Weird Tales

“ There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story; one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax. In another way, weird tales may be grouped into two rough categories—those in which the marvel or horror concerns some condition or phenomenon, and those in which it concerns some action of persons in connexion with a bizarre condition or phenomenon. ”

“ What particularly impelled me to write this letter is the story in the current issue, entitled ‘Beyond the Door.’ One reason why I single this one from such a congeries of thrilling, weird tales is that, with all its mystery and suggestion of the supernatural, the dénouement and everything that leads up to it are discovered at the end to be logically and physically ‘possible.’ So often, in mystery stories, we are called upon to accept much that simply is not naturally possible, and we turn from them, duly horrified, but unpersuaded that the tale is more than a figment of a morbid imagination. ”

“ They gleamed in the sunlight like gorgeous jewels, but their depths suggested darkness, black pools of brooding mystery. She smiled constantly for no apparent reason, and once she laughed aloud, a musical little laugh which made one think of the tinkling music of a tiny waterfall. ”

“ The range of Weird Tales comprises every type of fantastic fiction: from the occult to science fiction, from ghost stories to the supernatural, from voodoo thrillers to vampire tales, from werewolf yarns to reincarnation, and from the mystic to the physic.
Other current magazines may occasionally print fantasyarns. Keep an eye on Argosy, Blue Book, Magic Carpet, Ten Detective Aces, Dime Detective, Thrilling Adventures, Doc Savage, the Science Fiction Digest, and The Fantasy Fan, and, in truth, any of the detective, air, and adventure magazines. ”

“ IT WAS Halloween, the time of revelry, when mysticism holds full sway and hearts are supposed to be united beneath the magic glow of dim lanterns. It was the time of apple bobbing, fortune telling, and masking in motley raiment, the whole glamoured over by the light of wishing candles. ”

“ Weird Tales is certainly improving steadily. Every new copy gets better and better; evidently there is no end to your progress. The first installment of The Trail of the Cloven Hoof is as good a piece of weird fiction as it is possible to find. ”

“ Weird Tales prints the best weird fiction in the world today. If Poe were alive he would undoubtedly be a contributor. In addition to creepy mystery stories, ghost-tales, stories of devil-worship, witchcraft, vampires and strange monsters, this magazine also prints the cream of the weird-scientific fiction that is written today—tales of the spaces between worlds, surgical stories, and stories that scan the future with the eye of prophecy.
Read
Weird Tales
The Unique Magazine
On Sale At All News Stands
Volume I
Number 1
Published bi-monthly by the Popular Fiction Publishing Company. ”

“ It stopped in midair as the laughter ceased, and a loathsome sucking noise took its place. With a new and accelerated horror, I realized that that blood was being drained to feed the invisible entity from beyond! ”

“ Also, and as if to compensate for the lack of the love interest, the short story has a "touch of fantasy" which gives it a distinctive charm. This quality is the hint of—not necessarily the supernatural, but rather the weird; it is a recognition and a vague presentation of the many strong influences that are not explainable by our philosophy of life. It is the intrusion into our matter-of-fact lives of the uncanny element, which the novice so grossly misuses in his tales of premonitory dreams and visions, and of most unghostly ghosts. ”

“ Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious ”

“ Richard E. Morse's letter has impressed me as the one that really 'says something.' His thought had not occurred to me before, and it is worthwhile considering. Weird Tales allows science fiction; why not Wonder Stories weird tales? As the science fiction fan I am always eager to see stf in Weird Tales and any other magazine. ”

“ Who does not know with what mysterious power the mind is enthralled in the midst of unusual and singularly strange circumstances? Even the dullest imagination is aroused when it comes into a valley girt around by fantastic rocks, or within the gloomy walls of a church or an abbey, and it begins to have glimpses of things it has never yet experienced. When I add that I was twenty years of age, and had drunk several glasses of strong punch, it will easily be conceived that as I sat thus in the Rittersaal I was in a more exceptional frame of mind than I had ever been before. ”

“ Stories of horror, of magic, of hypernatural experience, strike home zestfully to nine readers out of ten. There is no other magazine of this sort. Yarns somewhat of the type published in book form—for instance, ‘The Grim Thirteen’—invariably are recommended from one reader to a fellow, with gusto.
“WEIRD TALES need not be immoral in slightest degree. Fact, ninety from one hundred generally contain wholesome moral, at least, derivable. Even studies of paranoia or fear hysteria, pure and simple, generally are clean from start to finish. ”

“ But it disappointed me very greatly to find it in a stf publication. In Weird Tales, all right. I don't like that type of story, I wouldn't read it there. I fail to find anything worth-while in an endless procession of ethereal lites, phantastic visions, ultra-mundane life, exotic paradises, airy vegetation, whispering flutes, ghastly plants, and dirge-like horrors. May the ink dry up in the pen from which they flow! Or, at least, Mr. Smith, direct those tales elsewhere—NOT to a stf publication, because I do like your science fiction like "Master of the Asteroid" and "Flight into Super Time." ”

“ From time to time we are importuned by our readers to devote several pages of Weird Tales each month to a forum in which the lovers of fantastic fiction can exchange views. We are asked to have articles on weird fiction generally, information about our authors, debates between the fans. It has been suggested that we expand the Eyrie for this purpose, and make it a battleground for the conflicts of the weird fiction fans. ”

“ I ask you: where has the mystery been hiding all these years?"
"That is a question I shall not try to answer, Mr. Rhodes. It is my belief. however, that the mystery has never been hiding,—using the word, that is, in its literal signification." ”

“ Perhaps to wonders the like of which Science never has dreamed. Perhaps to horrors and mysteries from which the imagination of even a Dante or a Doré would shrink and flee in mad terror—things nameless, worse than a thousand deaths. ”

“ But this feeling was like the shivery sensations that one has on hearing a graphically narrated ghost story, such as we all like. At this moment it occurred to me that I should never be in a more seasonable mood for reading the book which, in common with every one who had the least leaning towards the romantic, I at that time carried about in my pocket,—I mean Schiller's "Ghost-seer." I read and read, and my imagination grew ever more and more excited. ”

“ The ghost story per se is not necessarily a horror story, because a great many or nearly all of them can be read without any psychic discomfort. The final desideratum of the horror story is that this feeling should be translated to the hair on the back of the neck—that is, physically experienced. This feat is accomplished about once in a literary coon's age, so that it is not strange that in the following collection only one has this effect on me. I shall not name it; but I think the reader will discover it. ”

“ Naturally, there are those who aren't impressed one way or another, but in this article we are not concerned with personal tastes.
Perhaps Mr. Wright has the wrong idea of what constitutes weirdness. Would Weird Tales reach a tremendous circulation if Lovecraft, Machen, C. A. Smith, Blackwood, Merritt, and other blood-brothers collaborated on a novel with the following plot which I will sketchily outline? Have the hero born on Friday the 13th under the sign of—say Capricornus. ”

“ Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself whether I was misled—or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know—but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits' ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants; yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible. ”

“ The book can scarcely be read without shuddering; the dark maze of humane motion and human weakness-- a mingling of poetry, sentimentality, rollicking humour, wild remorse, stern gloom, blind delusion, dark insanity, over all which is thrown a veil steeped in the fantastic and the horrible--all this detracts from the artistic merits of the work, but invests it with a corresponding proportion of interest as a revealer of some of the deepest secrets and hidden phases of the human soul, if one only has the courage to wade through it. ”

“ Further, when we remember his fine imaginative powers, his inimitable humour, his vanity, his poetic cast of mind, his bitterness against the public for not appreciating his musical talents, and his consequent fits of fierce defiance and satiric gloom, there is still less cause for wonder when we find this propensity for seeking the uncommon and the marvellous deepening and developing in time into an unconquerable penchant for what was grotesque and eccentric, for what was fantastic, unnatural, ghostly, and horrible. ”

“ Maybe we can all agree pretty much on one thing, though. Reading about fantasy and weird things is great entertainment, and none the less so for those of us who have never actually run up against a ghost or vampire. ”

“ I am perfectly convinced that there is something especially exceptional in its inner construction, and that, if I took it to pieces, a secret would be revealed to me which I have long been seeking to discover, but—laugh at me if you like—this senseless thing which only gives signs of life and sound as I make it, often speaks to me in a strange way of itself. ”

“ Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind. ”

“ In short, by your playing and singing you work her up to a high pitch of excitement, and then, when she drifts without anchor and rudder on the boundless sea of dreams and visions and vague aspirations which your music, like some vile charm, has summoned into existence, you plunge her down into the depths of horror with a tale about a fearful apparition which you say came and played pranks with you up in the justice-hall. ”

“ Paler than the dead who lay so still in their quiet rest in the churchyard; colder than the very touch of death itself; rigid as the body when the breath has gone forever; there he stood, the epitome of awful fear. With eyeballs starting from their sockets, open mouth, dilated nostrils, he seemed the very personification of incredulous horror. ”

“ Farnsworth Wright has had several stories and poems published under the nom-de-plume of Francis Hard.... Desmond Hall, associate editor of Astounding Stories, admits having had a story published in Weird Tales under a pseudonym, but won't divulge which one. ”

“ Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable? ”

“ Handling these, and states and situations equally hideous, fantastic, and grotesque, with extraordinary clearness and precision both of thought and of language, considering the often misty nature of the subjects he treats of, and pouring upon the vivid pictures he conjures up the brightness of his wit and the exuberant gaiety and grace of his fancy, he succeeds in creating scenes, situations, and characters which seem verily instinct with real life. ”

“ Mostly we held to the theory that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom. ”

“ In addition to Amazing Stories, Science and Air Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories, Wonder Stories, Amazing Quarterly, Science Wonder and Wonder Stories Quarterly, Weird Tales, Strange Tales, the Argosy stf, The Time Traveller, Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Digest, I offer such rarities as the Amazing Stories Annual, the Weird Tales Anniversary Number, the two issues of Miracle Science & Fantasy Stories, and the first print of 'The Face in the Abyss.' These magazines and books are in perfect condition. They go to the highest bids ”

“ I'm glad you printed the letter headed 'Don't Be Funny,' One might raise the purely academic question whether anyone ever wrote a really good humorous weird tale, and win the debate for the affirmative by citing a few examples; but in general, humor is at war with weirdness, and humorous stories of the supernatural are almost without exception flops, or else succeed despite a great handicap. You do not need one an issue—one or two a year will be a remarkably high number to find if you demand the same standard you do for the rest of the magazine. ”