At just two pages of text, "The Traveler" by Francesco Tignini is the shortest story in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. There are three illustrations accompanying the story, a full-page illustration taking up the main title page, and two half-page illustrations after that. There are also eight breaks, signified by little black Cthulhus or mean-faced tentacled aliens. The whole thing makes for some pretty thin content.
Francesco Tignini is presumably the same person who has worked in television and movies as an assistant director, production assistant, unit production manager, producer, and actor. He has a page on the social media website Goodreads. As I write, on November 16, 2024, he is reading books by Jonathan Maberry, the current editor of Weird Tales magazine. (Maybe they're working on a TV project together.) So the pattern still holds: Francesco Tignini works in TV and movies and is not primarily an author of works in prose, and he is a friend of the editor, in other words, an insider. H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote a story called "The Outsider." As an outsider, would he have been welcome in the current Weird Tales?
"The Traveler" is an alien abduction story. It has just about all of the most worn-out tropes of that type: A man is driving alone at night on a back road. His trip is interrupted. He sees bright lights in the sky or on the ground. Leaving his car, he comes upon the typical gray alien. Although the alien has come here from another star system by some incredibly advanced technology, his spacecraft has broken down and he's trying to repair it like Goober on The Andy Griffith Show. Rendered unconscious, the man is taken aboard the alien craft. There he undergoes an examination. We have seen and read all of this before. Some of it was in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in 1956. Most of it was in the supposedly true accounts of Betty and Barney Hill. It was also in a tale told by scoutmaster Sonny DesVergers in 1952. (He was a Florida Man, maybe one of the first.) There was another account, more well known than DesVergers'. That one involved Travis Walton. We were promised new things in "The Eyrie." There is a slight twist at the end of Mr. Tignini's story, but there is really nothing new here. I have a sense that the editor and his authors think that we as readers don't know anything about fiction, literature, art, history, storytelling, or popular culture, that we have never seen or heard any of these things before. If that's what's happening, I think it's kind of insulting.
The only name dropped in "The Traveler" is that of Chuck Berry. (Well, him and Bigfoot.) This is done, I guess, so that we know that the author is cool and with it. He mixes his tenses. I don't know why. He also has a pretty limited vocabulary. The F-word is one of his favorites. He uses it six times, I think, in two pages of text. This is almost his whole description of the alien craft: "a f--king spaceship." Wow. Way to write. There are other vulgarities, too. And there is at least one seeming anachronism: the man's car is equipped with both an airbag and a pushbutton cigarette lighter, and he carries a cellphone. But this is what TV people do: they think we don't notice their anachronisms, mistakes, inconsistencies, plot holes, ignorance, lack of research, etc. As for cosmic horror content, there is in this story the alien presence but not much of the void or abyss. The narrator looks towards the road and sees: "Nothing. Darkness." He looks towards the forest. What does he see? "Nothing. Darkness."
I guess it pays to be an insider and a friend of the editor.
It's hard for me to believe that the editor couldn't find a better story from the countless number of writers populating this vast continent, or even from the slush pile that must surely still exist in the files of Weird Tales. I'll close by saying that among the duties of an editor is to maintain high quality in the magazine under his charge. If that high quality is not maintained, we really shouldn't blame the authors. Instead the blame must fall on the editor.
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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