A Lovecraft Sighting

I'm fitting things in as I come across them. I hope you don't mind going back and forth between topics this week.

I have been writing about teenager movies and high school movies, also about H.P. Lovecraft. Now I can write about both in the same entry. This past weekend we watched The DUFF, a teenager/high school movie released in 2015. It's a funny and enjoyable movie that hearkens back to previous movies of this type. It begins with an allusion to The Breakfast Club (1985). The principal reminds me of the character Onyx Blackman in Strangers with Candy (1999-2000). I imagine there are other references and allusions as well.

The title character in The DUFF is a girl named Bianca, played by Mae Whitman. She's a fan of horror movies. Rather than decorate the walls of her bedroom with concert posters and pictures of teen heartthrobs, she has chosen horror movie posters and other horror-related art. There is a poster for Murders in the Rue Morgue, starring Bela Lugosi and released in 1932, hanging above her bed. Above the title, in big, prominent letters, is the name of the original author, Edgar Allan Poe. Far less prominent on her wall is a small portrait drawing of H.P. Lovecraft--Lovecraft as teen heartthrob.

There is product placement in The DUFF. There is also president placement. Look for the names or images of Chester Arthur, James Buchanan, and Millard Fillmore, also for the middle initial of George W. Bush. There may be others. Be on the lookout for them. The Internet doesn't seem to have noticed this yet. Maybe you're seeing it here first.

Art by Karoly Grosz (1897-1952).

P.S. I have in the works a long series on Lovecraft. It begins this week.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Lou Feck (1925-1981)

For Remembrance Sunday, November 9, and Veterans Day, November 11, 2025

Yesterday I mentioned the artist Lou Feck in regard to his illustrations for The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth (Bantam Books, 1977). I would like to write about Lou Feck today, for he had an indirect connection to Weird Tales magazine, and I find that there isn't any biography of him on line, or at least as far as I have searched. He was a very good artist, especially good with airplanes and other machines, as well as with architecture. Like all really good artists, though, he was good at handling the human figure. He needed those skills in his work as a cover artist for science fiction and fantasy paperbacks. He did other paperback cover art as well.

Lou Feck's name can be added to the list of Conan cover artists. He also created the cover art for Kull, the Fabulous Warrior King by Robert E. Howard (Bantam Books, 1978). Feck's depictions of airplanes in flight, as well as of airfields, hangars, and other things related to aviation, are excellent. Now I find that he was acquainted with the field of aviation, as he had served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. Frederick Forsyth (1938-2025), by the way, also served in the air force, in his case the Royal Air Force, or RAF. He was commissioned three days after his eighteenth birthday and became a pilot a year later. At age nineteen, he was at the time the youngest pilot in the RAF. The late Mr. Forsyth flew the de Havilland Vampire, a graceful-looking, twin-tail, single-engine jet fighter. The pilot in The Shepherd flies the same type of aircraft. Frederick Forsyth died almost exactly one hundred years after Lou Feck's birth.

Louis Edward Feck was born on July 8, 1925, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Vela Bertyl (Edwards) Willett and Louis Fairfax Willett, Sr. The two were married on January 22, 1924, and divorced on or about March 15, 1930. Feck's name at birth was actually Louis Fairfax Willett, Jr. In the U.S. Census of 1930 (April 11), he was enumerated with his divorced mother in Norwood, Ohio. She worked then as an editor at a lithographing company. Three years later, a portrait of Vela Edwards Willett, painted by Glen Tracy (1883-1956), was included in an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum. So, Lou Feck came from a family connected to the art world.

Vela Willett remarried in 1932. Her new husband was Edward A. Feck. The couple lived in Melrose, Massachusetts, in 1940 and 1950 when the census taker came around. By then they had had a daughter, Rosemary Vela Feck, later Caldwell. The former Louis Fairfax Willett, Jr., was by then going by the name Louis Edward Feck, nicknamed Lou.

Lou Feck studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts  in 1940-1941 and graduated from Melrose High School in 1943. From July 24, 1943, to February 17, 1946, he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. In 1947, he resumed his studies at Vesper George School of Art in Boston. In 1950, he graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

On June 18, 1950, Feck married Ruth Evangeline Cutkomp in New York City. Born on February 24, 1925, in Columbus City, Iowa, she was an artist, too. She graduated from Rock Island High School, in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1943 and attended the Chicago Art Institute in 1944-1945. From 1945 to 1946, she served in the U.S. Navy. Like her new husband, she graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1950. The young couple lived in Brooklyn and worked in advertising and illustration in New York City. I wonder if they knew John and Elaine Duillo, another husband-and-wife pair of illustrators who had also attended the Pratt Institute.

Lou Feck enjoyed a long and successful career as an artist. You have no doubt seen his work. Rather than list and show his credits here, I'll refer you first to a blog called The Paperback Palette and a long article called "The Fantastic Paperback Cover Art of Lou Feck" by Jeffersen, dated April 10, 2018, here; and second, to a blog called Poplitiko and an entry called "The Secret Work of Lou Feck, Cover Artist Supreme" by Alex Ness, dated August 25, 2025, here. You can also look at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Lou Feck died suddenly and unexpectedly on November 4, 1981. He was just fifty-six years old. Ruth E. (Cutkomp) Feck died on May 11, 1990, in Broward County, Florida. Feck was buried at Huntington Rural Cemetery in Suffolk County, New York. His signature appears on his headstone. Next to his is another headstone with the signature of Anita D. Feck. Her dates are given as 1930-2016. Someone named Anita Feck wrote a letter to the science fiction magazine Locus, published in its issue of July 1982 (#258). I don't know what to make of all of that exactly. My best guess is that Anita D. Feck was Lou Feck's wife and widow and that she wrote to inform science fiction fandom of the death of her husband. I don't know anything else about her.

Kull, The Fabulous Warrior King (Bantam Books, 1978), with cover art by Lou Feck. Created by Robert E. Howard, Kull was first in Weird Tales in August 1929 in the novelette "The Shadow Kingdom." As you can see in this and other works by the artist, Feck painted using a dark, neutral or cool palette. Maybe he borrowed the red cape from Frank Frazetta's justly famous cover for Conan (Lancer, 1967).

Conan the Rebel by Poul Anderson (Bantam Books, 1981) with cover art by Lou Feck using his pseudonym Zorin. Someone is supposed to have figured out that Feck used this pseudonym, but the links in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database don't seem to go anywhere. Conan was of course also created by Howard. The character first appeared in Weird Tales in "The Phoenix on the Sword," December 1932.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Two Writers Lost

I promised to write about two recent real-world developments. The first was the advent on October 27, 2025, of a machine-man's machine-o-pedia. (Say what you will about Wikipedia, at least it's created by humans.) The second is a human story.

We have lost a lot of people (and animal companions, poor Lucy) in 2025. This is as it has always been. Among them were two authors. I didn't find out right away that they had died. It was only during my five-weeks-and-a-day that I learned that Martin Cruz Smith and Frederick Forsyth left us in the year 2025.

* * * 

Born on November 3, 1942, in Reading, Pennsylvania, Martin Cruz Smith was best known for his detective novels set in the Soviet Union and afterwards in Russia. The first of these was Gorky Park (1981), an exciting and engrossing book that was made into a movie in 1983. Although he was known for his detective novels, Mr. Smith got his start in other genres. His earliest credit in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is The Indians Won, an alternate history published in 1970. I have never read it, but I think we can easily add it to the Internet American Indian Science Fiction Database. Martin Cruz Smith also wrote the horror novel Nightwing (1977), which was also adapted to film, in 1979. (Links here and here.)

Martin Cruz Smith died on July 11, 2025, in San Rafael, California.

* * * 

Frederick Forsyth was born on August 25, 1938, in Ashford, Kent, England. He realized instant fame with the success of his novel The Day of the Jackal, published in 1971 and adapted to film in 1973. (I had thought of him as significantly older than Mr. Smith, but only four years separated them.) Many more international thrillers, some of them almost documentary or journalistic in nature, followed. I have read several of them with pleasure, and I have one more waiting to be read on my shelf.

I have read books in a similar vein by John le Carré (1931-2020), and I have enjoyed them, too, but reading John le Carré often leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Reading Frederick Forsyth never does, even if his books are not always very novelistic. (His female agent in The Negotiator is a basically a non-entity.) The reason for that, I know, is that the former was pretty well anti-American (and on the left end of the political spectrum), whereas the latter was not. Getting more to the heart of the matter (that was Greene, not Forsyth), Frederick Forsyth seemed to be a good and decent person. I have a feeling that John le Carré was perhaps a little nasty. At least that seems to come out in his books. (John le Carré went to Ireland to exit from Brexit. Frederick Forsyth went there to visit his first wife in the nursing home.) Anyway, although Mr. Forsyth was known for writing in one genre, he also wrote in another, namely, the ghost story, though his was of an unusual type. Its title is The Shepherd. I read it earlier this year in the Bantam Books edition of 1977, illustrated by Lou Feck (1925-1981).

Frederick Forsyth died on June 9, 2025, in Jordans, Buckinghamshire, England.

* * *

I read books by both Martin Cruz Smith and Frederick Forsyth this year. I began the year by reading Independence Square (2023) by Mr. Smith. Like I said, Gorky Park is an exciting book. I remember when it was published and how exciting it was then. Sometimes a novel is just a novel, but sometimes it can be an event. Gorky Park was an event in 1981. Independence Square, on the opposite end of Arkady Renko's career as a police detective, is, I'm sad to say, a letdown. It ends too quickly, as if its author were in a rush to finish. And maybe he was. Anyway, I'm not sure I have ever read a book set so recently in the past. That was a new experience for me.

Independence Square touches on two pet projects of the left, the coronavirus and war in Ukraine. I didn't let those things bother me, though. It bothered me far more to discover that the author's powers were fading, partly because of his age, I'm sure, but more due, I'm equally sure, to the Parkinson's disease that had beset him. I hated to think of his suffering. Like him, Arkady Renko has Parkinson's disease in Independence Square. Like him, his powers fade. And like Travis McGee and Johnny Fever, Renko finds himself to be a father.

* * * 

Hundreds of books came into my possession earlier this year after the man upstairs died, leaving them behind as we all must one day leave everything and everyone behind. Among them were The Day of the Jackal and The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth. I read both this year. This fall, I read The Negotiator (1989). That book is better when the story is more particular and closer to its characters. It's not as good when it takes a bird's-eye view. The set-up is based on the idea of "peak oil." As I was reading, it came to me that "peak oil" was the 1980s and '90s version of "overpopulation." So many people, including conservatives (who should have known better), accepted these things as real threats, the first in the 1960s and '70s, the second in later decades. Science fiction authors (who also should have known better) fell for both as well. "Peak oil" turned out to be naïve at best, a hoax or an outright power grab at worst. The extraction and production of oil have continued apace. Fossil fuels continue to fuel the world. And now we have the exact opposite of "overpopulation," as demographic disaster in the form of a demographic decline and possible collapse seems ready to strike. By the way, The Negotiator was published in early 1989, projecting the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev and the continued existence of the Soviet Union into the 1990s. By the end of the year, Mr. Forsyth's novel was out of date, as the world--as Jesus Jones sang--woke up from history.

The Negotiator is, unfortunately, a step down from Frederick Forsyth's previous books. As for The Shepherd, well, it stands alone in his oeuvre as far as I can tell. It's really just a short story or novelette, but it's expanded to fill a short book with the inclusion of illustrations, again, by Lou Feck, of airplanes, lonely skies, and deserted airfields. The Shepherd is a Christmas story, and so maybe you can look for it as the holidays approach. Like the lonely pilot in The Shepherd, England seems to need saving by its ghosts from the past. I wonder if such a ghost--King Arthur of legend, or like Merlin in C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength--may come and do it. The pilot in The Shepherd is in search of an airstrip on which to land. Let it not become Airstrip One.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Shoggoths with Smiley Faces

If Elon Musk can turn to fantasy and science fiction for his AI-related terms, why can't everybody else? And they have. It started in December 2022. I have found out about it only today. (I write on November 8, 2025.) The term is actually derived from an image. The image is of a shoggoth, representing Artificial Intelligence, presenting a smiley face to humanity. See, AI doesn't mean any harm. It's actually really nice. It wants to help. Now shoggoths with smiley faces have become a meme.* And now some people seem to be looking forward to the arrival of the AI-shoggoth. Evidently, they have never seen the cover of the February 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. They don't seem to realize that you're supposed to run away from shoggoths, not towards them!

I have encountered this term, drawn from H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" (Astounding Stories, Feb-Mar-Apr. 1936), in an article called "Baby Shoggoth Is Listening" by Dan Kagan-Kans, dated October 29, 2025, on the website The American Scholar, here. I think Mr. Kagan-Kans is writing in a light vein, but his essay is also supposed to be thought-provoking. What he writes about, though, is monstrous and nightmarish, just like a shoggoth. And he seems to be okay with that monstrousness, even to welcome it. The lure seems to be twofold. First, the AI-shoggoth will read everything the writer has ever written, even if his fellow human beings never read a word. Second, by his writing, assuming he does enough of it, the AI-shoggoth will recreate him after he is gone, and so he will live forever. It's the twin dream of the narcissistic, puffed-up, prideful writer: everyone will read and linger over every word I ever write, and through my writing I will never die. Again, monstrous. And until I know otherwise, I will place everyone who can't wait to be replaced by, united with, or created by a machine--or to shed his humanity and become a machine--into the category of monsters.

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*You can read about the origins and history of this phenomenon in an entry called "Shoggoth with Smiley Face (Artificial Intelligence)" on the website Know Your Meme, here.

P.S. Is AI an abbreviation for the Apple In the Garden of Eden?

P.P.S. In keeping with the theme and image of the train wreck, I just remembered that Lovecraft described the shoggoth as like "a vast, onrushing subway train." In riding the AI train (trAIn), are we headed for disaster?

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Train Wrecks & Rocketships

Super 8 (2011) is nostalgic and meta-fictional in more ways than one. Set in 1979, it is self-consciously about the past. You could say there is product placement in the film, but those products are shown not for commercial purposes (or at least not directly) but to recreate the atmosphere of the past. I think this is done mostly in good taste and generally pretty effectively. Super 8 evokes the 1970s pretty well, I think. That's especially true in the character of Cary McCarthy, the kid with the explosives, played by Ryan Lee. The moviemakers seem to have gone back in time to fetch him into the 2010s. I knew kids who looked and acted just like him then.

Super 8 is also self-consciously about the moviemaking of the past. J.J. Abrams (Gen X) wrote and directed it in the Steven Spielberg-Joe Dante-Richard Donner mode of the 1980s. (Two of those three are very early Baby Boomers. Steven Spielberg was born in Ohio.) Mr. Spielberg in fact co-produced Super 8. So the movie is an attempt to recreate two pasts, the real-life adolescent past of the 1970s and the moviemaking past of the 1980s. By the way, Joe Dante directed Explorers (1985), another teenage science fiction movie, which may have been an inspiration for the video for The Smashing Pumpkins song "Rocket," released in 1994. The action in the video crosses the decades by way of an Einsteinian time dilation, and so there is depicted, all together, past, present, and future.

Super 8 is about some kids trying to make a movie when they are interrupted by a train wreck. (A dozen years after the movie was released, a real train wreck occurred on the opposite end of Ohio, in East Palestine. The harm there was real. Unlike in the movie, the response of the U.S. government was slow and ineffective. I suspect that that was a kind of punishment meted out to a bunch of deplorables who would dare to vote for the other party and candidate. On the other hand, it could have been due simply to stupidity and incompetence. Robert A. Heinlein made that formulation in 1941. His insights carry through to today.) In Zapruder-film or Blowup (1966) fashion, they examine their film for evidence of what has happened. So Super 8 is a movie about moviemaking within the movie and refers to moviemaking outside of the movie. I would call that meta. And now it occurs to me that Super 8 is like an adolescent version of Boogie Nights (released in 1997, set in the 1970s and '80s) except that the moviemakers within that film are interrupted by changes in technology, lots of drug use, and those forever pesky human feelings and relationships. Super 8 happens before the apple and Boogie Nights after. The amateur child actors in Super 8, by the way, are better than the adult porn actors are in Boogie Nights, within their respective movies of course.

One more thing about "Rocket" . . .

Awhile back I noticed a similarity--and a distinct difference--in the lyrics of "Rocket" compared to those of "For Pete's Sake" by The Monkees, released in 1967 and used as the closing theme of The Monkees TV show. In the former, the singer--Billy Corgan--closes by exclaiming, "I shall be free/I shall be free." In the latter, the singer--Micky Dolenz--closes with a similar exclamation: "We gotta be free/We gotta be free." The first, though, is about only an individual, while the second is about an entire generation. I versus we. Mr. Corgan was born the year the Monkees song was released, but as a Gen Xer, does he have the same sense of belonging to a generation as did the young people of the 1960s? Or was one of the significant changes of the late 1980s and the whole of the 1990s a sense of separation and isolation among young people from the wider world, including from people their own age? So much of the 1960s was about young people. Could the same thing be said of those later years and decades?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Moviemakers Grok the Past

The Faculty (1998) is meta-fictional. Its characters know they're in an alien invasion story, and they refer to other such stories that have appeared in print and on film. It is from other alien invasion stories that they know that if they can neutralize the alien queen they can have all of their friends back and the threat will be ended.

* * * 

If I remember right, there aren't any meta-references in The Breakfast Club (1985). Times changed in the fourteen years that separated the release of these two films. More than fourteen years separated their respective creators. John Hughes, who wrote and directed The Breakfast Club, was an early Baby Boomer. Kevin Williamson who wrote and Robert Rodriguez who directed The Faculty come from Generation X. I don't know if that explains anything exactly, but it's clear that there were some pretty big changes in our culture between the 1980s and the 1990s and early 2000s. You could write a book or a dozen about those changes and what they might mean.

There have been bigger changes since the early 2000s. People still make teenager movies and high school movies, also alien invasion movies, but I feel certain that these are vastly different from similar movies from the past. And why wouldn't they be? Everything changes. Nonetheless, nostalgia seems to prevail. For example, Shoplifters of the World, released in 2021, is about teenagers living in Colorado in 1987 and lamenting the breakup of The Smiths. (The writer and director of the film, Stephen Kijak, is Gen X.) Last time I wrote I mentioned the film Super 8, which was released in 2011. Super 8 is meta in that it's a movie about a movie, made by teenagers in a small city or town in western Ohio. More importantly, it's meta in that it's self-consciously about the past, being set in 1979, the same year, incidentally, in which Alien was released. Remember that The Smashing Pumpkins' biggest and probably best-loved song is called "1979," the video of which is an exercise in nostalgia in which the singer--the storyteller--sits in the backseat of a car, a 1972 Dodge Charger, as his friends from the past go about their night's activities, like a four-and-a-half-minute American Graffiti (released in 1973, set in 1962). He's not really there. He has placed his current self into the seat he occupied in the past, at the outset of his adolescence. (Billy Corgan is Gen X, too.) He's like a ghost from the future, seeing but unseen in that haunted past. The song "1979," by the way, was released in 1996.

Things may be gained but others are always lost. We try to go back, but it proves impossible. We try to recapture the past and must always fail. We will forever find ourselves thrown upon the shores of today, forever marooned in the present. 

* * *

This blog entry is meta-factual. It's a blog entry about my blog. I noticed this past summer that the number of daily visits jumped by a lot. There were nearly 100,000 visits last month and now about 10,000 per day. I can't say why that is. I have suspected that a large number of those visits are actually made by the engines of artificial intelligence (AI). I have a feeling that I'm being ripped off by a lot of machines which are, to be fair to them, even though they don't need it, prompted to do the ripping off by a lot of lazy, stupid, impatient, and ethically challenged people. You know who you are. Or maybe you don't. I have thought about bringing this blog to an end because of AI. I don't do what I do for the benefit of machines and the machine-like people behind the machines. I do what I do for the benefit of people--real human beings of real human feeling, people questing for knowledge of the past and present and of the human culture of that same past and present. I might sound like Jeremiah, but AI might prove the ruination of the Internet, if it isn't already ruined.

* * *

I promised to cover a couple of real-world developments that I found out about during my five-weeks-and-a-day. I found out about one of those while sitting, in late October, at a computer in a university library . . .

On October 27, 2025, Elon Musk launched an online encyclopedia called Grokipedia. I had a feeling that this new website is AI-generated, and it is. I stay away from AI as much as possible. Remember that a vampire cannot enter your house unless you invite him in, but once he's in, you can never get him to go away again. Anyway, I thought I would have a look, and so I searched for the term "Weird Tales." There is a long entry on Weird Tales in Grokipedia. On the day that I looked, there were 110 footnotes in that entry. Eleven of those are in reference to my blog. I don't take any pride in that. Rewards, accolades, and recognition bestowed by machines are worthless, meaningless. But this makes me think that, yes, many of the visits to my blog are from machines. I would like to tell them: Stay away. You're not invited. You're not welcome here. This blog is for human beings only.

* * *

Like Clea DuVall's character in The Faculty, Elon Musk in his new venture refers to the works of Robert A. Heinlein, specifically in his case to Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and the Martian word grok. Heinlein may have died nearly four decades ago, but his works and influence live on.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

An Alien Invasion for Halloween

On Halloween I worked on a windy hilltop and in the evening drove on dark roads under a half-moon, including a road that runs along the route that the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln took from Washington, D.C., to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. By the time I got to where I was going, it was too late to do anything Halloween-related, but the next night we watched a scary movie on TV, and so that's what I'll write about today.

The movie is called The Faculty, and it was released in 1998. It's an alien invasion movie that takes place in the fictional town of Herrington, Ohio.* There are lots of characters in The Faculty but not too many. The main characters are high school students, but there are teachers and other faculty, too. The faculty members are taken over by aliens, one by one, and soon the students are, too. Pretty soon it becomes hard to tell who is an alien and who is still human.

The Faculty owes a lot to previous science fiction stories and movies, and it knows and acknowledges that. For example, one character refers to The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (1954, 1955) as a ripoff of The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951). I don't see it that way, but that's beside the point. The point is that the moviemakers are letting us know that they know that their own story is essentially a ripoff. Theirs is a deflection but a harmless one. Once we're aware that they're aware, we can sit back and enjoy the movie instead of saying, "This is all just a ripoff." By the way, that character, played by Clea DuVall, is the science fiction expert.** It is from her that the others learn about the nature of the alien threat and how to nullify it. She knows these things only by having read lots of science fiction stories. Like Faye Dunaway's character in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), she just knows and there isn't any need to find out. It's a neat trick by the moviemakers and avoids a lot of screen time spent on investigations when the main action in the movie is essentially a chase scene and a lot of hiding and sneaking.

The Faculty has things in common with The Blob (1956), too, but nobody in the movie mentions that. They do mention Independence Day (1996), however, and question why aliens would come to Earth in a podunk place in Ohio versus landing on the lawn of the White House. By asking that question, they essentially answer it, for a quiet and insidious invasion is more likely to work beginning in a place where people who are more powerful and more able to resist aren't rather than are.*** Remember that The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) begins in a small town in California and that the alien pods are grown and distributed as like an agricultural product. Rather than a great mother ship, the vehicle of invasion turns out to be a lowly farm truck.

There is in The Faculty an oblique reference to a concept that C.M. Kornbluth memorably covered in his short story "The Silly Season" (1950), namely that we are being softened up for invasion by repeated false reports--or in this case stories and movies about alien invasions--of  flying saucers. If you cry wolf enough times, nobody believes you when the wolf really arrives at your door. I can't say, though, that the movie-makers were aware of Kornbluth's story.

There is one other movie at least to which The Faculty owes a debt, for this film is a lot like a science-fiction version of The Breakfast Club (1985), with Jordana Brewster as Molly Ringwald, Clea DuVall as Ally Sheedy, Shawn Hatosy as Emilio Estevez, Josh Hartnett as Judd Nelson, and Elijah Wood as Anthony Michael Hall. That's an imperfect comparison, but it seems close enough. By the way, Laura Harris is an actress without a counterpart in The Breakfast Club, but there's reason for that. Watch the movie and you'll find out why. Another by-the-way: the queen-mother alien**** in The Faculty, as well as her little offspring, have tentacles. I would say that their lineage can be traced to H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds from a century before.

It's too late to say Happy Halloween for the year 2025. I had intended to but arrived too late. Maybe this is close enough. Next I'll write about a couple of recent developments in the wider world.

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*Super Eight (2011) takes place in Ohio, too, supposedly in western Ohio, even if the name Belmont County comes over the police radio. Belmont County is actually on the exact opposite end of the state. And what is the most populous city in Belmont County? None other than Martins Ferry, birthplace of William Dean Howells.

**She is first shown reading Double Star, another book by Heinlein, published in 1956. While we're on the subject of ripoffs--or call them more politely influences, inspirations, or homages--we can say that Double Star owes a lot to The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, from 1894.

***If the train wreck and chemical spill that happened in East Palestine, Ohio, had happened instead in President John Gill's Delaware, there would have been a completely different response from his regime. We can be sure of that.

****Sigourney Weaver of Alien (1979) earns mention in The Faculty as well.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Honest Abe & EAP

I had hoped to write again about Edgar Allan Poe in the anniversary month of his death, but I fell through the cracks of the world and only on Halloween night did I come out again. Things changed a little in that five weeks and a day. I'll write about a couple of them, but first I'll write about the more distant past.

* * *

Nearly two years ago, at Thanksgiving time in 2023, I wrote about Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln. I repeated the observation that one of our greatest presidents and one of our greatest writers were born within twenty-four days of each other in 1809. In that they were contemporaries, I wondered then whether Honest Abe ever read Poe. And then I found an answer, and the answer is yes.

I found the answer in a book called Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story by Howard Haycraft (1905-1991). I have the "newly enlarged edition" published by Biblo and Tannen in 1974. The original edition was published in 1941. A scholar and historian of the crime and detective genres, Haycraft found his own answer for the question of Did Abraham Lincoln read the works of Edgar Allan Poe? in the work of an earlier author, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), whom I think of as a late 19th-century author but who was old enough to have written about Abraham Lincoln while he was campaigning for president in 1860.

In his book, Haycraft referred to Howells' "little known 'campaign biography'" as the source of his information on Lincoln and Poe. That book is, by name, Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, co-authored with John L. Hayes (who wrote the biography of Hannibal Hamlin) and published in New York and Columbus, Ohio, in 1860. Howells' portion of the book was later reprinted as Life of Abraham Lincoln, including in a facsimile edition of the original, corrected by hand by Lincoln himself and published in 1938 and again in 1960.

Here is what Howells had to say about Abraham Lincoln on the subject of Edgar Allan Poe:

     The bent of his mind is mathematical and metaphysical, and he is therefore pleased with the absolute and logical method of Poe's tales and sketches, in which the problem of mystery is given, and wrought out into everyday facts by processes of cunning analysis. It is said that he suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this author. (1960, pp. 31-32)

And I think: what a wonderful development it is that Abraham Lincoln read Edgar Allan Poe!

* * * 

Howells is supposed to have had a not very high opinion of Poe, but I don't have any illustrative quotes. He seems to have shared that opinion with other prominent writers and critics. Popular culture is democratic, and so we should be careful anytime we find ourselves following the masses or the mob lest we also find our minds deadened, or worse than that, blood on our hands. But almost nobody reads Howells anymore and everyone reads Poe: we have made our judgment and our choice.

* * *

In looking for quotes by Howells on Poe, I found this quote instead:

     Yet every now and then I read a book with perfect comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole course of the story; "no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.

These words are supposed to have come from an essay in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 73 (1886), but I haven't found them in an online search. If they are indeed Howells' own, then he (as a realist) set himself up in opposition to the mainstream of American literature, that is if Leslie Fiedler was correct in positing in his Love and Death in the American Novel that "the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror," (Delta/Dell, 1966, p. 26) and that "our classic literature is a literature of horror for boys." (p. 29) Howells' brief summary of popular fiction, though, pretty well describes genre fiction, including the contents of Weird Tales.

* * *

I understand what Howells meant. It's good and I think necessary to read fiction in which "nothing happens," not in the Seinfeld sense of nothing happens but in the sense of nothing happens that is terrible or shocking or degrading to the author, his or her characters, or the reader. Readers of today, however, especially in genre fiction, seem to love and revel in violence, gore, destruction, nihilism, and so on. Stop and read instead something like a novel by Anne Tyler, or "Story of a Farm-Girl" by Guy de Maupassant (1881), or one like "Kari Aasen in Heaven" by Johan Bojer (1904; 1927), which is a fantasy to be sure but a nice one.

* * *

William Dean Howells was born in Martinsville, Ohio, now known as Martins Ferry. Like Johnny Appleseed, a fellow Ohioan, his family were Swedenborgians. Like Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), also a fellow Ohioan, he worked in his youth as a printer's devil.

During this past very hot summer in the Midwest, I read from The Ohio Guide, compiled by writers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and published in 1940, a book I had found at a secondhand store just a few days before. I was staying at a place along a road mentioned in that book, a road now called Cave Road, near Bainbridge, Ohio. It's a strange, fascinating, and mysterious world we live in when one can be carried away by a book, eighty-five years into the past, there to catch a glimpse of the very place in which one now finds himself. I have compared books to sailing ships, but here it seems apt to compare a book to an automobile, with the author as the driver and tour guide, and the reader as the backseat passenger, with eyes wide open and set upon the horizon. Every mile of road is a page in the book. We may turn its pages by traveling the miles.

Howells is in The Ohio Guide. There is mere mention therein of a figure from Ohio folklore of whom I had never heard and about whom Howells wrote in a book I soon found out was entitled The Leatherwood God (1916). As it turns out, the man called the Leatherwood God was not folkloric at all but--like Johnny Appleseed--a real person. His name was John C. Dylkes, and his career as a well-known figure in the Ohio country began in August 1828 in or near Salesville, situated along Leatherwood Creek in Guernsey County. Dylkes claimed to be a celestial being. I imagine him as another in a long line of Americans who fancied themselves important religious and theological figures. Like Ambrose Bierce, Dylkes disappeared without a trace.

* * *

By the way, Edgar Allan Poe's initials--EAP--are an anagram of the word ape, a kind of which is the perpetrator of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." According to Howard Haycraft and many others, that was the first detective story.

* * *

Finally, I met this past month a retired schoolteacher who was also from Martins Ferry, and I have a friend who is descended from the original settlers of Guernsey County, those who came from the Isle of Guernsey in the early 1800s and who gave that county its name. I will just say that the story of our America is fascinating beyond words and with God's grace will go on and on.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Poems for Poe, No. 2

At the Grave of Poe

by William James Price
Composed in June 1911. Published in The Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911. 

Here, with a few forgotten one, reposes

A bard whose fame our long neglect defies

To him the selfish world gave thorns for roses.

And nations wonder where his body lies.

 

His haunting melodies, too few in number,

In alien hearts beyond the ocean live,

While we his virtues doom to endless slumber,

Condemn his faults, and no reward will give.

 

Ere Time's relentless tread at last has crumbled

These hallowed stones into the silent dust,

Will Pride awake, Ingratitude be humbled,

And Truth compel our spirits to be just?

Ah, grant him now a nobleman's estate,
Lest all the dead arise to prove him great!

* * *

Please note: I have inserted breaks where I believe the poet intended to but which the newspaper may have removed for the sake of conserving space in print. Note that Price's poem is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, which is broken into stanzas as I have done here.

Posted by Terence E. Hanley on the anniversary of Poe's death, October 7, 2025.

Poems for Poe, No. 1

To Edgar Allan Poe

By Howard Elsmere Fuller

Originally in Contemporary American Poets, edited by Horace C. Baker (Boston, 1928). From the website Poetry Explorer.

Thou art a thing of Death--
Born of the love of Life,
Born of the love of Life-in-Death . . . .

Denizen of a world which hath no name,
Which hath no being out of Mind--
Far-flung, with the mad ecstasy of youth,
To the Attic hills where Pan first sang
To a dew-drenched world
The amorous strains of Creation.
Above, in the star-tossed main,
Thou must have sat,
In the cool grey dawn of things
And watched with knowing Messianic eye
The swirling mists of chaos
Stiffen into a world profane.

With a haunting, dreamy sadness
Is bared thy cryptic soul;
With a rhythmic rune of madness,
Thy melancholy soul.

Sea things with seaweed hair
And faces blanched with pale-eyed Death
Sleep on the motley sands--
The crested wave of the sobbing sea
Hath lapped their blood like wine.
Draped in whispering robes of satin,
There dream in weird, fantastic chambers,
Maidens with waxen faces, fragile fingers,
Drained of life by hectic living
In mansions, grim and sunless.

World-old newness exotic
To this sordid clime
Sprang to thy lips erotic
And flowed like ruby wine.

Sweet gamboler in the dewy gardens
Of jeweled Paradise,
Where ruddy roses ebb and flow
In the cheeks of sylph-like children.
Elves, in their amours sweet with thee
Fresh with the matin dews of time,
Whisper to thee things unknown
To the sodden soul of man.

Demons, ghastly, foul and gory
Infest the Stygian gloom,
Spectres, grim and grey and hoary
Come shrieking from the tomb--

Come shrieking from mouldering mausolea,
Whence vague shadows of the uneasy dead,
Eluding Cerberus, the red-eyed watcher,
Fare forth on the sable wings of night
Peopling the sentient blackness
With ghoulish wraiths of terror.

Tears unceasing, bitter sorrow
Hath seared thy lonely years--
The leprous touch of sorrow,
The agony of tears.

The love of woman was to thee
Divinest torture of the soul.
Radiant life was but to thee
The sad betokening of death.

Soft as the sighs of Eros
Is the music of thy pain,
Sweet as the breath of Zephyr,
Fresh as the cooling rain.

Pilgrims journey far to mourn thee
As they would a thing divine,
And they that sought to scorn thee
Pay thee homage at thy shrine.

* * *

 Posted by Terence E. Hanley, 2025.

The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe

The last poem printed in Weird Tales in 1925 was "The Haunted Palace" by Edgar Allan Poe. It first appeared in a magazine published in Baltimore by Nathan C. Brooks (1809-1898). The original title of the magazine was The North American Quarterly. In or about 1838, Brooks renamed his new charge The American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts, or The American Museum for short. Evidently, the magazine was also referred to as the Baltimore Museum. That's a lot to go through, but it seems like there is a lack of clarity and precision out there on the Internet as to the original source of "The Haunted Palace." The date of publication by the way was April 1839.

Poe soon incorporated "The Haunted Palace" into his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in September 1839. "The Haunted Palace" is a poem in six stanzas of eight lines each. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the stanzas are numbered. In Weird Tales, they are not. Without going through these two versions, I can't say whether they are word for word the same.

I have written before about "The Haunted Palace." First I listed it in Poe's works reprinted in Weird Tales. In writing about Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), I listed some of that author's screen adaptations of other works. These included the screenplay for The Haunted Palace (1963), which is actually an adaptation of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, May-July 1941).

In 2021, I wrote about Les Baxter (1922-1996). Baxter wrote the scores for many Hollywood movies, including The Dunwich Horror, from 1970. Inasmuch as The Haunted Palace was the first film adapted from a work by Lovecraft, the composer of that score, Ronald Stein (1930-1988), should probably get credit for the first recorded musical adaptation of a work by Lovecraft, assuming a movie score is a kind of program music and therefore an adaptation. Prior to that, I had written about what I called "The Other Forms of Lovecraft," listing The Haunted Palace as the first adaptation on film of a work by Lovecraft.

That's a lot about Lovecraft and less about Poe. I'll close by letting you know that, according to Wikipedia, "The Haunted Palace" has been adapted to music four times, first in 1904 by French composer Florent Schmitt (1870-1958).

The cover of an album of musical works based on two stories and a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, including Florent Schmitt's symphonic poem Le Palais hanté, Op. 49, based on "The Haunted Palace" by Poe. I have this image from a very thorough blog entry called "Florent Schmitt and the French Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe: Le Palais hanté (1904)" by Phillip Nones, posted on December 10, 2012, here. Thank you to Mr. Nones and the conductor(s) of that blog. This is the kind of thing the Internet was supposed to be instead of what it is.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Death of Alanson Skinner

The December 1925 issue closed out the first full year of Farnsworth Wright's tenure as editor of Weird Tales. It was also the first full year for the magazine itself, with twelve monthly issues published in all. Nineteen twenty-five was also the last full year during which the editorial offices of Weird Tales were based in Indianapolis. The magazine moved to Chicago in late 1926. I have already written about many of the authors who were in that December issue. A couple of others--James Cocks, Douglas Oliver--might prove a challenge.

There was sad news to report in "The Eyrie" that month. Alanson Skinner (1886-1925), who had had a story in the October issue, was reported killed in an automobile accident. That had happened on August 17, 1925, and so Skinner's first story in Weird Tales was published posthumously. I can't say that this was the first tribute to a deceased author to appear in Weird Tales, but it must have been one of the first. I'll reprint it here in it entirety so that we can remember again an author who died a century ago this past summer.

Those of you who read Alanson Skinner's story of Indian witchcraft, Bad Medicine, in the October issue, will be saddened to learn of the author's tragic death in an automobile accident near Tokio, North Dakota, on August 17. The car skidded on a slippery road and crashed over an embankment. A moment later, the Rev. Amos Oneroad, a Sioux Indian, dazed and bruised, crawled from the wreck, calling a name, listening for an answer. Then he struggled manfully, but in vain, to lift the mass of steel and release his dearest friend, who lay pinioned and silent beneath it. At length help was found, the car was raised, but it was too late. Alanson Skinner was dead--Alanson Skinner, sympathetic and appreciative friend of the Indian race, learned student of ancient America, prolific author of scientific works on Indian subjects, lecturer, fiction writer, poet. Gone forever was that wonderful memory, that bubbling humor, that active mind, that radiant, cheerful personality. He was only thirty-nine years old, just getting into his full stride, at the threshold of what promised to be the most brilliant and valuable part of his career. One of his last acts, before he left on the mission that cost him his life, was to send to WEIRD TALES The Tsantsa of Professor Von Rothapfel, an eery [sic] story of a South American Indian tribe that preserves and shrinks the heads of its dead enemies. This story will be published soon.

"Soon" was August 1926, a year after Alanson's death.

Reverend Amos Oneroad (1884-1937) was a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, an artist, a public speaker and performer, and a writer, as well as a Presbyterian minister. In 2005, the Minnesota Historical Society Press published his book, co-authored with Alanson Skinner, called Being Dakota: Tales and Traditions of the Sisseton and Wahpeton.

Although winter begins and the sun and the day reach their nadir in December, it is--or should be--a happy month. I wish there could have been happier news in Weird Tales in December 1925. But this was as it will ever be.

From the Trenton, New Jersey, Times, March 23, 1917, page 15.

In this series I have gone month by month through 1925, now a century past. I have left out a lot of writers, but these I can still cover in the future.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Bertha Russell (ca. 1910-?)

Young Author
Born Circa 1910
Died ?

There is an extra story in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales. It's not listed in the table of contents, and its author is not included with others who contributed to "The Unique Magazine." Her name was Bertha Russell and she was fifteen years old when her story was published. Editor Farnsworth Wright took the unusual step of publishing her story, entitled "Pity Me!", in its entirety not in the main body of the magazine but in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column. I have seen poetry in "The Eyrie" before, but this is the first time I have seen a short story.

"Pity Me!" is brief. Call it a short short story. It's in a necrophilic vein--pun partially intended. There were readers who liked and wanted stories of what they called necrophilia. There were others who did not. I don't think stories in this vein that appeared in Weird Tales were always sexual. I think when readers wrote about "necrophilia," they meant stories that were focused on death and corpses, maybe also stories that were especially gruesome. One of the first, if not the first, necrophilic story in Weird Tales was "The Loved Dead" by C.M. Eddy, Jr., assisted or revised by H.P. Lovecraft and published in the issue of May/June/July 1924. That story was supposed to have caused a wider controversy regarding pulp magazines. I'm not sure that that actually happened. Anyway, maybe what's needed here is some further research and a whole series devoted to stories of this type. But does anybody really want to read them?

We don't know anything about Bertha Russell except that she was fifteen years old in 1925, making her birth year about 1910 and making her yet another teen-aged author in Weird Tales. Usually "The Eyrie" included the city from which a correspondent wrote, but we don't have that for her. Suffice it to say that young Bertha Russell must have been thrilled and excited to have her story in Weird Tales.

Like I said, I have seen poetry in "The Eyrie." I have also seen it as an epigraph in various short stories. A list or discussion of poetry or lines of poetry that appeared in "The Eyrie" or stories published in Weird Tales would make for another essay or series. It would also make for an expanded list of authors whose work appeared in "The Unique Magazine."

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

William James Price (1875-1937)

Insurance Agent, Salesman, Bookkeeper, Poet, Editor, Book Reviewer
Born March 8, 1875, Maryland
Died June 2, 1937, Baltimore, Maryland

William James Price was a poet, editor, and book reviewer. He edited a quarterly magazine of verse called Interludes, published from about 1924 until the early 1930s by Interludes Publishing Company of 2917 Erdman Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland. That happened to be Price's home. In early 1923, Price had the idea of getting together a group of Maryland poets. Coincidentally, this was at around the same time that Weird Tales was first published. Price's idea came to fruition in the Verse Writers' Guild of Maryland. Interludes was its official publication. Price's own poems include the following:

• "Come Down to Maryland" (1920) 
• "A Walk Together" (1921)
• "Woodrow Wilson" (1924)
• "The Shot Tower Speaks" (1924)
• "The Wonder Song" (1926)
• "The Plight of John McBride" in Mystery Magazine (Mar. 1927)
• "The Ballade for the End of Battles" (1929)

"A Walk Together" reminds me of Robert Frost's poem "The Pasture," from 1915.

Price had four poems in Weird Tales from November 1925 to January 1927. See the list below. He also wrote a poem on Edgar Allan Poe, which was printed with his letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun on Christmas Day, 1911:

From the Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911, page 6.

This is the second tribute to Poe written by authors of 1925 about whom I have written this season, Howard Elsmere Fuller (1895-1985) being the first. Price shared pages with Poe in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Poe's poem was "The Conqueror Worm," from 1843, a powerful and devastating work.

 

William James Price was born on March 8, 1875, in Maryland. He worked as an insurance agent, salesman, and bookkeeper. On January 14, 1904, he married Mary Isabel or Isabella Painter or Paynter (1885-1980). Notice that Price's wife had the same (or similar) surname as Orrin C. Painter (1864-1915), who provided the bronze (or iron) gate for the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe and about whom Price wrote in his letter to the editor. Painter also provided a stone to mark Poe's grave, but for some reason it was put in the wrong place, bringing to mind Price's line, "And nations wonder where his body lies." By the way, Painter was also a poet.

 

I haven't been able to find a direct connection between Mary Painter or Paynter and Orrin C. Painter. Records for this family--or at least her branch--seem scarce, even if the latter wrote a history of them. (Where is it?) I should add that the artist, photographer, and explorer William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) married into the family of Orrin Chalfant Painter. William Henry Jackson, strangely enough, was the great-grandfather and namesake of cartoonist Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead. The connections to prominent people could go on, but this mini-biography has to turn back to its subject.

 

There was in Maryland a prominent family of men named William James Price. I don't know what relation, if any, these men had with the poet who shared their name:

• William James Price, Sr. (1831-1916) was a real estate broker and at one time the largest landowner and taxpayer in Queen Anne's County, Maryland.

• His son, William James Price, Jr., or the 2nd (1863-1928), was the editor and publisher of the Centreville [Maryland] Observer.

• His son, William James Price III (1899-1972), was a military man and an investment banker.

After following those leads for entirely too long, I discovered the identity of the poet. I wasn't prepared to rule out any of them in my search, even the Third. Money and versifying may not seem to go together, but they are also not mutually exclusive: let's not forget that Wallace Stevens, who worked in the insurance business, was also a poet of renown. Stevens famously wrote, "Money is a kind of poetry." That quotation brings us back to William James Price, or the Price of poetry, who was also in the insurance business but gave us verse to outlive all of his other work.

William James Price's Poems in Weird Tales
"The Ghostly Lovers" (Nov. 1925)
"The Ghost Girl" (Dec. 1925)
"Italian Love" (Feb. 1926)
"Ballade of Phantom Ships" (Jan. 1927)

Further Reading

• "A Maryland Society of Poets Is Suggested," letter to the editor in the Baltimore Evening Sun, February 14, 1923, page 15.
• Other brief articles and items, plus the poems themselves. 

Thanks to The FictionMags Index for the extra credit for William James Price.
Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

David Baxter (1882-1949)

Poet, Nature Writer, Author, Editor, Songwriter, Printer, Foundryman, Mechanic, City Parks Commissioner
Born October 27, 1882, Hutchinson, Kansas
Died June 9, 1949, Hutchinson, Kansas

David Baxter was born on October 27, 1882, in Hutchinson, Kansas, to Jackson B. and Mollie Baxter. I believe he was the oldest of eight children fathered by J.B. Baxter, who was later married to Rachel Horn. The elder Baxter was a blacksmith. His son followed in his footsteps. David Baxter married Myrtle B. Meyers. I believe they had just one son.

Although he traveled out of state, Baxter seems to have lived in Hutchinson for all of his life. He worked in mechanical fields, as a mechanic, a foundryman for twenty-three years, and a printer for eleven or more. He was the founder of Hutchinson Foundry and Machine Works in his native city. Hammer and tongs were his tools, but on the side, he wrote, and I believe he enjoyed a career in writing that might not even be possible now but was then, before we got caught up in other things. You could say that in his side career Baxter either hammered away at a typewriter or held a pen in the tongs of his forefinger and thumb. With these he forged words and lines.

David Baxter got started as a professional writer in July 1915 when his poem "A Globe-Trotter's Plaint" was published in Munsey's Magazine. He received $6 in return. From 1924 to 1940, he had poems, stories, and articles in The Blue Book Magazine, Weird Tales, and Argosy. He also contributed to Everybody's Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science Monthly, Field and Stream, The Outers' Recreation Book, Live Stories, Snappy Stories, Santa Fe Magazine, Every Week, Farm and Fireside, and other titles.

Much of Baxter's success came from writing poems and epigrams. He also wrote for trade journals, technical journals, and specialty magazines, including Blacksmith's Journal, Concrete Magazine, Journal of Acetylene Welding, Oxy-Acetylene Welding, International Molders' Journal, Cement Era, Welding Engineer, American Garage & Auto Dealer, and Motor in Canada. Still more of works appeared in The New York Clipper, Railroad Men's Magazine, and Fun Book. Baxter sometimes illustrated his own articles, or took the photographs that accompanied them in print. After only five and a half years as a published author, he had collected seventy-five poems, 500 epigrams, and as many as half a million words of stories and articles in his scrapbook. He averaged $80 per month in income from his writing.

Baxter wrote a song in ragtime, "You Ain't Talking to Me," published in Chicago by Success Music Company in 1905. In the 1920s, he edited "Attic Anthology," a column in the Hutchinson News composed of verses by members of the Hutchinson Writers Guild. Many of his own poems appeared in this column. I think they would be well worth collecting. Baxter was co-founder of the Hutchinson Writers Guild in 1927. He was also president of the Seventh District Club of the Kansas Authors Club and a member Authors League of America.

Baxter's  stories for Weird Tales are unusual in that they are animal stories. "The Brown Moccasin" (Feb. 1925) is about a snake, while "Nomads of the Night" (Oct. 1925) is about bats and other winged night creatures. These are not fables but nature writing. Both are set in Kansas, and that setting is what led me to their author. It has been a long, long time since I read anything by Ernest Thompson Seton, but I think Baxter's stories are in that mold. Later such writers, whose books I enjoyed as a child, included Herbert S. Zim, Charles L. Ripper, and Olive L. Earle. The Wonderful World of Disney showed films in a similar vein.

David Baxter was a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) and secretary-treasurer of the local Izaak Walton League. Late in life he ran for and was elected to the city parks commission in his hometown. David Baxter died on June 9, 1949, in the city of his birth. He was sixty-six years old.

By the way, the David Baxter of Hutchinson, Kansas, should not to be confused with the journalist and writer David Baxter (1908-1989) who was tried for sedition during World War II, along with George Sylvester Viereck, William Dudley Pelley, and others. That David Baxter seems to have had a Kansas connection, too, but don't go down the wrong road in looking for the man of the same name who contributed to Weird Tales. That other David Baxter had an interesting story to tell, too, and so you might want to read him as well.

David Baxter's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Brown Moccasin" (Feb. 1925)
"Nomads of the Night" (Oct. 1925) 

Further Reading

• "Works Days in Foundry; and Nights Writing Poetry: David Baxter, Hutchinson Foundryman, Making Profitable Sideline Out of Literary Work" in the Hutchinson [Kansas] News, December 28, 1920, page 9.
• "Mechanic Is Successful Writer for Magazines" in the Topeka [Kansas] Daily Capital, January 2, 1921, page 9.
• Many poems in the Hutchinson News.

 

From the Hutchinson News, March 25, 1939, page 8, when Baxter ran for city parks commissioner.

 Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Tessida Swinges (1881-1970)-Part Two

Tessida Swinges was actually Tessida Schwinges of Brooklyn, New York. For some reason, Weird Tales misspelled her last name when it published her story, "A Mind in Shadow," in October 1925.

Tessida Schwinges had an interesting career. It's too bad we don't know more about her or that we don't have more of her writings. Her lone story for Weird Tales is the earliest evidence I have found that she was a writer. She was already forty-four years old when it was published.

Married to German-American businessman Clement Schwinges (1871-1934), Tessida attended evening classes at the City College of New York in the 1920s. She was a member of the Short Story Group at the college in 1929. Her instructor was poet Marjorie Prentiss Campbell (1882-1967), who was the daughter of a poet, Caroline Edwards Prentiss (1852-1940).

Tessida Schwinges served as president of the All Writers Club, a small group in Brooklyn, in 1929. Annie B. Kerr, later author of Clear Shining After Rain: About Americans Born Outside America (1941) and other books, was associated with that group. As early as 1933 and as late as 1950, Tessida was a member of the Blue Pencil Club, a literary society that I believe grew out of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). Her story "Forbidden Fruit" appeared in The Brooklynite, the journal of the local Blue Pencil Club, in March 1936. She had an article in the September or October issue of 1936 as well. In 1950, she won prizes for her prose and poetry. If there are archives of the Blue Pencil Club anywhere, maybe we could recover some of Tessida's works.

I found newspaper articles about the local Blue Pencil Club from 1933 and 1936. In addition to Tessida Schwinges, members of the club included James Morton and Rheinhart Kleiner, so she knew them both. And in that way, Tessida Schwinges is connected in a roundabout way to H.P. Lovecraft.

Rheinhart Kleiner (1892-1949) was a poet, amateur journalist, and correspondent of Lovecraft. Kleiner and Lovecraft became acquainted by mail in 1915. They met in person sometime after that, although they are supposed to have been out of touch with each other during the 1930s. Kleiner wrote several essays on his friend after Lovecraft's death in 1937.

James Ferdinand Morton, Jr. (1870-1941) was also a friend of Lovecraft. Morton was lots of other things, too, including an anarchist; an esperantist; an advocate of the single-tax system of Henry George; a member of NAPA, the Kalem Club, the Blue Pencil Club of Brooklyn, and the Bahá'í faith; and the curator of the Paterson Museum in Paterson, New Jersey. That museum is mentioned in Lovecraft's long short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928). After his death, Morton's widow, Pearl K. Morton, was elected vice-president of the local Blue Pencil Club. So, as a member of the club and attendee of its meetings, Tessida Schwinges knew the Mortons, as well as Kleiner. So was she ever in contact with Lovecraft? And if not, did she know of him? These are open questions.

As the wife of a native-born German, Tessida Schwinges was in a position to renounce "absolutely and forever all allegiance and fidelity" to the German Reich on April 22, 1933. This was just three months after the Nazi party assumed power in Germany. She had previously claimed German citizenship, even if she was born in America. Even as early as April 1933, the United States must have recognized the threat of Nazism.

Sometime after her husband's death in 1934, Tessida became a lecturer and leader of groups for the Brooklyn Academy of Arts and Sciences, including on the topic of astronomy. She also served as head of the current events division at the academy. Tessida (Weczerzick) Schwinges died in August 1970 at age eighty-nine and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

I don't have a photograph of Tessida Schwinges, but I do of her husband. I think I would rather not show it, not because I have anything against him or his cause, but because a biography of a woman should be about her rather than of men. And yet I have written about him and two of her male associates, as well as about Lovecraft. (Do all things Weird Tales come back to him?) There is so much available about her husband because of his business activities, yet no one today knows of him. Maybe this becomes a principle, that some people work in the concerns of the day, while others--specifically artists--work in things that, at their best, do not know time. People in both groups are remembered. People in both are forgotten. We can only hope that works of art live on.

Tessida Schwinges' story in Weird Tales is a confessional. It opens with a boy confessing that he is a murderer. There is shock value in that kind of thing. Joyce Carol Oates realized that when she wrote Expensive People (1968). I read that book recently and was struck by the similarity. "A Mind in Shadow" also reminds me of the Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound (1945).

Tessida Swinges' Story in Weird Tales
"A Mind in Shadow" (Oct. 1925)

 

Further Reading

A few newspaper articles, some of which have lists of writers associated with writing clubs.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley