Weird Tales #367 (2023) is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror, with the sub-theme being the 100th anniversary of Weird Tales. These two themes kind of go together. H.P. Lovecraft was not in the first issue of March 1923, but Weird Tales is associated with him more closely than with any other of its authors. Lovecraft wrote a particular kind of weird fiction. People call it Lovecraftian horror, also cosmic horror. Lovecraft, or shadows of Lovecraft, hang over this issue and over weird fiction in general, even unto today. If you're going to observe a centennial in 2023 and you want people to join in, you might as well return to form and go with some name recognition--and with what you believe will bring in the dough, if anything in print will bring in the dough these days.
The cover story and lead story in Weird Tales #367 is "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola. "The City in the Sea" has its Lovecraftian elements, but the foundation of the story is in a poem entitled "The City in the Sea," written by Edgar Allan Poe and published in its final form in 1845. The story in Weird Tales begins with an excerpt from the poem. That excerpt serves as an epigraph. Poe used epigraphs in many of his own stories. So right away we have a story with its title taken from Poe, that begins with an epigraph by Poe, and that has the use of an epigraph as in Poe. The story also describes a city like that described by Poe in a poem that can well be described as apocalyptic in its vision. In beginning with Poe, the Cosmic Horror Issue goes back even further than a century and the beginnings of Weird Tales. It actually taps into the early years of American literature and the apocalyptic vision that has been with us and in us since our own origins on these shores and in these forests, both bright and dark. By the way, "The City in the Sea" was loosely adapted to film in City Under the Sea, directed by Jacques Tourneur, starring Vincent Price, and released in 1965.
Poe is in the introductory essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue, too, specifically, in a brief discussion of his only novel-length work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, from 1838 (which has meta content or meta origins of its own). Poe was also in the first year of Weird Tales, and his spirit in all of the years in between. As we know, Lovecraft was inspired by Poe. In his first letter to "The Eyrie," published 101 years ago last month, Lovecraft wrote: "My models are invariably the older writers, especially Poe, who has been my favorite literary figure since early childhood." And it was almost certainly for a nineteenth-century hardbound collection by Poe that Weird Tales was named. It's fitting, I guess, that the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales would begin with Poe and with meta-references and inside information about him and his literary offspring.
To be continued . . .
by Edgar Allan Poe
(Illustration by Edmund Dulac, 1912)
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye—
Not the gayly-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.
* * *
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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