nebraska of My Ántonia. They remind me of the characters in Seinfeld. (It's fitting that that series ended with all of them sitting in a jail cell.) Gatsby more than any of them is perhaps admirable. As for further similarities between The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia, you can decide for yourself whether one or both have homoerotic undertones. 

Jay Gatsby is like a weird-fictional character in that he oversteps his bounds and pays the price for doing so. Some of those bounds are of himself. Others are of the society, culture, and nation in which he lives. Gatsby may be called great, but he isn't a hero. Maybe after the Great War (which also wasn't great) and all of its devastations, there were no more heroes--or at least very few--in mainstream fiction. I would have to think on that for a while. But there were still heroes in genre fiction, in Westerns, crime and detective stories, and soon-to-be science fiction. I feel certain that that was one of the attractions in reading genre fiction. I will write shortly on heroism, courage, and their opposites. Some of that will also involve cars and driving, which, like violence, seem to go with our America.

Happy Anniversary to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald!

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925), the original dust jacket illustration, executed in gouache, by Spanish artist Francis Cugat (1896-1981). This could easily be a cover of The New Yorker. It could almost work as a cover of Weird Tales, with the nudes in Daisy's eyes drawn by Margaret Brundage.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The 100th Anniversary in the San Diego Comic Con Book

As I was going through anniversaries and observances of anniversaries last year, I missed an observance. This one was for the 100th anniversary of Weird Tales, and it was published in the Comic Con International: San Diego 2023 Souvenir Book, which went along with that renowned comic book convention held from July 20 through July 23, 2023. The article is called "Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird," and it was written by the current editor of the magazine, Jonathan Maberry. Mr. Maberry's article is nine pages long and includes a lot of illustrations and photographs. If you read it, you will probably notice the lists. Lists after lists. And after the lists, there are more lists. My complaint from before--lists are not writing--still applies. A second complaint: the use of brandnames, this time in the names of undefined or ill-defined sub-sub-genres of fiction, little pools filled with little fish, including "cosmic horror" and "dark fantasy," as if the use of these brandnames is somehow incantatory. Then there is product placement, more or less an advertisement for the 100th anniversary book, also edited by Mr. Maberry. And then another complaint: a lack of editing. Where was the editor or proofreader of Mr. Maberry's article when he wrote:

Part of the fun of this is working with the writers to discover new ways of crafting tales that do not fit easily into any other magazine's "box" but that whisper to the dark heart of  .

Yes, there really is an unfinished sentence in a professionally written and printed publication. And of course I have already written about this insistence that there is something new in genre fiction, when really there is nothing new at all as far as I can tell, including in the 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, which has on its cover and in its lead story a thirty-five-year-old comic book character.

Next: I continue beating a dead horse.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

100 Years of R'lyeh!

I have overlooked the 100th anniversary of the real-life earthquake that brought the fictional (we hope) Cthulhu Island to the surface of the South Pacific Ocean. It happened this past weekend, February 28-March 1, 2025. The earthquake struck at 9:23:30 p.m. on February 28, 1925, off the coast of Maine. In the South Pacific, it was March 1, and at coordinates 47° 9′ South, 126° 43′ West, Cthulhu's undersea crypt, on the island known as R'lyeh, was thrust up from the ocean floor. If I have calculated correctly, it was a little before 1 o'clock in the morning local time that R'lyeh bubbled up from the depths.

The Cthulhu crisis culminated on March 23, 1925, when the crew of the Emma encountered--and were slaughtered by--the Great Green Fiend from another world. Second Mate Gustaf Johansen fled. Once on board ship again, he drove the Emma into Cthulhu, cleaving him like a sunfish. Johansen escaped, only to be murdered later on by some Cthulhu cultists. Johansen's act was one of desperation and survival. But maybe we can stretch things a little and say that he acted heroically, as did, we hope to say, other characters in "The Call of Cthulhu." That's more than can be said of weird-fictional characters of today, who are either unheroic or downright reprehensible in their actions. Anyway, Happy Anniversary, Earthquake and R'lyeh!

(By the way, singer and band member David Johansen died on February 28, 2025. We send condolences to his friends and family. It's sad, so sad, that so many people so prominent in the culture of the 1960s and '70s have died and that those times are so rapidly fading from memory.)

The location of R'lyeh (at the crosshairs), about halfway between New Zealand and Tierra del Fuego.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers & the Language of Cosmic Horror

Robert W. Chambers' name is the first to appear in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, published in 2023). This is in "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column but has become simply a place for the editor to write about whatever pleases him. If you have ever read Chambers' book The King in Yellow (1895), you might recognize aspects of cosmic horror in its pages. I believe it to be there anyway. Chambers' early take on cosmic horror has been an inspiration for other writers in this now popular sub-sub-genre of fiction. I'm not sure that his take exists in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, though. The authors in that issue seem to have gone down a different road, actually two parallel roads laid down a long time ago by Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort. There are two prevailing themes, too. One, from the former, has to do with peering into voids. The other, from the latter, has to do with our existence as mere property of higher and more advanced intelligences. Both are pessimistic or negative, even somewhat nihilistic. Both can be applied in the writing of cosmic horror stories.

If you have read Weird Tales #367, you might have noticed the appearance and reappearance of the words void and abyss. If this were Pee-Wee's Playhouse and those were the secret words, there would have been a lot of screaming. There must be, I think, lots of different aspects of cosmic horror, or different ways of writing about it. The authors in that issue seem to have limited themselves pretty badly, though. So were they required to apply certain narrow interpretations of that term by the editor, or were they free to look into their own interpretations and simply settled on more or less the same across the board? I don't know. Either way, I don't think things went very well. Writers of genre fiction are supposed to let their imaginations roam. The writers in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have kept theirs pent up.

The words void and abyss are not in The King in Yellow. There is no cosmos, cosmic, universe, galaxy, or galactic either. Chaos appears, but it's used in conventional ways (x2). There is mention of stars, but most of these are in the first half of the book, black stars being a recurring phrase (x4).

Following are two passages that come close to the language of cosmic horror but don't quite get there. From "The Street of the First Shell":

"And through the smoke pall the lightning of the cannon played, while from time to time a rift above showed a fathomless black vault set with stars."

From "The Yellow Sign":

With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie's soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I think what happened here is that Chambers wrote too early in the history of weird fiction or genre fiction and, much more broadly, too early in--or before--the modern era. Although there were lots of scientific discoveries regarding astronomy and physics in his time, Albert Einstein's postulations of special and general relativity were still in the future, as was Edwin Hubble's discovery, more or less, of a greater universe outside our own galaxy. (Hubble's discovery was reported in November 1924 when the first issue of the revived Weird Tales was on the newsstand. He presented it in person on January 1, 1925, or one hundred years ago last month. So 2024 or 2025, depending on how you look at it, is the centenary of our awareness of the universe.) Also still in the future were modern art, modern music, modern poetry and fiction, the terrible disasters of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and a proliferation of isms that grew out of and fed into these many developments. A popular writer of the late nineteenth century could have looked upon human existence from a cosmic perspective, but I'm not sure he could have seen very far, nor would he have had necessarily the background or experience to write what is, very often--too often--nihilistic fiction. Cosmic horror need not be nihilistic, but in the hands of too many of the authors in Weird Tales #367, that proved to be the case. We could have had something different, something with more imagination, insight, vigor. We could even have had a taste of Chambers-style cosmic horror and his fin-de-siècle ennui and decadence. But that wasn't to be, I guess, and I wonder why.

Next: More on Robert W. Chambers.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Tellers of Weird Tales in The New Yorker

The first issue of The New Yorker was dated February 21, 1925, one hundred years ago today. Unlike Weird Tales, The New Yorker has been published continuously since its inception. Also unlike Weird Tales, The New Yorker is a general interest magazine. It is and was a slick magazine, too, whereas Weird Tales was a pulp magazine for about as long as pulp magazines lasted. (Weird Tales switched to the digest format in 1953.) Even so, over the years, The New Yorker has published stories by authors of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Some of them seldom if ever touched the pulps. They include Shirley Jackson, John Collier, Margaret Atwood, and Joyce Carol Oates. Others were actual contributors to Weird Tales, including Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and cartoonist Gahan Wilson. The New Yorker has written on these pulp genres and their authors, including an article on Robert A. Heinlein in the issue of July 1, 1974. It even had a Science Fiction Issue dated June 4 & 11, 2012, which included a story by Ray Bradbury, who died on June 5, I guess at the time the magazine was available on the newsstand and in the library. There have been lots of flying saucers, aliens, monsters, ghosts, and witches on the cover of the magazine and of course macabre cartoons inside, most famously by Charles Addams. Anyway, there may have been other tellers of weird tales in The New Yorker, but I won't go searching for them. If anyone makes such a search and cares to share his or her results, I'll be here. Just drop me a line.

Happy 100th Anniversary to The New Yorker!

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Reactions to "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas

"Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas (Mark R. Harrington) was the cover story for the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales. The issue of January 1925 was the first in which readers had a chance to respond to that issue and its stories. Before printing their responses in the revived letters column, called "The Eyrie," the new editor, Farnsworth Wright, provided some answers to his question about what kind of stories Weird Tales should print. Should they be horror stories or something else? The readers would have their say.

Reader W.S. Charles of Pendleton, Oregon, wrote: "I herewith put in my oar against 'horror stories,' particularly that class that are somber and in the main vicious, beyond the realm of reason." By "beyond the realm of reason," I think he meant "unreasonably" or "extremely." Too bad W.S. Charles and people like him (or her) are not around today to make their demands. I think we would have better and more enjoyable stories, as well as a higher level of art and accomplishment in weird fiction, if they were. Instead we have writers indulging in their sickness for the sake of themselves, their sick friends, and their sick readers.

Farnsworth Wright took the measure of the readers in 1924-1925, responding:

Well, readers, we are going to keep the magazine weird, but NOT disgusting. The votes for the necrophilic tales were so few that we are satisfied you want us to keep the magazine clean. Stories of the [Edgar Allan] Poe type -- scary stories -- spooky stories -- mystic and occult fiction -- thrilling mysteries -- bizarre crime stories -- all these will find place in Weird Tales, but those of you who want tales of blood-drinking and cannibalism will have to make your opinion register a great deal more strongly than you have yet done before we let down the bars to this type of stories [sic]. We repeat here what we have said before: Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers, and we will be guided by your wishes.

That last part bears repeating (and condensing):

Weird Tales belongs to the readers.

Authors, editors, publishers, and critics of today would never allow that, though. Never. For to allow Weird Tales and weird fiction in general to belong to the readers would make of all of this a democratic instead of an elitist thing. They would have to give up control and open up their clique. And as we have seen in election after election, democracy is intolerable to self-anointed elites, for if the people are allowed their say, they will inevitably choose things the elites must hate.

* * *

Also in November 1924, Farnsworth Wright instituted a voting process among readers for their favorite stories in every issue. The first winner was "The Brain in the Jar" by Norman Elwood Hammerstrom (Hamerstrom). Second place went to "Teoquitla the Golden." In the issue of January 1925, Lieutenant Arthur J. Burks wrote to say: "Ramón de las Cuevas is a writing hombre." (Sometimes the accent mark went one way and sometimes the other.) I like that compliment. Having served in the Caribbean, Burks recognized the meaning behind the pseudonym, continuing: "Also keep 'Ramón of the Caves' busy--he knows his stuff! His description of the old beggar woman took me bodily back to the West Indies. In any case my vote for the best story goes to him." In the March 1925 issue, Cecil Fuller of Tulare, California, asked for a second story by Ramón de las Cuevas. Alas, this was not to be.

In its May issue of 1925, Weird Tales observed (obliquely) its second anniversary. Among the letters in "The Eyrie" was one from an anonymous correspondent in Moscow, Idaho, in which he criticized what he termed "impossibilities":

"Just one instance: Teoquitla the Golden was very clever and entertaining, but the permutation of sex described is a biological impossibility. Let me qualify that. Sex has apparently been changed experimentally in certain lower animals; varying degrees of change from female to male are known to take place in cattle (the freemartin phenomenon), and possibly may also occur in other mammals. But the important point is this: such changes can only take place during the embryonic stage of development. After that, they are impossible. Any biologist will tell you that. Of course, fiction of the weird sort is not intended to stick to scientific facts, although realism in any story will be enhanced if the scientific basis is properly regarded. Still, Teoquitla the Golden was clever."

What was true at the beginning of time was also true in 1924 and is still true today: sex in human beings cannot be changed from one to the other. (Yes, there are only two.) A man cannot be a woman and a woman cannot be a man. There are those of us who like to think of history as being a positive progression and people of the past as being primitive, while we are naturally more advanced. But at least in 1924, someone in small-town Idaho knew and wrote the truth. He could have been a grade school dropout, a factory worker, farmhand, or common laborer, and he would still have been smarter and more sensible than so many people of today, including politicians, pundits, commentators, physicians, surgeons, teachers, librarians, college professors and administrators, journalists, authors, artists, and people in entertainment, sports, and the media. The worst of them are vicious, hateful, violent, aggressive, destructive. They wish to carry out--and do--the kind of necrophilic and cannibalistic horrors that readers in 1924 objected to. Worse yet, they wish to do these things to children. And the best of them? Dupes--people too weak in will and in the mind to think for themselves or to stand up for the truth. They are people who have fallen for lies, believe lies, and tell lies, even if it means women and children are harmed in the process. And they're always so sure they're smarter and better than those of us who speak and act on the truth. They are always so sure they're morally and intellectually superior to us. Shame on them all. If there are forces in history, surely the most powerful of these is divine in its origins. This force is expressed directly through truth, fact, unalterable reality, and immutable law, and their most horrible ideas will surely fall before it.

* * *

One thing the anonymous letter-writer here might have missed by a little is that weird fiction need not be scientific, for weird fiction is the fiction of weird. Science fiction is the fiction of science. In reading weird fiction, we seek a departure from strict realism and into weird realms. The whole point in "Teoquitla the Golden" is that it's a story in which Weird has her way. A man who was a hater of a woman meets his weird in being transformed into and living as a woman.

In looking for a candidate writer of that letter in Weird Tales regarding Teoquitla and science, I have come upon Dr. Carl DeWitt Garby (1890 or 1892-1928), lifelong friend of then unpublished but soon-to-be renowned science fiction author E.E. "Doc" Smith (1890-1965). Smith and Garby were roommates at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Both graduated in 1914. Like Smith, Garby was a fan of science fiction. Garby's wife, Lee Hawkins Garby (1890-1957), was, too. She collaborated with Doc Smith on his famed serial, then novel, The Skylark of Space (1928). All three lived and worked in Washington, D.C. Poor Dr. Garby died while quite young, presumably in that city. I can't say that Dr. Garby was the author of that letter to "The Eyrie"--I don't know about the timeline exactly. Could he have been in Moscow in 1924? Or could his friend Doc Smith have been the writer? The world, I guess, will never know.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas

One hundred years ago this month, in November 1924, Weird Tales came back. It had been gone for three months by its cover date but closer to six or even seven in actuality. The last issue before the hiatus was the first and only quarterly issue of the magazine, dated May/June/July 1924. There was an overhaul of the magazine, the business behind the magazine, and some of its staff in that time. There was a new editor in November 1924, Farnsworth Wright, and a new cover artist, Andrew Brosnatch (1896-1965). Brosnatch's first cover illustration was for a story called "Teoquitla the Golden" by a pseudonymous author, Ramòn de las Cuevas.

Ramòn de las Cuevas was actually the archaeologist, anthropologist, and museum curator Mark R. Harrington (1882-1971). He is supposed to have taken his nom de plume from the name of a Spanish-American historian. I haven't found a historian by that name, but Harrington mentioned a historian called Las Casas in his story. He was Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566). I wonder if Harrington transmuted las Casas' name to arrive at his own pseudonym. In Spanish, las Casas means "the houses," and las Cuevas, "the caves." And so Ramòn de las Cuevas means "Ramòn of the Caves." Harrington's middle name, by the way, was Raymond.

Caves meant something to Harrington, I think. In his story, he wrote:

     Dr. Branson turned to his new friend, Lewis, who lolled in a deck-chair beside him. "I'll bet," he suggested, "the old Indians used to have great times up in those caves before Brother Columbus butted in!"

     "Yes," agreed his companion, "the Cronistas tell us that the Taino tribes held some of their most important ceremonies in caves."

"Teoquitla the Golden" was Harrington's only story in Weird Tales. I wonder if there was an original in the folk tales, mythologies, or histories--the European Cronistas--of Mesoamerican Indians. If so, he would have been the right person to have come across it.

Set in Mesoamerica, "Teoquitla the Golden" is about an American explorer named Robert Sanderson who discovers a place called Nahuatlan, located "in the Hidden Valley, the last stand of the Aztec nation." The discovery of a hidden or lost valley is a convention in genre fiction. You can call it a trope if you want. Otherwise, "Teoquitla the Golden" is a very unusual story. And I mean very unusual.

I'll cut to the chase: "Teoquitla the Golden" is about the transformation of a man into a woman. This isn't by any of the fake-scientific or pseudo-medical butchery employed today. The transformation is actually carried out with ancient ways and the use of potions--evidently plant-based--blown into the man's body through straws. (Is he a genetically modified organism?) The transformation is gradual. It is also complete. I should add that Sanderson did not like women before his transformation. His weird is that he would become something he once disliked. This idea makes me think of the movie Watermelon Man (1970) starring Godfrey Cambridge and directed by Mario Van Peebles.

I'm surprised that Weird Tales would have printed a story like this one in 1924, but then it was "The Unique Magazine." "Teoquitla the Golden"--the title refers to the man after he has been transformed into a woman--is an unusual and weird story, but it isn't told in a weird or sensationalistic way. The tone is actually pretty even, as you might expect from a man working in a science-based discipline. And the narrative is sympathetic to the man in his transformed state.

The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has an entry on what it calls "Transgender SF," SF indicating science fiction. Science fiction is of course supposed to be based in science--real science and not fake. Science is right there in the name of the genre after all. Transgenderism, though, is not scientific. There is no science in it. In fact it's antiscientific, as well as pseudoscientific. Its true nature is political. In fact, transgenderism is a political belief system that is totalitarian in all of its intensity, scope, and ambitions. If you doubt that, just speak those words and wait for the blowback from people who want you not only to shut up, but who also want to force you to accept, embrace, and internalize their belief system. If you transgress, you must grovel in apology. You must be humiliated into speaking lies as the truth. And if you hold to the truth, you must be silenced, shouted down, banned, canceled, ostracized, and even fined or imprisoned. Dissent simply cannot be tolerated. Once you have spoken the truth, it won't take long for them to lash out. They are likely to be exceedingly vicious in doing it. Don't falter, though. Stand up for yourself, and tell it like it is. In this, it's helpful to have knowledge of the totalitarian principle, possibly first articulated in genre fiction: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." This is how they think. You must agree with them. And if you won't on your own, you must be made to agree. This is what they have planned for you. So remember: to be forewarned is to be forearmed against their certain assaults.

As for the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it has obviously been ideologically captured, the evidence of that being, if nothing else, its use of the phrase "gender reassignment surgery," which is an atrocious euphemism for the mutilation and removal of breasts and genitalia: healthy and normally functioning tissues and organs, removed from healthy and normally functioning human bodies, including--and seemingly as an especial target--the bodies of children. And here I thought the first command of medicine is to do no harm.

I hesitated to write about "Teoquitla the Golden." I don't like to fuel people's delusions and ideological insanity. I also don't want to point the way to a work of art that will no doubt be used for propagandistic--i.e., anti-art--purposes. But this blog is about Weird Tales, its authors, artists, stories, and poems, and so I feel an obligation to do it. This is also an anniversary, the 100-year anniversary of what very well could have been the first sex-switch in the history of pulp fiction. And "Teoquitla the Golden" is actually a good and interesting story. But if you read it, you should set aside your twenty-first-century self and attempt to read it in the mindset of a person from one hundred years ago. Forget politics. Forget insanity. Remember art and literature and their purposes.

Weird Tales, November 1924. Cover story: "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. Considering the subject matter of the story, you could take Brosnatch's last name as an obscene pun. Try not to.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

175 Years Ago

It's October, the month that ends on Halloween Night and in which Edgar Allan Poe died. He died in a suitably mysterious, curious, and tragic way. That unhappy event occurred 175 years ago, at five o'clock in the morning on October 7, 1849. More precisely, it was 175 years and 17.5 days ago as I post this. The word or words for a 175th anniversary are ridiculous, so I won't use any of them here. And there's no reason to celebrate such a sad and somber event. But we can at least observe it.

I have been writing about Poe and anniversaries and Weird Tales. It's strange to think that fewer years separated the death of Poe from the beginnings of the magazine than separate us from those same beginnings. I'll note that on October 6, 2024, the day before the 175th anniversary, the Baltimore Ravens, the only sports team that I know of named for a literary work, won their game against the Cincinnati Bengals, 41 to 38 in OT--October-time.

We miss you, Edgar Allan Poe.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at 100

More than one hundred years ago, in May/June/July 1924, Weird Tales magazine had what it called its anniversary number, and if you had laid down your money--four whole bits--you could have had 192 pages of stories, essays, and little pieces of non-fiction to pore over for the next several months. And it had to last that long because the next issue didn't show up until November.

Throughout 2023, some of us waited for a centennial issue of "The Unique Magazine." And we waited . . . and waited . . .

And finally it arrived.

On October 16, 2023, I ordered two copies of Weird Tales #367. In the email message confirming my order, this issue was identified as having been dated May 2024. I don't think it was available in May. I'm pretty sure I placed my order as soon as it was available on the Weird Tales website. In any case, in Issue Number 367, published in 2023, Weird Tales magazine finally observed its own one-hundredth anniversary.

Weird Tales #367 is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. That term, cosmic horror, is evidently a synonym for Lovecraftian horror, named of course for H.P. Lovecraft. In publishing a cosmic horror issue, Weird Tales appears to have been returning to form. In 2012, Jeff VanderMeer had urged us to move past Lovecraft. That doesn't appear to have worked. We're still reading Lovecraft, and there are still lots of people reading and writing Lovecraftian fiction. I would hazard that the long-dead Lovecraft sold more books last year than did Mr. VanderMeer.

Weird Tales is also, like I said, an anniversary issue. On the front cover is a small design element that looks something like this:

1923 W 2023

100 Years of Weird

Anniversary-related, or at least history-related, content inside includes the following:

• "Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales Go Hand-in-Tentacle" by the editor, Jonathan Maberry. Mr. Maberry's essay is the whole of "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column.

• "When the Stars Are Right: The Weird Tales Origins of Cosmic Horror," an essay by Nicholas Diak.

• "Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror," an essay by F. Paul Wilson.

• A full-color illustration on the last interior page showing Cthulhu chasing a $100 bill stuck on a fishhook, à la the Nirvana album Nevermind. And maybe that's a nod, after all, to Jeff VanderMeer and his sentiments about Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction.

On the back cover is an announcement for an anniversary anthology of Weird Tales. I might cover that anthology later. For now I would like to write about Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue.

To be continued. . . 

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales in The Pulpster

Weird Tales published issue number 366, a sword-and-sorcery issue, in early 2023, but there was no mention in its pages of an anniversary. I found that odd. Did the publisher and editor not know that their magazine was turning 100 years old at about the time they were making their newest issue available? You would think they would, but I think it's very possible that they didn't. We should remember that the businesses behind the magazine have been extremely secretive for years. And we should realize that secrecy is a hallmark of dysfunction. Just be up front. Tell us the truth. We can handle it. We're adults.

I have found out during 2023-2024 that the business behind Weird Tales magazine is also more or less incompetent. We should never underestimate the power of incompetence in making a wreck of things. We see that every day now that we're a quarter of a way through the twenty-fist century. We might actually be living in a Golden Age of Incompetence. One of the bad things about living in a Golden Age of Incompetence is that we might not survive long enough to live in the Silver Age.

Anyway, there is no anniversary content in Weird Tales #366, issued in early 2023. (That issue is otherwise undated.) If there was any on its way, it would have to wait until the next issue was published, which would be--when exactly? We didn't know. So what happened instead? Well, Weird Tales was scooped by The Pulpster, the magazine of the pulp-fiction convention PulpFest, held every year in the Pittsburgh area, formerly in Columbus, Ohio.

Actually Weird Tales was scooped in this very space. After all, I wrote on January 5, 2023 (here), about the one-hundred-year anniversary of "The Unique Magazine." But that wasn't anything in print. Print means something far more significant than do a bunch of organized electrons, and so we have to give PulpFest and The Pulpster credit. If there was anything in print before The Pulpster #32, dated August 2023, I don't know what it was.

PulpFest is an annual pulp fiction/pulp magazine convention, usually held in about the middle of summer. I didn't go in 2023 and I don't have the dates marked on my calendar. I believe it was in about the first week of August as it has been for the past few years. Every year, PulpFest publishes a nicely made magazine called The Pulpster. I have a copy of that magazine from last year's PulpFest. It was a gift from my friend SP, who is an artist, illustrator, and fan of comic book art and popular illustration. Thank you, SP.

The editor of The Pulpster #32, August 2023, was William Lampkin. The assistant editor was Peter Chomko, and the publisher was Mike Chomko. There are five thematic sections included in issue number 32, plus some other content. The fourth section in the magazine is called "A Century of Weird Tales." Its contents:

• "A 'Weird Tales' Club Member's Claim to Fame: Hugh Hefner's Love of the Pulps Was Reflected in His Men's Magazines" by Tony Davis (pp. 42-43+), plus a sidebar called "What Kind of Man Reads 'Blood 'n' Thunder'," also by Tony Davis (p. 43).

• "Remembered for 'Weird Tales,' HPL: Frank Belknap Long Reflects on Writing Supernatural Horror and Science Fiction" by Darrell Schweitzer (first published in Nyctalops 11/12, Apr. 1976) (pp. 46-50).

(Boldface added.)

There are also mentions of Weird Tales and some of its authors elsewhere in the magazine, including in advertisements. The current Weird Tales placed a full-page, full-color advertisement on page 44. That ad includes part of the iconic Bat-Woman cover from November 1933. The copy reads:

Weird Tales

100 Years of Weird

1923 - 2023

A couple of pages before that is an advertisement for the sale of a complete run of Weird Tales. I might have met the man who was offering that collection for sale. That was a few years ago at PulpFest, when it was held in Columbus, Ohio. Anyway, the going price was $125,000. I don't know whether that collection sold or not. At an original average price of about 25 cents per issue, the total price for those magazines would have added up to about $70.

PulpFest is put on and attended by diehard fans. They know their stuff. This is more than what we can say, I think, for some people who are actually active in writing, editing, and publishing genre fiction. So, congratulations to PulpFest and The Pulpster for being first in print (as far as I know) to observe the centennial of Weird Tales, and for its continued success. Next year's event is scheduled for August 7-10, 2025, in the Pittsburgh area.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Ninety & Ninety-Five

Ann VanderMeer became editor of Weird Tales with its issue of November/December 2007.  She remained at that post until the Winter issue of 2012, collecting awards along the way. She announced her resignation on August 20, 2012, which would have been H.P. Lovecraft's 122nd birthday had he been treated for many years with large volumes of cool air. This was all part of a controversy that took place so long ago that its has probably been forgotten by everyone except for perhaps its most aggrieved parties.

Marvin Kaye took over after that. The first issue under his editorship came along in Fall 2012. This was the "Cthulhu Returns" issue. The theme would have gone against Jeff VanderMeer's desire to move past Lovecraft. For those who don't know, Jeff VanderMeer is the husband of Ann VanderMeer. On September 1, 2012, as the Weird Tales controversy proceeded, he posted on the Internet an essay entitled "Moving Past Lovecraft." You can read it on the website Weird Fiction Review, here. I have written before on Mr. VanderMeer's essay. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

The workings of Weird Tales during and after the controversy remained a mystery for most of us. For a long time there wasn't any content on the Weird Tales website. There were also long delays between issues. In 2012, there were only two issues published. In 2013 and 2014, there was only one issue per year. Each was a themed issue. The theme in Summer 2013 was fairy tales. In Spring 2014, it was the undead. At some point, Marvin Kaye had announced a sword-and-sorcery issue. Alas, that issue was not to appear until late 2022, by which time Jonathan Maberry had taken over as editor. Marvin Kaye died more than a year before that, on May 13, 2021. I think we can say that we still feel the loss.

Once again there was a break in the year-to-year record of publication of Weird Tales. The lone issue of 2014 was the last of a run that had begun in 1998. I'm not sure what the difficulty was. Again, we were not allowed to know what was going on behind the scenes. If the publisher and editor had asked me to do it, I would have put out an issue every year during those missing years of 2015 to 2018, even if it was basically just an ashcan edition. In my opinion, Weird Tales has gone on for so long and is so significant in our popular culture--at least in a subset of our popular culture--that it has become a kind of common property. I think the legal holders of that property have a responsibility to readers and fans. If they're not up to it, they should pass it on to someone who will take care. And while it's in their care, they should not abuse Weird Tales. I would say there has been some abuse in recent years.

Anyway, Weird Tales was not in print in 2018 when it could have observed its own ninety-fifth anniversary. However, it was in print five years before, in 2013, for its ninetieth.

The Summer 2013 issue of Weird Tales was Volume 67, Number 1, whole issue number 361. Again, the theme was fairy tales. The cover art is by Jeff Wong. Marvin Kaye was the editor. The front cover doesn't mention the anniversary but the back cover does. "Celebrating 90 Years of Weird!" it reads. And there are tentacles. There is dreck on the title page, which calls Margaret Brundage the "artistic godmother of goth fetishism." Whatever. You can read the same kind of dreck on the current Weird Tales website. All of it has been written by supposed professional writers and editors. I think some of them should go back to school.

In "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column, Marvin Kaye mentioned the ninetieth anniversary, but he resolved to publish new stories rather than reprint old ones. I think we have to give the late Mr. Kaye credit for an abundance of content in the fairy tales issue. There is even a gag cartoon by Marc Bilgrey. Was that the first in the pages of Weird Tales? I can't say. And then comes an essay, "Ninety Years of Weird Tales," written by Darrell Schweitzer. Mr. Schweitzer's essay is only two pages long but it covers a lot of ground. I'll quote just one sentence, which is in regards to the classic Weird Tales main title logo, designed, incidentally, by J. Allen St. John: "To ever discard it would be unthinkable folly." And yet that's what happened under the previous editors,  Stephen H. Segal and Ann VanderMeer, who replaced it with a logo that should be buried deep in the ground and never resurrected.

Immediately following Darrell Schweitzer's essay is an interview with J. David Spurlock, conducted by Lynne Jamneck on his co-authorship of The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage--Queen of Pulp Pin-Up Art (2013). I think recognition of Margaret Brundage is fitting. The ninetieth-anniversary issue was a good place for it. I think the subtitle of Mr. Spurlock's book is inaccurate, but nobody asked my opinion. Margaret Brundage created most of her covers in the 1930s. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the term pin-up in reference to pictures of women pinned on walls is from about 1940 at its earliest. Has anyone ever seen a contemporaneous photograph of a Brundage cover pinned to a wall? Probably not. Anyway, I think people put into their stuff whatever they think is likely to make it sell, thus the Cthulhu Returns issue (No. 360), the Undead Issue (No. 362), the Margaret Brundage bat-woman ripoff cover of No. 363, the Sword and Sorcery issue (No. 366), the Cosmic Horror issue (No. 367), and, as Yul Brynner would say, et cetera, et cetera.

And now we're finally to the 100th-anniversary of Weird Tales, finally observed in 2023.

Weird Tales, October 1933, cover art by Margaret Brundage. The real thing, accept no substitutes, although to be fair to the cover artist on Issue #363, she was probably instructed by the editor or art director to draw what people call "an homage." I know we're looking at some of Bat-Woman's other features here, but have you noticed how long her fingers are?

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley