Peter Haining - Weird Tales - A Fascimile Of The World's Most Famous Fantasy Magazine (Neville Spearman, 1976)
Edmond Hamilton - The Man Who Returned
Robert E. Howard - Black Hound of Death
August Derleth - The Shuttered House
Seabury Quinn - Frozen Beauty
H. P. Lovecraft - Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Clark Ashton Smith - The Garden of Adompha
Virgil Finlay - The Horns Of Elfland [illustration]
Henry Kuttner - Beyond the Phoenix
G. G. Pendarves - The Black Monk
Henry S. Whitehead - The Passing Of A God
[The Eyrie: Readers Letters]
Manly Wade Wellman - The Valley Was Still
['It Happened To Me': True Psychic Experiences]
Nictzin Dyalhis - The Heart of Atlantan
[Calling All Fantasy Fans]
Fritz Leiber - The Phantom Slayer
[Weird Tales Club]
Robert Bloch - The Beasts of Barsac
Ray Bradbury - Bang! You're Dead!
[Stay Tuned For Terror: Ad. for Robert Bloch radio series]
[The Eyrie: Readers Letters]
Theodore Sturgeon - Cellmate
H. P. Lovecraft - The Familiars [verse]
Algernon Blackwood - Roman Remains
Eric Frank Russell - Displaced Person
H. Russell Wakefield - From the Vasty Deep
Mary Elizabeth Counselman - The Shot-Tower Ghost
Allison V. Harding - Take the Z-Train
[Lee Brown Coye - Weirdisms]
Margaret St. Clair - The Little Red Owl
Anthony M. Rud - Ooze Also available as a 2 volume set in paperback (Sphere, 1978), this is a great, horror-heavy introduction to "the unique magazine".
Spoilers/ Tasters, etcEdmond Hamilton - The Man Who Returned: John Woodward awakens to find himself encoffined in the family vault. Buried alive! Terrified, he struggles and scrapes until he eventually frees himself, and staggers off home to tell his wife the good news. A lot has changed in the time he's been away ...
Margaret St. Clair - The Little Red Owl: Unhinged uncle Charles takes sadistic pleasure in tormenting little Peter and Carlotta with horrible tales of the tortures inflicted on the little red owl by Vulture Man. He even goes so far as to have a picture of the victim printed and inserted into a magic painting book at great expense. As the tale progresses, he lapses into complete madness and sets fire to the house in a final attempt to destroy the children.
Manly Wade Wellman - The Valley Was Still: Paradine, a Confederate, stumbles upon a valley littered with the undecayed corpses of Yankee soldiers. The black magician, Teague, has hypnotised them: he plans to rule the country, and offers Paradine the Generalship of his private army. The pious rebel will have none of it and smartly decapitates the wretch, destroys the talisman and frees the Union soldiers. In the ensuing conflict he and his comrades are all but routed but, reasons Paradine, if you can't win fair ...
Fritz Leiber - The Phantom Slayer: The narrator, down on his luck, is remembered in the will of an uncle, David Rhode, an ex-police officer, who leaves him free board for three months. Rooting through the dead man's effects, he discovers stacks of press clippings and ephemera relating to a Ripper-like serial killer. The unnamed hero suffers from terrible nightmares - in which he witnesses two of the murders - accompanied by worrying OOB experiences. Slipping into his uncles uniform, he sleepwalks down town and approaches a little girl ....
Eric Frank Russell - Displaced Person: Narrator meets a stranger in Central Park. He learns that the man is some kind of refugee, unwelcome in his own country after leading a revolt against tyranny. His army was defeated and banished. He bemoans the loss and bitterly condemns the enemies' manipulation of the media and their ceaseless propaganda campaign versus himself. We guess long before the narrator just who he's been exchanging pleasantries with.
Seabury Quinn - Frozen Beauty: Dr. Paviovitch is assassinated by Tsarists before he can revive Nikokova, the girl he froze when illness prevented her fleeing the country with he and her lover. De Grandin releases the girl from her twenty-year suspended animation and takes out the entire evil death squad.
August Derleth - The Panelled Room: Mrs. Lydia Grant moves into the house on Main St. against all advice. Seventeen years previous, Peter Mason killed his wife then hung himself in the panelled room, and successive residents have been troubled by their ghosts. Her sister, Irma, is delighted when Lydia sees the ghastly apparitions - she stands to inherit the property on the elder woman's death - but comes unstuck when Mrs. Grant is strangled by unseen hands. One of Derleth's best - horrible ending!
Robert E. Howard - Black Hound Of Death: Egypt. The psychotic Tope Braxton breaks jail, killing two men in the process. Kirby Garfield, the narrator, goes to warn the reclusive Richard Brent of the escape. Passing through the woods he meets a dying negro, hideously mutilated, who looks as though a pack of dogs have torn him apart, although he insists with his last breath that a white man he was guiding to Brent's hideout performed these abominations.
Garfield is soon attacked himself, but escapes to alert Brent, who obviously knows more than he's letting on about the murder and comes on all terrified at mention of the word "hounds".It transpires that, some years earlier, Brent had left his friend Adam Grimm to be tortured by the Devil Monks of Mongolia while he made a run for it, and these fiends had transformed Grimm into a werewolf. Sworn to vengeance, he has teamed up with Braxton and together they cut a bloody swathe through the land as they hones in on their target. They've also lured Brent's niece, Gloria, from New York for the purpose of skinning her alive.
The 'bloke who get's tortured in the jungle and goes all surly about it' theme is also used to good effect in Seabury Quinn's
Suicide Chapel (a far better De Grandin than the average
Frozen Beauty, IMO).
Ray Bradbury - Bang! You're Dead: Bradbury's
The Ducker, appeared in
Weird Tales for Nov. 1943. Johnny Choir doesn't believe that the bullets the Germans are firing at him are real, or that world war II is anything other than one big playground game with everybody taking turns at playing dead for a while. It's an uplifting tale and, like his friend, Private Smith who urges him to keep believing that way, you know Johnny will survive the conflict.
By September of the following year, however, when
Weird Tales published another Bradbury effort,
Bang! You're Dead!, the author's mood had darkened. Private Smith is shot and badly injured, and the vindictive Melter finally gets it through to Johnny that the battle is REAL and men are being killed out there. Now 'enlightened', Johnny takes a direct hit to the skull.
