Howard Elsmere Fuller (1895-1985)

Author, Poet, Rural Letter Carrier
Born March 30, 1895, Worthington, Ohio
Died July 19, 1985, Baldwin County, Alabama

Howard Elsmere Fuller is a pretty easy case. I found him pretty quickly but only after finding his mother, Alice I. Fuller. As it turns out, she contributed to Weird Tales, too. And maybe her husband got in on the action as well, though I can't say that for sure. Or if the story by George Fuller came from the Fuller family, maybe it was Alice or Howard who was behind it. Or maybe Howard was behind all three Fuller stories. But then his mother was a writer for magazines, too. Anyway, I'll write first about Howard Elsmere Fuller, who contributed to the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales, one hundred years ago last month. (I'm catching up.)

Howard Elsmere Fuller was born on March 30, 1895, in Worthington, Ohio, to George Henry Fuller (1863-1944) and Alice Irene (Webb) Fuller, also known as Alice I. Clark (1870-1928). (She had lived with foster parents when she was young, thus the two different last names.) Fuller had one older brother, Clarence Clark Fuller (1893-1980). He was an engineer and inventor. I had a close call when I looked up a possible relationship of the Fuller family to Curtis G. Fuller (1912-1991), editor of Fate magazine. That Fuller's father was also named Clarence C. Fuller, but he was a different Clarence and apparently no relation at all.

The Fuller family moved to Loxley, Alabama, in 1908. Although Loxley is close to the utopian community of Fairhope, I didn't get any sense that the Fullers were utopian in their views. As we have seen, tellers of weird tales very often had an affinity for utopian and other fringe beliefs. I have written about Fairhope before. Volney George Mathison (1897-1965) lived there as a child. Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960) was buried at Fairhope. She, too, lived in Loxley, and now I wonder if she and the Fullers could have known each other. 

Howard E. Fuller served in the U.S. military from August 27, 1918, to December 24, 1918, beginning at Camp Pike in Little Rock, Arkansas. I don't know in which branch he served, but I'll assume it was in the army. The war ended less than three months after he joined. Being discharged on Christmas Eve in 1918 must have been a welcome gift to him and his family.

Fuller worked as a rural letter carrier, apparently for all of his working life. His writing was on the side. He had one story in Weird Tales, "Wolfgang Fex, Criminal" (Aug. 1925). He also had a letter published in "The Eyrie," in May 1925. He traveled to various places in the United States and went to the New York World's Fair in June 1939. The 1st World Science Fiction Convention was held a month later, from July 2 to July 4, 1939. Maybe Fuller was too early to meet any of its attendees.

An item from The Onlooker of Foley, Alabama, July 16, 1925. The newspaper botched Fuller's title and misspelled the word weird, but at least it was something.

 

Fuller was a member of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). In November 1953, he had a book of his poems published, Excursions in Arcady. A better claim to fame was his authorship of a poem, "To Edgar Allan Poe," published in Contemporary American Poets, edited by Horace C. Baker (Boston, 1928). I have these four lines from the website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore:

With a haunting, dreamy sadness
Is bared the crytic [sic] soul;
With a rhythmic rune of madness.
Thy melancholy soul.

You can read the whole poem on a website called Poetry Explorer by clicking here. 

Howard Elsmere Fuller died on July 19, 1985, in Baldwin County, Alabama, at age ninety. He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Loxley like his parents before him.

Howard Elsmere Fuller's Letter & Story in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (May 1925)
"Wolfgang Fex, Criminal" (Aug. 1925)

Further Reading
Only a few newspaper items, plus his poem, "To Edgar Allan Poe."

Next: Alice I. Fuller

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

James C. Bardin (1887-1959)-Part One

Author, Poet, Playwright, Book Reviewer, Translator, Military Officer, Explorer, Medical Doctor, University Professor, Public Speaker
Born September 25, 1887, Augusta, Georgia
Died October 13, 1959, Veterans Administration Hospital, Salisbury, North Carolina

James Cook Bardin had one essay and one short story in Weird Tales, both in 1925. He was born on September 25, 1887, in Augusta, Georgia, the son of Henry Clay Bardin and Mary Ella (Cook) Bardin. He appears to have attended Harvard University, graduating in 1908, and he attended the University of Virginia, there receiving his medical degree in 1909. Young Dr. Bardin was on the staff of Central State Hospital in Petersburg, Virginia, for one year before beginning as a teacher at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Central State Hospital was a hospital for mentally ill black people, the first of its kind in the United States.

James C. Bardin taught Romance languages and history at the University of Virginia for forty-four years, from 1910 until his retirement. He had an admirable career not only as a university professor but also as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, as well as verse, stage plays, and book reviews. Bardin had short stories in the lowly pulps as well as non-fiction articles in Scientific American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Raven Club, as well as societies in Latin America, where he often traveled. 

The Raven Club, which I think was also called the Raven Society, was a scholastic society at the University of Virginia. A newspaper article from 1909 lets us know at this late date that it was a "society made up of students who [had] distinguished themselves in literary work." That article, "Paying Tribute to Poe's Genius" (The Portsmouth [Virginia] Star, Jan. 18, 1909, page 1) makes it pretty clear that the "Raven" in Raven Club refers to the poem of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe. The article also gives details on the celebration of the centenary of Poe's birth at the university. Poe of course attended the University of Virginia, as did Captain Luke Leary Stevens (1878-1944), teacher of J.C. Henneberger, later co-founder of Weird Tales magazine.

On June 19, 1915, Bardin married Sally Norvell Nelson (1891-1969) in Charlottesville. She was a watercolorist and a volunteer librarian, among other things. They had a son, Captain James Nelson Bardin (1926-2008) of the U.S. Marine Corps. He was also a writer, of non-fiction on aviation and handguns.

James C. Bardin entered the U.S. Army in 1918 as a first lieutenant and eventually attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served in the medical corps at Camp Wadsworth, South Carolina, and Camp Cody, New Mexico, in late 1918. Later he was a reserve officer in the geographic division of the Military Intelligence Service. And he served again during World War II. Bardin had been in Paris at the outbreak of the Great War, but he made it back stateside in one way or another. He traveled often and to many different countries. He was a student of the Mayan civilization and its languages. In 1929, he criticized Charles A. Lindbergh's flights over Mayan ruins, a photographic expedition, as being "worthless to science," according to a contemporaneous newspaper article. The current website of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has a different opinion.

Bardin retired to the coastal counties of North Carolina (as Captain Stevens had before him). James C. Bardin, M.D., Ph.D., died on October 13, 1959, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Salisbury, North Carolina, after a very long stay. He was seventy-two years old. His death came in the same month of the year as Poe's and just six days after that anniversary, the 110th. Bardin was buried at Manteo Cemetery, Dare County, North Carolina.

To be concluded . . .

Dr. James Cook Bardin (1887-1959), from the Waynesboro [Virginia] News-Virginian, December 6, 1938, page 5, on the occasion of a talk Bardin gave on the Spanish Civil War.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Gatz, Kurtz, & Ántonia

For my next feat, I will attempt to connect Shakespeare to Conrad to Fitzgerald and Cather to mid-century urban horror to twenty-first-century cosmic horror. Edgar Allan Poe will make an appearance, too . . .

If you look hard enough and think hard enough, if you let your mind wander freely, you can make connections among any number of fictional works. So I'll give it away right away and let you know that this isn't much of a feat after all. This is just a brain, an eye, and a memory at work. I'll start with three novels in English published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . .

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899), My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918), and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) have at least one thing in common, for all three are first-person narratives told by a friend and observer of a great person. Here is Nick Carraway on Jay Gatsby:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. (Chapter 1)

Now Marlow on Kurtz:

"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.

     "Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things." (Chapter III)

And finally Jim Burden on Ántonia:

     I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed my window on its way up the heavens. I was thinking about Ántonia and her children; about Anna's solicitude for her, Ambrosch's grave affection, Leo's jealous, animal little love. That moment, when they all came tumbling out of the cave into the light, was a sight any man might have come far to see. Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade--that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer: Ántonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we came home in triumph with our snake; Ántonia in her black shawl and fur cap, as she stood by her father's grave in the snowstorm; Ántonia coming in with her work-team along the evening sky-line. She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. (Book V, Chapter II)

     It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

Whereas Gatsby has "an extraordinary gift for hope," Kurtz would seem a man in despair, or tipping on its edge. Although his is a "gift of noble and lofty expression," his last words are unclear, ambiguous. What does Kurtz mean when he cries, "The horror! The horror!"? Both are men of ambition, though. As a young man, Gatsby embarked upon a program of self-improvement. His ultimate ambition is to capture the heart of a woman. Kurtz's ambitions lie elsewhere. He has his Intended, but he has gone far away from her and never sees her again, dying as he does in Africa. Gatsby is a quintessentially American character, but Kurtz could be as well, at least at a basic level, for he goes away from woman and civilization into the wilderness. As for Ántonia, she is another kind of person altogether, "a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." Only she among these three characters has children.

Like Marlow, Jay Gatsby--originally James Gatz--served on board a craft, in his case the yacht of a wealthy man. Nick describes Gatsby as "extravagantly ambitious." Nothing deters him in his pursuit of his dream. Gatz's journey--soon Gatsby's--takes him from North Dakota to the Great Lakes, the West Indies, the Barbary Coast, finally to Long Island. Like Kurtz, he dies afloat. Whereas Kurtz departs from this earth on a boat bearing him downriver, like a latter-day pharaoh, Gatsby's life ends in a bitterly ironic way, in a swimming pool, on a pneumatic mattress. The yacht of his youth is in the distant past. His last craft is the size and dimensions of an open grave.

Marlow makes a different kind of journey. He travels from a great city into the dark heart of Africa, there to find and fetch back Kurtz, like Orpheus after Eurydice. He is his own Charon, or maybe his boat is a new Argo and his adventures in Africa a new argosy told to men on board a different craft, years later, upon the still, darkening waters of the mouth of the Thames. His earlier boat churns up and down river as he looks for Kurtz, then carries him away. The yawl Nellie, named for a woman, comes to rest in the very opening sentence of Heart of Darkness, and Marlow begins his tale, told only to men.

In his journey upriver, Marlow looks upon the deep, green, and wild world on its banks. This is a place mostly untouched by Europeans. In his upriver journey, his boat beats against the current. The journey downriver is easier on the boat but harder on Kurtz its passenger. In the end, he has on his face a look of "an intense and hopeless despair."

At the end of The Great Gatsby, Nick broods upon his own experience in knowing Gatsby:

     Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Marlow has a darker vision, I think, but Nick Carraway's words on the "fresh, green breast of the new world" are something like Marlow's in his encounter with an old and green and dark Africa. The American encounter with the wilderness is hopeful and full of positive awe and wonder. The European encounter--Marlow's and Kurtz's--must be far less so. And then there is the famous closing of The Great Gatsby:

     Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning--

      So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If time is a river without banks, then we can never go ashore and the future is unreachable. The river carries Marlow back to the sea--the point of origin for all of us--and bears Gatsby--all men--into the past. In My Ántonia, there are rivers, riverbanks, and bluffs high above, but these are places for play, or they are part of a great and awesome landscape, or they are rivers to cross: no one in My Ántonia goes lengthwise, up or down a river. And the only sea in Nebraska is a sea of grass. The breath of the prairie wind makes waves across its surface.

In My Ántonia, Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda also make their journeys. Jim is from the East, specifically Virginia. Ántonia is from even farther east, from Bohemia. Both arrive in Nebraska--like Jay Gatsby's home state, a place on the Great Plains--as children. Ántonia remains and lives out her life in this place close to the earth. The plants in her landscape are not wild but cultivated, planted and tended, grown and harvested. Her farm is green and is not one of gray ashes. Like Nick Carraway, Jim Burden goes east, to New York City, thus nearly cutting himself off from his past and his friend. The main characters in The Great Gatsby are from the Midwest and the Great Plains, or what was then or before called the Middle Border, as was their creator. Like Jim Burden, Willa Cather was from Virginia but grew up in Nebraska. Like Gatsby, she died in New York, though in the city rather than on the island. Of these three novels, My Ántonia is the most positive and affirmative. In fact, it's one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, one brimming with love and affection. Curiously, the last word in both The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia is "past."

I have written before that someone should look into connections between Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. I'm not ready just yet to talk about Shakespeare in this essay. Instead I'll make a brief connection between Poe and Conrad. The climactic event in Poe's long short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) is of course the fall of the House of Usher. Towards the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow goes to visit with Kurtz's unnamed Intended. He tells her a lie about Kurtz and practically flees from her presence, telling the men who are listening to his tale, "It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head."

In October 1941, Unknown Worlds published a story by Fritz Leiber, Jr., called "Smoke Ghost." This story is justly famous among fans of fantasy and horror. I don't care much for the ever-finer dividing of genre fiction into evermore minute sub-genres and sub-sub-genres, but I feel okay about calling "Smoke Ghost" an example of urban horror. Here is a passage describing the urban landscape through which the main character, Catesby Wran, moves:

      It had all begun on the elevated. There was a particular little sea of roofs he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar-paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by ghostly wind-blown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow; and it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive, almost beautifully ugly, though in no sense picturesque; dreary, but meaningful. Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and total wars. The quick, daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life. Oddly, he never saw it in the morning, for it was then his habit to sit on the other side of the car, his head buried in the paper.

And now here are the opening paragraphs of Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby, published sixteen years before:

     About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

     But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. 

Note the descriptions of advertisements in both. This is the America of the twentieth century.

(Is Catesby an intentional echo or eye rhyme of Gatsby?)

My second-to-last connection is between Shakespeare and Conrad. This is actually not a connection I have made. I'm just following the lead of Richard Meek of the University of Hull, who, on a website called Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, wrote an essay called "'Nothing like the image and horror of it': King Lear and Heart of Darkness." You can read his essay by clicking here. I don't know Shakespeare well enough to have recognized the influence of King Lear upon Heart of Darkness when I read Conrad's novel, but even I can see that when somebody writes several nevers in a row, he's probably echoing Shakespeare, and that very thing happens when Marlow goes to meet with Kurtz's Intended, who says: "'I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never.'"

I wrote about Conrad and Heart of Darkness recently because I was looking into a possible connection between the author, his novel, and the cosmic horror of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I didn't find anything conclusive. I don't think Kurtz's final cry is about horror in a cosmic sense. I think his thoughts are elsewhere. But if Heart of Darkness was influenced by King Lear, then there is this:

"King Lear -- '. . . Shakespeare staring cosmic horror in the face and refusing to back off,'" a quote from Matt Wolf, "London-Based Theater Critic," in an advertisement for a performance of King Lear, from the Muskegon (Michigan) Chronicle, May 16, 1999, whole page number 77.

A final note: The Great Gatsby is now one hundred years old. More than a few people have written on the book and its anniversary. I have read two otherwise good online essays on it, but both mention our current president, and I wonder why. Is that really necessary? Better yet, will it age well? The answers, I think, are no and most definitely not. Anyway, I hope this essay gives everyone enough to read for a while. It might be some time before I write again.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part Two

I'll set aside Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft before bringing them up again. The four men of the title are:

• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900);

• French author Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893);

• American author Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933); and

• American author and gadfly of science Charles H. Fort (1874-1932).

Some of the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) allude to ideas from two of these men, Nietzsche and Fort. Now that I have read "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, I can draw him into this discussion, too, along with Robert W. Chambers.

Robert W. Chambers is mentioned by name in the Cosmic Horror Issue. Guy de Maupassant is not, except very indirectly, for in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, one of the videos watched by the main character during his solitary holiday binge is Diary of a Madman (1963), starring Vincent Price. Although it bears the title of one of Maupassant's stories, Diary of a Madman is mostly based on another, namely, "The Horla." Both stories take the form of diaries, and so it was easy, I guess, to put them together. If the moviemakers had entitled their film The Horla, no one would have known what it was about. Besides that, it probably wouldn't have gotten by the censors.

The main character in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" thinks a little about Vincent Price but not at all about Maupassant. Thematically, "The Horla" is related to Quatermass (1979), a show in which Mr. Cornell and his TV watcher are much more interested. The illustration at the beginning of the story is of John Mills' image on a TV screen, Mills being the star of the show. I don't know whether Mr. Cornell was aware of the thematic connection when he wrote his story. The idea that we are property, or cattle, seems to have come from Charles Fort. No one writing for the Cosmic Horror Issue seems to have looked to "The Horla" for inspiration. I think, though, that "The Horla" must be considered seminal in the history of science fiction. I'll get into that a little more. Right now I'll just say that I can't believe I had never read it before a couple of weeks ago. But then you can't read everything all at once. Where would that leave you?

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant was published in two versions, the first in the October 26, 1886, edition of the French newspaper Gil Blas, the second in a hardbound collection called The Horla, published in 1887. I have the first version in Pierre and Jean and Selected Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (Bantam, 1994). I have the second and I guess definitive version in Selected Tales of Guy de Maupassant (Random House, 1945 and 1950), with illustrations by Adolf Dehn. Even so, this version is different from other translated versions. If you can, you should read these two versions together. I'll quote from them next time, or maybe the time after that if this brief series turns into a long one. By the way, "The Horla" was reprinted in Weird Tales in August 1926, in its author's birth month, as well as the same month that Maupassant's diarist first sees his previously invisible tormenter. 

Translator Charlotte Mandell has suggested that the portmanteau word horla is a combination of the French hors, meaning "outside," and là, meaning "there." The Horla, then, is "the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There," or "the 'what's out there'." (Quoted in Wikipedia.) That's an excellent interpretation, I think, and just another indication that we should always endeavor to look into the meanings of words. A simple English version of the word Horla might be alien, and I think that's what we are to believe about Maupassant's being, that it is an alien, probably an extraterrestrial alien.

H.P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Guy de Maupassant and Robert W. Chambers. Both are mentioned in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Lovecraft especially liked "The Horla." It's supposed to have been an influence upon him in his composition of "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928). I can't say that that's true. It appears to be one of those things that people say so often that everyone just accepts it. We should have some evidence instead, and then we can believe it for sure. The influence of Chambers upon Lovecraft is more evident. In contrast, any connection to or awareness of Nietzsche in Lovecraft seems tenuous. As for Charles Fort, look no farther than "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931) for Fort's name in Lovecraft's fiction.

All four men of my title read Poe, for Poe, once he arrived upon this earth, became inescapable. Here is Nietzsche in a discussion of Poe, and others:

     Those great poets, for example, men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol--I do not dare mention far greater names, but I mean them--are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of swamps--what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for him who has guessed their true nature!

The quote is from Nietzsche contra Wagner: Out of the Files of a Psychologist (1888). A different version is in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886). So, like Maupassant, Nietzsche sometimes changed what he wrote.

To be continued . . .

An illustration for "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, source and artist unknown. This may be in an edition published by P.F. Collier & Son in 1910, although the almost unreadable words above appear to be in French.

Posted early and revised later in the morning on March 2, 2025. I have changed what I have written, too.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Four Men-Part One

Two figures cast their long shadows over the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. They are of course Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. But it seems to me that there is more of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Fort than Poe or Lovecraft in Weird Tales #367. From Nietzsche comes the theme and imagery of staring into voids and abysses. From Fort comes the idea that we are merely the property of superior beings from outer space. I think there is very little if anything of Robert W. Chambers in this issue, even if his name is mentioned first.

• In "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, a man stays at home at Christmastime to watch TV. (Fun fun.) Among the shows he watches is Quatermass, a British TV serial from 1979. As I understand it, the premise of the show is that people on Earth are being harvested by aliens for their protein. Human beings, then, are essentially cattle, in other words, property. (Cattle is from the same root word as chattel, i.e., the Latin capitale, meaning "property.") This is the Fortean aspect of Mr. Cornell's story. Now the Nietzschean aspect:

The door opens. He's opened it inward. And he's just looking at darkness. Just space. (p. 24)

I take that to be an oblique reference to a quote from Nietzsche:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (From Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Chapter 4, No. 146) (1886)

• The reference to Nietzsche is more direct in "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan:

I stare at the box, and I imagine it stares back at me. (p. 38)

The reference to Fort is also more direct:

I think we're fished for. (p. 38)

It's also kind of indirect in that those italicized words refer to Edmond Hamilton's overtly Fortean story "The Space Visitors," from 1930.

• In "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, the title character says that on his trip to the Moon, he:

"stared in the other direction at all that empty space out there. At the Void. And not only did the Void stare back, it spoke to me--or at least something within the Void spoke." (p. 53)

Here's the Fortean concept to go with the foregoing Nietzschean one:

"We were to be contained--not because we were a disease, as I thought, but because we were playthings."

Whose playthings? According to Bonneville, we are the playthings of "Our Owner." (p. 53) So, again, we're property.

There is an alien presence in "The Traveler" by Francisco Tignini, "Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick, and "Laid to Rest" by Tim Lebbon, while the void appears right in the title of Carol Gyzander's story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide." I can't say that any of these stories has both a Nietzschean and a Fortean aspect.

As for the other two stories, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, and "Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, Poe and Lovecraft have a more prominent place in the former, while Mr. Campbell's story is the most Lovecraftian of all. And if cosmic horror is a synonym of Lovecraftian horror, then "Concerto in Five Movements" is perhaps closer than any to the concept of cosmic horror.

The title of this little essay is "Four Men," but I have written about only two of the four. The other two will come along in part two of this series.

To be continued . . . 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Two Poems About Two Crows

Francis Hard, aka Farnsworth Wright, had a poem called "Two Crows" in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Just six years earlier, Wright had been a soldier stationed in France. In composing his poem, he must have drawn on memories of the Great War:

Two Crows
By Francis Hard (Weird Tales, Jan. 1925)

Two crows flapped over dismally
(So wearily, so drearily)
To the blackened limb of a blasted tree;
The shells flew screaming overhead,
And the field was covered thick with dead--
The earth reeked with its dead.

One crow lamented to his mate
(So wearily, so drearily):
"How long, how long must we now wait
For the taste of food that was so good
Before the shrapnel shattered the wood
And loaded the ground with dead?

"The odor sweet of dying men"
(Lamented he so drearily),
"How strangely pleasant was it when
I sensed it first with ravished breath!
But I am sated, and sick to death,
And would fain lie yon with the dead."

A shell came moaning through the air
(So drearily, so eerily)
And burst where the crows were plaining there;
It shivered the wreck of the blasted tree,
And bits of crow fell bloodily
Among the tangled dead.

* * *

A year and a month later, in February 1926, in his capacity as editor, Wright placed a traditional ballad called "The Twa Corbies" ("The Two Crows") in Weird Tales:

The Twa Corbies
(Old Ballad)
[By Anonymous]

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane.
The tane unto the tother say:
Where sail we gang and dine today?

In behint yon auld fail dike
I wot there lies a new-slain knight.
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

I'll sit on his white hause-bane,
Ye'll pick out his bonny blue een,
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sail ken where he is gane.
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.

* * *

"The Twa Corbies" was first in print in 1812. A century later, it was reprinted in Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912), illustrated by Vernon Hill (1887-1972). It seems to me that Farnsworth Wright had read "The Twa Corbies" and was inspired by it in writing his own poem. The refrain, the repeated "wearily," "drearily," and "eerily," would seem to have been inspired by "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe and its own refrain of "evermore" and "nevermore," also from its opening line:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

I wrote about "The Twa Corbies" on December 19, 2022. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Two corvids on the cover of Weird Tales:

Weird Tales, July 1945, cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Weird Tales, September 1939, cover art by Virgil Finlay.

And what might be a crow but looks more like a myna:

Weird Tales, January 1946, cover art by Albert Roanoke Tilburne.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

"When the Stars Are Right" by Nicholas Diak

The second feature in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue (2023), is an essay called "When the Stars Are Right: The Weird Tales Origins of Cosmic Horror" by Nicholas Diak. Mr. Diak has an advanced degree from the University of Washington. Presumably he is an American. He is a writer and scholar interested in movies, music, comic books, and horror fiction, including the works of H.P. Lovecraft. His interests, then, match up with those of the other contributors to this issue. It looks like Weird Tales #367 is still, with this essay, the work of insiders. Mr. Diak has his own website. You can reach it by clicking here.

"When the Stars Are Right" is an essay of six pages all together. This includes a full-page illustration on the title page, four reproductions of Weird Tales covers from the 1920s through the 1940s, and a half-page illustration of tentacles at the end. That illustration is essentially filler. An enlarged part of it is used as the backdrop for the title page. Tentacles as a shorthand image representing weird fiction have become a cliché or, to use an academic kind of word, a trope. I wonder if we can all resolve to end it, to write and create new things and put some of the old ones (maybe some of those Old Ones, too) behind us. After all, new is the promise of the first essay in the Cosmic Horror Issue, editor Jonathan Maberry's brief introduction in "The Eyrie."

Nicholas Diak's essay begins with an epigraph. This is the second to appear in Weird Tales #367. The first is from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The City in the Sea." The second is from H.P. Lovecraft's poem "Nemesis," from Weird Tales, April 1924, or one hundred and a half years ago.

Mr. Diak's essay is scholarly or academic in its structure and tone. For example:

     This article aims to celebrate cosmic horror by showcasing its unique attributes: genre staples, meta and self-referential qualities, repudiation of reality, its sense of awe, and finally its delightfulness. (p. 15)

So maybe at last we have a definition of cosmic horror. Even so, I'm not sure that it's quite complete. Also, I see three different things mixed up in that sentence. First are things from outside the story itself, namely "genre staples" and "meta and self-referential qualities." I take "genre staples" to be just another term for conventions, tropes, or clichés. I have been writing about those qualities of what is called cosmic horror already in this series. I have also written about meta-references and self-references.

Next are things that are part of the story itself or that exist within the story as part of its plot, theme, mood, and so on, namely "repudiation of reality" and a "sense of awe." I think these attributes extend into weird fiction and fantasy fiction as a whole. A sense of unreality, even if it is fleeting, is an essential part of weird fiction, I think. So is a sense of awe. Awe is a feeling we have all experienced (I hope) as we gaze into the night sky, in other words, into the cosmos. I'm not sure that anyone has ever felt horror in so gazing. Maybe I'm wrong. I think it would take a sick person to have that kind of feeling in contemplating the stars.

Finally, there is the "delightfulness" of cosmic horror. Mr. Diak explains what he means later in his essay when he calls cosmic horror fun to read. I won't argue with that. I'll just point out that fun is a reaction of the reader. And so we have preparations made by the author in the first pair of attributes, the story as a kind of sealed container of the second pair, and the reader's reaction in the last single attribute.

There are lots of names of authors in Mr. Diak's essay, including a list in the first paragraph. That list includes the name of another contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue. If an essay can have a meta-reference or self-reference, then this is it. Mr. Maberry is also mentioned here, towards the end. I think we'll have to take Nicholas Diak's word for it that Weird Tales is enjoying a period of "current prosperity." Count me skeptical. Otherwise I don't see these names as examples of name-dropping or listing. You already know how I feel about those kinds of things.

I'll admit that I like reading non-fiction about science fiction, weird fiction, and fantasy. I like to see a mind at work. I like history and criticism that have behind them a thesis rather than just as chronicles of events. That's why I can say that Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler is an exciting book. So I'm predisposed to liking a well thought-out essay. Unfortunately, the space here is too limited, and I'm still not sure we have a very good--or at least a very thorough yet concise--definition of cosmic horror as a sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction.

In his essay, Nicholas Diak looks at stories by Lovecraft as well as by Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, C. Hall Thompson, and Clark Ashton Smith. I was surprised to find Thompson's name in this essay. As far as I can tell, he has seldom been talked about in the company of the other authors mentioned here. In 2019, I wrote a series on C. Hall Thompson. You can access the first part of what I wrote by clicking here. I have at least one more part to write in that series, based on information I did not have in 2019. I hope to get to that soon.

Like I said, there is a scholarly and academic tone and academic-type language, too, in "The Stars Are Right." For example, there is in the first paragraph the use of the passive voice, one of the scourges of academic writing. The author calls "The Call of the Cthulhu" a "text" instead of what it is, which is a story. The phrases "cosmic horror texts" and "cosmic horror canon" appear on the last page of the essay, also the word "tropes." It's good to notice and point out the use of tropes or clichés in any kind of storytelling. Those things are probably okay in storytelling for children. They should probably be left out of it for adults. "Text" and "canon" are pretty horrible words, though. My advice to any scholar is to throw them away. They're not texts, they're stories. And the only real canon I know of is in the Catholic Church.

* * *

Nemesis
by H. P. Lovecraft

     Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
     I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

     I have whirl'd with the earth at the dawning,
          When the sky was a vaporous flame;
     I have seen the dark universe yawning,
          Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

     I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
          Under sinister grey-clouded skies
     That the many-fork'd lightning is rending,
          That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.

     I have plung'd like a deer thro' the arches
          Of the hoary primordial grove,
     Where the oaks feel the presence that marches
          And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro' dead branches above.

     I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
          That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
     I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
          That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.

     I have scann'd the vast ivy-clad palace,
          I have trod its untenanted hall,
     Where the moon writhing up from the valleys
          Shews the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.

     I have peer'd from the casement in wonder
          At the mouldering meadows around,
     At the many-roof'd village laid under
          The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.

     I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
          I have flown on the pinions of fear
     Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,
          Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

     I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted
          The jewel-deck'd throne by the Nile;
     I was old in those epochs uncounted
          When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

     Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
          And great is the reach of its doom;
     Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
          Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

     Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
          Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,
     I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,
          I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

* * *

In his poem, Lovecraft used the word abyss. That word and a similar word or idea--void--will come up again in this series. It seems to me that there are two common and I guess connected ideas behind the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue, the abyss or the void being one of them. Also, note Lovecraft's allusion to "the far Arctic isle." Was he referring to Hyperborea? Or to Ultima Thule? Are these two imaginary places related somehow?

In reading about Ultima Thule, I came across Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Dream-Land," from 1844. I see some similarities between "Dream-Land" and "Nemesis." Note the archaic contractions in both, also the use of such words as "tarns" and "ghoul" or "Ghouls," and again the reference or allusion to Ultima Thule. Remember, too, that Lovecraft wrote a story called "The Colour Out of Space." Did he get his title from Poe's phrase "Out of SPACE--Out of Time"?

* * *

Dream-Land
by Edgar Allan Poe

By a route obscure and lonely,   
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,   
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly   
From an ultimate dim Thule--
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
       Out of SPACE--Out of TIME.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,   
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,   
With forms that no man can discover   
For the tears that drip all over;   
Mountains toppling evermore   
Into seas without a shore;   
Seas that restlessly aspire,   
Surging, unto skies of fire;   
Lakes that endlessly outspread   
Their lone waters--lone and dead,--
Their still waters--still and chilly   
With the snows of the lolling lily.

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,--
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,--
By the mountains--near the river   
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,--  
By the grey woods,--by the swamp   
Where the toad and the newt encamp,--   
By the dismal tarns and pools
   Where dwell the Ghouls,--   
By each spot the most unholy--   
In each nook most melancholy,--   
There the traveller meets, aghast,   
Sheeted Memories of the Past--   
Shrouded forms that start and sigh   
As they pass the wanderer by--   
White-robed forms of friends long given,   
In agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.

For the heart whose woes are legion   
'T is a peaceful, soothing region--   
For the spirit that walks in shadow   
'T is--oh, 't is an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,   
May not--dare not openly view it;   
Never its mysteries are exposed   
To the weak human eye unclosed;   
So wills its King, who hath forbid   
The uplifting of the fring'd lid;   
And thus the sad Soul that here passes   
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

By a route obscure and lonely,   
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,   
I have wandered home but newly   
From this ultimate dim Thule.

* * *

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

175 Years Ago

It's October, the month that ends on Halloween Night and in which Edgar Allan Poe died. He died in a suitably mysterious, curious, and tragic way. That unhappy event occurred 175 years ago, at five o'clock in the morning on October 7, 1849. More precisely, it was 175 years and 17.5 days ago as I post this. The word or words for a 175th anniversary are ridiculous, so I won't use any of them here. And there's no reason to celebrate such a sad and somber event. But we can at least observe it.

I have been writing about Poe and anniversaries and Weird Tales. It's strange to think that fewer years separated the death of Poe from the beginnings of the magazine than separate us from those same beginnings. I'll note that on October 6, 2024, the day before the 175th anniversary, the Baltimore Ravens, the only sports team that I know of named for a literary work, won their game against the Cincinnati Bengals, 41 to 38 in OT--October-time.

We miss you, Edgar Allan Poe.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola-Part Three

The self-references and meta-references continue:

We get a little of Hellboy's backstory in "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story." One sentence stands out to me:

And there had been countless hours reading pulp magazines and comic books on the floor of Professor Bruttenholm's office, or his study at home. [Emphasis added.] (p. 6, col. 2)

I think that sentence describes not Hellboy so much as many of the authors represented in this issue, as well as the editor who recruited them and whatever number of readers Weird Tales #367 might have had in its year (or less) in print. Things in their experience that are left out of Hellboy's are countless hours of watching TV and playing video games. If there is a stepping-down in our culture, it has reached a point where people learn about storytelling not by reading or even watching stories unfold on screen but by playing video games.

* * *

Decades and decades ago, a large part of American literature became not only by writers but, to the point, about writers and for writers. A good example of this is Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, from 1972, a novel by a novelist about a novelist writing a novel, and in which most of the action in the novel takes place in the head of the novelist McMurtry as he writes about his fictional novelist. In other words, it's not set authentically in a fictionalized real world but inauthentically inside a real-world novelist's head. In one sentence, the fictional novelist gets in his car, and in practically the next, he arrives at his destination hundreds of miles away. Didn't anything happen in the in-between? Didn't he do any living or thinking or seeing on his trip? Or did Scotty just beam him to where he was going inside of his car? Actually it was the real-world novelist who did this because he needed his fictional novelist to get from one place to the next as quickly as possible and without event. Things happen this way in novels, less often in real life. I like better what happens in The Charisma Campaigns by Jack Matthews, also from 1972, in which a short car trip--and the protagonist's story--is badly interrupted and the novel takes a drastic turn towards the end. This is more true to life. Matthews' protagonist, by the way, is a used car salesman, even if he writes imaginary newspaper headlines in his head. I guess that makes them literally headlines.

Anyway again, the same thing can be said now of genre fiction, at least in the case of Weird Tales #367. It's one thing to write about writing, writers, and stories in an essay in "The Eyrie." That's what essays are for. (I have just done a little name-dropping myself.) It's quite another to say that your main character reads pulp magazines and comic books and then write your story as if that's all you yourself have ever read, Edgar Allan Poe notwithstanding. Like I said, one thing missing from Hellboy's upbringing is countless hours of watching TV shows and playing video games. Poor Hellboy. Don't worry, though. Authors, editors, readers, and fans of today have more than made up for what he missed, and it all shows in what they create, what they prefer to watch and read, and how they spend their time.

* * *

In addition to Poe, there are references in "The City in the Sea" to:

• Lemuria, a pseudoscientific, pseudo-historical, or pseudo-religious appropriation by Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophists of a previously hypothesized lost continent.

• Pangea, a supercontinent of the distant past, in other words, another lost continent.

• Hyperborea, a place in ancient Greek myth and another that has been appropriated by esoteric thinkers and writers. It isn't supposed to have been a continent (I don't think), but it was and is lost.

• Mu, a mythical lost continent that also has a place in esoteric thought.

• Vril, a type of energy and an overt fiction created by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, taken to be nonfictional by some people who can be described pretty well, I think, as crackpots. Writing like Vril is real drags down your story, I think. If your characters have a brain in their heads, they should know that Vril and things like it are not real, that they exist in the real world only as crackpot ideas and hoaxes.

• Thoth, an ancient Egyptian god used in twentieth- and twenty first-century popular culture. His name is inside of Lovecraft's name for his god Yog-Sothoth and his own name for what is called "the Cthulhu Mythos," that is, Yog-Sothothery.

That's a list. Not a very long one, but still a list. It reminds me of the listing that August Derleth did in The Lurker at the Threshold (1946).

As you can see, some of these references are to cities or civilizations situated on island continents or surrounded by seas, just as in Poe's original poem "The City in the Sea." You could call all of this background information. Alternatively, you could call it name-dropping, a series of meta-references, or a lot of inside information. The problem is that all of these words and concepts have been used and overused to a point where they don't mean very much, if anything, any more. Their use could be an attempt to invoke something larger and more powerful than themselves, or to evoke thoughts and feelings in the reader. Words do of course have that kind of power. But these words have lost their power and their mystique. We don't need grimoires and dusty, buckled tomes at hand in order to read about obscure and esoteric subjects. We all have access to Wikipedia now. The mystique is gone. The balloon has been deflated. And all of it is old, so old, after we were promised new things.

* * *

I don't think name-dropping (or listing) works very well in fiction. When I read something like this:

On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. 

it doesn't mean much to me. (At least the artist's names are euphonic.) I guess those names are supposed to provide a kind of shorthand imagery. They are supposed to move us, or to hint at some esoteric, inside information held by the author in all of his erudition. But what if we are unfamiliar with the artists and their work? I think a better use of the author's limited word count would have been to tell us what he wanted us to envision or imagine rather than relying on name-dropping for his effect. The quote by the way is from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, from Weird Tales, February 1928.

* * *

There are also in "The City in the Sea" indirect references or similarities to other works of weird fiction or fantasy, including She, A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard (1887); "The Girl in the Gem," a Brak the Barbarian story by John Jakes, first in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Jan. 1965); and "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens in Argosy (three-part serial, March 6-20, 1920). As for the statuette, it reminds me of the Maltese Falcon, which also arrives wrapped as a package. Or maybe it's like the weird obelisk on the cover of the Led Zeppelin album Presence. If they keep gazing at it, those nice people on the cover are going to be transported to that awful City in the Sea.

* * *

You might think that I don't like "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story." Sorry for sounding cranky and complainy. It's actually a story one can enjoy, I think, with a good setup and some vivid imagery. The prose is good and clean, meaning unencumbered and not clunky (there is at least one vulgarity, though), which is often a wonder in our world of today. And I didn't pick up on any twenty-first century inanities. Thank God. I think "The City in the Sea" suffers, though, from being unsustained or not fully developed. It moves too quickly from one thing to the next and then back again without much of an explanation of why they're happening and what it could all mean. But I'm not sure that's the fault of the authors. That lack of full development appears to be a feature of Weird Tales #367. I'm not sure why there couldn't have been more content in this issue. There's room for it, but the whole thing seems to have been cut short for some reason. Also, we know that because Hellboy is a series character, nothing extremely bad or life-changing can happen to him. He has to come through his experience unscathed, with all of his sanity points still on the board and ready for his next adventure.

Finally, being a comic book artist myself, I can't complain about reading a prose story about a comic book character. This kind of thing can actually work. (I have done it myself. I hope it can work.) See for example The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker by Otto Binder, from 1967. It's not great literature, but it works. On the other hand, it has to be handled and developed in just the right way. The appearance of a comic book character in Weird Tales is something new, even if the character is not and the type of story in which he appears is not, even if the inspiration for the story is more than 175 years old. Finally, finally, I'm not sure that a comic book story, which is what this is, should take the lead over real prose fiction that does not resort or refer to any other work or form but instead stands alone.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley