One Reader Responds to the First Issue

There are thirty-three items in the first issue of Weird Tales. Twenty-six are stories. Six are nonfiction fillers. The last is the letters column, "The Eyrie." I will look only at the twenty-six stories.

First, I'll set aside four of the short short stories. These are:

• "Fear" by David R. Solomon

• "The Closing Hand" by Farnsworth Wright

• "The Sequel" by Walter Scott Story

• "The Gallows" by I.W.D. Peters

These stories are not very well developed. None of them is especially good or interesting. "The Closing Hand" is one of the least interesting stories in the first issue, but it's not really offensive. "The Sequel" on the other hand is a swipe and an attempt to remake Edgar Allan Poe's original "The Cask of Amontillado." In my opinion, "The Sequel" is a story that should never have been written. Then again, maybe I'm taking it too seriously.

Next I'm going to cross out some stories that are either pretty poor or of only middling quality:

• "The Ghost Guard" by Bryan Irvine--An unremarkable and pretty conventional ghost story.

• "The Chain" by Hamilton Craigie--A lot of story to little effect. Craigie's protagonist is not very interesting. He could have been, but he isn't. Worse yet, Craigie's prose is overheated and pretty purple.

• "The Accusing Voice" by Meredith Davis--An entirely implausible tale. In my opinion, the poorest or one of the poorest stories in the first issue.

• "The Scarlet Night" by William Sanford--A short study in psychopathology and another pretty unpleasant story.

I don't like "The Dead Man's Tale" by Willard E. Hawkins. There is real cruelty in it and undertones of misogyny, if only in the narrator. "Hark! The Rattle!" by Joel Townsley Rogers is an interesting story, but it's too idiosyncratic, I think. The thing to do when you're telling a story is to tell your story and not put yourself or your technique on display.

"The Ghoul and the Corpse" by G.A. Wells is based in a good story idea, but it isn't very well done. The two main characters, for example, are basically lunkheads. They're like college chums instead of serious men. I think this was still too early in the evolution of science fiction, science fantasy, and weird fiction for an author of limited imagination and talent to have pulled it off, even if his idea was a good one.

"The Place of Madness" by Merlin Moore Taylor isn't a bad story, but it also isn't very strong or memorable. "Nimba, the Cave Girl" by R.T.M. Scott has the beginnings of a weird-fictional awareness of great scales of time and space, but it's marred by the author's sexual interest in his title character, also by its faintly Theosophical content. Like Scientology and other wacky belief systems, Theosophy makes me uneasy.

"The House of Death" by F. Georgia Stroup is not a bad story, but also not an especially strong one. It's brief and consists of a single episode, in truth a tale rather than a story. It tells of a sad and terrible event, something that's hard for me to take with all of the recent losses in my family. "The House of Death" is remarkable for being the first story by a woman author to appear in Weird Tales.

"The Skull" by Harold Ward is also based on a good and workable idea, but I think as readers we need someone with whom we can sympathize in a story. I remember how unpleasant it was to read Couples by John Updike (1968) because of its lack of sympathetic or likable characters. Only one character of that kind, one of the women, remains as such in my memory. I told myself I would never again read one of Updike's books because of the effect this one had on me and I never have. In getting back to "The Skull," you're kind of glad when the two main characters meet their ends.

"The Ape-Man" by James B. M. Clark, Jr., starts out well and does pretty well until you reach the anticlimax. I'm afraid the ending isn't very satisfying.

Now we come to a special case, that of Otis Adelbert Kline, author of "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" and probably also of "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die." Willard E. Hawkins' story "The Dead Man's Tale," a story outright of the occult and of psychic pseudo-phenomena, came first in Weird Tales. "Ooze," an early science fiction story, came second. Third in order is the first installment of Kline's serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." Whether Kline had read Hawkins' and Rud's stories or not, he seems to have attempted to bridge the gap between them, for his story, which also includes occult and psychic elements, is actually a kind of science fiction or science fantasy story. That's an interesting enough idea. More interesting in both of Kline's stories--I assume that "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" was his--are the protagonists' travels through vastnesses of time and space. This was still early in the evolution of weird fiction. Kline wasn't there quite yet, and his protagonists' travels are not real or actual. They take place instead only in their own minds as they experience altered states of consciousness. In one case, it's a kind of dream-vision. In the other, it's a near-death experience. These two stories are not especially good. The inclusion of ectoplasm in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" really weakens it. But we can't simply dismiss them, the reason being that they are two of the earliest examples of weird-fictional odysseys and weird-fictional treatments of time and space to appear in Weird Tales. And they were written by a firsttime author.

"Ooze" is the most well-developed of all of the stories in the first issue. Written by a science-minded author--Rud was the son of two medical doctors and studied medicine himself--"Ooze" is fairly strong as an early science fiction story. It's also an early example of the monster made by science, in the mode of Frankenstein's monster. (I think we can call them both lab leak stories. If the coronavirus plandemic has done anything good at all, it has given us a real-world, unifying idea that may lie behind so much of our genre fiction, i.e., the lab leak, or, put another way, hubristic science gone wrong.) Good monsters make good jumping-off points for genre fiction. Swamp monsters are always popular. Beyond that, "Ooze" is probably the only story in the first issue that was capable of carrying it. I'm not sure that any other story could have provided such a strong centerpiece. Few would have made good cover stories.

That leaves what I think are the best or strongest--or maybe only my favorites--in the first issue of Weird Tales. In addition to "Ooze" these are:

• "The Mystery of Black Jean" by Julian Kilman--An out-of-the-ordinary story, almost like a folktale, fairy tale, or fable.

• "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson--A really terrifying tale if you consider the possibility that it could have been based in fact. One of the most even and sober accounts in the first issue, at least in the voices of the two American soldiers.

• "The Unknown Beast" by Howard Ellis Davis--Yes, it includes the n-word, but I think we have to disregard that as an artifact of early twentieth-century life in the South. Remember that word is used both by a white man and a black man in their everyday conversation. Beyond that, Ellis could have developed his story a little more and to greater effect.

• "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham--Sober, concise, insightful, no flab, and no purple prose. I think that Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt were right to include this story in their anthology of the best of 1923.

• "The Weaving Shadows" by W.H. Holmes--A flawed story to be sure and not fully developed, but interesting nonetheless. Possibly ahead of its time in the development of Weird Tales.

• "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding--A little adolescent--its authors were very young when they wrote it--but still interesting. It could be a plot for a comic book story. Alternatively, it would have fit in with magazine science fiction of the 1920s and '30s.

• "The Return of Paul Slavsky" Captain George Warburton Lewis--Another out-of-the-ordinary story for that first issue. The character Olga Slavsky is memorable, and what she does to one of the detectives is both weird and gruesome.

I think I have one more article on the first issue of Weird Tales. I would like to look at subsequent issues of "The Unique Magazine," but only in summary. In this, its centenary, we're still only partway through a look at that first year.

Vincent Napoli's illustration and the first page of the reprinting of "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud in the January 1952 issue of Weird Tales.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley