Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Fantastic Adventures, October 1942

I don't think J. Allen St. John's cover on this issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES is one of his best, but it's still pretty darned good and is intriguing enough to make me want to read the story it illustrates, so I guess it did its job. The whole issue is on-line here, along with lots of other issues of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. Will I ever get around to reading it? Who knows? But there's a good group of writers inside including Robert Bloch, Nelson S. Bond, Don Wilcox, Ross Rocklynne, Leroy Yerxa, Dwight V. Swain (writing as Clark South), James Norman, and Robert Moore Williams (writing as Russell Storm). The lead novel is by house-name E.K. Jarvis, so there's really no telling who actually wrote that one.  

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Magic Carpet Magazine, July 1933

This pulp also contains a Robert E. Howard story, his historical novelette "The Lion of Tiberias". But also behind that J. Allen St. John cover, you'll find a superb novella by H. Bedford-Jones, "Pearls From Macao" (which Tom Roberts reprinted as an early entry in his Black Dog Books line, many years ago, the edition I read and remember fondly), as well as stories by E. Hoffmann Price, Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, Warren Hastings Miller, and Geoffrey Vace, who was actually Hugh B. Cave's brother Geoffrey. This is just a spectacular issue of THE MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE, a great example of why the pulps were so wonderful, and if you want to read it for yourself, Adventure House has reprinted the whole thing. High recommended.

Classic Adventure/Horror Stories: The Fire of Asshurbanipal - Robert E. Howard

Now this is a yarn! One of my favorite Robert E. Howard stories, and one of my favorite WEIRD TALES covers, with art by the great J. Allen St. John. This story is considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, and rightly so, but for most of its length it's a classic adventure tale with one of Howard's two-fisted American adventurers in the Middle East, Steve Clarney, who, along with his Afghan sidekick Yar Ali, ventures into the desert to find a lost city where a fantastic, mysterious gem known as the Fire of Asshurbanipal rests in the skeletal hand of a long-dead emperor. Along the way they have to battle Bedouin bandits and an Arab outlaw and slave-trader.

Well, even if you've never read this story (and I'll bet most of you have, some multiple times like me), you can guess that Steve and Yar Ali will find what they're looking for, and more besides, and it's that more that ties this yarn in with Cthulhu and his outfit. If I have one quibble with the story, it's that our heroes act more like Lovecraft protagonists in the end, rather Howard protagonists, but I can accept that in exchange for all the great stuff along the way. I reread this in the Del Rey edition THE HORROR STORIES OF ROBERT E. HOWARD and thought it held up just fine.