Weinberg et al. - 100 Wild Little Weird Tales

[cauldronbrewer]

Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg (ed.) - 100 Wild Little Weird Tales (Barnes & Noble, 1994)

Across the Gulf - Henry S. Whitehead
Alice and the Allergy - Fritz Leiber
Anton’s Last Dream - Edwin Baird
The Archfiend’s Fingers - Kirk Mashburn
Berenice - Edgar Allan Poe
The Black Madonna - A. W. Wyville
The Black Monk - G. G. Pendarves
The Boat on the Beach - Kadra Maysi
Burnt Things - Robert C. Sandison
Cat’s Cradle - E. W. Tomlinson
The Cavern - Manly Wade Wellman
The Chain - H. Warner Munn
The Church Stove at Raebrudafisk - G. Appleby Terrill
The Closed Door - Harold Ward
Country House - Ewen Whyte
The Cracks of Time - Dorothy Quick
The Cripple - Maurice Level
Cross of Fire - Lester del Rey
Dark Rosaleen - Seabury Quinn
The Death Mist - Captain George H. Daugherty, Jr.
The Disinterment of Venus - Clark Ashton Smith
The Doom That Came to Sarnath - H. P. Lovecraft
Dream Justice - E. W. Mayo
A Dream of Death - Andrew Daw
The Dream of Death - Elwood F. Pierce
Eric Martin’s Nemesis - Jay Wilmer Benjamin
Escape - Paul Ernst
The Extra Passenger - Stephen Grendon
The Feast in the Abbey - Robert Bloch
Fidel Bassin - W. J. Stamper
The Fifth Candle - Cyril Mand
The Finishing Touches - Renier Wyers
A Gipsy Prophecy - Bram Stoker
The Girdle - Joseph McCord
The Gloves - Garnett Radcliffe
The Harbor of Ghosts - M. J. Bardine
The Hate - Wilford Allen
The Haunted Wood of Adoure - Elliot O’Donnell
The Hidden Talent of Artist Bates - Snowden T. Herrick
The High Places - Frances Garfield
His Brother’s Keeper - Captain George Fielding Eliot
The Hunch - Gene Lyle, III
Hypnos - H. P. Lovecraft
I Can’t Wear White - Suzanne Pickett
In the Dark - Ronal Kayser
The Iron Hands of Katzaveere - David Eynon
The Japanese Tea Set - Francis J. O’Neil
The Justice of the Czar - Captain George Fielding Eliot
The Last Drive - Carl Jacobi
The Last Incantation - Clark Ashton Smith
The Last Man - Seabury Quinn
The Last of Mrs. Debrugh - H. Sivia
The Late Mourner - Julius Long
The Man in the Taxi - Leslie Gordon Barnard
The Man Who Was Saved - B. W. Sliney
Masquerade - Mearle Prout
Mr. Bauer and the Atoms - Fritz Leiber
Muggridge’s Aunt - August W. Derleth
Murder Man - Ewen Whyte
Murder Mask - Edgar Daniel Kramer
The Murderer - Murray Leinster
Night and Silence - Maurice Level
The Nightmare Road - Florence Crow
No Eye-Witnesses - Henry S. Whitehead
Nude with a Dagger - John Flanders
The Ocean Ogre - Dana Carroll
Off the Map - Rex Dolphin
On Top - Ralph Allen Lang
One Chance - Ethel Helene Coen
The Other Santa - Thorp McClusky
A Pair of Swords - Carl Jacobi
The Pale Man - Julius Long
Parthenope - Manly Wade Wellman
The Phantom Bus - W. Elwyn Backus
Rendezvous - Richard H. Hart
The Ring - J. M. Fry
The Sealed Casket - Richard F. Searight
The Seeds from Outside - Edmond Hamilton
The Sixth Gargoyle - David Eynon
Soul-Catcher - Robert S. Carr
The Statue - James Causey
The Stranger from Kurdistan - E. Hoffmann Price
Swamp Horror - Will Smith & R. J. Robbins
Take the Z Train - Allison V. Harding
The Teakwood Box - Johns Harrington
These Doth The Lord Hate - Manly Wade Wellman
Thinker - Malcolm Kenneth Murchie
Threshold of Endurance - Betsy Emmons
Top of the World - Tarleton Collier
The Tree of Life - Paul Ernst
The Tryst in the Tomb - M. J. Cain
Under the Eaves - Helen M. Reid
The Unveiling - Alfred I. Tooke
The Violet Death - Gustav Meyrink
A Visitor from Far Away - Loretta Burrough
Warning Wings - Arlton Eadie
What Waits in Darkness - Loretta Burrough
When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead - Robert Peery
The Witch-Baiter - R. Anthony
The Witch-Ball - E. F. Benson

This is the book that trigged my fixation on Weird Tales magazine. It includes a hundred short-short stories from the original version of the magazine; among those, a number have never been reprinted elsewhere. Many of the stories are great fun. Others are mediocre, and more than a few are terrible. But that’s OK—taken as a whole, the collection provides a good picture of what the magazine was all about.

I read this almost eight years ago and have entirely forgotten many of the individual stores. Several, however, have stuck around in my memory for one reason or another.

The Archfiend’s Fingers - Kirk Mashburn
Travel tip: if a devilish stranger in a New Orleans bar offers you a shimmery green potation on Mardi Gras, just stick with drinking hurricanes. Grand schlock, and I mean that in a good way.

The Black Monk - G. G. Pendarves
A monk promises to lead the narrator to buried pirate treasure—but does all that’s gold glitter if it’s in perpetual darkness? You can see the ending of this one coming, but it still packs a punch.

Cross of Fire - Lester del Rey
This is an innovative first-person tale of a man who realizes that he’s recently recovered from being a vampire. Unfortunately, the ladyfriend and trusty servant whom he turned are still 100% undead.

Dark Rosaleen - Seabury Quinn
There’s only so much tension that a writer can wring out of horror stories with recurring protagonists; for example, the reader always knows that Quinn’s Jules de Grandin will not only survive but prevail. That’s why it’s often interesting to read non-series stories by authors such as Quinn; as in this one, really bad things can happen to the main character. Here, the unfortunate business revolves around a poem, a painting, and an old Irish curse.

Dream Justice - E. W. Mayo
This might get my vote for the worst professionally published horror story I’ve ever read. It’s a tale told in diary form (of course) by a murderer (who conveniently mentions his crime in his diary—not the brightest killer, is he?) haunted by a recurring dream. Would it surprise you to learn that his last entry trails off into nothingness, or that he’s subsequently found dead with mysterious markings on his body?

The Ocean Ogre - Dana Carroll
According to Robert Weinberg’s excellent book on the history of Weird Tales, this story is a “paragraph by paragraph paraphrase” of Frank Belknap Long’s “The Sea-Thing.” Which begs the question: how did it wind up in a book co-edited by Weinberg himself?

Parthenope - Manly Wade Wellman
As with Quinn’s de Grandin, the reader always knows that Wellman’s recurring heroes, John Thunstone and Silver John, will win in the end. There are no such guarantees for the protagonist of this story when he washes up on a Greek island and meets an odd woman. She tells him that she’s a “seiren.” He doesn’t immediately grasp the full significance of this information.

[dem]

Feb 4, 2012 18:05:37 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Many of the stories are great fun. Others are mediocre, and more than a few are terrible.

My kind of book! Have read the same editors' Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors and Weird Vampire Tales, but this looks even better. I like the quirkiness of including The Ocean Ogre even if, as Robert Weinberg claims (and I wouldn't doubt him) it's a rip off of The Sea Thing: chances are it won't be published again, and it's these curios that tend to make the Weinberg - Dziemianowicz - Greenberg books - and, of course, the original magazine - so interesting.

I've an article somewhere by, I think, Robert Lowndes, in which he mentions some of the absolute shockers published in the very early years of the magazine, so there could well be even worse things waiting than Dream Justice! G. A. Wells' The Ghoul and the Corpse in the debut issue is reputedly one such crime against literature, so no surprise I've wanted to read it for years.

[doug]

Man, oh man do I want thse books!

[cauldronbrewer]

Feb 5, 2012 10:53:13 GMT dem said:

i've an article somewhere by, i think, Robert Lowndres, in which he mentions some of the absolute shockers published in the very early years of the magazine, so there could well be even worse things waiting than Dream Justice! G. A. Wells' The Ghoul and the Corpse in the debut issue is reputedly one such crime against literature so no surprise i've wanted to read it for years.

Another challenger for the "worst Weird Tales story ever" is "The Brown Moccasin," a 1925 nature-documentary-style tale of an epic battle between an evil water snake and a sympathetic salamander (spoiler: the plucky salamander wins!). I don't recall any "weird" element in the story at all. It was reprinted, along with some other WT rarities, in Forrest J Ackerman's bizarre anthology of color-themed stories, Rainbow Fantasia: 35 Spectrumatic Tales of Wonder. I assume it was chosen solely because, like all of the other stories in the book, it has a title that includes the name of a color.

Weinberg's book is also fairly blunt about how much dreck the early issues of the magazine included. One story that he singles out as being particularly bad is "The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other," which does sound awful. He lays much of the blame on Edwin Baird, who was editor before Farnsworth Wright.

More story notes to follow soon . . .

[cauldronbrewer]

Fidel Bassin - W. J. Stamper
Stamper ranks up there with Bassett "Brain Transplant" Morgan when it comes to narrow specialties. In Stamper's case, it's Haiti-themed stories. This one involves a callous military officer, a prophecy, and a dysentery-ridden corpse.

The Girdle - Joseph McCord
A soldier explains to the father of a dead comrade how his son died. The tale involves a strange belt that may have the power to turn its wearer into a werewolf. It ends with a great line.

The Harbor of Ghosts - M. J. Bardine
The narrator relates how his ship sank and his lifeboat drifted to an icy bay full of ships--including his own grandfather's ship, lost at sea long ago. His grandfather is long since dead, yet he still walks the decks, gazing at a horrible spectacle on another ship. I'm surprised that this atmospheric (and obviously Poe-influenced) story has never been reprinted elsewhere.

[dem]

Still don't have a copy of this, but it's another book i'm slowly collecting in instalments. Several of the stories - including Fidel Basin, The Girdle, The Closed Door, The Phantom Bus, The Witch-Baiter, Swamp Horror, The Man Who Was Saved and The Chain - are familiar from the Not At Night books, and one or two are floating about online (am about to add to the number).

Ronal Kayser - In the Dark: (Weird Tales, August 1936). Asa Gregg, acid murderer, is haunted to his doom by victim Jeannette, whose corpse regenerates in the vat from a heap of grave mold!

Dana Carroll - The Ocean Ogre: (Weird Tales, July 1937). Robert Weinberg is absolutely bang on the money. This is an outrageous steal from Frank Belknap Long's The Sea Thing (Weird Tales, Dec. 1925). Frank's 'Francis de la Vega' becomes 'Alain Gervais but otherwise business as usual. Sometimes Carroll doesn't bother to paraphrase and just swipes entire lines.

E. W. Mayo - Dream Justice: (Weird Tales, Feb. 1932). Three years after he got away with murder, Edward Martin is tormented by a serial nightmare in which he's convicted of his crime and sentenced to the electric chair ....

Have to agree with CB; Dream Justice is not very good, but I can't help but love it, so, while the spirit of Christmas generosity is upon me, have twinned it with Paul Compton's equally impressive The Diary Of Philip Westerly (Weird Tales, August 1936) as a bonus give-away pdf.

Attachments:

[cauldronbrewer]

I recently discovered that "Dream Justice" was also reprinted in Dennis Pepper's The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares. Good for E. W. Mayo; at least he wasn't a plagiarist, unlike Dana Carroll.

[dem]

Dec 15, 2012 2:18:35 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

I recently discovered that "Dream Justice" was also reprinted in Dennis Pepper's The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares.

Yeah, that's where I eventually caught up with it and also Syd Bounds' Dream Ghost which i'd not read before. Dennis Pepper even includes involuntary Vault Advent Calendar veteran 'Philip Murray's The Patch from Birkin's Creeps series, so obviously a man who knows what he's about.

It's bizarre that Farnsworth Wright was taken in by Carroll's mischief, as he was a year in the editor's chair when FBL's ever-so-slightly deranged The Sea Thing made the magazine, and it's not a story you forget!

[cauldronbrewer]

Dec 15, 2012 9:12:46 GMT dem said:

Dennis Pepper even includes involuntary Vault Advent Calendar veteran 'Philip Murray's The Patch from Birkin's Creeps series, so obviously a man who knows what he's about.

Pepper did a good job editing the Young Oxford books. In addition to Nightmares, I've also read Nasty Endings and the first Ghost Stories. I recently bought the second Ghost Stories, as well. His selections are eclectic--you can count on him to include some classics and old obscurities along with more recent works by writers such as Bounds, Alison Prince, Kenneth Ireland, and Joyce Marsh.

[dem]

That Dream Justice made it into an issue of Weird Tales boasting contributions from, among others, REH, Maurice Level, Alexandre Dumas, Donald Wandrei and the first instalment of Seabury Quinn's sporadically brilliant The Devil's Bride is implausible enough, but that it would reappear under the OUP imprint ... Maybe the Folio Society will publish an edition of Paul Errol's The Woollen Helmet.

Incidentally, if ever you're in the mood to know the meaning of true suffering, hunt down a copy of the Devendra P. Varma edited The Spectre Bridegroom & Other Horrors (Arno, 1976) for Smyth Upton's short novel The Last Of The Vampires: A Tale ....

[dem]

Been dipping in and out of this while recovering from latest round of viruses and it is almost impossibly entertaining. Some highlights to date.

Captain George Fielding Eliot - His Brother’s Keeper : (Sept. 1931). Best known for his torture classic The Copper Bowl, Captain Eliot's two further contributions to Weird Tales prove he was no flash in the pan. John Dangerfield, heir to Cragmore, invariably wants - and gets - anything that takes his younger brother fancy, and that includes Horace's fickle fiancée, Leslie. Today, John and Leslie are studying an authentic Iron Maiden from the Torture Chamber at Nuremberg. Guess who sneaks up on them?

Captain George Fielding Eliot - The Justice of the Czar: (August 1928). Dimitri, the Czar's executioner, is looking forward to his evening bowl of soup when he's summoned by his master for an urgent midnight torture session. The ensuing violence with the knout is so disgusting that even Dimitri finds it difficult to enjoy. When, eventually, what is left of the hooded victim is slopped up and carried away in a bucket, the Czar's mood turns nasty. As mindless sadism goes, this is on a par with the shudder pulps.

Kirk Mashburn - The Archfiend’s Fingers: (August 1932) To accept a drink from a stranger during Mardi Gras is a one way ticket to instant alcoholism and reefer madness!

A. W. Wyville - The Black Madonna: (May 1928). Two brilliant but murderously competitive brothers build a laboratory in the village and set to solving the greatest chemical problem of the age. Finally, the younger man succeeds. And then he realises his lethal pet spider has gone walkabout ....

Wilford Allen - The Hate: (June 1928). A medieval knight runs two brothers through with his sword just because he can. The second youth's loathing is such thast it survives right the way through time and space until the Great War, where it reanimates a dead soldier to storm the trenches and destroy the knight's descendent.

[cauldronbrewer]

Mar 19, 2014 14:26:23 GMT dem said:

Been dipping in and out of this while recovering from latest round of viruses and it is almost impossibly entertaining.

This really is one of my favorite anthologies. The focus on short-shorts from WT led to the inclusion of many never-reprinted stories.

[dem]

Mar 21, 2014 17:31:54 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Mar 19, 2014 14:26:23 GMT dem said:

Been dipping in and out of this while recovering from latest round of viruses and it is almost impossibly entertaining.

This really is one of my favorite anthologies. The focus on short-shorts from WT led to the inclusion of many never-reprinted stories.

Have to agree. Have been reading them faster than I care to jot down notes, but two more that stick in mind are Ethel Helene Coen's One Chance and Robert C. Sandison's Burnt Things. Come to think of it, if you can imagine The Archfiend's Fingers with added Egyptian mythology, a fake severed penis, and expanded to 130 pages, you have Derek Hyde-Chambers' The Orgy Of Bubastis. Almost.

By the by, it could be argued with some justification that the twenties-early thirties content also doubles as perhaps the finest unofficial Not At Night companion to date.

[dem]

Another nibble at this one.

Ethel Helene Coen - One Chance: (Sept. 1935). Plague stricken New Orleans in 1720. Desperate to break quarantine and escape to Canada with his beautiful fiancée Marie, Paul devises a foolproof, albeit macabre plan. That is foolproof, as in nothing could possibly go horribly wrong.

Kadra Maysi - The Boat on the Beach: (Dec. 1930). The Astarte is lost at sea with several hands including Captain Card, who dutifully opts to go down with the ship. His loving widow keeps vigil on the shoreline. Eventually her faith is rewarded. Not quite as mawkish as it sounds, though its no One Chance.

John Flanders - Nude with a Dagger: (Nov. 1934). Old Gryde the loan-shark pursues promising artist Warton to the grave over an unpaid debt, and inherits an unfinished portrait. Warton returns to apply the lethal finishing touches.

Betsy Emmons - Threshold of Endurance: (Sept. 1946). A domineering wife learns too late that there is only so much nagging a man will suffer before he retaliates with vigour ... Betsy most definitely not at one with the sisterhood on this occasion.

[cauldronbrewer]

"John Flanders" was a pseudonym for Jean Ray. Sadly, I didn't find this one as memorable as some of his other stories.