R.G. Macready (1905-1977)-Part Two

R.G. Macready contributed to student publications at all of the schools he attended. He also contributed to the Volta Review, a publication for the deaf and hard of hearing that is still being published today. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1945, he went to work as a teacher of English, history, and journalism at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf. He planned to write in his spare time.

Macready contributed just one story to Weird Tales. Entitled "The Plant Thing," it was published in July 1925 when its author was just twenty years old. "The Plant Thing" is a brief tale of a large, carnivorous plant, bred by a scientist who lives in a walled estate with his daughter and a Malay servant. The narrator of the story is a newspaper reporter. "The Plant Thing" has similarities to "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), as well as to "The Hand" by Guy de Maupassant (1883). Stories of murderous or carnivorous plants are common in weird fiction, horror fiction, and science fiction. I have written before about plants like these that appeared on the cover of Weird Tales. Click here to find your way. And of course there is in "The Plant Thing" the scientist and his beautiful daughter, with his wife and her mother nowhere to be found. Women in popular culture should know better than to marry scientists and to give them beautiful daughters. They're likely to end up like Dr. Morbius' wife in Forbidden Planet (1956) or Dr. Medford's wife in Them! (1957).

"The Plant Thing" has been reprinted several times since its original publication, as early as 1925 in Not at Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson, and as late as 2022. In a newspaper article from 1946 ("Deaf Man Receives M.A. in Journalism," in The Deaf Mississippian, Feb. 1, 1946, p. 1), Macready was described as having written "two horror novels and numerous short stories and novelettes, as yet unsold." I wish that these novels and stories were still in existence, but I fear they have been lost, for Macready never married and died without issue. He was survived only by two brothers and several nieces and nephews.

Macready had two letters in "The Eyrie." Here is the text of his first, from June 1925:

You are to be commended on the determined stand you, as well as the great majority of WEIRD TALES readers, have taken against those who protest at the weird quality of the stories printed in your periodical. Why do not these people, who are trying to wipe out of existence the only magazine of its kind, turn their artillery upon the sex-exploiting magazines that are crowding the best magazines out of place on our news stands? Anyway, a mind that can go undiseased through that so-called literature should be able to survive the pleasantly exhilarating 'kick' of a good horror tale. There can be no question as to the literary status of WEIRD TALES. In it have appeared stories worthy of Kipling himself, to say nothing of Poe.

Macready worked as telegraph editor at the Galveston Daily News in 1948 and at the Big Spring Daily Herald in 1949 and after. I don't have anything on his career after 1950. Reginald G. Macready died on May 10, 1977, in Arlington, Texas, at age seventy-two and was buried at Southland Memorial Park in Grand Prairie, Texas.

R.G. Macready's Story & Letters in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (June 1925)
"The Plant Thing" (July 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (July 1925)

Further Reading

Many interesting and detailed newspaper articles about him and his career as a student and journalist. You might start at the website of the Oklahoma Historical Society and its archive of newspapers.

 Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

World Tales (1985)

In 1985, the World Fantasy Convention was held at the Doubletree Hotel in Tucson, Arizona. The dates were October 31 to November 3, 1985. The souvenir book of the convention is entitled World Tales, and it was made to look like an issue of "The Unique Magazine." Not only does it look like an issue of Weird Tales, it is superior in quality to any issue published up until that time. You might as well call it an honorary issue of the magazine, published at a time when Weird Tales was not. The cover art is by Victoria Poyser. That keeps with the precedent of cover art by a woman artist. In the 1930s and '40s, she was Margaret Brundage. In the program book of two years before, she was Rowena Morrill. World Tales is pulp-sized, perfect bound, and contains 88 pages. The paper is off-white and beautifully made. The cover stock is excellent, and the typeface resembles that of a pulp magazine of long ago. Donald D. Markstein was the man behind the book. He designed, produced, and packaged World Tales. Weird Tales-related content includes an appreciation of guest of honor Evangeline Walton, a poem by Clark Ashton Smith, and a letter's column called "The Crow's Nest," but then the whole issue is Weird Tales-related in that it's essentially a facsimile of the original. If you collect issues of Weird Tales, you might want to add this book to your collection.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

First Verse

Although he did not receive credit in the table of contents, Clark Ashton Smith had, in the issue of July/August 1923, the first verse in Weird Tales. The first of his two poems in that issue is entitled "The Red Moon." You will find it on page 48.

The Red Moon
by Clark Ashton Smith

The hills, a-throng with swarthy pine,
Press up the pale and hollow sky,
And the squat cypresses on high
Reach from the lit horizon-line.

They reach, they reach, with gnarled hands--
Malignant hags, obscene and dark--
While the red moon, a demons'-ark,
Is borne along the mystic lands.

The second, a sonnet, appearing on page 68, is entitled "The Garden of Evil":

The Garden of Evil
by Clark Ashton Smith

Thy soul is like a secret garden-close.
Where the cleft roots of mandragores enwreathe;
Where lilies and where fumitories breathe,
And ivy winds its flower with the rose;

The lolling weeds of Lethe, green or wan,
Exhale their fatal languors on the light;
From out infernal grails of aconite.
Poisons and dews are proffered to the dawn.

There, when the moon's phantasmal fingers grope
To find the marbles of a hidden tomb.
In cypress-covert sings the nightingale;

And all the silver-bellied serpents pale
Their ruby eyes among the blossoms ope,
To lift and listen in the ghostly gloom.

There were three poems in the January 1924 issue of Weird Tales, "Hops" by Preston Langley Hickey, "Solution" by Clark Ashton Smith, and "The Cataleptic" by Charles Layng. Mary Sharon had the first poem by a women. Hers was called "The Ghost," and it appeared in the February 1924 issue:

The Ghost
by Mary Sharon

There is a ghost that walks for me,
     A Presence that I dread;
The Spirit of the Youth I was
     Before my dreams were dead.

I sit before my study fire,
     While shadows writhe along the wall,
And Spirit hands rap on the door,
     And ghostly feet glide down the hall.

Outside my window, lifeless trees
     Lift fleshless fingers to the sky;
The night wind whistles eerily,
     Its moaning echoes will not die.

This ghost of mine will not be laid,
    Time cannot set me free; 
It is the wraith of dear dead days,
    That comes to torture me.

Note the similarity in imagery between Smith's poem "The Red Moon":

They [the cypresses] reach, they reach, with gnarled hands--

And Mary Sharon's lines:

Outside my window, lifeless trees
     Lift fleshless fingers to the sky;

Should we take that as a swipe? An inspiration of one author to another? Or two minds arriving independently at the same image?

There were six poems in the issue of March 1924 but only one in the issue of April. That one, called "Nemesis," was by H.P. Lovecraft.

I will soon have more on the first of Lovecraft in Weird Tales, including lines of verse he inserted in his letters to "The Eyrie."

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Botanical Fiction Database

I don't ordinarily provide links to other sites, but recently I found one that probably every fan of fantasy and science fiction should know about. The site itself is called The Fish in Prison. The page to which I'd like to refer you is called "Botanical Fiction." The URL is as follows (click on it for the link):

http://www.thefishinprison.com/botanical-fiction-database.html

The author of the site is Dr. Timothy S. Miller of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Dr. Miller received his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame. If he'll accept the honor, we'll call him a Hoosier.

The Botanical Fiction Database isn't quite a database yet. Dr. Miller calls it instead a "Timeline of Botanical Fictions." It begins with "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1844 and reprinted in Weird Tales in May 1928. There are many other stories from Weird Tales in Dr. Miller's list, including "The Blood Flower" by Seabury Quinn, which was reprinted in The Adventures of Jules de Grandin, a book from one of my recent postings. In fact, a lot of the stories on his list are from Weird Tales. The John Carstairs series by Frank Belknap Long is not. This is the first I have heard of the series. It's about a botanical detective. As a forester, part-time botanizer, reader of detective fiction, and (bewildered) explorer of the mysteries of life, I want to read the series exactly right now.

I have written a little about plants in two of my last three postings. They have led me first in an unintended way, then in an intended way, to today's posting. By the way, I wrote more on plants in "Trees and Other Plants on the Cover of Weird Tales" on February 11, 2014. Click on the title for a link.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Worlds Invisible

A long time ago, British historian, author, and television personality James Burke hosted a show called Connections in which he wandered through history making connections among seemingly disparate and unconnected events. It was a good show and he was a great host. It's always fascinating to me to see a great mind at work and to read history with a thesis rather than as just a chronicle of events. One of the points of Connections is that historical events have not taken place in isolation, rather, they should be seen and can best be understood in a historical and cultural context.

Fans of science fiction and fantasy prefer to escape from the facts of history, biography, and personality. It's why we read and why it's called escapist literature. The problem is that science fiction and fantasy do not and cannot exist in isolation, separate from their historical and cultural context. Likewise, escapist literature cannot be separated from the biographies of its individual authors. Those facts are among the reasons I write this blog, to place science fiction and fantasy in historical context and to tell something of the biography of the creators of these genres. As writers, readers, and fans, we would prefer not to be bound by history or fact. Instead, we would like to escape. But we should all realize as every person must realize in his or her life that there can be no escape from living.

The last time I wrote, I looked at the story "Unseen-Unfeared" by Francis Stevens (1919). It's a story about invisible monsters that are incarnated through human hatred and violence. The theme in Stevens' work of the monster created by humanity goes back to her novel, The Citadel of Fear (1918). Both stories are in the end positive and life-affirming. They may be fantasy, but they are not dark. 

The supposition is that Francis Stevens was the creator of the sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. I haven't found any really good evidence of that yet, but then the term itself, dark fantasy, is ill-defined and seems to be whatever one person or another wants it to be. Dark seems to be the operative word, as dark fantasy is apparently dark, negative, pessimistic, and nihilistic. It involves malevolent forces from the outside that seek to corrupt and destroy humanity. In our materialistic age, that means creatures from other times, other places, or other dimensions. In other words, they are not supernatural in origin, as we in this age won't allow for such things. In a time of believers, fantasy, it seems to me, would have been the age-old story of good versus evil, of God versus the devil. It would have been clear to all just who was the Good Guy and who was the bad guy. That, at least, was true until science put God into his grave in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. With dark fantasy, writers, readers, and fans seem to have switched sides and to identify with the powers of darkness rather than Light.

With all that in mind, I realized that there was a concept of invisible monsters or invisible evil in American literature before Francis Stevens and H.P. Lovecraft, before Ambrose Bierce and Fitz-James O'Brien. I remembered my high school days and reading Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather (1693). This is where the connections begin.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), like John Dee (1527-1608 or 1609) and Joseph Glanvil (1636-1680), whom I quoted recently (by way of Edgar Allan Poe), was a practitioner of pneumatology. That's a new word for me, and I had to look it up. According to Wikipedia, "pneumatology is the study of spiritual beings and phenomena." All three men found their way into the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. It's worth mentioning that Mather was also a scientist who advocated for inoculation against smallpox. The germ theory of disease was still far in the future, but it seems that Mather was interested in the invisible world of the spirit and of organisms invisible to the naked eye.

There isn't any evidence that Francis Stevens sought to connect a seventeenth-century dissertation on witchcraft in New England to events contemporaneous to her own life. But I wonder if in one way or another she updated the concept of an invisible evil to the twentieth century and introduced a very old idea into a newly forming genre, science fiction. There is reason to believe that Francis Stevens--Gertrude Barrows Bennett--was a Catholic. If that was the case, I wonder, too, how receptive she would have been to the very Protestant and very Puritan ideas of Cotton Mather. Finally, I wonder if dark fantasy is simply a genre that is essentially theological in nature but with God and devil (ideas that are considered naïve and unsophisticated today) removed, only to be replaced by material forces. If that's true, then Francis Stevens--if she was indeed an author of dark fantasy--would have come before the break from the theological past into a materialistic present. If that's the case, then it hardly makes any sense to say that she created the genre attributed to her.

It also occurred to me that the invisible creature spawned by human hatred, jealousy, and destructiveness reappeared, so to speak, in the movie Forbidden Planet from 1956. By then the creature was explained in purely materialistic terms as a monster of the Id manifested with the aid of vast and powerful machinery. Many of Freud's ideas are now considered politically incorrect or simply invalid, but in the 1950s, Freudian psychology was wildly popular and I think carried a kind of scientific cachet. It's no wonder that it found its way into science fiction. Heck, even Dianetics, the root of a science-fiction religion, is made up in part of Freudianism. The irony is that Marx, who was an out-and-out crackpot, has adherents today, while Freud has fallen out of favor, despite the usefulness of some of his ideas. The double irony is that the political correctness that has gone against Freud grew, I believe, out of a marriage of his ideas to those of Marx in the forms of critical theory and the schemes of the New Left.

The race that created the machines in Forbidden Planet were called the Krell. The source of their great power is subterranean. The name evokes, if ever so slightly, the subject of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's romance of 1871, Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. The Vril is the power, also subterranean. The people who wield that power are the Vril-Ya, which word seems to have been the source of H.P. Lovecraft's name for his submarine city, R'lyeh, in "The Call of Cthulhu." Bulwer-Lytton's book also influenced the Theosophists (who were mentioned in "The Call of Cthulhu"). They in turn seem to have influenced Raymond A. Palmer in his peddling of the so-called Shaver Mystery and perhaps even L. Ron Hubbard, an even greater huckster than Palmer, who invented a quasi-Freudian Dianetics and a quasi-religious Scientology. Forbidden Planet is said to have influenced the making of the television series Star Trek (1966). In one episode, "The Ultimate Computer," human "engrams" are encoded in the eponymous machine. Engram is of course a term from Dianetics and Scientology. The Krell's machinery, like the Vril-Ya's technology before it, might easily be called "the ultimate computer" as well. The Mathison E-meter is a pretty meager gadget by comparison. (1)

So, Karl Marx, Theosophy, Raymond A. Palmer, L. Ron Hubbard, and to a lesser extent Sigmund Freud attempted to uncover or explain earth's secret history, each in more or less materialistic terms. Cotton Mather had his own non-material explanation for historical forces. Poor Francis Stevens, whom hardly anyone remembers, relied on a very old and very simple explanation. She laid the blame instead at the feet of a corrupt humanity and its influencing "Powers of Evil."

The connections continue: There are those who explain witches and even zombies by material means. This is, after all, the era of Scientism in which all things are or can be explained by science. One of those means is by ingestion of jimsonweed, a highly toxic plant that grows in old barn lots, hog lots, and other waste places here in the Midwest. If jimsonweed is only one of many material sources of altered states of consciousness, morality, or being, then Cotton Mather's ideas are rendered obsolete. After all, in an era of Scientism, there can't be any supernatural or non-material explanations for human conduct.

Another name for jimsonweed is thornapple. You and I ran across that word recently in our reading. You will remember that Lee Brown Coye passed through an area overgrown with pines and thornapple trees on his way to a house of horrors in central New York State. I take that name, thornapple, to mean hawthorn, a small tree with apple-like fruits and thorny twigs. Hawthorn is common on old-field sites, as Coye's woods seem to have been. But there is a suggestion of the name of that far less innocuous plant that I have called jimsonweed. That suggestion gives a whole new meaning to Coye's tale, and to the story "Sticks," adapted by Karl Edward Wagner, who was a psychiatrist, a drug user, a nihilist, possibly an atheist, and the one who may very well have coined the term dark fantasy.

Note

(1) Speaking of the E-meter, I think people undergoing auditing grip cylindrical electrodes in their hands. If I remember right, I read a story that early auditors might even have used tomato cans as the electrodes. That makes me think of Mr. Haney, from Green Acres, who very famously said, "Don't look in the termator can!" It also makes me think of the "time machine" from Napoleon Dynamite, the title character of which was, like L. Ron Hubbard, Lee Brown Coye, and Karl Edward Wagner, a redhead. Here's another quote from Wikipedia: "Montague Summers, in his translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, notes that red hair and green eyes were thought to be the sign of a witch, a werewolf or a vampire during the Middle Ages." Readers of H.P. Lovecraft have of course heard of the Malleus Maleficarum. In some of the images of Cotton Mather on the Internet, his hair is suspiciously ruddy in hue. Anyway, if a witch is a drug user, and werewolves and vampires are either psychopaths or victims of bloodborne illness, then evil and corruption have satisfactorily been explained by science, and the individual is excused from responsibility for his own actions.

Copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Trees and Other Plants on the Cover of Weird Tales

Plants make human life possible, yet writers of science fiction and fantasy have often shown them to be strange and menacing. For instance, the title character in The Thing from Another World (1951) is a plant, a kind of super carrot. The aliens from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the plague species in The Day of the Triffids (1962) are also plants. Then there was The Happening from 2008.

Science fiction and fantasy artists often let us know that something is strange or alien by painting it green. So why should plants be scary or threatening? They may be alien to us, and they may be green, but they are mostly harmless. There are of course plants to stay away from: poison-ivy and giant hogweed for their toxins, briars and brambles for their thorns. Maybe those plants remind us of wild beasts with their poisoned fangs and their claws that catch. More disturbing are plants that move, like the Venus flytrap. Maybe we imagine that plants might want to devour us. After all, we have been devouring them since the beginning. (A moving plant large enough to devour a human is a staple of fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories.)

I can think of a couple of other reasons why plants might be seen as strange or menacing. Both have something to do with weird fiction. First, the dense, dark, overgrown forest or jungle can seem frightening or oppressive. Wild animals lurk there. So might witches and demons and even the devil himself. The Puritans are supposed to have been frightened of the forest. Young Goodman Brown was stripped of his illusions after a night in the darkened woods. Second, if weird fiction is about the past and about decadence, then the image of a tree or a jungle overtaking or growing up among a ruined house or a ruined city becomes symbolic. It may just be too much for us to consider, for we, too, shall be overtaken as all things are by the passage of time.

Who says a weird story can't be told in the form of a gag cartoon? Charles Addams did it. So does Sam Gross. George Price (1901-1995), the creator of this drawing and one of my favorite New Yorker cartoonists, did it on occasion, too.

The great James Flora (1914-1998) told weird stories for children. I would highly recommend Grandpa's Ghost Stories (1978) and The Great Green Turkey Creek Monster (1976), about a plant that takes over a town. But then what would you expect from an artist named Flora? By the way, we just passed the one hundredth anniversary of Flora's birth--January 25, 1914. So Happy Birthday, Jim Flora!

Now let the covers begin.

Weird Tales, August 1926. Cover story: "The Woman of the Wood" by A. Merritt. Cover art by C. Barker Petrie, Jr. The tree on Petrie's cover is the most man-like of plants in this category. It would almost qualify as a monster except that it appears to be the woman's friend. When I first saw this illustration, I thought of the mythological story of Daphne and the laurel. 

Here's one example among many from the art world, "Daphne and Apollo" by the British Pre-Raphaelite artist John William Waterhouse (1849-1917).

Weird Tales, September 1928. Cover story: "The Devil Plant" by John Murray Reynolds. Cover art by C.C. Senf. We have seen this cover before in the category of man, woman, and monster. The sexual symbolism here is unavoidable except that the woman is being engulfed by the plant--an obvious symbol of the woman--while the man endeavors to cut her loose. If you would like to see more explicit sexual symbolism in the depiction of flora, look no further than the art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Weird Tales, April 1938. Cover story: "The Garden of Adompha" by Clark Ashton Smith. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. I pointed out before that there is a lot of looking in fantasy art, maybe in art in general. That's true in this image as well. Finlay had a talent for covering key parts of female anatomy with bubbles, stars, and other things. Here he used leaves and flowers such that we can look but not see. The plant isn't quite a monster, but it is moving.

Finlay's cover reminds me of "Persephone," a painting by Thomas Hart Benton from 1938-1939. I wonder if Benton would have seen Finlay's illustration before beginning his own composition.

Weird Tales, March 1952. Cover story: "Morne Perdu" by Alice Drayton Farnham. Cover art by Joseph R. Eberle. This is more or less a conventional haunted house picture of a kind we all drew as children, but of three monstrous trees (this image and the two to follow), I like this one the best.

Weird Tales, May 1953. Cover story: "Whisper Water" by Leah Bodine Drake. Cover art by Joseph R. Eberle. I guess nobody said, "We used a tree-monster on the cover last year. We'd better not do it again so soon," because here is another tree-monster. It looks like the white box is covering up a key part of the picture, but where else were they supposed to put the blurb?

Weird Tales, January 1954. Cover story: "Effie's Pets" by Suzanne Pickett. Cover art by W.H. Silvey. The illustration here is mostly about a Morlock-like woman and an unlucky guy, but there is also a monstrous tree in the lower right corner. Of all the plants shown here, this one reminds me most of . . .

The apple trees from The Wizard of Oz (1939), one of the creepiest parts of that movie.

Frank Frazetta got in on the act in 1970 with his own version of a monster-tree.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Eternal Triangle: Man, Woman, Monster

First I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I hope this year offers health and happiness to all.

Second, I would like to begin a new series in which I attempt to classify the covers of Weird Tales magazine. I'll begin with the cover of the first issue from March 1923 and the pattern it set for many covers to follow. The pattern is one of the eternal triangle of man, woman, and monster--not an animal, not another man, but a monster.

Every boy wishes to be a hero, to rescue the beautiful damsel in distress, to slay the horrible monster that threatens not only her but also perhaps his own happiness. (After all, if he is to go on living, he must have her and be loved by her.) I suppose every woman in her heart wishes to be a damsel, in distress or not. There may be something else at work in the eternal triangle though. A boy may wish to be a hero. An adolescent or man on the other hand may see himself as more monster than man. The eternal triangle in fantasy allows a man to identify with the hero rather than with the monster--to escape the real or imagined facts of his own existence. I think that's one of the appeals of the TV show Beauty and the Beast: the man who sees himself as a beast can believe that he might win the love and affection of a beautiful woman.

Pulp magazines abounded with images of the eternal triangle. In science fiction, the monster was often of the bug-eyed alien variety, a creature so common that it earned an acronym: BEM. In weird fiction and fantasy fiction, the monster was of other types, some of which you'll see below. With its illustration of Anthony M. Rud's "Ooze," Weird Tales began with a cover showing the eternal triangle. The man and woman are the subjects of a search by the narrator of "Ooze." The monster is the reason they are missing. Richard R. Epperly's depiction of the monster isn't quite accurate, for in the story the monster is not an octopoid (or Cthuloid) creature but an outsized amoeba. In any case, let the menacing and the rescuing begin.

Weird Tales, March 1923, the first issue of "The Unique Magazine." The cover story is "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud.  The artist was Richard Ruh Epperly. There is also supposed to have been a variant cover in which the black and orange plates were reversed.

In the eternal triangle, the woman is menaced by a monster while the man comes to her rescue. The woman may be in the clutches of the creature as in this illustration. In other variations, she is threatened by the monster (see July 1926, immediately below), or she is shielded from the monster by the man (see Feb. 1928, below that). The man sometimes has only his bare hands with which to fend off the monster's advances. More often he has a weapon, either a gun or a blade. The man in the illustration above isn't taking any chances: he has both gun and knife.

Note the somewhat childlike or primitive aspect of the drawing. Rather than face the monster as they would in three dimensions (thus facing away from the viewer), both man and woman are shown in profile and are looking at the monster as if they and it exist only in two dimensions. I doubt that any readers of the first issue of Weird Tales quibbled with the art: for the first time, they had before them an American magazine title devoted exclusively to weird and fantastic fiction.

Weird Tales, July 1926. The cover story is "Through the Vortex" by Donald Edward Keyhoe, later of flying saucer fame. The artist was E.M. Stevenson. The cover is now in full color, but there is still a somewhat primitive aspect to the art, especially in the dragon. The woman is being threatened by the monster, but the man--a classic pulp hero--intervenes. His weapon of choice: a pistol.

Weird Tales, February 1928. The cover story is "The Ghost Table" by Elliot O'Donnell. The artist was C.C. Senf. Once again, the man intervenes between the woman and the monster, in this case a scary table, so scary that the woman swoons. The weapon is again a pistol. This is the same issue in which "The Call of Cthulhu" appeared for the first time, yet the editorial staff of Weird Tales chose "The Ghost Table" as their cover story. That might not be as bad as giving Milli Vanilli a Grammy for best new artist, but you get the idea.

Weird Tales, September 1928. The cover story is "The Devil-Plant" by John Murray Reynolds. The cover artist was C.C. Senf. The monster this time is a plant. The man seems to be in no great hurry to chop at it with his knife, which--for some reason--has blood on it. Sexual imagery is probably unavoidable in depictions of the eternal triangle. Often the woman is wrapped in snakes or tendrils or threatened by long-necked dragons as in the cover from 1926. Here she is being engulfed in flora, more symbolic of the female than of the male, especially when the parts of the plant are vertically bifurcated. So this cover is unusual in that the monster is more feminine than masculine. There will be more monstrous plants in a later category of cover illustrations.

Weird Tales, February 1929. The cover story is "The Star-Stealers" by Edmond Hamilton. The cover artist was Hugh Rankin. C.C. Senf was a competent artist and occasionally produced a really fine cover. But for true weirdness, none of the early Weird Tales cover artists could match Hugh Rankin. And speaking of triangles, get a load of that monster. Note the influence of art deco, especially in the female figure, her clothing (such as it is), the bird-like motifs, and the lettering, no doubt done by hand by the artist himself.    

Weird Tales, September 1931. The cover story is the third installment of "Tam, Son of the Tiger" by Otis Adelbert Kline. The cover artist was once again C.C. Senf. The monster in this example is humanoid. The hero's weapon is a sword. I haven't read "Tam, Son of the Tiger," but I suspect it was inspired by the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs. By the way, four of the six installments of "Tam" were cover stories. All four of those covers were by Senf. "Buccaneers of Venus" (following) also earned four cover spots.

Like some weird alien camel-like creature, sexual imagery rears its head again in Senf's illustration, nowhere more obviously than in the woman's skirt. The question is this: Does an artist purposely inject (no pun intended) symbolism into his work? Or is symbolism unconscious? I would suggest that symbolism is by definition unconscious. That's why the artist often shrinks (no pun intended) from showing his work: he knows that it reveals something about him, something that he may not know himself on a conscious level, yet is immediately obvious to the viewer. Did C.C. Senf mean to lay the staff of the monster's trident (perhaps as an extension of the monster's arm and hand) so neatly across the woman's breasts? Probably not. What about the club? The sword? Or the camel's neck and head? Did the artist mean to show them as sexual symbols? My guess is probably not, probably not, and probably not.

Weird Tales, December 1932. The cover story is the second installment of "Buccaneers of Venus" by Otis Adelbert Kline. The cover artist was J. Allen St. John. Here's a variation on the man-woman-monster triad. This time there are two monsters. The snake will reappear in a later category of covers. The man's weapon: a sword. Kline was back at it with "Buccaneers of Venus." The resemblance to the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs is even stronger here. Weird Tales even used Burroughs' artist in J. Allen St. John for this cover.

Weird Tales, February 1933. Another month, another monster. The cover story (installment number four) and cover artist are the same as in the previous example. The monster, apparently a sort of spider-scorpion, is vastly different. Critics of Margaret Brundage might object to her floating figures, yet if she was guilty, so was J. Allen St. John on occasion. St. John's influence on Frank Frazetta, moreover on Roy Krenkel, can be traced back to illustrations like this one.

Weird Tales, May 1934. The cover story is "Queen of the Black Coast" by Robert E. Howard. The cover artist was the aforementioned Margaret Brundage. Again, the monster (enter stage left) is humanoid. Again, the weapon is a knife. But in this case, the man seems more vulnerable than the woman. She almost seems to be protecting him. Margaret Brundage was a big, tall woman and no shrinking violet. Her female figures by contrast are usually small and dainty. But perhaps only a female artist could have depicted Robert E. Howard's mighty barbarian in this way. (See also her cover for "The Hour of the Dragon," Dec. 1935).

Weird Tales, February 1937. The cover story is "The Globe of Memories" by Seabury Quinn. The cover art was by Virgil Finlay. The undead are monsters, even if they were once people. The hero must always overcome the prohibition against killing another human being if he is to survive among them. The hero in this illustration could be a self-portrait of the artist. The woman doesn't seem very involved in what's going on. She is clearly a posed model, more likely a photograph of a posed model from Finlay's morgue--no pun intended.

A photograph of Virgil Finlay from almost the same angle. I'd say yeah, that's him. 

Weird Tales, May 1940, the first issue with Dorothy McIlwraith as the editor. According to Jaffery and Cook, the cover art, created by Hannes Bok, does not illustrate a story in the magazine, despite the fact that Edmond Hamilton's byline and the title "The City from the Sea" are pretty prominent here. I haven't read the story, so I can't say one way or another. In any case, a little naked elf is still a man, and a woman in the clutches of a giant, green, furry bat-creature is still a woman in need of rescuing.

Weird Tales, January 1941. The cover story is "Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner. The cover artist was Harold S. De Lay. By 1941, Robert E. Howard was gone. Readers would have to make do with Henry Kuttner. The cover illustration is another iteration of the hero, damsel, and dragon image. Later readers of fantasy looked for the drama, action, and mystery of a Frazetta painting. De Lay's illustration is more subdued, but if you look closely, you can see foreshadowing of Frazetta in the horsemen in the background, in the technique in the dragon's scales and the hero's armor, and in his cloak, sword, shield, scabbard, and leggings.

By comparison, here is a painting by Frank Frazetta from 1972.  The man and the monster are somewhat similar to the figures in De Lay's painting. Unfortunately the woman is missing. Frazetta's work is entitled "Monster Out of Time." The double meaning may not have been intentional.

Weird Tales, July 1941. The cover story is "The Robot God" by Ray Cummings. The cover artist was newcomer Hannes Bok. (The male figure looks like a self-portrait of the artist.) What a change: the monster is a new type, the science-fictional monster, in this case a robot. H.P. Lovecraft, long dead, is relegated to a tiny blurb at the top of the cover. Ray Cummings, still kicking at fifty-three, gets the cover spot with a science fiction story. Note also the confessional and very topical title "I Killed Hitler." Not quite the Weird Tales of old.

A photograph of Hannes Bok, the artist and undoubtedly the model for the male figure in the illustration above.

There were 279 issues of Weird Tales, not counting variants published in Canada. I count thirteen covers in the category I have called The Eternal Triangle of Man, Woman, and Monster. Next, a variation: woman and monster.

Updated on January 23, 2014.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley