Weird Tales Books-Alone by Night

Alone By Night edited by Michael and Don Congdon

Don Congdon (1918-2009) was a longtime editor in the nation's publishing capital of New York City, arriving in 1935, and at the end of his life, running his own agency. According to the New York Times, he "developed an enviable reputation as a skilled editor, tough negotiator and shrewd judge of talent." He was Ray Bradbury's editor for over half a century. Other clients included William Styron, Jack Finney, and Evan S. Connell. Congdon landed himself in the news in 1966 when he sold the serial rights to William Manchester's "Death of a President" to Look magazine for the then-staggering sum of $600,000. A contentious lawsuit by the president's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, followed. After changes were made to Manchester's manuscript, Mrs. Kennedy dropped her suit and the book and adaptation went to press.

During the 1960s, Congdon edited several collections of romance, war, and horror stories. One of these was Alone By Night (1961). Published by Ballantine Books and co-edited by Congdon's son, Michael Congdon, Alone By Night went through several printings as late as 1967. The book includes eleven stories. The subject of each is a favorite monster or creature: witch, ghost, werewolf, vampire. Even succubi, imps, fiends, and phantoms are represented. Three of the stories are from Weird Tales. The most famous of the stories in this book is probably Richard Matheson's "Nightmare at Twenty Thousand Feet," which was adapted to television in 1963 as an episode of The Twilight Zone with William Shatner in the lead role. A final comment: Henry Kuttner gets credit by name for "A Gnome There Was," but the story originally appeared under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett. That was a name shared by Kuttner and his wife, C.L. Moore, who was also of course a teller of weird tales.

Alone By Night edited by Michael and Don Congdon

(Ballantine Books, 1967, 144 pp.)

Introduction: "A Note to Teachers and Parents" by Richard H. Tyre, Abington High School, Abington, Pennsylvania
"Sweets to the Sweet" by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, Mar. 1947)

"The Strange Children" by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Aug. 1955)

"The Likeness of Julie" by Logan Swanson (1962)

"It Will Come to You" by Frank Belknap Long (Unknown Worlds, Dec. 1942)

"A Gnome There Was" by Henry Kuttner (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941, as by Lewis Padgett)

"Nightmare at Twenty Thousand Feet" by Richard Matheson (1962)

"In the Midst of Death" by Ben Hecht (1945)

"Gabriel-Ernest" by Saki (The Short Stories of Saki)

"Baynter's Imp" by August Derleth (Weird Tales, Sept. 1943)

"Enoch" by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, Sept. 1946)

"For the Blood Is the Life" by F. Marion Crawford (Wandering Ghosts, 1911)

Alone By Night, edited by Michael and Don Congdon. The cover artist is not identified, and I don't see a signature, but it looks like the work of Richard M. Powers.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books-Best Short Shorts

Best Short Shorts edited by Eric Berger

Best Short Shorts is a collection of short, short stories from Scholastic Book Services, published in several printings from 1958 until at least an eighth printing in 1967. There are thirty-five stories in the book, about one-third of which are from Collier's. Others are reprinted from The American Magazine, Liberty, Senior Scholastic, Seventeen, and This Week--what you might call mainstream titles. A few of the tales are from books or magazines of fantasy and science fiction. I'll list only those stories here. Finally, there are stories from tellers of weird tales, including "Code of the Underworld" by Jim Kjelgaard and "Two Were Left" by Hugh B. Cave.

Best Short Shorts edited by Eric Berger

(Scholastic Book Services, 1967, 183 pp.)

• "A Battle Over the Teacups" by August Derleth (Oriental Stories, Summer 1932)
• "August Heat" by W.F. Harvey (The Beast with Five Fingers, 1947)
• "The Open Window" by Saki (The Short Stories of Saki, 1930)
• "The Voice from the Curious Cube" by Nelson Bond (No Time Like the Future, 1955)
• "The Dreamer" by Alfred Coppel (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Apr. 1952)
• "The Fun They Had" by Isaac Asimov (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Feb. 1954)
• Plus 29 other short short stories.

Best Short Shorts, edited by Eric Berger (1967), with some odd cover copy and an unknown cover artist.

Text and captions Copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books-The Mummy Walks Among Us

The Mummy Walks Among Us edited by Vic Ghidalia

One fond memory of school days for Baby Boomers was the annual arrival of the Scholastic Books catalog and order form. For little money, you could order cartoon books, puzzle books, children's mysteries, anthologies, mythology, non-fiction, and even classics in paperback. After a short wait, the book was yours. There were other companies that published books specifically for the grade-school market. Xerox was one of them. Who knew as a child that for a mere 75 cents, you could lay your hands on what amounted to an issue of the long-defunct magazine Weird Tales? Yet that's just what The Mummy Walks Among Us and other books like it represented. Edited by Vic Ghidalia, The Mummy Walks Among Us is a collection of stories, seven in all, about the undead. Six of the book's tales came from the pages of "The Unique Magazine." The remainder was the work of two men whose work was also published in Weird Tales, though their story for this book came from Strange Stories. The Mummy Walks Among Us is still available second hand, even after forty years of wandering from bookstore to bookshelf, from one reader to another.

The Mummy Walks Among Us edited by Vic Ghidalia

(Xerox Corporation Publishing, 1971, 151 pp.)

"The Man in Crescent Terrace" by Seabury Quinn (Weird Tales, Mar. 1946)

"A Visitor from Egypt" by Frank Belknap Long (Weird Tales, Sept. 1930)

"The Mummy's Foot" by Théophile Gautier (Weird Tales, Apr. 1926)

"The Eyes of the Mummy" by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, Apr. 1938)

"The Vengeance of Aï" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer (Strange Stories, Apr. 1939)

"Monkeys" by E.F. Benson (Weird Tales, Dec. 1933)

"The Nameless Mummy" by Arlton Eadie (Weird Tales, May 1932)

The Mummy Walks Among Us, edited by Vic Ghidalia. The cover art is by someone with the initials E.V.

Text and captions Copyright 2011, 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

Jim Causey and Bill Blackbeard-Part 4

Jim Causey's letter to Randal Everts concludes:

     Unfortunately, I have no old rejects from WT [Weird Tales], or from the pulps. Only a couple of stf rejects, because I sold most of my output in the fifties. Every few months I would tear up everything I had previously written, even if it had only been rejected once. I figured I'd improved. (I stopped this practice when Ray Bradbury once told me that his fine story The Swan had been rejected over 50 times before he finally sold it to the big slicks.)

     Digging through my archives, however, I found an old issue of Fantasy Times, with a picture of Bill on the cover, and also an article by him where he mentions the lamentable demise of WT and how "Dorothy McIlwraith steered the old magazine into uncharted reefs of the most unspeakable crud ever seen in print . . . ." [Causey's ellipses] I enclose copy of same for your interest.

     Sorry not to have had a more adventurous existence. Bottom line: For over 30 years have had the same wife, worked for the same company, and used the same golf putter. This should provide some clue to my massive and complex character.

All best

[Signed] Jim

Fantasy Times #254 (September 1956) with tellers of weird tales Bill Blackbeard and Forrest J Ackerman on the cover. In addition, John Giunta, pictured here, was an artist for "The Unique Magazine." Blackbeard's article, "SF and Fantasy, 1941-1956," appeared in this issue of Fantasy Times. It may be the same issue mentioned by Blackbeard's friend, Jim Causey, in Causey's letter to Randal Everts.

Thanks again to Randal A. Everts for providing the letter from his collection.

2011, 2023

Jim Causey and Bill Blackbeard-Part 3

Jim Causey's biographical letter to Randal Everts continues:

     In the early sixties, I was fortunate enough to transfer to my company's aerospace division in Newport Beach, which permitted me to move from the Garden Grove smog belt to Laguna Beach, only a stone's throw away from work. (My wife and I both grew up in beach towns and love the ocean.) The house we bought had a little basement apartment, and Bill stayed with us for a few months. I remember him telling me what a great opportunity this was to do some serious writing.

     Bill's fiction output during this period was desultory, but his collecting mania intensified, if such a thing was possible. Soon he had the place filled floor to ceiling with moldering pulps. Tons of them. When I berated him for a magazine junkie, Bill looked bemused.

     "These are an investment," he said loftily. "These idiot booksellers don't realize the true value of their inventories."

     Alas, he marched to a different drummer. He left us a few months later, and we continued to correspond for a time, and I remember meeting him and his bride, Barbara, at a Forrie Ackerman benefit dinner a few years ago. Anyway, Bill finally established his great pulp museum and more power to him. His recent book, Sherlock Holmes in America, was a Literary Guild selection a couple of years ago and he must have gotten a rattling good price for it. There is obviously some kind of moral here about doing your own thing. [Sherlock Holmes in America was published in 1981, thus dating Causey's letter to sometime in the early to mid 1980s.]

Conclusion in the next entry.

Sherlock Holmes in America by Bill Blackbeard (1981).

2011, 2023

Jim Causey and Bill Blackbeard-Part 2

A continuation of Jim Causey's letter to Randal Everts, in which the author describes his return to California after a foray into New York City during the late 1940s:

     Came home to the west coast after a year, bloody but unbowed. Bounced around at odd jobs, sold a little real estate, and when I got married in 1950 decided to get a steady job. Kept writing on the side, nothing sensational, sold a few stf and mystery shorts. A TV sale to Alfred Hitchcock from one of my Manhunt stories. Three original paperback mysteries to Gold Medal, Avon & Crest in the late fifties.

     Bill and I had stayed in touch over the years and he kept telling me I should shuck the job and go to Mexico and write full-time. I couldn't see it. Had a wife and two sons who liked to eat regularly. Besides, the paperback market was getting anemic and it bothered me. Even worse, in the parlance of the trade, I was a "bleeder." Eked out first drafts in longhand, retyped, and tortuously revised. Finally typed the final draft for submission -- provided everything went well. How I envied these guys who could hammer it out first draft and sold immediately with only minor revisions! I tried this a couple of times and back came my manuscripts with dull thuds. Could simply not sell first drafts. Besides, every time I even considered writing full-time, I would get an unexpected raise and a sudden promotion. Somebody up there somewhere was trying to tell me something. . . [Causey's ellipses]

     So Bill and I each continued to follow our divergent destinies. He was still the compleat [sic] collector. Typically, he would quarter in one of those ancient, rambling frame gothics that lend a kind of updated Arkham flavor to the lees of Los Angeles. Whenever his vast collection threatened to tilt the house on its foundations, Bill would have to move, dragging tons of pulp treasure with him. An inveterate stf buff, Bill knew just about every fellow fan in the area and was a familiar sight at most of the stf/fantasy conventions. They all know him and love him. He is not, incidentally, a violent hirsute fellow as his name portends. Prematurely bald since his late teens, he is freckled, affable and articulate. Since nineteen he has looked forty. He will probably look the same at seventy.

Continued in the next entry.

Weird Tales for January 1943, the issue in which James Causey's  first story for the magazine, "The Statue," was published. The cover art is by A.R. Tilburne.