Weird Tales March 1923

by Edwin Baird (Editor)

A facsimile reprint of the first issue of Weird Tales pulp magazine, from March 1923. Contains "Twenty-two Remarkable Short Stories" plus editorial content.

Genres: Pulp, Science Fiction, Horror, Short Stories, Mystery, Fantasy

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1923

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read many later issues of Weird Tales, the godfather of American fantastic fiction, but never any of the earliest ones, so I was happy to have the opportunity to read this impressive facsimile of the first issue. Pulp enthusiasts generally regard the stories in the early issues -- before Lovecraft, Howard, Seabury Quinn, and Clark Ashton Smith joined the authorial ranks -- as minor, even trivial and for the most part I can't argue with that assessment, based on this issue.

However, reading this magazine as history rather than as mediocre fiction is worthwhile. I was struck immediately by the advertisement in the first few pages for a sex advice book from Margaret Sanger, a daring bit of commerce that presages the oddly bohemian future of WT, a kind of cautious but resolute statement of outsider status. Other elements of 20s Modernism show up here and there. Two of the stories deal with men suffering from World War shock; two with a latter day post-Darwin naturalistic horror; and many treat rural America as a place primitive in nature and given to fearful otherness, at least to the urban eye. A couple are stunningly, offensively racist, even in the context of the times.

My favorite story in the issue is "The Basket," by a writer I do not know, Herbert J. Mangham, an understated story of alienation and the anonymity of modern life that feels distinctly European in tone.

The first year or so of Weird Tales can be read now in these editions and I intend to read at least the first half dozen. What's lacking in quality is more than made up for in insight into the period and to the birth of horror as a genre.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

A (excellent):

Ooze by Anthony M Rud
The Weaving Shadows by W H Holmes
The Unknown Beast by Howard Ellis Davis
The Sequel by Walter Scott Story

B (very good):

The Mystery of Black Jean by Julian Kilman
The Ghoul & the Corpse by G. A. Wells
The Closing Hand by Farnsworth Wright
The Basket by Herbert J Mangham
The Accusing Voice by Meredith Davis
The Young Man Who Wanted to Die by anonymous
The Scarlet Night by William Sanford
The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr Calgroni by Joseph Faus & James Bennett Wooding
The Dead Man's Tale by William E Hawkins
The Thing of a Thousand Shapes, part 1 by Otis Adelbert Kline

C (average):

The Chain by Hamilton Craigle
The Ape-Man by James B M Clark Jr
The Skull by Harold Ward
The Gallows by I W D Peters
The Return of Paul Slavsky by Capt George Warburton Lewis
Nimba, the Cave Girl by R T M Scott
The Place of Madness by Merlin Moore Taylor
Fear by David R Solomon
Hark! The Rattle! by Joel Townsley Rogers
The Grave by Orville R Emerson

D (poor):

The Ghost Guard by Bryan Irvine
The House of Death by F Georgia Stroup

[Forked Radish]

"The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson: ⭐️⭐️⭐️: The Mole Man cometh. Shades of Ukraine today, all of Eastern Europe, Taiwan, and Korea tomorrow.

[Werefox by moonlight: Half man, half beast, but all horror · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, about Weird Tales. If you're into old horror fiction like I am, you probably know the name. A long-running pulp magazine that launched the careers of most major American horror writers of the early 20th century, and highly influential on many that came later.

You wouldn't guess that from the stories in this first issue.

What we have here is mostly a collection of mediocre crime fiction, with a few mild horror stories mixed in. Among the more readable stories are The Basket, a story of a mysterious recluse who moves into a San Francisco boarding house, which, despite having very little in the way of substance, has an undefinable, eerie vibe; Ooze, which, as one can likely guess from the title, concerns a deadly ooze; The Weaving Shadows, a haunted house story; The Thing Of A Thousand Shapes, an intriguing first chapter of a serialized piece; The House Of Death, which probably has the best period atmosphere; Hark, The Rattle, an odd story of reincarnation; and The Young Man Who Wanted To Die, which, although the plot is perhaps overly familiar, features some odd, vaguely surrealistic imagery that makes it stand out from the morass of tedium that surrounds it. The other stories cover such hoary themes as a love triangle gone wrong leading to murder (at least two stories here follow this plot), a ghost returning to avenge its murder, a mad scientist transplanting people's brains into the bodies of gorillas, a guy going mad from spending a brief time in solitary confinement, revived cavemen on the rampage, a man mistreating a trained bear, a man trapped in an underground bunker, a fake haunting of the sort found on tv shows like Scooby-Doo, and a number of stories so thoroughly uninteresting that I've already forgotten them. It's hard to imagine, even at the time, that anyone would have found the majority of these stories interesting; after all, when this initially came out, people like M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood were writing stories that leave the stuff here looking downright archaic. Even as a historical curiosity, this is probably too dull to recommend to all but the most devoted completionists of the literature of the macabre (a category into which I unfortunately fall). I'm still going to try to read and review all the issues, though.