Weird Tales and the End of the World

As everyone knows, the Mayan calendar (and so too the world) ends on December 21, 2012. Rather than just get a new calendar as we all do every year, we're just going to let this happen I suppose. Before it does, though, you might want to read a little about Mayas and the end of the world, and what better place than in the magazine Weird Tales?

Stories about the end of the world abound. It's enough to make me think that the end of the world is a common, if not universal, fantasy. (Why should this be so? I have a feeling that it has something to do with our knowledge that we ourselves are going to end while the world will go on. Maybe the only way to correct that perceived injustice is for all the world to end as well--for all of us to go at the same time.) In any case, here are some stories and poems from Weird Tales on the occasion of the end of the world. (I have selected these stories and poems solely for their titles. I haven't read them myself and don't know their plots or themes.)

• "In Mayan Splendor" by Frank Belknap Long (poem, Apr. 1934)
• "World's End" by Henry Kuttner (short story, Feb. 1938)
• "The World Wrecker" by Arlton Eadie (serial, Apr.-June 1929)
• "In the World's Dusk" by Edmond Hamilton (short story, Mar. 1936)
• "The Planet of the Dead" by Clark Ashton Smith (short story, Mar. 1932)

You could of course also read "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, and though the world doesn't end in that story, it's only because the stars aren't right. Finally, here's a story I have read, and though humanity doesn't meet its end in this one either, we live on only because people from Venus save our bacon: "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis.

In Mayan Splendor is a collection of poems by Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994), published by Arkham House in 1977. The back cover shows the familiar circular motif of Mayan art. If a circle has no end, why shouldn't the calendar as well?

Of all the covers I have looked at this evening, this one seems most appropriate to the subject at hand. The cover story is "The Monster of the Prophecy" by Clark Ashton Smith. The cover art is by C.C. Senf. I think this is one of his better covers, not only in its design but also in its execution.

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books-Strange Eons by Robert Bloch

Strange Eons by Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch (1917-1994) was only a teenager when he began writing for Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales. His first story for the magazine, "The Feast in the Abbey," was published in January 1935. Over the next seventeen years, Bloch would pen nearly seventy more stories for Weird Tales, in the process becoming one of the foremost writers of fantasy in America. His writing for Weird Tales also earned him entry into H.P. Lovecraft's circle, though only briefly. Like Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, and other young writers, Bloch befriended and wrote letters to Lovecraft in his Providence home and emulated him in the pages of Weird Tales. Bloch was devastated when his mentor died in 1937. Forty years later, he revived Lovecraft's memory in a novel that--although it is included in tales of the Cthulhu Mythos--bears little resemblance to any that I know that preceded it.

Bloch's novel is called Strange Eons (1978). His premise is that H.P. Lovecraft's work was not fiction but based on fact and that Lovecraft, as an investigator of the supernatural, wrote as a warning to humanity. In the novel's semi-documentary pages, Lovecraft becomes a historical figure and his collected works a sort-of grimoire revealing much about earth's secret history. (Bloch even includes himself in the story, though not by name.) In Bloch's hands, the Cthulhu Mythos is updated for the 1970s and comes to encompass a number of other mysterious, unexplained, and paranormal phenomena, including UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, Easter Island, and parapsychology. Like Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu," Strange Eons culminates in a far-reaching (though government-sponsored) correlation of events and an ending to put an end to all stories of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Strange Eons (1978) by Robert Bloch, a novel "In the Fantastic Tradition of H.P. Lovecraft," in which Lovecraft himself becomes a historical figure. The title is from a sinister couplet from the fictional Necronimicon, quoted in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928):

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange eons even death may die.

The cover art is by David Hada.

Incidentally, the cover of Strange Eons resembles Rowena Morrill's cover painting for The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft (1978).

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley