Various

“ Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, that vision had power to project itself in marvelous crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the thirties and forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn had known in the days of the unutterable blasphemies. Verses and tales alike sustain the burden of cosmic panic. ”

“ In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European aesthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. ”

“ Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority's artificial ideals. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist ”

“ Not again to thee or to any man will return the perfect vision and the perfect flesh of the goddess."
Ending thus, she stepped from that ashen strand to the dark prow of the barge; and even as it had come, without wafture of wind or movement of oar, the barge put out on a sea covered with the fallen, fading petals of sunset. Quickly it vanished from view, while the desert lost those ancient asphodels and the deep verdure it had worn again for a little. Darkness, having conquered Illarion, came slow and furtive on the path of Aphrodite; shadows mustered innumerably to the grey hills ”

“ He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species. ”

“ Hodgson's tales may well have served as source books for many of the stories now being read in our present day pulp magazines. The whole range of weird and fantastic plots appears to have been covered in the five books listed previously—pig-men, elementals, human trees, ghosts, sea of weeds, thought-transference, intelligent slugs, and in "The Night Land" the men are equipped with a hand weapon called a Diskos. This consists of a disk of gray metal which spins in the end of a metal rod, is charged from earth currents and capable of cutting people in two. ”

“ No longer did philosophers sit upon street corners speaking wise words to the populace, for stupid ignorance ruled within the crumbling and immemorially ancient walls. Where once the wisdom of the stars abounded, only feebleness and desolation now lay upon the place; spreading like a monstrous blight and sucking foul nurture from the stupid dwellers. ”

“ A Witches' Sabbath of horror flinging off decorous robes is flashed before us—a sight the more monstrous because of the scientific skill with which every particular is marshalled and brought into an easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of material life.
Poe's tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a purer essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and ratiocination, forerunners of the modern detective story, are not to be included at all in weird literature ”

“ Poe's weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.
Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. ”

“ Hearing it brings the soul closer to strange terrors and gives the listener vague glimpses into half-opened door-ways thru which no man should peer too closely. Once I heard that mocking laughter in the silence of the night, and since that evil-fated day the night has held neither silence nor surcease from the haunting memory of that mirth or madness. Ever it lurks and lingers in the shadows of my brain, till only thru expression of my torment can I hope to maintain my sanity in a world made hideous by the Nemesis of inescapable memory. ”

“ It is a story of the world in the future when the sun has died and the "Last Millions" are living in a large redoubt, a huge pyramid of gray metal nearly eight miles high and five miles around the base. Beyond the pyramid were mighty races of terrible creatures, half-beast and half-man, night hounds monstrous slugs, and other horrible monsters. As a protection against all these evils a great electric circle was put about the pyramid and lit from the Earth Current. ”

“ And out of the waters of the Oll that meandered from the mountains of Azlakka to pass by the aged city, there rose often great clouds of pestilence that racked the people sorely, leaving them pale and near to dying. ”

“ Poe's fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to minimise his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the pervasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his ”

“ Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins takes the form of a gigantic horse. "The Man of the Crowd," telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. ”

“ He knew no lion had killed old Azik, let the council say what they might. Does a lion slash with a sword and leave his prey uneaten?
Through many seasons Aphlar sat upon the mountain, gazing at the muddy Oll as it wound into the misty distance to the land where none ever ventured. He spoke his words of wisdom to the snails that worked in the ground by his feet. They seemed to understand, and waved their slimy feelers before they sank beneath the sand again. On moonlight nights he climbed the hill above his cave and made strange offerings to the moon-God Alo ”

“ Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. "Usher," whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history—a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment. ”

“ Most of the stories included in this splendid anthology were by well-known writers such as Blackwood, Dunsany, and Bierce and many of the stories were familiar ones—"The Monkey's Paw," "Green Tea" and "The Ghost Ship." However, one new story was included in the book; one comparatively new face appeared among all the old familiar ones. The story was "The Voice in the Night" a horrifying and yet pathetic tale of human beings turned into a fungoid growth; the author is William Hope Hodgson. ”

“ Clark Ashton Smith does a lot of drawing for his own amusement, mostly heads of supernatural creatures. One very good one shows an old man with an elephant's trunk for a nose, ending in the head of a snake.
A strange and unusual twist to stories about radio will be given in a new story by the author of "Vampires of the Moon," A. W. Bernal, titled "The Man who was Two Men".... Tales of Magic and Mystery, a short lived weird magazine, published a few yarns by Frank Owen, and an exceptionally good H. P. Lovecraft story, "Cool Air".... ”