More than one hundred years ago, in May/June/July 1924, Weird Tales magazine had what it called its anniversary number, and if you had laid down your money--four whole bits--you could have had 192 pages of stories, essays, and little pieces of non-fiction to pore over for the next several months. And it had to last that long because the next issue didn't show up until November.
Throughout 2023, some of us waited for a centennial issue of "The Unique Magazine." And we waited . . . and waited . . .
And finally it arrived.
On October 16, 2023, I ordered two copies of Weird Tales #367. In the email message confirming my order, this issue was identified as having been dated May 2024. I don't think it was available in May. I'm pretty sure I placed my order as soon as it was available on the Weird Tales website. In any case, in Issue Number 367, published in 2023, Weird Tales magazine finally observed its own one-hundredth anniversary.
Weird Tales #367 is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. That term, cosmic horror, is evidently a synonym for Lovecraftian horror, named of course for H.P. Lovecraft. In publishing a cosmic horror issue, Weird Tales appears to have been returning to form. In 2012, Jeff VanderMeer had urged us to move past Lovecraft. That doesn't appear to have worked. We're still reading Lovecraft, and there are still lots of people reading and writing Lovecraftian fiction. I would hazard that the long-dead Lovecraft sold more books last year than did Mr. VanderMeer.
Weird Tales is also, like I said, an anniversary issue. On the front cover is a small design element that looks something like this:
Anniversary- or at least history-related content inside includes the following:
- "Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales Go Hand-in-Tentacle" by the editor, Jonathan Maberry. Mr. Maberry's essay is the whole of "The Eyrie," which used to be a letters column.
- "When the Stars Are Right: The Weird Tales Origins of Cosmic Horror," an essay by Nicholas Diak.
- "Cosmic vs. Abrahamic Horror," an essay by F. Paul Wilson.
- A full-color illustration on the last interior page showing Cthulhu chasing a $100 bill stuck on a fishhook, à la the Nirvana album Nevermind. And maybe that's a nod, after all, to Jeff VanderMeer and his sentiments about Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction.
On the back cover is an announcement for an anniversary anthology of Weird Tales. I might cover that anthology later. For now I would like to write about Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue.
To be continued. . .
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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