Weird Tales volume 1 number 1 boasts 26 separate pieces of fiction, one of which is continued in the next issue. As you’d expect from an anthology, some stories are better than others. None reach the heights of the fiction the magazine would publish later. But a few are at least interesting in their own right.

I’m going to look here at each story, which means this post is going to run long. After I’m done going piece-by-piece, I’ll write about the collective effect of the issue, and how it reads as a whole. But there are over 100,000 words of fiction to discuss before I get there.

Three of the longest pieces lead off the issue. The second story is the cover feature, and the third story’s the first part of the serial. The opener, though, is “The Dead Man’s Tale,” by Willard E. Hawkins. So the first story of the first issue of Weird Tales lets us know right in its title to expect the unexpected: here dead men do tell tales.

It’s the first genre story from Hawkins, who at 26 was already an experienced pulp writer. It’d prove to be his only story for Weird Tales, though it’d be reprinted in the magazine in July of 1934. In 1923 Hawkins was also the editor of The Student Writer, a trade publication; Weird Tales had first been publicly announced in the January issue. Weird Tales editor William Baird promoted Hawkins’ story in the February issue of The Student Writer, as well as giving it the lead slot in Weird Tales’ premiere issue, which presumably didn’t hurt the coverage of Weird Tales in The Student Writer.

In fact, though, Hawkins’ story isn’t bad. It starts with a paragraph-long intro telling us that the text “was found among the papers of the late Dr. John Pedrie, psychical investigator and author of occult works,” and that it was “received through automatic writing” by a medium, perhaps Pedrie himself. That’s a nice touch, though it’s not brought up again as the story unfolds. Still, it feels appropriate that right off the start of the first Weird Tales story we get an occult investigator.

The tale itself is the recollection of a soldier in the First World War named Dick Devaney. Deeply in love with a woman, Velma, who loves both him and his buddy (or, in the story’s spelling, “buddie”) Louis, Dick’s about to murder Louis during the Second Battle of the Marne when he’s killed by a German shell. A nice scene follows in which Dick’s spirit gradually realises he’s dead but still bound to the mortal plane. Dick slowly learns that he can partially possess Louis; Louis and Velma get married; but Dick’s still madly in love with Velma, and schemes to reunite with her even at the cost of Louis’ sanity and Velma’s life.

There are moments in the tale that have the effect of an old-fashioned ghost story, but for the most part it’s a spiritualist fable. The point of the story is that spirits can contact the living through possession and automatic writing; and, crucially, they can change and evolve after their death. The theme of the story is an unpleasant and entitled spirit learning through his metaphysical existence how to move on from earthly concerns and leave others to their happiness. There’s a nice structural choice in the plot where a moment in which Dick seems close to getting what he wants instead leads directly to the change in character that leads to his greater evolution. And there are some interesting reflections on what it is for a ghost to be haunted; there’s not much of what you might call worldbuilding in this story, but there is enough to give a sense of Dick’s existence and give the story something of a shape.

The reality of the supernatural in a ghost story is often ambiguous, and if this tale had been told from the perspective of the living characters, it’d appear to be a story of the psychic trauma Louis suffered during the war. Telling the story from the perspective of the ghost forecloses that possibility: the ghost here is indisputably real. Metaphorically, though, it’s still possible to read the story as thematically concerned with the effect of World War I. Ghost stories, by nature, are about the past. In this case, the recent past is haunting the living. You wonder what the War did to Dick before the action started. Was his desire to kill Louis a function of wartime trauma? Dick’s so unpleasant for much of the story you wonder how Louis and Velma tolerated the guy. Did the War send him into a downward spiral? Maybe, but there’s no way to tell from what we get.

Stylistically, the story’s competent, with a tendency to superlatives. There are certainly supremely pulpy passages: “Her beauty — the raven blackness of her hair falling over her bare shoulders and full, heaving bosom, fanned the flame of my gory passion into fury.” But mostly the story’s a touch arid, telling us Dick’s spiritual state without giving us dramatic moments to make them real. There are some points that are convenient or deliberately not explored; Dick tells us he finds “vicariously enjoying the delights of love” impossible, as “something barred me from intruding upon the sacred intimacies of [Louis and Velma’s] life.” Dick also doesn’t try to take over Velma’s body the way he does Louis.

Most seriously, the ending’s facile; Dick performs an action to reassure the living characters that he will no longer haunt them, but it’s an action more believable symbolically than logically. You can see what Hawkins is driving at, but practically you wonder if it’ll have the effect Dick imagines. Still, on the whole this is an effective ghost story, a haunting from a ghost’s point of view.

Next is the title story, “Ooze” (“A Novelette of a Thousand Thrills,” a sub-header promises) by prolific pulp writer Anthony M. Rud. The Chicago-born Alabama-dwelling Rud was already a veteran writer in 1923, and he’d go on to have several more stories in Weird Tales. “Ooze” would be reprinted in a 1927 anthology of Weird Tales fiction called The Moon Terror and Other Stories, then again in the January 1952 issue, and several times more in various venues since.

The story’s told by an unnamed narrator investigating the deaths of his friends, a young married couple named Lee and Peggy Cranmer. Supposedly they were killed by Lee’s father, a scientist named John Corliss Cranmer, in John’s isolated laboratory in southern Alabama. The narrator’s the foster-father of Lee and Peggy’s daughter, and for her sake he wants to get answers regarding her parents’ death. Why did John Cranmer go mad? Why did he build such thick walls around his lab? And what really happened to Lee and Peggy, whose bodies were never found?

The actual plot’s fairly slight: the narrator pokes around the ruin, talks to a local, and finds Cranmer’s notes, which tell the full story of what happened. The structure’s more interesting, playing with chronology to establish mysteries and then presenting information out of order to lead up to a final unveiling of the explanation of events. It turns out that after creating an amoeba the size of “a large beef liver,” John Cranmer ordered his son to destroy it before it grew larger and more threatening; but the son instead kept it alive, hoping that a multi-ton amoeba would lead to his father being celebrated by the world of science. Things did not go according to plan.

The problem is that while the narrator’s detailed descriptions of the ruin builds the mystery of what happened, they don’t to my mind develop a horrific atmosphere. Theoretically, the clinical detail of the mysterious — the weird — could develop a sense of the uncanny, but Rud’s not quite a good enough writer to pull that off. There are too many exclamation points; too heated an atmosphere for a chilling sense to arise on its own. Italics are overused, insisting on the dramatic and portentous. The story might have worked better if it had focussed more intently on fact and science, letting the horror build by implication.

In fact, one of the most charming aspects of the story is an early reference to what we would now call science fiction: “… [T]he pseudo-scientific story. In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.” Science fiction writers are “allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility.” Rud cites Verne and Wells as predecessors; a lineage of weird writers is already taking shape.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of “Ooze” is the way the timeline of events is oddly fractured, almost dreamlike. As the narrator tries to work out what happened, the reader has to work alongside him, cobbling together an understanding based on what the narrator says at odd moments — and, ultimately, based on a found manuscript that provides the final key. Unfortunately, while the idea is strong, frankly I found the details of the chronology overly confusing, particularly in the early going.

The real problem here, though, is that most of the good aspects of the story would later be used better by another writer. You can’t help but see the story as an influence on H.P. Lovecraft. It particularly foreshadows “The Color Out of Space,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” and “The Dunwich Horror,” and maybe “The Call of Cthulhu” in structure and the way the story’s pieced together from various sources. Even the vocabulary recalls Lovecraft: I can’t offhand recall coming across another writer using ‘squamous’ except in a Lovecraft pastiche. But there’s a scope to Lovecraft’s work that doesn’t exist in Rud’s story. Instead of horror, Rud gives us a straightforward mystery with a strange scientific explanation, and an atmosphere that doesn’t quite come together. There’s nothing especially notable in this story that isn’t in Lovecraft, and an awful lot in Lovecraft that isn’t here.

Unfortunately, there’s also some ugliness in the way the narrator, never challenged by the story, is casually contemptuous of both Blacks and Cajuns (or “Cajans,” in Rud’s spelling). I should also note as well that there’s an odd moment in which the narrator reflects that he hopes his foster daughter “could come to love me as more than foster parent.” I take it that the emphasis is meant to be on the word ‘foster,’ implying that he hopes to have a relationship as close as a biological father-daughter pair; not the most positive view of step-parents, but more palatable than the alternative, which I have seen at least one thoughtful reader assume — not unreasonably, given some of the narrator’s other references to the child (“… those strangely long black lashes some day might droop in fun or coquetry …”).

The next piece is part one of “The Thing of a Thousand Shapes,” concluded in issue two. My general plan in these pieces is to discuss serialised stories as a whole, so I’ll cover the entire tale here. It’s the first published fiction by Otis Adelbert Kline, at the time an assistant editor of the magazine, later the literary agent for Robert E. Howard as well as a prolific fiction writer. Near Peoria, a man named Jim Ansley dies, and his nephew William, our narrator, comes to see to his affairs. But William finds the dead man, a former member of the Society for Psychical Research, left strange instructions for his corpse to be untouched until decomposition sets in. And then that night William starts to see strange ghost-white animals and figures.

The story has a slightly florid and slightly stilted style that more or less succeeds in building an atmosphere. The pacing’s strong in the first part, and the depiction of uncanny incidents works, building well to a suspenseful vigil. It’s a touch Victorian, but the gothic is mixed here with an almost scientific approach, including the narrator reflecting on the distinction between the supernatural and supernormal. In its first half alone, this story’s more effective than Rud’s tale in creating a distinctive horrific tone through a precise description of events. Unfortunately, the plot falls apart in the second half of the story.

Two new characters are introduced to give exposition and provide a love interest. Ill-health of nearby villagers turns out to be a disease unrelated to the main action of the story. And the climax of the story has the narrator standing around and watching events while other characters solve the main problem — which itself shifts from the supernatural to human fear of the same.

There’s arguably a theme here about the importance of rationality over superstition, but the thin characters and haphazard plotting make the actual story a disappointment. The first part has some solid imagery, and builds to a solid cliffhanger. The conclusion’s much more of an exercise in the ticking-off of boxes.

After that comes “The Mystery of Black Jean,” by Canadian-born writer Julian Kilman (a pseudonym for Leroy Noble Kilman). It’s a grim story with a reasonable payoff, told by an older man to an attentive audience, recalling a story of infidelity and murder that he spied on when he was a child. An attempt at a French-Canadian accent is unsurprisingly ineffective, but the main action works and the style’s brisk, capturing a bit of the rhythms of oral storytelling. The rural setting somewhere in northern Canada — perhaps the Klondike during the gold rush — flavours the story in interesting ways. Also shaping the narrative is the first-person child’s-eye view of events. Pulp stories aren’t known for being strong on character, but the perspective choice here is distinctive, and so is the unnamed lover of Black Jean who drives the plot: a young schoolteacher who is a much nastier piece of work than she at first appears.

There aren’t any supernatural elements in “Black Jean,” with the possible exception of an animal perhaps acting with human awareness. The next story, Orville R. Emerson’s “The Grave,” also has nothing supernatural or science-fictional about it, but is one of the most effective horror stories in the issue. Emerson’s only published fiction, it’s a tale of the Great War, with a frame story setting up a manuscript recovered from a German soldier trapped in a subterranean redoubt following an artillery attack. (The location is specified to be the real-life Kemmelberg, and the shelling that traps the narrator is presumably during the Fifth Battle of Ypres.) This gives us a claustrophobic narrative about the soldier trying to keep himself alive over weeks as he digs himself free during his waking hours only for the tunnels to partially cave in again while he sleeps.

The point-of-view shift from frame to manuscript and back is handled naturally and well, and there’s an interesting point that the soldier’s unnerved by the silence following the attack that traps him — we can work out from the timeline that the armistice must have happened soon after he was trapped, but he has no way to know that and expects somebody to launch another attack on the mountain at any point. Crucially, the slow degradation of the German’s situation is effective and credible. Emerson himself served during World War I in roughly the area he writes about here, which may account for an intensity to the story that raises it out of the ordinary. While it’s not particularly stylistically distinctive, for me this is one of the best and most haunting stories of the issue.

Stylistic distinction comes in the next story, “Hark! The Rattle!” by Joel Townsley Rogers, a feverishly-written tale that consistently does stranger things than you might expect. A couple of men in a New York club watch a dancer; from their dialogue we learn one is a killer; there is a flashback to a Florida swamp; the killer gives himself away. But that doesn’t get at the drive of the story. Rogers tells a fairly complex tale briefly, with characters sketched in quickly but effectively. Sentence fragments build a nervous, tense energy. With prose heated in a very pulp way, Rogers is able to quickly establish a convincing relationship between the narrator and his old comrade-in-arms, upon which the plot hangs. The tale has an interesting structure, moving between past and present, and a strong payoff with a definite supernatural element. I’ll note it also lends itself to a queer reading of the central relationship. In all, it’s easily one of the standouts in the issue.

Following that is “The Ghost Guard,” by Bryan Irvine. A convict and a strict guard have a deadly quarrel in an isolated prison; the convict manages to kill the guard, but the quarrel goes on from beyond the grave. It’s an old-fashioned ghost story, which plays out in the conventional if decently-crafted way of a campfire tale. For example, a guard captain recognises the guard’s ghost has returned when he hears it sing the guard’s favourite song, which itself is a song about returning from the grave. The style’s creakier and yet also more breathless than it should be, and while the nature of what the story’s doing means that the supernatural horror of the ghost’s appearance has to be balanced by description of the routines and geography of the prison, the balance here feels off. Add to that the ending’s predictable.

Next is G.A. Wells’ “The Ghoul and the Corpse,” told in the first person by a White fur trader wintering in Alaska who receives a visit from a local prospector. The prospector unfurls an incredible story about finding a body in the ice, a proto-human from some time long past when “the world revolved on its axis in a different place.” And then the prospector finds that the body’s not wholly dead, only frozen. Marred by some incidental racism, the tale builds reasonably well; the main problem is that you see where it’s going early on, as the story’s central idea is now both familiar and better-executed elsewhere. (One thinks of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There,” of Godzilla, of the 1963 retcon to Captain America; the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction cites a novel from 1887 as the first example of the suspended-animation trope, William Clark Russell’s The Frozen Pirate, so in 1923 this is perhaps still a relatively unusual concept.)

The tale-inside-a-tale frame does help, though, giving a bit of life to the telling of the story. The risk of that structure is that it distances the reader from events; the reward is that it creates a kind of ambiguity that makes the events more vivid — you know that you’re hearing things from an individual perspective, you know it might all be false, but if done well you get pulled into the tale nevertheless because you’re trying to assess the storyteller as well as the story. Here, the technique works more than not, because the trader who recounts hearing the tale is especially dubious of the teller’s honesty.

The next story, “Fear,” is by David R. Solomon, who was a writer and lawyer based in Birmingham, Alabama (and given the demographics of early Weird Tales writers, it’s worth noting that Solomon was Jewish). The story’s about a lawyer visiting the south who’s been sent out for legal reasons to accompany a work crew for a lumber company in deep forested swampland. It’s a tight character-based short story in which the lawyer’s quickly established, we learn what is most important to him, and what he fears the most, and how he has suffered, and then see him have to make a terrible choice in the face of potentially devastating consequences. It has good strong themes, about the conflict of love and fear, and whether you can predict what a man’s capable of in extremis. The language isn’t especially evocative, but the emotional content is written with an intensity that makes the story work, and the depiction of the character and dynamics of a group of men is engaging.

“The Chain,” by prolific pulp writer Hamilton Craigie, follows. The last of the long stories in this issue, it’s a proto-hardboiled detective story, and it’s hard not to think that it might have been originally meant for Weird Tales’ sister magazine Detective Tales. There’s no supernatural element, but the story does hinge on the possibility of a supernatural explanation for a mystery it poses, and it does occasionally try to describe its settings in a gothic tone. It opens with a private eye named Quarrier, who as the story begins has has acquired and stashed documents incriminating industrialist and crime-lord Hubert Marston. Quarrier gets in a cab that turns out to be driven by one of Marston’s men, which leads to a punch-up in an alley. Quarrier’s captured by Marston’s hoods, but escapes, and gets back to his office in a thirty-story skyscraper. He checks on the documents to make sure Marston hasn’t got them; only as he does, he has a strong feeling somebody’s in the office with him.

I mentioned that Craigie was prolific, and this story gives every sign of being written quickly. It’s divided into six chapters, but actually consists of two loosely-connected parts — Quarrier’s adventures in the alley, then the mystery at his office. That mystery is conceptually solid, but not especially well articulated: when Quarrier enters his office he’s sure somebody’s been there and may be there at that moment, but he’s not sure why. Where the person is, how they hid themselves, and why Quarrier’s so certain they’ve been there are all things the detective has to figure out. Craigie uses a diagram of Quarrier’s office as an illustration so that the reader understands the geography of events, admittedly a more common feature of mysteries then than now, but the precise details Craigie includes on the diagram necessarily give away much of the twist.

Other details are shaky; after knocking out the bad-guy cabbie, Quarrier walks into an alley expecting an ambush (which duly comes) rather than driving out in the cab. And the backstory that led to Quarrier getting the goods on Marston is intriguing, but doesn’t quite come together; the story opens right after Quarrier “had gone to the offices of the Intervale Steel Company on a mission, an important one. As a matter of fact, it was vital—almost a matter of life and death.” But we don’t find out what the mission was; he already has the plans stowed in his office at this point.

Quarrier’s established well as a two-fisted man of action, which is why it’s odd when the story abruptly changes tone and moves from an action story to tension. There’s a locked-room aspect to the mystery facing Quarrier, though without a murder. But it’s not a fair-play mystery. The reader isn’t given the clue that lets Quarrier put things together. Instead the tension’s used to set up a final brief action set-piece.

The style’s clunky, but has its moments of pulp thrills, as when Quarrier recalls visiting a police station filled with “crooks, thugs, strong-arm men, yeggs, hoisters, pennyweighters, housemen, and scratchers.” Or when the story describes Hell’s Kitchen as a “grim neighborhood of battle, murder, and sudden death.” Most interesting are nods toward an almost horror-story tone in the descriptive prose early on: “the black maw of an alley, a deeper blot of blackness, loomed. In its heart, like a witch-fire, there swam upward a nebulous, faint glow as from the pit;” or mention of “a darkness not merely of the night but of a prison-house, silent, musty with the stale odor of decay and death.” When Craigie gets to the locked-room mystery later and hints at the supernatural, passages like these prime the reader to accept that possibility. Arguably much of the fun of a locked-room mystery lies in the tension between the apparently-supernatural, a thing done where no mortal could have been, and the fact of a rational explanation. Clumsy as this story is in many ways, Craigie does do a decent job of emphasising the uncanny.

It’s followed by “The Place of Madness,” by traveller and journalist Merlin Moore Taylor. A convict testifies before a Prison Commission about the inhumanity of solitary confinement, leading one of the commissioners, a doctor named Blalock, to ask to be briefly imprisoned himself to put the convict’s claims to the test. The centrepiece of the story is Blalock’s two hours in solitary, during which he effectively goes mad. The sequence appears overwrought, but the twist ending explains why he’d have some weighty matters on his mind. You still need to allow for some exaggeration in the description of Blalock’s final state for the story to work. (I also should point out that the story insists on describing the pitch-dark solitary confinement cell as an utterly empty box of a room with no landmarks — no bedding, no way to find your way around in the dark. By implication there’s also no toilet.) There’s a neatness of construction to the story, but the final twist’s unconvincing; and Blalock’s step-by-step mental disintegration is relatively well-handled, but given too little time.

Next is “The Closing Hand,” by Farnsworth Wright. In early 1923 Wright was a young man trying to start a writing career; as fate would have it, he’d end up as the editor of Weird Tales for 16 years. Nobody could have known that was coming when this two-page story was published, though, and it’s hard to spot anything special in the story itself. It’s a tale about a pair of sisters spending the night in a house with a dark history; after a murder five years before, nobody’s been able to live in the place for more than a short time. It’s an older house with no electricity, so when the sisters hear a noise, one has to light a candle when she goes to look. The writing’s unsubtle and unimaginative, but to give the story credit the ending is set up in the opening lines, and the sisters’ dialogue does effectively establish backstory. But the resolution’s too blunt in its presentation, so the whole thing ends up feeling like a campfire horror story from an enthusiastic but unskilled tale-teller.

“The Unknown Beast,” by Howard Ellis Davis is next, and taken all in all is for my money the worst story in the issue. In rural Mississippi there’s a small town near a swamp where an unknown creature is killing wayfarers. The locals bring in a deputy sheriff known for his skill as a hunter, and he goes into the swamp to fight the killer. He loses, but lives; luckily he was followed by more men who shoot and kill the killer: an intellectually disabled Black man with great physical strength, who was being used by “East Indee” smugglers to keep people away from their dope-importing operation.

There are sometimes racist stories that have things in them that work structurally or stylistically. There’s nothing like that here. The plot doesn’t make sense; smugglers wouldn’t want to draw attention, but killing passersby is liable to draw attention to an area, as indeed happens. There’s no kind of character arc. The deputy’s set up as a great hunter, but he doesn’t notice that he’s been followed into the swamp. And much of the story’s told in a dialect that verges on the impenetrable without yielding any countervailing sense of local flavour. It’s simply not good.

But it’s followed by “The Basket,” by Herbert J. Mangham, which is one of the best stories in the issue — it and “The Grave” are the only stories from the first issue to make it into Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt’s 1997 anthology The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, which collected stories from the magazine’s first year of publication. It’s brief, and told in a spare but evocative style. A man moves into a San Francisco boarding house. He is quiet and discreet, though there’s a mystery about his past. The story describes his routine over the course of a few years, unvarying and uninteresting, but with tinges of obsessiveness and even strangeness. He dies, is taken away by the police, and his landlady, asked afterward, claims nothing happened.

This sounds simple, but is full of ambiguity. The style’s lovely in an understated way, each world precise and well-chosen. It’s the most subtle piece in an issue not otherwise notable for subtlety; I read it the first time as basically realist fiction, and then the second time through interpreted the portrait of the central character as hinting at something strange and supernatural. Both readings are valid, I think, making the story truly uncanny. It’s a quiet triumph of a tale.

It’s followed by “The Accusing Voice,” by Meredith (Tim) Davis. An opening courtroom scene gives the perspective of the foreman of a jury who finds a defendant guilty and condemns him to death; but it turns out to be a dream, and waking by the fire, Allen Defoe, the foreman of that jury a dozen years ago, is accused by a mysterious voice of knowing more about the case than he let on. The speaker holds a pistol to Defoe’s head, but Defoe’s Cuban valet doesn’t see anything. The speaker returns to Defoe in the following days, and when Defoe takes a cruise to calm his nerves the story climaxes in a confrontation aboard ship.

The structure’s interesting, and there’s a half-decent twist involving the valet, but the ending’s told with the same lack of subtlety as “The Closing Hand” and the overall plot relies on a lot of fortunate coincidences. It’s not a very good story, and not very well written, but I was distantly amused by the fact that it revolved around an avenging shadow with a distinctive laugh who knows what evil lurks in the heart of a man and appears to have the power to cloud men’s minds. That sets up a comparison the story can’t hope to sustain, and the tale simply doesn’t work well in its own right — barring some effective writing in the opening dream sequence.

Next is “The Sequel,” by veteran pulp writer Walter Scott Story (not a pseudonym; he was the son of a printer named Benjamin Franklin Story, so whatever nominative determinism was going on came naturally). The tale’s named because it’s a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” This is an odd choice, to me, because while some of Poe’s stories work by encouraging you to fill in blanks and ponder what more might happen, “The Cask of Amontillado” isn’t really one of the ones that leave you wondering what happens next. It’s got a very clear ending, and if the characters’ backstory encourages speculation, Poe was wise enough to know how withholding information builds the story’s effect. There’s no reason for extending the action of the story, and indeed plausibility’s strained getting any kind of a sequel out of the original tale.

It’s told from the perspective of the victim of the classic story, who here manages to get revenge on Poe’s narrator. The original has characters (or at least one character) taking extreme actions for unknown reasons, but what they’re doing is clear and broadly why; here the lead character does things nominally for the sake of revenge, but why he does some things instead of others is never explained. Questions implied by the original story are answered with the dullest possible explanation. It’s tempting to call this an early example of fanfic — however that’s to be defined — but this reads to me like a professional writer given an assignment that didn’t especially appeal to him or strike his imagination. That may not be the case, but this story’s an odd way for a relatively well-known writer to introduce himself to a new market and new readers. Stuff happens; it’s neither clever nor well-written; at least it’s brief.

It’s followed by “The Weaving Shadows,” by W.H. Holmes, which boasts one of the more intriguing opening lines of the issue: “Chet Burke was lazily reclining in his favorite easy chair, absorbed in a rare book on alchemy and black magic, when his sister answered a summons at the door.” Burke’s a bookstore owner who doubles as a consulting detective, and a friend who’s the chief of a detective agency has brought him a new case. A carpenter named Hayden recently moved to upstate New York to live in an old remote house with his widowed sister and niece, only for him to experience apparently supernatural events at night. Notably, shadows twist and writhe in strange forms, and the two women appear drained in the morning. Burke travels with Hayden to the isolated house, but ends up irrelevant to the way events turn out.

There’s a lot of promise in this story, and an awful lot of good ideas, but nothing much comes of them. Hayden’s sister and niece are said to be spiritualists, but while you can see ways that might affect events, it’s left too indeterminate to be meaningful. There’s more than a hint of vampirism in the supernatural occurrences in the house, but there’s no real final conflict with a malign force. There’s at least one plot hole, as human remains are discovered where they should have been found long before. Burke’s vocation as detective doesn’t enter into the story, and he doesn’t do anything intelligent or forceful — the story ends tragically, in part because of his failure to take action. There are some nice atmospheric horror moments, though. A number of early Weird Tales stories boast strong memorable scenes while ultimately falling apart in terms of plot or resolution; this story’s an example of that.

It’s followed by R.T.M. Scott’s “Nimba, the Cave Girl.” The Canadian-born Scott, 40 at the time the magazine came out, was already a veteran of the pulps; he’d go on to have a solid career as a detective and thriller writer, and is perhaps most notable today as the author of the first two novels featuring the pulp hero called The Spider. “Nimba” sadly does not have the staying power of The Spider (who would go on to star in 119 books). Probably the most interesting thing in the story is the setting: just south of James Bay, at some time in the distant past (“many thousands of years ago”) when the lands to the south are uninhabitable due to extreme heat, filled with “great cloud-masses of steam.” Nimba’s a full-grown young woman who, we are told in the first sentence, “was still a maid.” I note without further comment that she is described looking eastward, “her coppery-tanned skin glistening in the sun and her firm young breasts rising and falling as if they, too, saw and wondered in dreamy contemplation.”

Nimba’s made a home in an almost-inaccessible cave in the middle of a sheer cliff face. To her cave comes Oomba, a man of her tribe who wants her for a mate; but Nimba defends her secret cave with a stout club. There’s a bracing obviousness to the Freudian symbolism. Nimba and Oomba have a running battle, into which wanders another young man. At the end of the story, Nimba takes the second man back to her cave, and feeds him; he shoves her away to take her food, then ignores her and goes to sleep; and Nimba goes to sleep beside “her master,” for “Nimba had taken her mate.”

So: the story uses the idea of cavepeople, a narrative trope that had really only emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century, to tell a story of stone-age romance. The implication, I think, is that the story’s meant to be a reflection of some timeless essence of sexual relations; which is to say, timeless in the imagination of a guy in 1923. If Nimba’s interesting in the way she’s allowed to use violence and generally be primitive, that’s undercut by having her abandon her independence for the sake of a man she’s just met. It is, essentially, an unpleasant parable about a woman who wants to be dominated by a man of her choosing. The writing’s not especially interesting, being at its best in invoking setting, and the plot’s not neat enough to be engaging on its own.

It is notable, though, in the context of this issue, because it is the story furthest removed from a setting in the contemporary world. A few tales take place in a distant location, Europe or the far north or the Caribbean; “The Sequel” is nominally set in the past; and several stories have glimpses of some world after death. But “Nimba” is the closest thing this issue gives us to what we might call a secondary-world story.

The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales by John Locke
(Off-Trail Publications, June 19, 2018). Click for bigger versions

The next tale, “The Young Man Who Wanted to Die,” is one of the stories that gives us a glimpse of the world of the afterlife. The author’s anonymous, and as far as I can tell is still unknown; this site suggests that the author might be Otis Adelbert Kline, with some supporting circumstantial evidence. I’ll add that the story’s main character is a young man who “had a terrible desire to know what follows death,” and says that “I devoured every book on theosophy and kindred subjects I could lay hands on; I attended meetings of psychic societies; at college my avidity for psychology was remarked by everybody,” while Kline wrote that in his early 20s he “began a study of psychology and psychic phenomena. I read everything I could find on the subject, conducted numberous experiments, and eventually felt the urge to write.” (As quoted by John Locke in his invaluable book The Thing’s Incredible!) There are also some similarities between events in this story and the 1921 death of Spiritualist Thomas Lynn Bradford, though that may be coincidence.

Whoever wrote the story, it opens with the unnamed lead about to kill himself. He’s so obsessed with learning what follows death he’s decided to commit suicide to find out, thereby alienating the young woman he loves. The action of the story is slight: he turns on the gas in his apartment; he passes out; he has a series of hallucinations or visions; when one of the hallucinations attacks him, he cries out “GOD!” and wakes up, being nursed by his lost love.

It’s tempting to think that the conclusion after he wakes is a final hallucination, but it’s presented in third-person, so is difficult to parse as dream. It’s too contrived an ending; even if you want to say the dream-visions lead to the neat working-out of all the lead’s problems, it’s far too pat. And there’s no particular sense that the visions would lead to the recovery of the lost love. This is, essentially, a story whose entire interest is in the description of the hallucinatory visions. Which, to my mind, aren’t bad; but also not enough to make the piece work.

There are descriptions of eons flowing by, and dragons, and a prehistoric world, and monsters, and “a dense jungle of some marvelous fungus that attained a wondrous height.” The imagery is strong, but doesn’t build very well. There’s certainly no sense of a meaningful revelation; you don’t know what the main character took from these visions that might have given him some peace from wondering what lies after death. His dialogue after waking suggests he’s been scared by the things he saw, but that doesn’t really satisfy after the opening of the story — why do these particular images affect him so deeply? It’s abstractly interesting as a story that can be seen as pointing toward some of the weirder tales that will come in later issues, but it’s not much on its own.

It’s followed by William Sanford’s “The Scarlet Night,” a brief and reasonably effective tale. Sanford was another prolific contributor to now-forgotten magazines; this is a first-person story about a 40-year old alcoholic married to a woman 15 years younger than him, who he thinks is having an affair with one Doctor Langley. The narrator meets up with an old friend, who has some illegal whiskey with him (this, of course, taking place during Prohibition), and the narrator comes home drunk to his wife. The narrator goes on to tell a story in which his wife asks for a divorce, he refuses, and the next day she poisons his coffee; he awakens, not quite killed by the poison, and his wife kills herself as the doctor collapses. But the final paragraphs reveal that he’s telling us this from a prison hospital, where he’s been imprisoned after witnesses saw him kill his wife after catching her with the doctor.

The story’s clear that the version of events we’ve been told was madness or hallucination. There’s no ambiguity or doubt. Still, the piece builds to a memorable enough scene of violence, and is brief enough, that it’s at least passable. It’s not a particularly good story, but it holds the interest as long as it lasts, and does quickly what it needs to do.

Following that is “The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni,” by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding. This was the third story the two men wrote in collaboration; both were near the start of their careers, as both had had their first published stories in the December 1918 issue of 10 Story Book (“America’s Most Daring Sex Story Magazine”), and both would go on to have several further stories published. “Calgroni,” unfortunately, reads like writers still finding their way. There are some solid atmospheric passages, but the plot doesn’t cohere at all.

It’s the tale of a visitor to the small town of Belleville, New York, writing an account of a sinister doctor who moved to the vicinity to conduct mysterious experiments. Despite the fact that the narrator tells us in the first sentence that “there is much concerning the queer Dr. Calgroni that I can not give to the world,” we get a complete picture of Calgroni’s actions: renting an old house, bringing in strange scientific equipment, then the nature of the experiment — which involves the use of an ape from a circus that coincidentally happens to come to town. Curiously, though we’re told Calgroni “claimed that he could prolong a human life indefinitely by the insertion of a live thigh gland from a young quadrumanous mammal,” the experiment is of rather a different sort. (Note that some doctors at the time still claimed to believe that inserting animal testicles into a human male could give the human more ‘vitality.’)

The final revelation of the experiment comes off as an anticlimax, because it becomes too obvious what it is as the story goes on, while still not foreshadowed effectively from what we’re told of Calgroni’s background. In fact other things in the story don’t quite cohere. There’s a relatively extensive description of a small-town hellraiser, establishing him as a notable character, only for him to do next to nothing through the rest of the story. The narrator turns out to have a connection to Calgroni which defies belief. And Calgroni skips town after he conducts his experiment, missing the climax and avoiding consequences for his actions for no obvious reason — apparently the very success of his plans frightened him. Finally, it has to be pointed out that the resemblance of the title to the classic 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is either coincidental or may as well be; there’s no similarity of story. “Calgroni” sets up various plot threads and interesting mysteries, then fails to draw them together effectively by the end. (Also worth noting that there’s a contemptuous depiction of an intellectually disabled man, negative perhaps even by 1920s standards.)

Next is “The Return of Paul Slavsky,” by former army officer and long-time pulp author Captain George Warburton Lewis. It’s the story of a law-enforcement agent from “Central Office” who tracks down Paul Slavsky, a “Terrorist” from Russia, kills him in the course of apprehending him, then along with a “noted criminologist” tries to get the goods on Slavsky’s sister Olga. They succeed and arrest her, but have to transport her as a prisoner, and that proves difficult.

Most of the story’s told as summary. There are two real scenes, one in which the criminologist has a conversation with Olga, and then the final train journey, again mostly from the criminologist’s perspective. Too much plot is crammed into third-person exposition — this story could be the classic example of what it means to tell in prose and not show — although there is a clumsy lapse into first-person when the third-person narration refers to “the idea I wish to convey.”

The plot doesn’t work, either, at the end; another character’s brought in out of the blue, and Olga commits a final crime that makes no sense given the amount of preparation it would require. The political perspective’s rudimentary, with no sense that the writers grasp the political situation in Russia or what a ‘terrorist’ is, and no sense of the philosophy driving Slavsky — the story refers to “the doctrine of Gorgias and Fichte,” which doesn’t seem especially relevant to twentieth-century revolutionaries. And the final revelation, of how Olga was able to commit her last crime, doesn’t demonstrate her cunning so much as the incompetence of the lawmen.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in a not-especially-interesting story is that Olga’s repeatedly described as a ‘vampire.’ On the one hand, this shows Lewis’ disgust for revolutionaries. But on the other, the idea of a ‘vampire’ had multiple applications, especially at this time. The word ‘vamp’ had been popularised around 1915 as a term for a seductive and unscrupulous woman, coincidentally the same year French director Louis Feuillade presented a serial called Les Vampires about a criminal gang by that name. All of which is to say that at about this time, the idea of a vamp or vampire had a constellation of meanings, especially when applied to a sexually predatory woman. There are nods to the supernatural in the story, especially at the end, but this is an example of a story using ‘vampire’ as an image with multiple resonances.

Following comes one of the best stories in the issue, F. Georgia Stroup’s “The House of Death.” Sadly, this seems to be the only fiction by Stroup; there’s some fine biographical research about her here. In rural Kansas, three woman — Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Prentis, two farm wives, and Mrs. Prentis’ daughter Selina — clean up a farm house. The woman of the house, Mamie Judy, has been arrested under suspicion of killing her baby. It’s not clear where her husband Jed is, but the four-and-a-half-page story follows the women as they tidy the house, talking, pondering the possible crime, and discussing how hard it is to be a farmer’s wife. Then they find a piece of evidence, and make a decision about what to do with it.

The style is brief and effective, relying mostly on very convincing dialogue. The mundane details of the story are excellent and well-chosen. The description of the house is superb, telling us about Mamie Judy through the things the other women see. The tale evokes a life, and the nature of any number of similar lives, through its images and word choice. It’s powerful, concise, and resonant. It’s not even slightly weird or supernatural, and only marginally touches on mystery. But it is very, very good.

It’s the kind of story that invites discussion and unpacking; there is a lot that can be written about it. First and foremost, a lot about gender, and the effect of the women’s choice. But also about the emotional texture of women’s lives. So therefore about class. And about isolation, and the effect on the psyche. About landscape, and place. About family, and about community. (And here is an article about some of the issues surrounding the medical terminology used in the story; includes plot spoilers.) There is a hell of a lot happening in less than three thousand words.

“The Gallows,” by I.W.D. Peters, follows. According to the biographical research here, it’s the other story in the issue confirmed to be written by a woman, Ida (or Idella) W. Donnally Peters. It opens with a man on death row who wants to die, while his wife Gladys struggles to get a pardon to keep him alive. This is not a bad hook, as we immediately wonder why the narrator, Traylor, wants to die. He tells us his story. But in the end we still don’t really know.

The story itself is basic: Traylor did not show as much love to his wife as she wanted — and given that this is from his perspective, it’s hard to know what to make of their relationship — so she starts to have affairs, he catches her with a lover, he pursues and kills the lover, he decides he wants the death penalty and falsifies his evidence to ensure his death. Everything’s clear until the last bit, which is the key to the story.

You can see a reference near the end to “surcease from the nausea that comes to those who have known disillusion and disappointment,” and connect that to hopes the narrator had earlier on for a child, and assume that discovery of the affair left him suicidal. If so, there’s an absence of emotion in the way he tells the story that’s difficult to justify. The other characters certainly never display the distinctiveness needed for them to come alive as individuals. Stylistically, the prose consists of short sentences that aren’t terse so much as straightforward, arranged in brief paragraphs. There’s nothing interesting here.

It is, though, a better story than the next one, Harold Ward’s “The Skull.” Ward, who had been a newspaperman, a press agent, and a city clerk, had been writing for the pulps for a few years when Weird Tales hit the stands; he’d go on to write exploits of the short-lived pulp character Doctor Death in the 1930s, and end up publishing 15 stories in Weird Tales. “The Skull” isn’t particularly accomplished work, though.

It takes place somewhere in the South Pacific, the main geographic locator being a reference to “the beche-de-mer of the Islands.” Beche-de-mer, also Bichelamar or Bislama, is an English creole that’s now one of the national languages of Vanuatu; the ‘islands’ would therefore likely be in the Vanuatu archipelago, or other islands nearby in the South Pacific. At any rate, the story takes place on an island with a plantation worked by several hundred Black men, apparently indentured labourers, overseen by two brutal white men.

The story’s about the white men, though it’s clear that we’re not meant to sympathise with them. The reader’s not exactly encouraged to sympathise with the labourers, either, though; they’re presented as easily cowed and near-subhuman (“like a herd of cattle ready to stampede”). Details of the island’s culture are often inaccurate, both the characters and the third-person narrator are free with racial epithets, and a sentence like “the supremacy of the white man must be maintained for the common good of all” does not read as ironic as it needs to be. At any rate, one of the supervisors, Kimball, has apparently written to the the fiancée of the other man, Hansen, telling her that Hansen’s been sleeping with one of the local women. Hansen, sick to the point of death, curses Kimball, promising to return from the grave if need be to exact revenge. Kimball then drunkenly shoots Hansen with a poisoned arrow, killing him. The rest of the story is the working-out of the curse.

I don’t think the tale succeeds on its own terms, as Kimball’s inevitable doom feels contrived; you wonder about the practicalities of the mechanism, in a way that undermines the neatness of the plotting. And if the plot doesn’t work cleanly, there’s not much else. Characters aren’t interesting or individual, the style’s undistinguished, and the story’s uninterested in the morality of the plantation or plantation system — which is to say uninterested in the basic nature of its setting. There’s simply not much here.

The final story of the issue is “The Ape-Man,” from Montrealer J.B.M Clarke, Jr., which is oddly like a more competent version of “The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni.” A strange man named Needham has moved to the city of Burlington, Vermont to do “something in connection with lumber” — in the words of Harry Norton, a Burlingtonian and old acquaintance of Needham. Norton’s current friend Meldrum is the main character, who watches a growing enmity between Needham and Norton, apparently due to Needham’s desire for Norton’s sweetheart Elsie. Needham, described physically as “a throw-back — an atavistic specimen,” has spent time in Africa, and knows the ways of the apes, including learning vocal cues that he can use to control them. And then a circus arrives, with a great grey baboon.

Events develop from there, in a more logical and controlled manner than “Calgroni.” The climax isn’t especially well-staged, or written with a feel for pace or excitement, but it gets the job done and events are reasonably coherent. The style’s engaging, with a decent sense of rhythm. The biggest problem is that Elsie never appears on the page, so that Needham’s conflict with Norton seems curiously unmotivated; there’s a lack of dramatic set-up. But the story builds well, and the characters are relatively vivid. Needham’s a villain out of central casting, but the story’s insistence on his “unpleasant laugh” and “evil smile” and “the singular shape of his small head, with its closely-cropped black hair, offending the sense of just proportions” does at least get the point across.

So with all this said about the stories individually, how does the issue hold up as a whole?

For a pulp magazine more than a hundred years old, it’s not bad at all. It’s got some very poor stories, but I would say that more are decent or good, with some very good. I don’t think there are any stories that reach the level of an average story by Lovecraft, Howard, or Smith, but this isn’t a terrible showing overall.

Still, if it’s hard not to look at it through the lens of what it later became, even in a vacuum it doesn’t live up to what the title Weird Tales evokes. There’s a lack of fantasy and science fiction. Horror is frequent, but there are also non-supernatural crime and detective stories — perhaps originally bought for Weird Tales’ sister publication Detective Tales, but for whatever reason, here they are. All the stories are set in the present day except for “The Sequel” (historical fiction) and “Nimba, the Cave Girl” (an imagined prehistory).

Weird Tales, March 1933. Cover by Margaret Brundage

As a relatively random contrast, look at the issue exactly ten years in the future, from March 1933, with a Margaret Brundage cover illustrating a Seabury Quinn werewolf story. Harold Ward, who wrote “The Skull” in the first issue, has a story (about an evil Chinese mastermind). So does Otis Adelbert Kline (“The Thing Of A Thousand Shapes”) — but Kline’s story is part 5 of “Buccaneers of Venus,” a sword-and-planet adventure. Among the other tales are Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Isle of the Torturers,” in the dying-earth setting of Zothique; and, above all, Robert E. Howard’s classic “The Tower of the Elephant.” Note that the 1933 issue has a different format than the 1923 issue, with only 9 stories and a poem, so although the other stories are set in contemporary or historical settings, there’s still in proportion much more outright science fiction and high fantasy.

In March of 1923, most of the supernatural occurrences come from ghosts, typically influenced by spiritualism, and similar manifestations of life after death. Weird Tales is frequently said to have been seeking new things that were specifically alternatives to the Gothic, as its subtitle ‘The Unique Magazine’ implies, but the first issue has quite a lot of Gothic machinery. Its Poe influence in particular is very clear, even to the point of including a sequel to one of his better-known works.

Thematically, there’s a recurring interest in imprisonment and escape. A hero being captured and then breaking free is a staple of adventure fiction, but to my eye there’s more of an interest in the experience of imprisonment — literally in “The Place of Madness” and “The Gallows,” more metaphorically in stories like “The Basket” and “The House of Death.” “The Sequel” continues on from one of the most famous stories in the English language about a man’s imprisonment. “The Place of Madness,” “The Ghost Guard,” and “The Gallows” are all set in jails; “The Accusing Voice” opens at a trial with a man being found guilty.

Beyond that, there’s an openness to the supernatural, but not an obsession with it. There’s more of a focus on criminality, I’d say, and wrongdoing in the past or present. There’s also an openness to violence — well over half of the stories (maybe over two-thirds, depending on how you count) have a fight scene or on-the-page depiction of violence. There’s action in these stories, as well as brooding horror.

I note that even the mediocre and poor stories often have moments that work — moments of atmosphere, of vivid description, or of tense action. Plots don’t always wrap up well, sometimes not neatly enough and sometimes too neat by half, but typically these stories aim to give you some excitement or thrill in the moment of reading. You might expect an emphasis on thrills and action in a pulp magazine. But the rough plotting’s a bit of a surprise. Narrative drive is usually effective, but too often there’s a slackness of form that has to be considered poor craftsmanship.

On the other hand, given that pulp fiction’s often considered straight-ahead unironic storytelling, there are a lot of unreliable narrators in the issue. Sometimes there’s a frame story setting up a recounting of events, as in “The Ghoul and the Corpse,” but there are also untrustworthy first-person narrators, as in “The Gallows.” Occasionally, as in “The Dead Man’s Tale,” there are both. This perhaps points to ambition among writers trying deal with implication and point-of-view, emphasising subjectivity as a way to get at something ‘weird.’ Along the same lines, while there are outright heroes in some of these stories, like “The Chain” or to an extent “The Ape-Man,” there are a lot of unpleasant leads — “The Accusing Voice,” for example, or “The Scarlet Night” — and some who simply observe what happens to other people, as in “The Weaving Shadows.”

So all in all, what does the first issue suggest about where the magazine’s going? What does it say about what Weird Tales will be? To start with, it promises a magazine strongly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. The mix of horror and crime, with some ghosts and a sprinkling of what we would now call science fiction, feels like the collective impression one might take away from Poe’s work. Even Poe’s obsession with premature burial is reflected in the issue’s concern with imprisonment and release.

Beyond that, the magazine aligns reasonably well with Baird’s description of it in the issue’s ads and editorial. It’s less shocking and revolutionary than he claimed. But tonally, it’s in line with what he writes: “fantastic stories, extraordinary stories, grotesque stories, stories of strange and bizarre adventure — the sort of stories, in brief, that will startle and amaze you.” Stories about “‘forbidden’ subjects, like insanity, some … concerned with the supernatural and others with material things of horror.” That’s all about right, given a wide enough definition of ‘forbidden.’

Is the magazine unique, as its subhead promises? It might have been, relative to other magazines on the stand. But from a broader perspective, it doesn’t read as a break with older horror or the Gothic. There are ghosts and haunted houses, murderers and madness, but not much that I would read as hinting at cosmic horror. What may be most notable is that the cover story, “Ooze,” is proto–science fiction as well as horror. I would say it fits in with stories like Frankenstein or to an extent The Island of Doctor Moreau but is a development of that tradition that moves away from the Gothic.

There’s a lot of fiction in the issue, and there is a very definite tone that emerges from it. There’s an interest in extreme mental states. And there’s at least an openness to the supernatural. As it turns out, the magazine would expand on the latter, presumably because that’s what the readership wanted. Weird Tales would find its niche in the ecology of pulp magazines, but it would have to evolve a bit first. Still, the first issue is an interesting document, even if it doesn’t hint at the weirdness to come.

Find all my posts about Weird Tales here!

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Matthew David Surridge is the author of “The Word of Azrael,” from Black Gate 14. You can buy collections of his essays on fantasy novels here and here. His Patreon, hosting a short fiction project based around the lore within a Victorian Book of Days, is here. You can find him on Facebook, or follow his Bluesky account, @bookofdays.