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Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror
Weird Tales began publishing in 1923 and formally folded up shop in 1954. Since then, however, it has been revived four times, proving the enormous popularity of a genre that encompasses science fiction, mystery, horror, and the occult. This anthology includes the best of the most frightening stories that have made the famous pulp magazine a household name for more than 70 years. Contributors include H.P. Lovecraft, Tanith Lee, Ray Bradbury, Nancy Springer, Robert Bloch, Mary E. Counselman, Steve Rasnic Tem, and others.
438 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
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112 people want to read
About the author
John Gregory Betancourt
397 books68 followersJohn Gregory Betancourt is a writer of science fiction, fantasy and mystery novels as well as short stories. He has worked as an assistant editor at Amazing Stories and editor of Horror: The Newsmagazine of the Horror Field, the revived Weird Tales magazine, the first issue of H. P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror (which he subsequently hired Marvin Kaye to edit), Cat Tales magazine (which he subsequently hired George H. Scithers to edit), and Adventure Tales magazine. He worked as a Senior Editor for Byron Preiss Visual Publications (1989-1996) and iBooks. He is the writer of four Star Trek novels and the new Chronicles of Amber prequel series, as well as a dozen original novels. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as Writer's Digest and The Washington Post.
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January 12, 2017
This is the seventh anthology that I have reviewed that has been drawn from the pages of "Weird Tales," one of the most famous pulp magazines in publishing history. Each of the previous collections had employed its own modus operandi in presenting its gathered stories. "Weird Tales" (1964) and "Worlds of Weird" (1965) had been slim paperbacks featuring previously uncollected stories. "The Best of Weird Tales: 1923" (1997) had spotlighted tales solely from "WT"'s very first year. "Weird Tales: A Selection In Facsimile" (1990) was a generous hardcover offering photocopied pages from the original magazine. "Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors" (1988) gave us one story for each year of the magazine's initial incarnation (1923 – '54), while "Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies" (1988), another mammoth hardcover, had not confined itself to those 279 classic issues of "The Unique Magazine" alone, but had included stories from its four later incarnations, as well. And then there was "Weird Vampire Tales" (1992), which limited itself to stories of all manner of blood- and lifesuckers, and even "Rivals of Weird Tales" (1990), which gave us stories from some other pulps of the time.
And now, "Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror" (1997), another generous hardcover, of 460 pages, whose M.O. is to give us four stories from each of the magazine's seven decades of existence (including its latter-day incarnations), for a total of 28 marvelous tales of horror, fantasy and sci-fi. Preceded by a knowledgeable introduction by editors John Betancourt and Robert Weinberg, the collection is a highly pleasing one, and practically every single one of the stories therein manages to impress. Many familiar authors are highlighted--authors whose initial fame came as a result of their appearance in the magazine; authors such as Lovecraft, Howard, Moore, Kuttner, Bradbury, Bloch, Quinn, Derleth, etc.--as well as some names that might be less familiar. Like those other anthologies mentioned up top, this one is most assuredly a must-have for all readers of the fantastic, the supernatural, the macabre and the outré. Personally, I loved it!
As for the stories themselves, the 1920s are represented by voodoo expert Henry S. Whitehead's grisly ghost story that transpires in a Mississippi hotel, "The Fireplace." This is followed by one of H.P. Lovecraft's most famous and oft-anthologized stories, "The Rats in the Walls," which tells of the prehistoric horrors to be found beneath the English abode known as Exham Priory. In "Bells of Oceana," former Marine Arthur J. Burks writes of a troopship, in the middle of the Pacific, that becomes the prey of a very murderous, Lorelei-type of creature. Finally, in 'The Eighth Green Man," British author G.G. Pendarves writes of the Sons of Enoch cult in the Connecticut countryside, and of the strange fate that befell two men who ventured into its clutches.
The 1930s was the so-called Golden Age for "Weird Tales"; its heyday as regards quality and the finding of fresh talents. This period is here represented by Clark Ashton Smith, for starters, an author widely known for his lushly written fantasies, but who here gives us a more science-fictiony-type of tale with "The Seed From the Sepulcher," and its hypnotic parasite plant in the upper Orinoco. Mary Elizabeth Counselman is up next, with her tale--"The Accursed Isle"--of seven men who are shipwrecked on a very small island, one of whom has gone bonkers and turned into a night killer. But which one? One of Henry Kuttner's most infamous pieces, "The Graveyard Rats," is up next. Kuttner's very first published work is a truly claustrophobic and gruesome story that deals with Masson, a cemetery caretaker and part-time ghoul, and his underground battle with a veritable army of rodents. The future Mrs. Kuttner, C.L. Moore, next gives us one of her more well-known stories starring Northwest Smith (who had also figured in one of "Weird Tales"’s most famous pieces, "Shambleau"). In "Lost Paradise," Smith and his longtime companion, Yarol the Venusian, learn just how Earth's moon became the wasteland it has been for untold millennia; another beautifully written story by this great author.
Sales for "Weird Tales" declined in the wartime years of the '40s, although the magazine continued to discover fresh new authors to maintain its high quality. This decade is represented here first by Fritz Leiber, whose tale, "The Hound," gives us a protagonist who is continually haunted by the modern-city supernatural being of the title. Next up is another story of modern-day urban paranoia, Ray Bradbury's "The Crowd," in which a man learns the hard way that those people who magically seem to appear at the site of auto accidents might have more on their minds than idle curiosity. August Derleth's "Pacific 421" is a straightforward ghost story mixed together with a homicide plot, centering around the spectral arrival of a wrecked locomotive, and concluding on a highly ironic note. And then there is Manly Wade Wellman and one of his many adventures starring John Thunstone (a supernatural investigator, of sorts). In this one, "The Dead Man's Hand," Thunstone goes to the assistance of a father and daughter who have run afoul of an ancient North American race, the Shonokins, a race that would figure in many later Thunstone tales.
As mentioned earlier, 1954 would be the final year for "Weird Tales"'s first incarnation, yet this curtailed decade is still represented by four wonderful selections. Utilizing gorgeous, dreamlike language, Frank Owen's "The Three Pools and the Painted Moon" tells the story of the Chinese porcelain maker Tang Ling, and his efforts to place himself into one of his own creations. Seabury Quinn was the author who appeared more than any other in "Weird Tales"; no fewer than 165 times, actually, with 93 of those involving the occult sleuth Jules de Grandin. Here, we have one of the very last de Grandin tales, "The Ring of Bastet," which sees the Frenchman giving aid to a young fiancée who has come under the influence of an ancient Egyptian artifact. Robert Bloch had long maintained that his short story "Lucy Comes to Stay," a tale of deep and troubling schizophrenia, was a formative influence on his later novel "Psycho," and a reading of this disturbing story here will surely show why. Finally, in "The Rhythm of the Rats," Eric Frank Russell, an author usually associated with science fiction, updates a German legend (I wouldn't dream of revealing which one) into modern times, and with haunting results.
The new "Weird Tales" of the 1970s was not above the utilization of an occasional reprint, and thus, to start off the section dealing with that decade, we have "Sea Curse" by Robert E. Howard, the Conan creator who suicided in 1936. In this wonderfully atmospheric story, a witch puts a curse on the two boisterous seamen who had murdered her niece, with both ghastly and ghostly results. The oft-reprinted story "The Dead Smile" is up next. Written by F. Marion Crawford (who had passed away in 1909, actually), this is a deliciously Gothic affair that transpires inside an old Irish estate, and one that features banshees, a sentient and headless corpse, and an ancient family secret. Morbid great fun! "Playboy" editor Ray Russell is featured next, in the story "Lethal Labels." Here, a young, hate-filled man uses those ubiquitous, self-sticking mailing labels to exact vengeance on his enemy, but with boomerang results. And next, we have another terrific reprint, this one by William Hope Hodgson, the wonderful British author who had died in WW1 action in 1918: "The Finding of the Graiken." Here, two men search for a lost ship in the weed-befouled Sargasso Sea and battle giant octopi after finding it; another great tale of life at sea, by a man who knew the milieu well.
The 1980s saw "The Magazine That Wouldn’t Die" revived no fewer than three times. From these reincarnations, this generous anthology gives us "The Dead Man," written in typically oddball fashion by Gene Wolfe, and telling of an Indian peasant who is killed by a crocodile...but whose spirit continues to witness subsequent events. Next up, Brian Lumley offers us a wondrously atmospheric story, "The Pit-Yakker" (you've got to love that title!). Set in a grimy colliery town in northeast England in the mid-'50s, this tale mixes romance, insanity, murder...and quicksand to winning effect. In Steve Rasnic Tem's "Save the Children!," a husband/ad exec who had earlier lost his own baby (in childbirth? Tem doesn't make this clear) feels an obsessive urge to help all the children in the world. Brief and undeveloped as this story is, it is the sole offering in this entire collection that just did not work for me. But things rebound rather quickly with Robert Sheckley's "Love Song From the Stars," in which a young archaeologist exploring a small island in the Aegean learns (the hard way) how inadvisable it can be to have sexual relations with the women of planet Andar. One of the more sci-fi-oriented tales in this anthology, this one builds to a memorable conclusion.
The "Weird Tales" incarnation started by the Terminus Publishing Company in the late '80s lasted well into the '90s, and from these issues have been drawn this volume's final four stories. In the truly haunting "Welcomeland," by British horror master Ramsey Campbell, a man returns to his old hometown, which has now been partially transformed into an amusement park, with nightmarish results. Next up, another British master, Tanith Lee, give us "The Lily Garden," in which a young student, in what seems like medieval times, trespasses into an alchemist's walled-in garden and falls in love with the strange young woman he finds there, leading to tragedy. And then there is Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "The Pulse of the Machine," in which a catlike shapeshifter, now in human form and attending a college in rural Idaho, hunts for a local serial killer along with his only friend, a young woman and fellow student named Anitra. Told from Terry the shapeshifter's point of view, this suspenseful story could easily have been the launching pad for a fresh, new series of interesting works. All of which leads us to this collection's final offering, Nancy Springer's "Turn, Turn, Turn," in which a Martha Stewart-like, neglected housewife, with a genuine gift for turning useless household junk into works of art, finds a new and decorative use for her recently deceased hubby. A story in equal parts humorous and morbid, to round out this terrific collection.
So there you have it: 28 assorted tales from one of the greatest of all pulp magazines. As I write these words in early 2017, the latest incarnation of "Weird Tales" is going very strong...along with its website and very active Facebook presence, I'm happy to report. Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if the magazine could survive to see its 100th anniversary in just six more years? To quote the Bard, "tis a consummation devoutly to be wished...."
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for fans of any of the authors mentioned above....)
And now, "Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror" (1997), another generous hardcover, of 460 pages, whose M.O. is to give us four stories from each of the magazine's seven decades of existence (including its latter-day incarnations), for a total of 28 marvelous tales of horror, fantasy and sci-fi. Preceded by a knowledgeable introduction by editors John Betancourt and Robert Weinberg, the collection is a highly pleasing one, and practically every single one of the stories therein manages to impress. Many familiar authors are highlighted--authors whose initial fame came as a result of their appearance in the magazine; authors such as Lovecraft, Howard, Moore, Kuttner, Bradbury, Bloch, Quinn, Derleth, etc.--as well as some names that might be less familiar. Like those other anthologies mentioned up top, this one is most assuredly a must-have for all readers of the fantastic, the supernatural, the macabre and the outré. Personally, I loved it!
As for the stories themselves, the 1920s are represented by voodoo expert Henry S. Whitehead's grisly ghost story that transpires in a Mississippi hotel, "The Fireplace." This is followed by one of H.P. Lovecraft's most famous and oft-anthologized stories, "The Rats in the Walls," which tells of the prehistoric horrors to be found beneath the English abode known as Exham Priory. In "Bells of Oceana," former Marine Arthur J. Burks writes of a troopship, in the middle of the Pacific, that becomes the prey of a very murderous, Lorelei-type of creature. Finally, in 'The Eighth Green Man," British author G.G. Pendarves writes of the Sons of Enoch cult in the Connecticut countryside, and of the strange fate that befell two men who ventured into its clutches.
The 1930s was the so-called Golden Age for "Weird Tales"; its heyday as regards quality and the finding of fresh talents. This period is here represented by Clark Ashton Smith, for starters, an author widely known for his lushly written fantasies, but who here gives us a more science-fictiony-type of tale with "The Seed From the Sepulcher," and its hypnotic parasite plant in the upper Orinoco. Mary Elizabeth Counselman is up next, with her tale--"The Accursed Isle"--of seven men who are shipwrecked on a very small island, one of whom has gone bonkers and turned into a night killer. But which one? One of Henry Kuttner's most infamous pieces, "The Graveyard Rats," is up next. Kuttner's very first published work is a truly claustrophobic and gruesome story that deals with Masson, a cemetery caretaker and part-time ghoul, and his underground battle with a veritable army of rodents. The future Mrs. Kuttner, C.L. Moore, next gives us one of her more well-known stories starring Northwest Smith (who had also figured in one of "Weird Tales"’s most famous pieces, "Shambleau"). In "Lost Paradise," Smith and his longtime companion, Yarol the Venusian, learn just how Earth's moon became the wasteland it has been for untold millennia; another beautifully written story by this great author.
Sales for "Weird Tales" declined in the wartime years of the '40s, although the magazine continued to discover fresh new authors to maintain its high quality. This decade is represented here first by Fritz Leiber, whose tale, "The Hound," gives us a protagonist who is continually haunted by the modern-city supernatural being of the title. Next up is another story of modern-day urban paranoia, Ray Bradbury's "The Crowd," in which a man learns the hard way that those people who magically seem to appear at the site of auto accidents might have more on their minds than idle curiosity. August Derleth's "Pacific 421" is a straightforward ghost story mixed together with a homicide plot, centering around the spectral arrival of a wrecked locomotive, and concluding on a highly ironic note. And then there is Manly Wade Wellman and one of his many adventures starring John Thunstone (a supernatural investigator, of sorts). In this one, "The Dead Man's Hand," Thunstone goes to the assistance of a father and daughter who have run afoul of an ancient North American race, the Shonokins, a race that would figure in many later Thunstone tales.
As mentioned earlier, 1954 would be the final year for "Weird Tales"'s first incarnation, yet this curtailed decade is still represented by four wonderful selections. Utilizing gorgeous, dreamlike language, Frank Owen's "The Three Pools and the Painted Moon" tells the story of the Chinese porcelain maker Tang Ling, and his efforts to place himself into one of his own creations. Seabury Quinn was the author who appeared more than any other in "Weird Tales"; no fewer than 165 times, actually, with 93 of those involving the occult sleuth Jules de Grandin. Here, we have one of the very last de Grandin tales, "The Ring of Bastet," which sees the Frenchman giving aid to a young fiancée who has come under the influence of an ancient Egyptian artifact. Robert Bloch had long maintained that his short story "Lucy Comes to Stay," a tale of deep and troubling schizophrenia, was a formative influence on his later novel "Psycho," and a reading of this disturbing story here will surely show why. Finally, in "The Rhythm of the Rats," Eric Frank Russell, an author usually associated with science fiction, updates a German legend (I wouldn't dream of revealing which one) into modern times, and with haunting results.
The new "Weird Tales" of the 1970s was not above the utilization of an occasional reprint, and thus, to start off the section dealing with that decade, we have "Sea Curse" by Robert E. Howard, the Conan creator who suicided in 1936. In this wonderfully atmospheric story, a witch puts a curse on the two boisterous seamen who had murdered her niece, with both ghastly and ghostly results. The oft-reprinted story "The Dead Smile" is up next. Written by F. Marion Crawford (who had passed away in 1909, actually), this is a deliciously Gothic affair that transpires inside an old Irish estate, and one that features banshees, a sentient and headless corpse, and an ancient family secret. Morbid great fun! "Playboy" editor Ray Russell is featured next, in the story "Lethal Labels." Here, a young, hate-filled man uses those ubiquitous, self-sticking mailing labels to exact vengeance on his enemy, but with boomerang results. And next, we have another terrific reprint, this one by William Hope Hodgson, the wonderful British author who had died in WW1 action in 1918: "The Finding of the Graiken." Here, two men search for a lost ship in the weed-befouled Sargasso Sea and battle giant octopi after finding it; another great tale of life at sea, by a man who knew the milieu well.
The 1980s saw "The Magazine That Wouldn’t Die" revived no fewer than three times. From these reincarnations, this generous anthology gives us "The Dead Man," written in typically oddball fashion by Gene Wolfe, and telling of an Indian peasant who is killed by a crocodile...but whose spirit continues to witness subsequent events. Next up, Brian Lumley offers us a wondrously atmospheric story, "The Pit-Yakker" (you've got to love that title!). Set in a grimy colliery town in northeast England in the mid-'50s, this tale mixes romance, insanity, murder...and quicksand to winning effect. In Steve Rasnic Tem's "Save the Children!," a husband/ad exec who had earlier lost his own baby (in childbirth? Tem doesn't make this clear) feels an obsessive urge to help all the children in the world. Brief and undeveloped as this story is, it is the sole offering in this entire collection that just did not work for me. But things rebound rather quickly with Robert Sheckley's "Love Song From the Stars," in which a young archaeologist exploring a small island in the Aegean learns (the hard way) how inadvisable it can be to have sexual relations with the women of planet Andar. One of the more sci-fi-oriented tales in this anthology, this one builds to a memorable conclusion.
The "Weird Tales" incarnation started by the Terminus Publishing Company in the late '80s lasted well into the '90s, and from these issues have been drawn this volume's final four stories. In the truly haunting "Welcomeland," by British horror master Ramsey Campbell, a man returns to his old hometown, which has now been partially transformed into an amusement park, with nightmarish results. Next up, another British master, Tanith Lee, give us "The Lily Garden," in which a young student, in what seems like medieval times, trespasses into an alchemist's walled-in garden and falls in love with the strange young woman he finds there, leading to tragedy. And then there is Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "The Pulse of the Machine," in which a catlike shapeshifter, now in human form and attending a college in rural Idaho, hunts for a local serial killer along with his only friend, a young woman and fellow student named Anitra. Told from Terry the shapeshifter's point of view, this suspenseful story could easily have been the launching pad for a fresh, new series of interesting works. All of which leads us to this collection's final offering, Nancy Springer's "Turn, Turn, Turn," in which a Martha Stewart-like, neglected housewife, with a genuine gift for turning useless household junk into works of art, finds a new and decorative use for her recently deceased hubby. A story in equal parts humorous and morbid, to round out this terrific collection.
So there you have it: 28 assorted tales from one of the greatest of all pulp magazines. As I write these words in early 2017, the latest incarnation of "Weird Tales" is going very strong...along with its website and very active Facebook presence, I'm happy to report. Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if the magazine could survive to see its 100th anniversary in just six more years? To quote the Bard, "tis a consummation devoutly to be wished...."
(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for fans of any of the authors mentioned above....)
September 28, 2016
Because I have numerous volumes of poetry and short stories, I decided to punctuate my A-to-Z fiction reading with a book of each before heading back to "A", and for my short story selection I chose this best-of Weird Tales, that has been staring at me balefully since I bought it years ago. It was one of the many attempts to reanimate the corpse of that illustrious magazine, but while well-written—very well written, indeed—it underscores the fact that the days of pulp are long over, and while the magazine may stumble onward like a corpse freshly pulled from its grave by an ink-stained necromancer, it will never be the unholy icon it once was.
H.P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" is probably the most iconic of the stories, his best and arguably the best in the book, and also a widely republished one—I probably have ten copies of it in one book or another—followed by Ray Bradbury's "The Crowd", which is another popular reprint. Nothing from any of the revivals after the magazine first died in the '50s is going to have the same effect, of course: TV probably killed the short story with its meteoric rise in the '50s. By the '70s you have splatter flicks and a replacement of the weird (in the sense used when the magazine was founded) with mere gore. By the late '90s, you have CGI, which replaces the imagination with a curiously sterile representation unbounded by physics but heavily bounded by wide commercial acceptance.
But that doesn't mean we can't still enjoy the stuff, and there's a nice selection here, from the sort of shaggy-dog-esque (like "Lethal Labels", about a guy who vests sticky labels with palpable hatred, or "Love Song from the Stars" which highlights the peril of thinking with that part of your body), to those with a more epic feel (like "Rats" and Fritz Leiber's "The Hound").
A couple of the stories seem to have aged poorly (although I hasten to point out, they're still quite well written): In particular, "The Accursed Isle" is an odd tale which is premised on the notion that one of seven men on a tiny desert island lapses into unconsciousness and becomes a murderer, entirely out of his own control and memory, but in a canny enough way to avoid detection. "The Ring of Bastet" feels dated, not just with its reliance on the social customs of the day but with its climax several pages before the end of the story which is both low key and followed by what seems to be unnecessary explanation. Sort of like the end of Psycho, where we get a long explanation of Norman Bates' behavior which is no longer necessary because we're all really familiar with the trope by now.
But, speaking of "Psycho", Robert Bloch has a story in here called "Lucy Comes To Stay" which is meant as a head fake but is pretty much apparent from page one. I'm going to assume Bloch is a victim of Hitchcock's success, and this story was a shocker at the time.
Probably the best thing about this collection, though, is the variety of stories. There are ghost stories, madmen stories, sci-fi, psychodrama and just "weird" tales which are hard to categorize. Given the rise of misanthropic dystopias (dystopic misanthropies?) which were so prevalent in sci-fi in the '60s and '70s, it's easy to see both how "Weird Tales" (with its concern for the fantastic) would seem quaint, and refreshing that the tales of the modern revivals are not afraid to embrace that. The late Tanith Lee's tale "The Lily Garden", from the '90s revival, is very evocative of "golden age" stuff, for example, while Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "The Pulse of the Machine" feels very modern but still recalls old-school wonder.
It's a good collection. Worth checking out.
H.P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" is probably the most iconic of the stories, his best and arguably the best in the book, and also a widely republished one—I probably have ten copies of it in one book or another—followed by Ray Bradbury's "The Crowd", which is another popular reprint. Nothing from any of the revivals after the magazine first died in the '50s is going to have the same effect, of course: TV probably killed the short story with its meteoric rise in the '50s. By the '70s you have splatter flicks and a replacement of the weird (in the sense used when the magazine was founded) with mere gore. By the late '90s, you have CGI, which replaces the imagination with a curiously sterile representation unbounded by physics but heavily bounded by wide commercial acceptance.
But that doesn't mean we can't still enjoy the stuff, and there's a nice selection here, from the sort of shaggy-dog-esque (like "Lethal Labels", about a guy who vests sticky labels with palpable hatred, or "Love Song from the Stars" which highlights the peril of thinking with that part of your body), to those with a more epic feel (like "Rats" and Fritz Leiber's "The Hound").
A couple of the stories seem to have aged poorly (although I hasten to point out, they're still quite well written): In particular, "The Accursed Isle" is an odd tale which is premised on the notion that one of seven men on a tiny desert island lapses into unconsciousness and becomes a murderer, entirely out of his own control and memory, but in a canny enough way to avoid detection. "The Ring of Bastet" feels dated, not just with its reliance on the social customs of the day but with its climax several pages before the end of the story which is both low key and followed by what seems to be unnecessary explanation. Sort of like the end of Psycho, where we get a long explanation of Norman Bates' behavior which is no longer necessary because we're all really familiar with the trope by now.
But, speaking of "Psycho", Robert Bloch has a story in here called "Lucy Comes To Stay" which is meant as a head fake but is pretty much apparent from page one. I'm going to assume Bloch is a victim of Hitchcock's success, and this story was a shocker at the time.
Probably the best thing about this collection, though, is the variety of stories. There are ghost stories, madmen stories, sci-fi, psychodrama and just "weird" tales which are hard to categorize. Given the rise of misanthropic dystopias (dystopic misanthropies?) which were so prevalent in sci-fi in the '60s and '70s, it's easy to see both how "Weird Tales" (with its concern for the fantastic) would seem quaint, and refreshing that the tales of the modern revivals are not afraid to embrace that. The late Tanith Lee's tale "The Lily Garden", from the '90s revival, is very evocative of "golden age" stuff, for example, while Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "The Pulse of the Machine" feels very modern but still recalls old-school wonder.
It's a good collection. Worth checking out.
Want to read
April 5, 2022PLACEHOLDER REVIEW:
Read G.G. Pendarves's "The Eighth Green Man" in which an adventurer and his headstrong pal (who doesn't yield to said adventurer's warnings of a presentiment of evil) run across a strange little inn in the countryside, run by a creepy gentleman - and overlooked by seven tall trees. The young idiot friend is goaded into agreeing to return to join a secret society - and things go pretty much as you'd expect in this pulp yarn. Not bad (I liked the contrast of the he-man adventurer suddenly being afraid in the quiet countryside) but not great (the title, and heavy leaning in the story, REALLY signposts the ending).
Read G.G. Pendarves's "The Eighth Green Man" in which an adventurer and his headstrong pal (who doesn't yield to said adventurer's warnings of a presentiment of evil) run across a strange little inn in the countryside, run by a creepy gentleman - and overlooked by seven tall trees. The young idiot friend is goaded into agreeing to return to join a secret society - and things go pretty much as you'd expect in this pulp yarn. Not bad (I liked the contrast of the he-man adventurer suddenly being afraid in the quiet countryside) but not great (the title, and heavy leaning in the story, REALLY signposts the ending).
March 13, 2020
There's no beating the old weird tales stories, many of which are available online for free these days. But it's always nice to read them in a real book. Always recommended. Buy this, it's not possible to regret it. Highly recommended.
May 28, 2025
This anthology, ambitiously subtitled “Seven Decades of Terror,” attempts to offer up a retrospective on the variety of writing served up by the various incarnations of the pulp that lent its name to an entire genre of fiction. And for the most part editors John Betancourt and Robert Weinberg do an admirable job of assembling a fair cross-section of the varied offerings from the 20s to the 90s. Some of the stories, particularly H.P. Lovecraft’s famous if somewhat offensive “Rats in the Walls” and later works by Ray Bradbury and Fritz Leiber, are excellent examples of the cutting-edge fiction that established Weird Tales as a breed apart. On the other hand, it also includes several entries more symptomatic of the worst aspects of their ages, ranging from the two-fisted tales of manly men versus other-worldly horrors common in the golden age of pulp fiction up to the too-poetic-by-far flights of fancy common in later decades. At least this melange of quality, camp and crud is an honest reflection of what the readers of the source magazines must have encountered.
May 13, 2013
Listened to "Love Song from the Stars".
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