Weird Tales: British editions

[dem bones]

By my reckoning, there were 32 in all, including three published by Gerald G. Swan in 1942, one by William C. Merrett in 1946 before Thorpe & Porter and then Strato publications ran 28 issues between them from September 1949 through to July 1954. The general consensus is that, with the death of Farnsworth Wright in 1940, the magazine lost much of its sparkle - it obviously didn't help that Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were no longer with us - but there is still much to recommend these latter-day issues, not least the regular contributions from Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Margaret St. Clair, Mary E. Counselman, August Derleth and, toward the end, Richard Matheson and Joseph Payne Brennan. Seabury Quinn's De Grandin adventures were becoming decidedly patchy, but he still had his moments. Also like that, along with the original fiction, Dorothy McIlwraith would periodically raid the archives. The British # 15, for example, was where I finally caught up with the legendary Anthony M Rud's supremely ludicrous Ooze, and where the hell else were you going to find the bizarre likes of William P. Barron's 1923 effort Jungle Beasts? Kurt Singer, uniquely, seems to have preferred these post-war issues above all others, or at least, he selected almost exclusively from the McIlwraith years for his several million anthologies, so some titles are more familiar than they might otherwise be.

Just found some sample copies among my stash so will drift 'em up over the week and see where that gets us.

Dorothy McIlwraith (ed.) - Weird Tales UK #1 (Nov. 1949) [US, July 1949]

Matt Fox

Long Novelette:
Fredric Brown - Come and Go Mad
Who is to know with certainty the mad from the unmad in this turbulent world in which both play parts

Short Stories:
Ewen Whyte - The Masher
A species of man usually thought to be annoying but harmless—usually that is!

H. Russell Wakefield - From the Vasty Deep
Beyond the furthest depth of the fathomless ocean comes in ageless horror to right men's wrongs.

Stephen Grendon - The Blue Spectacles
Strange sights could be seen through these glasses; of this and that and things quite preposterous.

Russell Branch - How Strange My Love
If two people represent the opposite poles of emotional intensity, what happens, pray tell, in the middle?

Fritz Leiber - In the X-Ray
The x-ray reveals many matters beneath the surface: beneath the surface of the human being and the small confines of his world.

Stanton A. Coblentz - The Ubiquitous Professor Karr
The suspect of the crime is often the least liable to suspicion.

Harold Lawlor - The Previous Incarnation
Certainly life heretofore is of as much concern as life hereafter.

Robert Bloch - Floral Tribute
You know those flowers they put in graveyards? They're there for a very special reason you might not guess!

Seabury Quinn - Dark O' the Moon
A strange doom stalked this man through the bayous: a doom far worse than revengeful bullets or a hangman's noose for those are simple ways of dying.

Dorothy McIlwraith (ed.) - Weird Tales UK #15 (April 1952) [US, January, 1952]

Jon Arfstrom

Novelettes:
August Derleth - The Black Island
... which rose to the surface only at intervals, was unnamed, uncharted - the perfect abode of the Deep Ones.

Anthony M. Rud - Ooze
. . . if it got food enough in the swamp it could grow as big as the Masonic Temple. (Copyright 1923 by Rural Publishing Company)

Joseph Eberle

Short Stories:

Robert Bloch - Lucy Comes to Stay
I knew why Lucy had run out on me that way; she knew they'd find me and call it "murder."

E. Everett Evans - The Seamstress
No other village can boast a professional seamstress worth ten million dollars; dollars which carry a curse.

J. Paul Suter - The Guard of Honor
Something began calling him from far away, something remote, terrible. Through the corridors of sleep he advanced to meet it. (Copyright 1923 by Rural Publishing Company)

Harold Lawlor - Lovers' Meeting
Lots of elderly people retire to Floridia. Who is to say in which incarnation they are sojourning?

E. W. Tomlinson - Cat's Cradle
Could it be that the skipping cords of the bizarre design were themselves hypnotic?

David Eynon - The Iron Hand of Katzaveere
The man had been strangled ... by two right hands

Verse:
Harriet A. Bradfield - Cat-Eyes
Clark Ashton Smith - Not Altogether Asleep
Clark Ashton Smith - Sonnet for the Psychoanalysts

The Eyrie
The Weird Tales Club

[andydecker]

I didn´t knew there were british editions of WT. Interesting.

I also didn´t know that "Lucy comes to stay" is that old. How often did he do this plot? Coincidentally I read this story for the first time recently, I got my hand on some old german horror antho/magazine which - from todays view - was pretty good; it also had this Bloch story. I knew it of course from its movie-version but always thought that Bloch used newer stuff for that.

[noose]

Dorothy McIlwraith (ed.) Weird Tales (1952 - Vol 44, #5)

Jon Arfstrom

Hells Bells - Duncan H. Monroe
Which's Witch - Harold Lawlor
The Emperor's Letter - David Enyon
Elmer Bittersnitt and the Three Bears - Harry Botsford
There Was Soot on the Cat - Suzanne Pickett
The Green Parrot - Jospeh Brennan
The Temple of Serpents - Paul Ernst
The Plaid - Abrach
Live Evil - Emil Petaja
The Lakes of Nai Loodie - Donald F. Vieweg
Alethia Phrikodes - H.P. Lovecraft
Black Candles - Yetza Gillespie
A Weirduation - Joseph Howard Krucher

[dem bones]

Dorothy McIlwraith (ed.) - Weird Tales UK # 17 (Aug, 1952) [US, May, 1952]

Virgil Finlay

Novelette:
Thorp McClusky - The Lamia in the Penthouse
Can demons be summoned up or banished at will or do they sometimes get out of control?

Short Stories:
Arthur J. Burks - Rhythmic Formula
The old jungle chief announced that one murderer in his family was enough; but there were other families!

Suzanne Pickett - A Bit of Moss
She heard his voice and felt his presence, yet could not see him. Was he invisible or was she blind?
G. G. Pendarves - The Eighth Green Man
The idea of any form of life not classified and labelled as belonging to the animal or vegetable kingdom could only be a joke. (Copyright Popular Fiction Publishing Co., 1928)
Frederick Sanders - She Wore A Black Rose
Even in her coffin she wore it; her coffin sealed with twenty-six of the ghostly blooms

Joseph Eberle

Garnett Radcliffe - Dark Laughter
You have only to obey the great masters and they will treat you with love
Cyril Mand - The Fifth Candle
The old man reached back from the grave each year to light one candle in a fearsome candelabrum (Copyright Weird Tales, 1939)
C. F. Birdsall - The Little Tree
Did you hear of a dead delegate turning up at a convention.?
August Derleth - The Night Road
In Lost Hope Valley someone cut the seven of spades.
Douglas Leach - The Devil of Maniara
Too much curiosity about jungle sorcery is unwise. (Copyright 1933 by Doubleday, Doran & Co.)
Alvin Taylor & Len J. Moffatt - Father's Vampire
Authorities, being politicians as they are, are naturally stupid, so they didn't try to account for any missing blood.

Joseph Howard Krucher

Joseph Howard Krucher - Double Haunt

Verse:
Pauline Booker - Ghost Port
Dorothy Quick - Out of Space

Weird Tales Club
The Eyrie

Thorp McClusky's lovely lamia is among his finest creations in my humble, etc, so Dorothy McIlwraith cleverly undermines it by including the Taylor-Moffat collaberation, an alleged comedy piece so diabolically bereft of hilarity that for years i suspected the hand of R. Chetwynd-Hayes. There really doesn't seem to be much difference between the editions, though i'm guessing the US originals didn't devote the inside back covers to full page advertisements for that Badger Books legend, the 'lucky Cornish pixie', Joan The Wad?

[dem bones]

Dorothy McIlwraith (ed.) - Weird Tales UK # 16 (Aug, 1952) [US, March, 1952]

Joseph Eberle

Novelettes:
Alice Drayton Farnham - Morne Perdu
...a sleepless night, a spider bite on her arm, and she had seen goblins where no goblins were. And all at once she heard the silence, like the crashing of drums.

H. P. Lovecraft - The Horror at Red Hook
A master hand at tales of terror follows up the thought that awful lore is not yet dead. (Copyright 1927 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co.)

Short Stories:

Garnett Radcliffe - The Monkey Ship
Banda Bap, who is the god of monkeys, listened tensely for the voices that had left the forest.

Curtis W. Casewit - The Mask
The dead - they always look serene, features are never ghoulishly distorted.

Seabury Quinn - The Scarred Soul
... my body has to stay and haunt the place where my soul died.

Mary Elizabeth Counselman - The Prism
Different folks, they show different color. Violet - can it be the color of saints and babies?

August Derleth - The Place of Desolation
A space-time warp, where time and space as we know them terrestrially, do not exist. How about a house that was built in it?

William P. Barron - Jungle Beasts
That which is alive hath known death, that which lives can never die. (Copyright 1923 by Rural Publishing Company)

Verse:
Joseph Howard Krucher - The Bride of Death
Clark Ashton Smith - O Golden-Tongued Romance
"The Eyrie": Readers letters.

[dem bones]

still have some more to scan, but it's time to take a lucky dip on the stories.

Joseph Eberle

David Eynon - The Iron Hand of Katzaveere: Netherlands, World War II. With the British army advancing, Commandant Von Flolich is preparing to withdraw his troops from the village of Katzaveere, but first he's going to detonate the dyke. But first a souvenir: what are those ghastly severed hands chained to the dyke wall all about? The Burgomaster explains: ""They are from the middle ages. It was then the custom to cut off the hand - as a punishment for great crimes. The hand was set in iron and hung in a private place as a warning to malefactors." The three at Katzaveere belonged to a murderer and two traitors respectively. The Commandant secures his prize. The Burgomaster is less upset about this than he might be ....

William P. Barron - Jungle Beasts: (Originally Weird Tales, May 1923) "Why am I here in this place of madness, this house of diseased minds? Because of a cat!": Manuscript found in the drawer of Robert, a patient recently released from Dr. Winslow's private sanatorium. As a youngster, Robert despised his grandma's cat, Toi Wah, as the old girl showed it a sight more affection than she did him. Toi Wah, stolen by Bob's late grandfather from a Buddhist monastery, is descended from an unbroken line of felines from the Royal household of Ghengis Khan and wears a beautiful ornate collar that none can remove. Their mutual loathing dates from the stone age when Toi Wah was a sabre-toothed tiger and ate Robert's first-born!

Bob's seething hatred eventually climaxes in bloody violence when he batters Toi Wah with a poker, having first throttled her newborn kitten. He doesn't bother with burial, just leaves the bones to rot in the attic.

On his grandmother's death, Bob, still only twenty-four, is a rich man. Despite the unpleasant business with the cat, he marries a gorgeous Chinese girl. No-name has a certain feline elegance about her, inscrutable cat-like eyes, the habit of climbing on top of him as he sleeps and sucking the breath from his lungs ....

Garnett Radcliffe - Dark Laughter: An expedition led by the brilliant big game hunter, explorer and scientist Dr. Lake goes missing presumed murdered by pygmy cannibal head-hunters in the swamps of darkest Africa. Felton, a student of Dr. Lake's, strays from the search party, finds some demented old dosser babbling on about his "masters", the gorilla's. Not exactly The Planet Of The Apes though the savage natives are quite impressive.

H. Thomson Rich - The Phantom Express: A slight, two-page 'End of the line' contender from the Not At Night man, originally published in the October 1926 issue. The Transcontinental express train hurtles toward Mansford during a dreadful storm. Driver Haddon swears he can see another locomotive up ahead, but his crew think he's maybe been working too hard. The phantom train reaches Cleft Forest Valley, leaves the track and drops into the gaping chasm below. Haddon slams on the brakes and not a moment too soon - the bridge has been washed away in the torrent. Disaster averted.

[dem bones]

Frederick Sanders - She Wore A Black Rose: Now this one's deserving of revival. By far my favourite of the lesser known stories to date.

On Christmas Eve 1569, Lady Dorl, twenty-six, finally succeeded in cultivating a pure black rose. Overjoyed at her success, she raced to inform her husband, only to trip and break her head on a stone step. She was buried in an airtight coffin, the fatal black bloom pinned to her bosom.

Over 450 years later, the Squire's son, Tom Barton, an enthusiastic gardener, announces in The Black Horse that he's going to visit the vaults of St. Nicholas, open the coffin and plant a kiss on her Ladyship's lips. Old Eli Task, the deacon of the 'Queer People', a local religious sect of rigid Biblical beliefs, shouts him down as a blasphemer, but Tom is very determined when he's had a few too many. The following morning, he's found in Ten Acre Meadow, "wandering in circles, naked - except for his boots, socks and suspenders - bereft of speech and sanity. Mad! An imbecile; a speechless madman!"

Barton is committed to Dr. Stark's private mental hospital. He dies a gibbering wreck two years later, but not before he's finally committed to print his horrific recollections of that fateful night.

Dorothy McIlwraith (ed.) - Weird Tales UK # 5 (Nov, 1950) [US, May, 1950]

Boris Dolgov

Novelettes:
Robert Bloch - Tell Your Fortune
It looked like an ordinary bathroom scales: but the little professor had trafficked with darkness to bring it into being.
Harold Lawlor - Djinn and Bitters
Fancy being married at ten o'clock-and having a diinn come out of a bottle by afternoon!
Short Stories:
Stanton A.Coblentz - The Round Tower
The ghostly voice pleaded for the stranger to come on; some counter voice, maybe an inward devil, warned him back.
Seabury Quinn - The Last Man
"I have been told you can bring back the spirits of the dead. Is that true?" . . . "Of course," was the reply.
William F.Temple - The Triangle of Terror
The words "Is anybody there."' died in my mouth-for it was manifest there was nobody. Yet I had seen. . . .
Mary Elizabeth Counselman - The Monkey Spoons
These three little monkey spoons were surrounded by forces no one could combat. Forces older than time - older than logic.

Jon Arfstrom

Margaret St.Clair - The Last Three Ships
Fifteen deserted ships at night might give a graveyard, eerie effect; but it was all right if one kept away from those last three hulls.
Evangeline Walton - At The End of the Corridor
A story of the Greek undead - if dead men could walk because they had reason for revenge, a lot of them would have done it these last few years.
Stephen Grendon - The Man on B-17
The cinder bull couldn't see the man on the trestle - nor the woman either - but the engineer and the fireman and the conductor, they all did.

Matt Fox

Malcolm M.Ferguson - Mr. Hyde - And Seek
Country doctors are supposed to be able to cope with anything. How about the supernatural?
Clark Ashton Smith - Luna Aeternalis [verse]
The Eyrie

[cauldronbrewer]

Mar 20, 2012 7:42:07 GMT dem bones said:

The general concensus is that with the death of Farnsworth Wright in 1940, the magazine lost much of its sparkle - it obviously didn't help that Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were no longer with us - but there is still much to recommend these latter-day issues, not least the regular contributions from Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Margaret St. Clair, Mary E. Counselman, August Derleth and, toward the end, Richard Matheson and Joseph Payne Brennan. Seabury Quinn's De Grandin adventures were becoming decidedly patchy, but he still had his moments. i also like that, along with the original fiction, Dorothy McIlwraith would periodically raid the archives. The British # 15, for example, was where i finally caught up with the legendary Anthony M Rud's supremely ludicrous Ooze, and where the hell else were you going to find the bizarre likes of William P. Barron's 1923 effort Jungle Beasts? Kurt Singer, uniquely, seems to have preferred these post-war issues above all others, or at least, he selected almost exclusively from the McIlwraith years for his several million anthologies, so some titles are more familiar than they might be.

I have a soft spot for the McIlwraith years, too. I like Singer's anthologies precisely because he focuses on the late run of WT, rather than the "Golden Age." The magazine may have been even more hit and miss than usual toward the end (that goes for the Singer anthologies as well), but McIlwraith printed some brilliant work--Exhibit A being Fredric Brown's absolutely bonkers "Come and Go Mad."

For me, Margaret St. Clair was a particular bright spot in the final years of WT. It's a shame no one has collected her horror/strange fiction into one book. Consider the following potential lineup of stories (call it, say, The Counter Charm and Other Strange Tales):

"The Counter Charm" (1949)
"The Last Three Ships" (a.k.a. "The Estuary," 1950)
"The Family" (1950)
"Mrs. Hawk" (1950)
"Professor Kate" (1951)
"The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" (1951)
"The Little Red Owl" (1951)
"Island of the Hands" (1952)
"The Goddess on the Street Corner" (1953)
"Brenda" (1954)
"Horrer Howce" (1956)
"The House in Bel Aire" (1961)

I would say there's not a weak link there. She also published at least two stories in WT that I've never read and never seen reprinted: "The Corn Dance" and "The Bird."

Also: I dig that Boris Dolgov cover.

[dem bones]

Mar 22, 2012 23:46:49 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

I have a soft spot for the McIlwraith years, too. I like Singer's anthologies precisely because he focuses on the late run of WT, rather than the "Golden Age." The magazine may have been even more hit and miss than usual toward the end (that goes for the Singer anthologies as well), but McIlwraith printed some brilliant work--Exhibit A being Fredric Brown's absolutely bonkers "Come and Go Mad."

For me, Margaret St. Clair was a particular bright spot in the final years of WT. It's a shame no one has collected her horror/strange fiction into one book.

Also: I dig that Boris Dolgov cover.

There's an endearing slapdash quality to Singer's Weird Tales-derived collections, or at least, so it seems to me. They don't give the impression that he sat down to compile a 'best of', more that he just grabbed a few stories from whatever issues he had immediately to hand. Be that as it may, etc., they're probably an accurate reflection of the state of play at time of McIlwraith's editorship. Stories that would now possibly be lauded as 'classic Weird Tales' had they only been published during the Farnsworth-Wright years: much above par competent hackwork: plenty that likely weren't much to shout about at the time and haven't improved. Singer's anthologies of material lifted wholesale from Magazine Of Horror & Startling Mystery Stories hang together a whole lot better because Robert Lowndes had already done all the hard work.

I've not read enough Margaret St. Clair to comment on your selection, though will happily vouch for the excellence of Horror Howse, The Little Red Owl, Mrs Hawk and The Family. Island Of The Hands and The Last Three Ships will go under the microscope at the earliest opportunity.

Boris Dolgov is deserving of a thread to himself at the very least!

[andydecker]

Mar 23, 2012 7:04:42 GMT dem bones said:

Boris Dolgov is deserving of a thread to himself at the very least!

These are wonderful covers. One tends to be so fixated on Finlay that the others often got neglected.

At least those guys were artists, not some kid with a photoshop program. I´d really like to know if publishers are not willing to pay enough for the coverartwork or if there is not avaiable talent. Here in Germany are also ever more of the computer-drawn art on covers, especially on the horror stuff, and I have to say that from the early annoyance I have developed a good loathing for this crap.

[dem bones]

it's sad, but if photoshop had been available from the 'twenties through to the eighties, my guess is that some, probably all of our most revered pulp artists would have gone down that route. I take your point though. i reckon it takes talent, possibly even genius to master photoshop, but even in the most capable hands, there's often something slick and uniform about the end results - they lack the beautiful-ugly appeal of hand painted covers, or so it seems to me.

Dorothy McIlwraith (ed.) - Weird Tales UK # 19 (Feb, 1953) [US, September, 1952]

Virgil Finlay

H. P. Lovecraft - Hallowe'en In A Suburb (Verse)
Margaret St. Clair - Island of the Hands .
From his dreams she came; Joan was the magnet, he the steel. But Joan was dead.
Curtis W. Casewit - Table Number Sixteen
The "Whistling Shrimp" was atmospheric, very atmospheric. Almost the atmosphere of the Internal Revenue Department.
Frederick Sanders - One Fantastic Day
The Red Horse Inn had been pulled down years ago, its landlord hanged for murder. No wonder he welcomed guests so cordially....
David Eynon - A Habit Out of History
"Always discovering people who weren't or hadn't been or shouldn't have been; rarely a trace of people who were supposed to be."
Henry T. Simmons - The Archive (Verse)
L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt - Where to, Please?
One man wished to see the town as it was a hundred years ago; the second man wished to see it a hundred years is the future.
H. Thompson Rich - The Phantom Express (Copyright 1926 Popular Fiction Publishing Company)
... saved by a man or a miracle. Which?
E. Everett Evans - Sa'antha
To the wind and the rain and the earth and the sky she prayed, asking that they might always be together.
August Derleth - The Lost Path
The orders were explicit - no one with children must ever live in the house. They might explore beyond the lilac bushes.
Yetza Gillespie - The Singing Shadow (Verse)
G. G. Pendarves - The Sin-Eater (Copyright 1938 by Weird Tales)
A strange powerful tale of possession, of dual personality and things beyond the ken of men.
The Eyrie

[dem bones]

Two macabre musts from Weird Tales, May 1950 [UK #5, Nov 1950].

Evangeline Walton - At The End Of The Corridor: Athens. The remains of Dr. Dragournis lie entombed in the Mycerian burial chamber he deliberately collapsed upon himself and the Nazi with whom he suspected his wife, Anthi, was having an affair. Anthi, "one of the famous beauties of the Balkans", fears Dragournis is a vrykolake and refuses to remarry until he has been despatched in the traditional manner and imposes upon current toy-boy Phillip Martinto bring her the dead man's severed arms and legs as a token of his undying love. Axe at the ready, the young American descends into the tomb and presently Anthi is the grateful recipient of a grisly package ...

Margaret St. Clair - The Last Three Ships: Pickard and his novice, Gene, nightly strip metal from the fifteen Liberty ships rotting in the harbour. Pickard knows to leave the last three ships well alone - apparently, a welder became a component of one of them before its maiden voyage - but his youthful companion won't be told. When Gene goes missing, Pickard has a nightmare in which he stoops to drink the filthy, stinking bilge where the lad's cap was found. Overcoming his fears, Pickard sets to work on the haunted vessels. The putrid, rotting forms of the welder and his new recruit lure him to his watery doom.

[ramseycampbell]

Mar 22, 2012 23:46:49 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

Mar 20, 2012 7:42:07 GMT dem bones said:

The general concensus is that with the death of Farnsworth Wright in 1940, the magazine lost much of its sparkle - it obviously didn't help that Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were no longer with us - but there is still much to recommend these latter-day issues, not least the regular contributions from Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Margaret St. Clair, Mary E. Counselman, August Derleth and, toward the end, Richard Matheson and Joseph Payne Brennan. Seabury Quinn's De Grandin adventures were becoming decidedly patchy, but he still had his moments. i also like that, along with the original fiction, Dorothy McIlwraith would periodically raid the archives. The British # 15, for example, was where i finally caught up with the legendary Anthony M Rud's supremely ludicrous Ooze, and where the hell else were you going to find the bizarre likes of William P. Barron's 1923 effort Jungle Beasts? Kurt Singer, uniquely, seems to have preferred these post-war issues above all others, or at least, he selected almost exclusively from the McIlwraith years for his several million anthologies, so some titles are more familiar than they might be.

I have a soft spot for the McIlwraith years, too. I like Singer's anthologies precisely because he focuses on the late run of WT, rather than the "Golden Age." The magazine may have been even more hit and miss than usual toward the end (that goes for the Singer anthologies as well), but McIlwraith printed some brilliant work--Exhibit A being Fredric Brown's absolutely bonkers "Come and Go Mad."

For me, Margaret St. Clair was a particular bright spot in the final years of WT. It's a shame no one has collected her horror/strange fiction into one book. Consider the following potential lineup of stories (call it, say, The Counter Charm and Other Strange Tales):

"The Counter Charm" (1949)
"The Last Three Ships" (a.k.a. "The Estuary," 1950)
"The Family" (1950)
"Mrs. Hawk" (1950)
"Professor Kate" (1951)
"The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" (1951)
"The Little Red Owl" (1951)
"Island of the Hands" (1952)
"The Goddess on the Street Corner" (1953)
"Brenda" (1954)
"Horrer Howce" (1956)
"The House in Bel Aire" (1961)

I would say there's not a weak link there. She also published at least two stories in WT that I've never read and never seen reprinted: "The Corn Dance" and "The Bird."

Also: I dig that Boris Dolgov cover.

I'm with you on Margaret St Clair! "The Gardener" from the same period would fit too.

[dem bones]

Anthony Di Giannurio's "vulture & skulls" cover artwork, (Weird Tales, Nov 1952, Brit edition #20 April 1953) and Joseph Eberle title for Mop-Head (Weird tales, Jan. 1954, Brit edition, March 1954)

This would make for a decent 'Rivals of Kurt Singer' selection. Below are the original blurbs for a dozen stories referenced - not all of them favourably - in Ramsey Campbell's recent Paperback Fanatic article, 'Weird Tales' remembered. The Skull of Barnaby Shattuck not top of my 'must read' list, but snagging a copy of The Legs that Walked has become a personal obsession.

J. Paul Suter - Beyond the Door: (April 1923, reprinted May 1954). "The whole affair had been a mystery of lips which closed and faces which were averted at my approach." reprint from (Brit vol 1 no 5, July 1954)

G. G. Pendarves - Thing Of Darkness: (August, 1937, reprinted Nov. 1953). "A novelette of a Thing of Horror that brought death to Troon House." (Brit vol 1 no 2 Jan. 1954)

Robert E. Howard - The Black Stone: (Nov. 1931, reprinted Nov. 1953) "...some unspeakable monster from the Elder World." (Brit vol 1 no 2 Jan. 1954)

Allison V. Harding - The Damp Man: (May, 1949). "A relentless pursuit instituted by a beyond-normal monster with a loathesome scheme hinted at only in nightmares." (There doesn't seem to have been a UK edition of this issue?)

Fredric Brown - Come and Go Mad: (July, 1949) "Who is to know with certainty the mad from the unmad in this turbulent world in which both play parts?" (Brit #1, Nov 1949)

Joseph Eberle

Allison V. Harding - The Underbody: (November, 1949). "The country fields of summer hid, within their rich earth, a terror-rid doom to transcend men's ability to fear." Matt Fox cover artwork. (Brit #2, Jan 1950)

Margaret St. Clair - The Last Three Ships: (May 1950). "Fifteen deserted ships at night might give a graveyard, eerie effect: but it was all right if one kept away from those last three hulks." Jon Arfstrom illustration. (Brit # 5 Nov 1950)

Gordon McCreagh - The Hand Of St. Ury: (Jan. 1951). "An old theory has it that a thought of hate can be a powerful enough force to persist after the death of its originator." (Brit #9, June 1951)

Merle Constiner - The Skull of Barnaby Shattuck: (July, 1951: originally Short Stories, May 1945). "Caught up in a maelstrom of tragedy and murder – could those be credentials for asking questions bound to be resented?" (Brit #12, Dec. 1951)

Justin Dowling - The Legs that Walked: Nov 1953). "...with every clap of thunder they came marching on." (Brit vol 1 no 2 Jan. 1954)

Lea Bodine Drake - Mop Head: (January, 1954) "Its mockery of speech it had made from fox's bark, owl's cry, rains patter." (Brit vol 1 no 3, March 1954)

Manly Banister - Song in the Thicket: (May 1954). "Neither closer nor farther, the voices urged him onward - calling, luring, promising, lulling." (Brit vol 1 no 5 July 1954)

[ramseycampbell]

Your very consciousness will be changed by "The Legs that Walked".