Weird Fiction discussion

Howard Wandrei (1909-1956) is the twelfth of the thirteen challenge authors and arguably the most obscure. Younger brother of his more famous because more long-lived brother Donald Wandrei (1908-1987), Howard's prose has an exciting, intense quality about it. He tends to get to the heart of a matter quickly and stay absolutely focused on exploring it while ignoring peripheral concerns other authors might distract themselves with.

It is a real challenge, even now, to find much of his work. It was originally published in fanzines and pulps and was never collected into book form during his life and seldom anthologized. Complicating matters further, he often published under various pseudonyms. Wikipedia states that he published over 200 short stories during his lifetime, but the claim is unattributed and I am skeptical. Wikipedia often passes along exaggerated claims of publication prowess without any attempt at verification.

Even still, ISFDB lists 65 short stories, no novels, a sufficiently impressive verified output. His work was rediscovered in the 1990s, almostv forty years after his death, and most of it was collected in three short story collections. His short story mysteries, which all tend to have a tinge of the Weird, was collected in The Last Pin. Of greater interest to us are his two Weird collections: Time Burial : The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei and The Eerie Mr. Murphy. These were published some time ago and are becoming increasingly expensive to acquire. I hope someone soon collects all 65 or so of his stories and makes a Kindle collection of it. That would be very well worth it!

I have found one of his stories, a short one of just four pages length, available at no charge here: https://archive.org/details/WeirdTale.... It can also be found in the aforementioned Time Burial : The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei. It reads like a werewolf story to me, only with an odd twist.

Howard Wandrei's second of two short story collections The Eerie Mr. Murphy collects all the obtainable speculative fiction stories that did not appear in Time Burial : The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei. I hold a copy in my hands now and would like to report how amazed I am in the quality of the book. Published by Fedogan & Bremer out of Minneapolis, MN, it is 426 pages long with 29 of his stories. Fifteen of the stories never saw publication anywhere before until this collection. This is a 2002 book containing stories written by a man who died in 1956! Some of the other stories are "unpublished versions" of stories that did see print. Most of the republished stories are of stories that only saw print only once in an old magazine.

Not only do we have these 29 stories, but there is a good full-page photo of the author. You can't find one on the internet. The final section, called the gallery, reproduces over thirty pages of his artwork. Unfortunately it's in black and white. Even still, the level of detail in his beautiful, strange drawings are incredible.

The back cover of the book, incidentally, claims Howard Wandrei wrote nearly 200 stories. This, no doubt, is the source for Wikipedia's claim of "over 200 stories," which of course has now been reproduced everywhere as fact. As I said, many of the 29 never saw publication until this book. A double-digit number therefore is a more believable one for Wandrei's short story output.

I thought paying nearly $20 for this book was a lot, $12 plus shipping and tax, but it's list price in 2002 was $32. I got a bargain!