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Weird Tales Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1923: Pulp Fiction Classics
This is the readers’ edition of the first issue of Weird Tales, the hugely influential Pulp Magazine that went on to define many ideas of modern fantasy and supernatural horror. It spawned the careers of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
This edition strips the original manuscript of ads and irrelevant news items, keeping only the stories and the notes from the original editor. It presents these stories in a way that is easier for modern readers on modern devices. PDF scans of the original magazine, as it would have been read in 1923, are available online.
This edition strips the original manuscript of ads and irrelevant news items, keeping only the stories and the notes from the original editor. It presents these stories in a way that is easier for modern readers on modern devices. PDF scans of the original magazine, as it would have been read in 1923, are available online.
325 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 20, 2020
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If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.
Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 11, 2021
“In the yard [she] was half engulfed in a squamous, rubbery something …”
Weird Tales became a legendary magazine during its original thirty-one years of exitance. All of the cornerstone authors of fantasy and horror appeared in its pages, often with their most famous stories.
Unfortunately, for the first few years the editor was Edwin Baird (1886-1954) and he hated horror fiction, and it shows, and after running the magazine into the ground, in 1924 he was fired.
Still, MythBank has now reprinted all of the fiction from the first issue. In non-facsimile form, minus the filler articles and the ads, and they have done so cheaply, so despite the reputation of the first few issues, I have finally got the chance to read the first issue myself.
●So, the keynote story of the first issue is The Dead Man’s Tale by Willard E. Hawkins (1887-1970) and this is a story of a man who is about to assassinate his romantic rival during WWI when an exploding shell ends his life. But, it doesn’t end his existence as his spirit continues, and the spirit decides to destroy his rival from the other side. A ghost, possession, and attempted murder still leaves us with a hateful character.
●Up next is the story this issue is most famous for. Ooze by prolific pulpster Anthony M. Rud (Anthony Melville Rud: 1893-1942). In the backwoods of Alabama something weird is happening and our lead character has come down to Alabama to find out what has happened to his relatives. In his investigations he finds out what has happened, and it will not be good. Not bad, for what is perhaps the first ever blob story,
●The Thing Of A Thousand Shapes by Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) is part one of a serial, and I never read a serial unless I have all of the parts. Maybe in the future.
●Things start going wrong with this issue with the story The Mystery Of Black Jean by Julian Kilman (Leroy Noble Kilman: 1878-1954) is about an uncouth backwoodsman, his drunkenness, his abusiveness towards his animals, and his eventual murder. An unremarkable backwoods crime story with no fantastic content.
●The Grave by Orville R. Emerson is a war story in which a soldier in WWI gets buried in a bunker during a shelling and his non-fantastic story is told through his diary.
●Hark! The Rattle! by the prolific Joel Townsley Rogers (1896-1984) is another crime story in which a woman gets killed and the search for her killer. Notable only because the main characters are both black and not criminals.
●The Ghost Guard by Bryan Irvine is a decent ghostly revenge story set in a prison, as a no-nonsense guard is murdered, and then comes back for revenge on his killer.
●The Ghoul And The Corpse By G. A. Wells takes place in Alaska, and MacNeal has missed his ride back to civilization when trapper Chris Banner wanders into his camp with a tale to tell. While prospecting, Banner uncovers a primitive man frozen in ice, then Banner makes the mistake of thawing the man-creature out. Oops!
●Fear by David R. Solomon is a short-short non-fantastic adventure story about a man who has a phobia of snakes and gets bitten by a moccasin and almost dies. Then his daughter plays around snakes with predictable results.
●The Chain by Hamilton Craigie (Henry Hamilton Edmund Craigie: 1880-1956) is another forgettable non-fantastic crime story dealing with a man trying to retrieve some documents while playing cat-and-mouse with a criminal who also wants them.
●The Place Of Madness by Merlin Moore Taylor is another prison story. A man wants to know what it is like to be in solitary for two hours. Filled with non-fantastic hallucinations.
●The Closing Hand by future Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) is a moody crime story about a supposedly haunted house. A neat short-short no matter where published and even if had no fantastic content.
●The Unknown Beast by Howard Ellis Davis (1883-1951) is a story ripped from the pages of Weird KKK Stories dealing with a creature in the bayous that is running amok and killing people in a particularly bloody manner. The disgusting ending is particularly racist. One of the worst stories that I’ve ever read.
●The Basket by Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967) is a character sketch about a loner who moves into Mrs. Buhler’s rooming house, and that’s it as far as the story goes. Yeah, really.
●The Accusing Story by Meredith Davis is another crime story. Is the lead character being haunted by the ghost of a man he was responsible for sending to the death house, or is the haunting in his mind? Or is it something else?
●The Sequel by Walter Scott Story (1879-1955) is just a ghodawful sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask Of Amontillado, as Fortunato escapes from his trap and then runs off with Montressor’s wife and lives happily ever after.
●The Weaving Shadows is a good haunted house story by W. H. Holmes as an investigator tries to stop a pair of ghosts from sucking the life out of a mother and daughter.
●Nimba, The Jungle Girl by the creator of The Phantom Detective, writer of The Spider, and ex-soldier R. T. M. Scott (Reginald Thomas Maitland Scott, Sr.: 1882-1966) and it could have been a contender. This is a short about how the independent Nimba has to kill the tribal bully and then choose her mate. Nimba could have been a feminist icon, but the story is by the numbers, and ends up being very much a piece of filler.
●The Young Man Who Wanted To Die by Anonymous is one of the issue’s better stories, and it is about a man who has been jilted and then tries to kill himself just to see what’s on the other side. I don’t know who wrote this surreal story, but good job ma’am/sir. Nice twist ending.
●The Scarlet Night by William Sandford is another lame crime story in which a man is caught between his wife and her lover. **Sigh** Let’s just move on shall we?
●The Extraordinary Experiment Of Dr. Calgroni by Joseph Faus & James Bennett Wooding is a mad scientist story in which a mad doctor ends up transferring an apes brain into the village idiot’s body with predictable results. Bad even by the poverty row standards of these mad scientist ape stories.
●The Return Of Paul Slavsky by Capt. George Warburton Lewis (1878-1963) is another crime story. This time dealing with terrorists. OK, but not a weird tale.
●The House Of Death by F. Georgia Stroop is a non-fantastic western story that deals with three gossiping women who are cleaning and preparing a house for the funeral of baby that might, or might not, have been killed by its mother.
●The Gallows by Harold Ward (1879-1850) is another crime story about a man who has killed his wife’s lover and wants to die for it.
●The Skull by Harold Ward is a jungle crime story that would have been ok, I guess, in another pulp, but it’s racism makes it hardly worth the effort to read. Well over a decade later Ward would write the Dr. Death novels.
●The Ape-Man by James B. M. Clark, Jr. deals with hypnotism as a man performs mesmeric experiments on an ape to try to get the ape to murder a man.
This is a dreadful issue of this magazine, Baird clearly stole his inventory from other pulps, and he just didn’t want to be here and do his job.
While this pulp was hard, at times, to get through, not just because some of the stories were mediocre, but, because this ebook was a masterclass in how to create typos. OMG! The typos.
However, it was for the stories that I got this, and the stories that worked made the work to read this issue worth the slog were by Rud, Irvine, Wells, Wright, Holmes, Anonymous, and Stroup. However, if you want to read this pulp looking to enjoy early pulp horror stories, you’re in for a terrible disappointment, as only ten out of twenty-six stories, about thirty-eight percent, have some fantastic elements to them. The rest are just various forms of crime fictions, and these should have been published in some crime pulp. All-in-all, I’m glad I read this issue, but it’s for pulp historians only
Weird Tales became a legendary magazine during its original thirty-one years of exitance. All of the cornerstone authors of fantasy and horror appeared in its pages, often with their most famous stories.
Unfortunately, for the first few years the editor was Edwin Baird (1886-1954) and he hated horror fiction, and it shows, and after running the magazine into the ground, in 1924 he was fired.
Still, MythBank has now reprinted all of the fiction from the first issue. In non-facsimile form, minus the filler articles and the ads, and they have done so cheaply, so despite the reputation of the first few issues, I have finally got the chance to read the first issue myself.
●So, the keynote story of the first issue is The Dead Man’s Tale by Willard E. Hawkins (1887-1970) and this is a story of a man who is about to assassinate his romantic rival during WWI when an exploding shell ends his life. But, it doesn’t end his existence as his spirit continues, and the spirit decides to destroy his rival from the other side. A ghost, possession, and attempted murder still leaves us with a hateful character.
●Up next is the story this issue is most famous for. Ooze by prolific pulpster Anthony M. Rud (Anthony Melville Rud: 1893-1942). In the backwoods of Alabama something weird is happening and our lead character has come down to Alabama to find out what has happened to his relatives. In his investigations he finds out what has happened, and it will not be good. Not bad, for what is perhaps the first ever blob story,
●The Thing Of A Thousand Shapes by Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) is part one of a serial, and I never read a serial unless I have all of the parts. Maybe in the future.
●Things start going wrong with this issue with the story The Mystery Of Black Jean by Julian Kilman (Leroy Noble Kilman: 1878-1954) is about an uncouth backwoodsman, his drunkenness, his abusiveness towards his animals, and his eventual murder. An unremarkable backwoods crime story with no fantastic content.
●The Grave by Orville R. Emerson is a war story in which a soldier in WWI gets buried in a bunker during a shelling and his non-fantastic story is told through his diary.
●Hark! The Rattle! by the prolific Joel Townsley Rogers (1896-1984) is another crime story in which a woman gets killed and the search for her killer. Notable only because the main characters are both black and not criminals.
●The Ghost Guard by Bryan Irvine is a decent ghostly revenge story set in a prison, as a no-nonsense guard is murdered, and then comes back for revenge on his killer.
●The Ghoul And The Corpse By G. A. Wells takes place in Alaska, and MacNeal has missed his ride back to civilization when trapper Chris Banner wanders into his camp with a tale to tell. While prospecting, Banner uncovers a primitive man frozen in ice, then Banner makes the mistake of thawing the man-creature out. Oops!
●Fear by David R. Solomon is a short-short non-fantastic adventure story about a man who has a phobia of snakes and gets bitten by a moccasin and almost dies. Then his daughter plays around snakes with predictable results.
●The Chain by Hamilton Craigie (Henry Hamilton Edmund Craigie: 1880-1956) is another forgettable non-fantastic crime story dealing with a man trying to retrieve some documents while playing cat-and-mouse with a criminal who also wants them.
●The Place Of Madness by Merlin Moore Taylor is another prison story. A man wants to know what it is like to be in solitary for two hours. Filled with non-fantastic hallucinations.
●The Closing Hand by future Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) is a moody crime story about a supposedly haunted house. A neat short-short no matter where published and even if had no fantastic content.
●The Unknown Beast by Howard Ellis Davis (1883-1951) is a story ripped from the pages of Weird KKK Stories dealing with a creature in the bayous that is running amok and killing people in a particularly bloody manner. The disgusting ending is particularly racist. One of the worst stories that I’ve ever read.
●The Basket by Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967) is a character sketch about a loner who moves into Mrs. Buhler’s rooming house, and that’s it as far as the story goes. Yeah, really.
●The Accusing Story by Meredith Davis is another crime story. Is the lead character being haunted by the ghost of a man he was responsible for sending to the death house, or is the haunting in his mind? Or is it something else?
●The Sequel by Walter Scott Story (1879-1955) is just a ghodawful sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask Of Amontillado, as Fortunato escapes from his trap and then runs off with Montressor’s wife and lives happily ever after.
●The Weaving Shadows is a good haunted house story by W. H. Holmes as an investigator tries to stop a pair of ghosts from sucking the life out of a mother and daughter.
●Nimba, The Jungle Girl by the creator of The Phantom Detective, writer of The Spider, and ex-soldier R. T. M. Scott (Reginald Thomas Maitland Scott, Sr.: 1882-1966) and it could have been a contender. This is a short about how the independent Nimba has to kill the tribal bully and then choose her mate. Nimba could have been a feminist icon, but the story is by the numbers, and ends up being very much a piece of filler.
●The Young Man Who Wanted To Die by Anonymous is one of the issue’s better stories, and it is about a man who has been jilted and then tries to kill himself just to see what’s on the other side. I don’t know who wrote this surreal story, but good job ma’am/sir. Nice twist ending.
●The Scarlet Night by William Sandford is another lame crime story in which a man is caught between his wife and her lover. **Sigh** Let’s just move on shall we?
●The Extraordinary Experiment Of Dr. Calgroni by Joseph Faus & James Bennett Wooding is a mad scientist story in which a mad doctor ends up transferring an apes brain into the village idiot’s body with predictable results. Bad even by the poverty row standards of these mad scientist ape stories.
●The Return Of Paul Slavsky by Capt. George Warburton Lewis (1878-1963) is another crime story. This time dealing with terrorists. OK, but not a weird tale.
●The House Of Death by F. Georgia Stroop is a non-fantastic western story that deals with three gossiping women who are cleaning and preparing a house for the funeral of baby that might, or might not, have been killed by its mother.
●The Gallows by Harold Ward (1879-1850) is another crime story about a man who has killed his wife’s lover and wants to die for it.
●The Skull by Harold Ward is a jungle crime story that would have been ok, I guess, in another pulp, but it’s racism makes it hardly worth the effort to read. Well over a decade later Ward would write the Dr. Death novels.
●The Ape-Man by James B. M. Clark, Jr. deals with hypnotism as a man performs mesmeric experiments on an ape to try to get the ape to murder a man.
This is a dreadful issue of this magazine, Baird clearly stole his inventory from other pulps, and he just didn’t want to be here and do his job.
While this pulp was hard, at times, to get through, not just because some of the stories were mediocre, but, because this ebook was a masterclass in how to create typos. OMG! The typos.
However, it was for the stories that I got this, and the stories that worked made the work to read this issue worth the slog were by Rud, Irvine, Wells, Wright, Holmes, Anonymous, and Stroup. However, if you want to read this pulp looking to enjoy early pulp horror stories, you’re in for a terrible disappointment, as only ten out of twenty-six stories, about thirty-eight percent, have some fantastic elements to them. The rest are just various forms of crime fictions, and these should have been published in some crime pulp. All-in-all, I’m glad I read this issue, but it’s for pulp historians only
October 20, 2023
Having now read all of Lovecraft's stories, I was curious to learn more about the market where they found a home, so I decided to check out the very first issue of Weird Tales.
“The Dead Man’s Tale” by Willard E Hawkins. 4 stars. A great story to start things off with, as a soldier dies in a battlefield, and he finds himself lingering on as a ghost. He sticks with his wounded and mourning best friend, loathed as a simple minded lackey, who now returns home and begins a relationship with the dead man's widow, leading the ghost to hatch a plot to take control over the man and either bring the couple misery or find a way to possess his wife again in the afterlife. The writing is just the right level of overwrought, with the POV of an antagonist continuing his abuse from beyond the grave being an unsettling view to fall into, but the lead couple are so genuine that the ghost’s actions are still played as something you don’t root for and hope to see them overcome. And as the story takes a more philosophical tone, with the ghost realizing he’s making a hell for himself to wallow in and begins questioning his choices, it ends up being a much more moving than expected tale.
“Ooze” by Anthony M Rud. 2 stars. Such a simple, evocative title, and there’s so much potential in a hard-boiled detective story in the bayous of Louisiana, where an investigator is trying to uncover the fate of a weird fiction writer* who used his stories to lay out the theories and raise funding for his secret swampland experiments. Unfortunately, while the prose can be vivid at times, it’s choppy and awkward at others. The structure is poor, not giving us much mystery before over-explaining a reveal that I could see coming from page one. And it’s not helped by this being an openly and frequently racist tale right from the first paragraph, with an investigator who gets most of his clues by plying stereotypical minorities on “Shinny” (aka moonshine).
(* Amusingly, even though the term Weird Fiction had already been in place for decades by the debut of this magazine, the writer here is described as an author of “pseudo-science yarns”.)
“The Thing of a Thousand Shapes, Part 1” by Otis Adelbert Kline. 4 stars. Heck of a great first half, as an anxious young man has to spend several nights watching over the body of an uncle, noted for his books on psychic phenomenon, who begins to witness ectoplasmic phantasms. Kline’s writing is jaunty and absorbing, and I like that there’s a light element of farce to the encounters, with writhing blobs of white mistaken for cats and tricks of the eye. In spite of the character’s fear at the abnormality, there’s a sense of wonder to the spectacles as opposed to any feeling of menace, and when you get to the spectral figure rapidly evolving through the stages of life on earth, it’s a perfect cliffhanger to make me excited to come back next month.
“The Mystery of Black Jean” by Julian Kilman. 4 stars. A lushly written country murder plot, about an abusive couple and their pet bear, who are constantly taking pieces out of each other. Folksy, but also sly and quite shockingly violent at times as it explore how cruel people are drawn to each other, how easy it is for that cruelty to flip on them, and how casually the community around them can take notice of horrors but still shrug them away as “not my business”. The style of generational reminiscence lends an impressively timeless quality to the writing, and I think it would still pack a punch if published today. Wouldn’t be out of place in a Stephen King collection.
“The Grave” by Orville R Emerson. 3 stars. An uneven if effective “buried alive” scenario of a German WWI soldier stuck in a collapsed trench dugout. It seems a little convenient at first how spacious and well supplied the burrow is, but given the depth and the time it would take to dig back to the surface, I like the way the slowly building tension suddenly explodes into complete madness. The epilogue is unnecessary, and I wish they’d left us on the ambiguous way the journal ends.
“Hark! The Rattle!” by Joel Townsley Rogers. 3 stars. A wild story that doesn’t fully work, but what an exciting trip as two guys at a table watching a dancer turns into a wild fever dream of tension and memory, leading to an absurdist twist ending straight out of a giallo film, and writing that’s a fascinating midpoint between hard-boiled pulp, and surreal and experimental modernist fiction. I can definitely see why Rogers’ work went on to build a cult following, and I definitely want to check out more. I’ve already added his novel Red Right Hand to my cart.
“The Ghost Guard” by Bryan Irvine. 3 stars. A little dry at times, a little overly drawn out at others, and there’s not much surprised to the premise of the coldly dedicated ghost of a slain prison guard continuing his duties as he singles out the inmate who killed him. But it’s nicely written, with Irvine laying in authentic details of his own prison guard time, and I really enjoy how the story can simultaneously build fear out of the supernatural sequences – especially with that radio switch – while still allowing the ghost to be a figure more of duty than menace. I’d be curious to read more by Irvine.
“The Ghoul and the Corpse” by GA Wells. 4 stars. It’s a shame we don’t know more about Wells, because this was a nice tale, if wildly mistitled. Sure, it plays out in a very expected fashion, as an arctic prospector finds a frozen missing link in the ice and accidentally thaws it back to life for a violent encounter, but it plays out nicely as a salty campfire confession between the prospector and a trapper, never letting the characters fall into overwrought horror, and even has a tinge of sadness as this immediate shock of an encounter instantly undoes something that spent countless ages clinging to the frozen hope of living again. And yes, there are many parallels between this and the opening segments of Who Goes There, but Campbell still gets credit for taking his version in such a different direction.
“Fear” by David R Solomon. 3 stars. Uneven and brisk, a little muddled in its points, but I like the character study of a man, recovering from a recent poisonous snake bite, who has to confront his lifelong crippling fear of snakes when one threatens his daughter. The treatment of his wounds is a horrifying sequence, as is the overwhelming terror. It just feels overly slight before the amusing O’Henry twist ending.
“The Chain” by Hamilton Craigie. 1 star. Largely a scattershot and choppy hack detective story. There’s nothing to the characters, the actual plot is uninvolving and immediately after finishing the story I’ll be damned if I could tell you what it was. There’s an attempt at a Caruso-Shades twist ending line, but it lands with more of a quiet groan and pinch of the nose than actual cleverness. I think the reason this story has been presented in this “Weird Fiction” mag is that a big chunk of the second half has a guy return home, and he just senses that he’s not alone. He’s not exactly afraid, but he’s in the middle of a crime caper, so his cautions are aroused, as he’s piecing together all possible avenues in the room which might give away an intruder. Which is interesting on paper, but it goes on and on and on, for multiple pages and even multiple chapters. A few early moments of nice action just don’t make up for the majority of the story being a chore.
“The Place of Madness” by Merlin Moore Taylor. 4 stars. A near masterpiece, as a councilors at a prison hearing brush off a prisoner’s claims at the horrific mental effect suffered by those locked in unlit solitary rooms, where you can’t even tell where the door is, until a physician offers to give it a try for a couple hours. His internal sense of growing horror and madness is grippingly well delivered. The only strike against this on is the silly and obvious twist ending.
“The Closing Hand” by Farnsworth Wright. 4 stars. Very short and simple, but deeply chilling and sad as it explores two young sisters alone at night in a creepy house. What a gut punch of an ending.
“The Unknown Beast” by Howard Ellis Davis. 2 stars. Another bayou story where a hunter is after a mysterious creature that’s taken some lives. Some good atmosphere and vivid imagery, but the story itself isn’t interesting, and the general air of racism includes most of the climactic exposition being buried in a bad, exaggerated accent.
“The Basket” by Herbert J Mangham. 3 stars. I like the very jaunty and punctual writing style, with an air of whimsy as it sets up a strange man moving into a boarding house. Peculiar airs are noticed leading up to a mysterious death, and then…. it just kind of ends? Never builds into an actual mystery, doesn’t have a punchline to bring it all into context. It’s just a weird event that nobody knows the rationale behind, so they just sweep it away and never mention it again. So odd.
“The Accusing Voice” by Meredith Davis. 3 stars. A little clunky and drawn out, and the ending isn’t hard to see coming, but it’s a fascinating predecessor to The Shadow as the head juror of a trial that convicted a man for murder becomes haunted by this gun-wielding figure in the shadows, cackling and urging him to confess who the real killer is. Even beyond the imagery, the way it plays out, with the confident, accusing voice from a hidden figure, has me wondering if anyone has dug into the possibility of a direct tie between this and the development of the pulp hero.
(Since the next story is a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado”, taking a moment to check that out first. Pretty sure it’s one of the handful of Poe tales we read back in middle school, but I haven’t read any since. 5 stars. A short, wicked bite of a classic, with a great, unassuming comedic build to the horrific twist at the end.)
“The Sequel” by Walter Scott Story. 3 stars. Amusing attempt to flip the original Poe story, taking the POV of the man walled into the crypt to explore his escape and own little revenge, but the writing style is much dryer and less piercing than Poe, and it never comes close to reaching his level of wicked glee.
“The Weaving Shadows” by WH Holmes. 2 stars. Some vivid spectral imagery in its tale of a detective spending a night in a house plagued by vampiric hauntings, but the characters and plot are bland, the prose is clunky, and the resolution is uninteresting. Had they ended it a few paragraphs earlier, leaving it bizarrely ambiguous and unresolved, it would have been more striking at least.
“Nimba, the Cave Girl” by RTM Scott. 4 stars. I had concerns about this, thinking it would be a cheesecake fantasy, but it’s actually a great story about an actual cavewoman living on her own in prehistoric times, fully capable of doing so as she hunts and survives and fends off the attentions of a male (the way he meets his end got a cheer from me). The ending is a little pat, but I like the frank brutality of the story, the inventiveness, the snappy and energetic prose. I’d like to read more from Scott.
“The Young Man Who Wanted to Die” anonymous author. 4 stars. A man commits suicide and journeys to hell. That’s the entirety of the story, which is more about vivid and explosive phantasmagoric landscapes of tendril tunnels, and ancient creatures dancing about a huge overlord snake, but it’s grippingly well written, and I’d really love to know who the author was.
“The Scarlet Night” by William Sanford. 3 stars. Not badly written, but it’s largely a mashup of familiar tropes; a husband, bitter about an affair, finds himself drugged and buried alive, then the shock of his return leads to bloody suicides and him being convicted of their murder. It’s too brisk and too underdeveloped when I felt it could lean into moments, like the fear of a living yet paralyzed man undergoing dissection and the complete breakdown of just how much his loving wife actually hates him. It’s still an adequate nugget, but there’s room for so much more.
“The Extraordinary Experiments of Dr Calgroni” by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding. 2 stars. Decent enough prose, if a typical and obvious story about a mad scientist swapping the brains of a mentally disabled man and a gorilla. Ends too abruptly when I wish it had dug deeper into the implications.
“The Return of Paul Slavsky” by George Warburton Lewis. 3 stars. An interestingly odd story. Doesn’t fully come together and the prose is wobbly, but it’s a mashup of espionage and vampires as two detectives are transporting an infamous female terrorist on a train, only for horrors to unfold. The character of Olga is a really interesting and progressive antagonist for the time, and I’d be game to see more adventures starring her.
“The House of Death” by F Georgia Stroup. 3 stars. An awkward but interesting gothic western piece about two aging women cleaning up a house, as they ponder the reasons for why the arrested matron of the home killed her infant daughter. Less a horror story than a sad exploration of the state of things in dusty, isolated towns, with an odd attempt at an O Henry ending that doesn’t fully land.
“The Gallows” by IWD Peters. 2 stars. The deeper I got into this story, the less I understood the point of it. It’s about a social dandy who learns his wife is having an affair and kills the boyfriend. Okay. But then the dude sabotages his own trial and eagerly awaits his execution just because he wants to spitefully make his wife feel bad? I guess? And there’s an attempt at a twist ending that goes nowhere? There’s ways in which this could be made to work as an exploration of modern concepts of toxic masculinity, but it seems nowhere near self-aware enough to hit those layers.
“The Skull” by Harold Ward. 2 stars. Vivid prose and some great twists, but brisk and messy, and I couldn’t tell if the super-racist verbiage was meant to comment on the vile people who managed plantations in Africa, or if the author was getting a little too into making them “authentic”.
“The Ape-Man” by JBM Clarke Jr. 2 stars. The writing itself isn’t bad as it plays around with an eclectic man who has some sort of fondness for or relation to apes, but it's not very strongly plotted, with obvious twists, and a far too drawn out pace for the open, anti-climactic ending.
Overall - A mixed bag of interesting ideas and uneven execution. A little overstuffed, as they didn't yet have the backing for illustrations and advertisements, and peppered with silly and often quite mean and racist little trivia bits. For as noted as Lovecraft's racism was, it definitely wasn't out of the norm for this mag, sadly, as some stories are deeply and openly bigoted. Still, there's some gems in there, some authors I'd like to dig more into. There's times when it became a chore, but others where I was really gripped, and I can see the foundations for the legendary home for weird fiction that this magazine became. I don't know that I'm going to continue digging into the archives moving forward, but this was a nice taste of the format for the time.
“The Dead Man’s Tale” by Willard E Hawkins. 4 stars. A great story to start things off with, as a soldier dies in a battlefield, and he finds himself lingering on as a ghost. He sticks with his wounded and mourning best friend, loathed as a simple minded lackey, who now returns home and begins a relationship with the dead man's widow, leading the ghost to hatch a plot to take control over the man and either bring the couple misery or find a way to possess his wife again in the afterlife. The writing is just the right level of overwrought, with the POV of an antagonist continuing his abuse from beyond the grave being an unsettling view to fall into, but the lead couple are so genuine that the ghost’s actions are still played as something you don’t root for and hope to see them overcome. And as the story takes a more philosophical tone, with the ghost realizing he’s making a hell for himself to wallow in and begins questioning his choices, it ends up being a much more moving than expected tale.
“Ooze” by Anthony M Rud. 2 stars. Such a simple, evocative title, and there’s so much potential in a hard-boiled detective story in the bayous of Louisiana, where an investigator is trying to uncover the fate of a weird fiction writer* who used his stories to lay out the theories and raise funding for his secret swampland experiments. Unfortunately, while the prose can be vivid at times, it’s choppy and awkward at others. The structure is poor, not giving us much mystery before over-explaining a reveal that I could see coming from page one. And it’s not helped by this being an openly and frequently racist tale right from the first paragraph, with an investigator who gets most of his clues by plying stereotypical minorities on “Shinny” (aka moonshine).
(* Amusingly, even though the term Weird Fiction had already been in place for decades by the debut of this magazine, the writer here is described as an author of “pseudo-science yarns”.)
“The Thing of a Thousand Shapes, Part 1” by Otis Adelbert Kline. 4 stars. Heck of a great first half, as an anxious young man has to spend several nights watching over the body of an uncle, noted for his books on psychic phenomenon, who begins to witness ectoplasmic phantasms. Kline’s writing is jaunty and absorbing, and I like that there’s a light element of farce to the encounters, with writhing blobs of white mistaken for cats and tricks of the eye. In spite of the character’s fear at the abnormality, there’s a sense of wonder to the spectacles as opposed to any feeling of menace, and when you get to the spectral figure rapidly evolving through the stages of life on earth, it’s a perfect cliffhanger to make me excited to come back next month.
“The Mystery of Black Jean” by Julian Kilman. 4 stars. A lushly written country murder plot, about an abusive couple and their pet bear, who are constantly taking pieces out of each other. Folksy, but also sly and quite shockingly violent at times as it explore how cruel people are drawn to each other, how easy it is for that cruelty to flip on them, and how casually the community around them can take notice of horrors but still shrug them away as “not my business”. The style of generational reminiscence lends an impressively timeless quality to the writing, and I think it would still pack a punch if published today. Wouldn’t be out of place in a Stephen King collection.
“The Grave” by Orville R Emerson. 3 stars. An uneven if effective “buried alive” scenario of a German WWI soldier stuck in a collapsed trench dugout. It seems a little convenient at first how spacious and well supplied the burrow is, but given the depth and the time it would take to dig back to the surface, I like the way the slowly building tension suddenly explodes into complete madness. The epilogue is unnecessary, and I wish they’d left us on the ambiguous way the journal ends.
“Hark! The Rattle!” by Joel Townsley Rogers. 3 stars. A wild story that doesn’t fully work, but what an exciting trip as two guys at a table watching a dancer turns into a wild fever dream of tension and memory, leading to an absurdist twist ending straight out of a giallo film, and writing that’s a fascinating midpoint between hard-boiled pulp, and surreal and experimental modernist fiction. I can definitely see why Rogers’ work went on to build a cult following, and I definitely want to check out more. I’ve already added his novel Red Right Hand to my cart.
“The Ghost Guard” by Bryan Irvine. 3 stars. A little dry at times, a little overly drawn out at others, and there’s not much surprised to the premise of the coldly dedicated ghost of a slain prison guard continuing his duties as he singles out the inmate who killed him. But it’s nicely written, with Irvine laying in authentic details of his own prison guard time, and I really enjoy how the story can simultaneously build fear out of the supernatural sequences – especially with that radio switch – while still allowing the ghost to be a figure more of duty than menace. I’d be curious to read more by Irvine.
“The Ghoul and the Corpse” by GA Wells. 4 stars. It’s a shame we don’t know more about Wells, because this was a nice tale, if wildly mistitled. Sure, it plays out in a very expected fashion, as an arctic prospector finds a frozen missing link in the ice and accidentally thaws it back to life for a violent encounter, but it plays out nicely as a salty campfire confession between the prospector and a trapper, never letting the characters fall into overwrought horror, and even has a tinge of sadness as this immediate shock of an encounter instantly undoes something that spent countless ages clinging to the frozen hope of living again. And yes, there are many parallels between this and the opening segments of Who Goes There, but Campbell still gets credit for taking his version in such a different direction.
“Fear” by David R Solomon. 3 stars. Uneven and brisk, a little muddled in its points, but I like the character study of a man, recovering from a recent poisonous snake bite, who has to confront his lifelong crippling fear of snakes when one threatens his daughter. The treatment of his wounds is a horrifying sequence, as is the overwhelming terror. It just feels overly slight before the amusing O’Henry twist ending.
“The Chain” by Hamilton Craigie. 1 star. Largely a scattershot and choppy hack detective story. There’s nothing to the characters, the actual plot is uninvolving and immediately after finishing the story I’ll be damned if I could tell you what it was. There’s an attempt at a Caruso-Shades twist ending line, but it lands with more of a quiet groan and pinch of the nose than actual cleverness. I think the reason this story has been presented in this “Weird Fiction” mag is that a big chunk of the second half has a guy return home, and he just senses that he’s not alone. He’s not exactly afraid, but he’s in the middle of a crime caper, so his cautions are aroused, as he’s piecing together all possible avenues in the room which might give away an intruder. Which is interesting on paper, but it goes on and on and on, for multiple pages and even multiple chapters. A few early moments of nice action just don’t make up for the majority of the story being a chore.
“The Place of Madness” by Merlin Moore Taylor. 4 stars. A near masterpiece, as a councilors at a prison hearing brush off a prisoner’s claims at the horrific mental effect suffered by those locked in unlit solitary rooms, where you can’t even tell where the door is, until a physician offers to give it a try for a couple hours. His internal sense of growing horror and madness is grippingly well delivered. The only strike against this on is the silly and obvious twist ending.
“The Closing Hand” by Farnsworth Wright. 4 stars. Very short and simple, but deeply chilling and sad as it explores two young sisters alone at night in a creepy house. What a gut punch of an ending.
“The Unknown Beast” by Howard Ellis Davis. 2 stars. Another bayou story where a hunter is after a mysterious creature that’s taken some lives. Some good atmosphere and vivid imagery, but the story itself isn’t interesting, and the general air of racism includes most of the climactic exposition being buried in a bad, exaggerated accent.
“The Basket” by Herbert J Mangham. 3 stars. I like the very jaunty and punctual writing style, with an air of whimsy as it sets up a strange man moving into a boarding house. Peculiar airs are noticed leading up to a mysterious death, and then…. it just kind of ends? Never builds into an actual mystery, doesn’t have a punchline to bring it all into context. It’s just a weird event that nobody knows the rationale behind, so they just sweep it away and never mention it again. So odd.
“The Accusing Voice” by Meredith Davis. 3 stars. A little clunky and drawn out, and the ending isn’t hard to see coming, but it’s a fascinating predecessor to The Shadow as the head juror of a trial that convicted a man for murder becomes haunted by this gun-wielding figure in the shadows, cackling and urging him to confess who the real killer is. Even beyond the imagery, the way it plays out, with the confident, accusing voice from a hidden figure, has me wondering if anyone has dug into the possibility of a direct tie between this and the development of the pulp hero.
(Since the next story is a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado”, taking a moment to check that out first. Pretty sure it’s one of the handful of Poe tales we read back in middle school, but I haven’t read any since. 5 stars. A short, wicked bite of a classic, with a great, unassuming comedic build to the horrific twist at the end.)
“The Sequel” by Walter Scott Story. 3 stars. Amusing attempt to flip the original Poe story, taking the POV of the man walled into the crypt to explore his escape and own little revenge, but the writing style is much dryer and less piercing than Poe, and it never comes close to reaching his level of wicked glee.
“The Weaving Shadows” by WH Holmes. 2 stars. Some vivid spectral imagery in its tale of a detective spending a night in a house plagued by vampiric hauntings, but the characters and plot are bland, the prose is clunky, and the resolution is uninteresting. Had they ended it a few paragraphs earlier, leaving it bizarrely ambiguous and unresolved, it would have been more striking at least.
“Nimba, the Cave Girl” by RTM Scott. 4 stars. I had concerns about this, thinking it would be a cheesecake fantasy, but it’s actually a great story about an actual cavewoman living on her own in prehistoric times, fully capable of doing so as she hunts and survives and fends off the attentions of a male (the way he meets his end got a cheer from me). The ending is a little pat, but I like the frank brutality of the story, the inventiveness, the snappy and energetic prose. I’d like to read more from Scott.
“The Young Man Who Wanted to Die” anonymous author. 4 stars. A man commits suicide and journeys to hell. That’s the entirety of the story, which is more about vivid and explosive phantasmagoric landscapes of tendril tunnels, and ancient creatures dancing about a huge overlord snake, but it’s grippingly well written, and I’d really love to know who the author was.
“The Scarlet Night” by William Sanford. 3 stars. Not badly written, but it’s largely a mashup of familiar tropes; a husband, bitter about an affair, finds himself drugged and buried alive, then the shock of his return leads to bloody suicides and him being convicted of their murder. It’s too brisk and too underdeveloped when I felt it could lean into moments, like the fear of a living yet paralyzed man undergoing dissection and the complete breakdown of just how much his loving wife actually hates him. It’s still an adequate nugget, but there’s room for so much more.
“The Extraordinary Experiments of Dr Calgroni” by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding. 2 stars. Decent enough prose, if a typical and obvious story about a mad scientist swapping the brains of a mentally disabled man and a gorilla. Ends too abruptly when I wish it had dug deeper into the implications.
“The Return of Paul Slavsky” by George Warburton Lewis. 3 stars. An interestingly odd story. Doesn’t fully come together and the prose is wobbly, but it’s a mashup of espionage and vampires as two detectives are transporting an infamous female terrorist on a train, only for horrors to unfold. The character of Olga is a really interesting and progressive antagonist for the time, and I’d be game to see more adventures starring her.
“The House of Death” by F Georgia Stroup. 3 stars. An awkward but interesting gothic western piece about two aging women cleaning up a house, as they ponder the reasons for why the arrested matron of the home killed her infant daughter. Less a horror story than a sad exploration of the state of things in dusty, isolated towns, with an odd attempt at an O Henry ending that doesn’t fully land.
“The Gallows” by IWD Peters. 2 stars. The deeper I got into this story, the less I understood the point of it. It’s about a social dandy who learns his wife is having an affair and kills the boyfriend. Okay. But then the dude sabotages his own trial and eagerly awaits his execution just because he wants to spitefully make his wife feel bad? I guess? And there’s an attempt at a twist ending that goes nowhere? There’s ways in which this could be made to work as an exploration of modern concepts of toxic masculinity, but it seems nowhere near self-aware enough to hit those layers.
“The Skull” by Harold Ward. 2 stars. Vivid prose and some great twists, but brisk and messy, and I couldn’t tell if the super-racist verbiage was meant to comment on the vile people who managed plantations in Africa, or if the author was getting a little too into making them “authentic”.
“The Ape-Man” by JBM Clarke Jr. 2 stars. The writing itself isn’t bad as it plays around with an eclectic man who has some sort of fondness for or relation to apes, but it's not very strongly plotted, with obvious twists, and a far too drawn out pace for the open, anti-climactic ending.
Overall - A mixed bag of interesting ideas and uneven execution. A little overstuffed, as they didn't yet have the backing for illustrations and advertisements, and peppered with silly and often quite mean and racist little trivia bits. For as noted as Lovecraft's racism was, it definitely wasn't out of the norm for this mag, sadly, as some stories are deeply and openly bigoted. Still, there's some gems in there, some authors I'd like to dig more into. There's times when it became a chore, but others where I was really gripped, and I can see the foundations for the legendary home for weird fiction that this magazine became. I don't know that I'm going to continue digging into the archives moving forward, but this was a nice taste of the format for the time.
April 10, 2023
While I am thankful to be able to read this piece of pulp history in its entirety, the numerous typographical transcription and formatting errors are a serious distraction. Also, modern readers should be aware that some of these stories are far more shocking in their racist language than their "weird" content.
September 22, 2020
In the dead mans tale, the ghost is so vengeful and full of hate and obsession. It’s very well written and an amazing start to a series in the newspaper allowing more horror novels and stories to become popularized throughout the years.
December 29, 2020
Solid
Great stories that will help you pass the time. There is something here for everybody that loves Weird Tales!
Great stories that will help you pass the time. There is something here for everybody that loves Weird Tales!
October 15, 2021
Good to see the first-ever issue of Weird Tales brought back to life. The mag was a staple of my teen years, left around the house by my much older brother. I've seen some complaints that there's not enough "horror" is this issue. Well, "weird" wasn't only horror, it's often reality skewed and nailed to a tree. No sense listing and evaluating individual tales here. A few duds, of course, but if you're interested in the history of this bedrock journal of the outre, you're sure to like it.
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