The table of contents of the second issue of Weird Tales advertises “Sixteen thrilling short stories / Two complete novelettes / Two two-part stories / Interesting, odd, and weird happenings.” More specifically, one of the two-part stories, the cover story, begins this month while the other concludes. As for the “interesting, odd, and weird happenings,” I wrote about them here, so now let’s get to the fiction. (Note that discussion of one of these stories necessitates quoting an ethnic slur, directed against the French, of all people.)

The first of the tales on offer in this issue is one of the novelettes, “The Scar,” by Carl Ramus (whose surname’s misspelled in the table of contents as ‘Rasmus’). It’s the only known published story by Ramus, though his sister Sybla was a writer whose work would later appear in Weird Tales. Carl Ramus had a day job as a doctor, and as it happens “The Scar” is a tale of a dashing young doctor pulled into a kidnapping plot. It’s not a terrible story, but it’s a surprising choice to lead off the issue as there’s little supernatural about it — the heroine claims to be able to bring on a fever by willing it and the hero believes he has a knack for hypnotism — and nothing I can see as ‘weird’ in any other sense. If the magazine’s still in the process of defining itself, then editor Edwin Baird has a different sense of where he intends it to go than we might expect from our later perspective.

At any rate, we follow Doctor Herbert Carlson, who has a conversation with a colleague that introduces sundry plot-relevant details about a recent kidnapping, and then is hired for a mysterious house call. Taken by chauffeur to a meeting with masked gunmen, he’s made to wear a blindfold before being taken the rest of the way to his patient. When he sees her, he realises she’s the beautiful young kidnapping victim he’d just been discussing. Can he figure out a way to turn the tables on the criminals?

It unfolds about as you might expect, but the story moves briskly and uses (what so far as I can tell is) accurate medical references, specifically in regard to the stitching of a certain kind of surgical incision. On the other hand, there’s also some ethnic stereotyping; the villains are Italian “black-handers.” And the age of the heroine is an issue. She’s 16, while Carlson — “five-feet-eleven, well-built and athletic. He had clear hazel eyes with a very direct look, and thick and wavy brown hair, which was much admired by his women patients” — is 27. At least the story mostly avoids direct statement of romantic interest until the girl gets an internal monologue at the end. ‘Mostly’ is not ‘entirely,’ but the story moves fast enough and is stylistically terse enough that the emotions of the characters aren’t investigated.

It’s an effective pulp story that isn’t especially notable or surprising, and has aspects that’ll reasonably alienate at least some modern readers. It’s also a straightforward crime story with no significant horror or fantasy element. If it were placed later in the issue that’d be less notable, but the story’s a strange choice to lead off the magazine.

The next tale, “Beyond the Door” by Paul Suter, is a major step up in technique and in weirdness. There are functionally three parts to it. In the first, our first-person narrator discusses the mysterious death of his entomologist uncle with his uncle’s housekeeper. In the second, the narrator reads the uncle’s diary and finds his uncle suffered from nightmares and terrifying visitations in the night. In the third, some mysteries are resolved as the narrator and forces of the law investigate a mysterious pit in the basement that had to do with the uncle’s fears.

It’s not a perfect story. The second part ends with the uncle writing under a mental ‘compulsion,’ which reads like a forced way to get information across to the reader. And the third part, while effectively creepy and even uncanny, is lacking in suspense and pure fear.

But, on the whole, the effect of the tale comes across very well. I was wrong-footed on a first reading by the uncle’s entomological researches not tying into later events as much as I might have expected, but the atmosphere conjured up by a house full of bugs impaled on pins is memorably creepy. The use of the conversation with the housekeeper is a good and relatively light way to introduce the situation and hint at the supernatural. The diary section builds very nicely, with ebbs and flows to the haunting. And the conclusion nicely pays off earlier set-up; a character’s revealed as convincingly flawed, and the whole story gains a touch of the tragic.

Suter was a prolific pulp writer, who would write hundreds of stories for various pulp magazines, including several more for Weird Tales. This piece gets the sub-head “An Unusual Story” under the title; other pulp magazines referred to fantasy and supernatural horror tales as ‘unusual stories,’ and perhaps this early in Weird Tales’ run editor Edwin Baird thought audiences would appreciate being told what kind of thing they were about to read. On the other hand, the other supernatural stories don’t get the ‘unusual’ tag. Either way, it’s a solid horror piece, and would be reprinted in a 1954 issue of Weird Tales as well as Darrell Schweitzer’s Weird Tales: The Best of the 1920s. It would also be praised by H.P. Lovecraft as the story in this issue “most truly touched with the elusive quality of original genius.”

It’s followed by another effective horror tale, “The Tortoise Shell Comb” by Roylston Markham. Markham was a newspaperman who seems to have dabbled in pulp fiction, with a story in a 1920 issue of Black Mask as well as this one. The piece here is a tight three-page tale about an American serviceman in France, telling a visitor the story of the death of the captain of his unit at the hands of a ghost. The last few paragraphs then has the visitor uncover a different view of events, ending with a character-based explanation for everything we’ve read.

The writing’s taut and the voices vivid. (I’ll note some in-character ethnic insensitivity, but we’re supposed to have an ambiguous view of the characters in question.) Markham has his main character repeat phrases with a neurotic obsessiveness that builds the sense of a man on the edge, and the description of the main events of the story has a solid grasp of tone while also sounding at least vaguely like something someone in the character’s situation would say. It’s a good well-crafted horror story that does a lot in a short space of time.

Next is the first piece of nonfiction to be listed in a Weird Tales contents page. “The Photographic Phantasm,” by Paul Crumpler, MD, is a single-page anecdote in which Crumpler recounts events leading up to his seeing a spectral figure in a photograph. It’s not especially distinctive, as those stories go, and neither especially well nor especially poorly told.

It’s followed by Anton M. Oliver’s “The Living Nightmare.” Another relatively brief story, it’s about a man boarding with a family in an unnamed village in the northern United States. After one of the family dies, the rest head out of town to the dead woman’s former home to arrange matters, leaving the boarder alone overnight. He thinks nothing of this, at first, but then strange things begin to happen in their tall dark house, and an atmosphere of horror builds.

Unfortunately, it comes to nothing. Oliver tries for a twist ending, but it ends up undercutting everything that came before without explaining any of the strange things that happened. The style’s reasonably solid, if simplistic and overly given to the use of italics. But character never comes alive, and the weakness of the ending lets the story down badly.

Then comes Hamilton Craigie’s “The Incubus.” Craigie contributed the slightly-strange hard-boiled detective story “The Chain” to the first issue, but this tale’s quite a different thing. We follow Gerald Marston, who as the story begins has just ambushed and presumably murdered his friend, archaeologist Professor Pillsbury, in an Aztec tomb the professor’s been exploring. The tale’s an exercise in atmosphere, as Marston stumbles through pitch-dark catacombs seeking a way out, and at six pages it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Whether it works is another story. Craigie keeps a superheated tone in what is essentially the story of one man’s perceptions and reactions as he wanders around in the dark, and I suppose there’s technical interest in that. But there’s no variation in tone, and not much actually happens to Marston. Craigie’s main device is often-overheated multi-clause sentences that take up an entire paragraph, such as: “In his headlong flight, cleaving an unimagined depth of Cimmerian darkness, through which it seemed he was breathing the oily tide of a dim nightmare of viscid flood, all sense of direction had been completely lost.” Or: “Somehow, once more, he rose upright, after a multiplied agony of straining effort, but he felt, deep within his consciousness, that he was but a puppet in the hands of a ruthless fate, doomed to wander forever under his detestable load.”

The incubus of the title’s symbolic, referring to the feel of sleep paralysis and not the sexual demon, and is an image of the character’s fear and claustrophobia. This is another story, as were so many in the first issue of Weird Tales, about a man imprisoned in a close, dark place. It has enough of a headlong pace that it might keep you reading, but not enough actual narrative interest to be memorable despite the lurid style.

After that is “The Bodymaster,” by Harold Ward, the veteran pulp writer who contributed “The Skull” to the first issue. This story’s better than that one, as well as longer, and frankly odder. If the title reads strangely today, sounding like some sort of workout machine, at the time it was more likely to evoke the president of a chapter of freemasons. The story, meanwhile, also perhaps reads differently today than a hundred years ago: it’s about a sprawling Victorian lunatic asylum on the outskirts of a major city, a curiously strong-willed detective who infiltrates it, and the detective’s battle with the supervillain who has taken it over.

After a strange murder near a sanitarium just outside New York City, a private investigator’s hired to find out what really happened. He goes undercover as an employee of the sanitarium owner, Doctor Darius Lessman — who turns out to secretly be a psychic, capable of possessing another man’s body due to his immense force of will. Lessman uses the inmates of the sanitarium to commit thefts and murder, planning eventually to conquer the world alongside his beautiful parmour, Meta Vinetta. The unnamed investigator fights, driven by love for one of the prisoners, a woman named Avis. Eventually, he strikes a deal with the self-proclaimed Bodymaster to save Avis’ life.

Lessman is a true evil genius, and soon the investigator becomes his ally in exploring the cosmic visions Lessman’s powers unlock. But Lessman’s sinister plans continue, and the investigator soon finds himself caught up in murderous revenge schemes — and in Lessman’s desire for Avis.

The story’s written so as to hint at enormous crimes while foreclosing the sexual implications of psychic possession. But the atmosphere of wrongness is nevertheless effective, if unsubtle. Ward blurs the line between ‘scientific’ psychic powers and ‘occult’ diabolism in some interesting imagery, making the lurid horror of the story even more heightened.

The conclusion’s rushed and simple, and generally the story’s undercut by Ward’s tendency to use simple description instead of dramatic scenes and character development — he tells instead of showing. But some of the descriptions of the psychic voyages are imaginative, and the whole story’s written at a feverish pitch with every emotion always at maximum. That does give it a certain pulp energy, made even stronger by Lessman’s villainy. He’s a cartoon, but an effective cartoon, one that’s fun to read about.

It is hard not to think of the story as “Arkham Asylum Year One,” even though it predates the first appearance of Arkham Asylum in comics by more than 50 years (and indeed predates the first professionally-published reference to ‘Arkham’ by a few months). But in 1923 it was evoking different stories; the protagonist recalls that “My first glimpse of [the sanitarium] recalled to mind a description I had read somewhere of a ruined castle ‘from whose tall black windows came no ray of light and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.’” The “somewhere” was the end of Chapter I of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the source is relevant; it’s hard not to think of Jonathan Harker’s stay in Castle Dracula while reading Ward’s story.

“The Bodymaster” is in the end a fun pulp action-horror story that is let down by some failures of craft but made interesting by touches of cosmic strangeness. It doesn’t explore the depths of horror the possession theme implies; at times it reads as though it wants to imply a sexual subtext with its matched couples (Lessman and Meta, and the narrator and Avis), but nothing coherent comes of it. That’s unsurprising, given the era and venue, but does add to the frenzied feel of the story, with the narrator half-remembering terrible crimes.

It’s followed by Artemus Calloway’s “Jungle Death,” which is a lesser story in every way. Bart Condon, a small plantation owner in Honduras, is at risk of being bought out by a larger plantation, because the manager of the large plantation has convinced a voodoo priest to stir up the workers against him. Luckily, Condon has a foreman with a plan.

Except it’s not much of a plan. Bad things happen to the nominal baddies, without any action taken by the supposed heroes. Clunky exposition suggests the foreman managed to get the workers on site to see the priest’s comeuppance, thus discrediting the priest, but it feels like an afterthought. It’s a brief story that doesn’t work, and is thoroughly racist — the foreman’s competence is explained by his being of “pure Spanish blood” as contrasted with the simple and superstitious Black workers, and even the witch doctor’s easily manipulated by a white man. Unpleasant, then, as well as unsuccessful.

It’s followed by “The Snake Fiend,” by future Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Which is not a good story, but is at least interesting because it appears to have been written around a single strong concept. Specifically: two people are trapped in a locked cabin with a ton of rattlesnakes and no weapon. Only the male hero gets to take action while his wife gets to be terrified and then unconscious, but the story’s otherwise a competent working-out of a nightmarish premise.

The setting-up of that premise isn’t great — an Italian villain, mad with desire for the aforementioned wife, rigs the cabin and dumps a bunch of snakes into it. And the conclusion’s facile, as well. Stylistically, it’s unsubtle even by pulp standards. It’s not a good story, then, except for the basic idea of the snake-filled room, which has some real force. This is pulp fiction with poor craft but a strong central image, evoking good genre thrills almost despite itself.

Anthony M. Rud’s “A Square of Canvas” comes next, and it’s a step up. Rud contributed the cover story for the first issue, “Ooze,” and while this story doesn’t have the science-fictional weirdness of that one, it does have a good line in maniacal horror. An art student (a woman, although interestingly her gender doesn’t affect the plot) visits an insane asylum for reasons never made clear, and meets a man she is surprised to learn is a famous artist, Hal Pemberton. He unfolds quite a tale for her.

It’s the tale of Pemberton’s life, and in his telling, his artistic accomplishment is linked to violence. He reached new plateaus as an artist whenever he killed an animal. A larger animal was required each time, until — you can see it coming — he was faced with the need to kill a human being. The story’s obvious, and the style’s a bit formal and overwrought, but it’s well-paced and well-structured with a very effective build of horror through the tale. And there are some relatively subtle points, such as the implication that the ‘mundane’ art Pemberton painted when not under the influence of bloodshed was in fact quite as strong as his other work — except to his eyes.

And there is a half-twist at the end, too, that makes for a satisfying cap to events. It’s an ending that can be read a number of ways, and also suggests different ways to read the rest of the story. I note that it uses the structure of ‘tale told by a madman,’ as also seen this issue in “The Tortoise Shell Comb,” to set up an unreliable narrator. This story uses the structure better, with more of a payoff and yet also more ambiguity. It’s solid work.

It’s followed by Julian Kilman’s “The Affair of the Man in Scarlet.” Kilman contributed “The Mystery of Black Jean” in the first issue, but to my mind this story isn’t as strong as that one. It takes place in the thirteenth century, in a small village in “Angouleme Wood” where the “official headsman” of France lives. Two visitors arrive, one a woman to be executed at the order of the king, the other a count conveying her to the executioner. But the count, sympathising with the beautiful woman, recalls an ancient law according to which a condemned prisoner who marries the executioner may be saved. As the current executioner is a bachelor, a plan suggests itself. But there is also a prophecy based on a portent from years ago which must be reckoned with.

Unfortunately, the reckoning isn’t terribly clear. It’s obvious what happens at the end of the story, but not why. Character overall isn’t especially engaging, the style’s affected as Kilman tries to write a ‘medieval’ story in the vein of Walter Scott or Alexandre Dumas, and there’s no real atmosphere to the story. It’s not actively unpleasant, and you can more-or-less see what Kilman was aiming at, but the crucial final twist fails to work.

A few things about names in the story, though: the beautiful woman’s named Madamoiselle Bonacieux, the name of a beautiful woman in The Three Musketeers, while the count who tries to help is the Comte de Mousqueton, where a relevant definition of ‘mousqueton’ is a short-barrelled musket. The hangman’s family name is Capeluche, the name of an actual 15th-century French executioner; the name of the town in which the story’s set is Peptonneau, and when I googled ‘Peptonneau’ every result was for either this issue of Weird Tales or a story, “The Joke on M. Peptonneau,” written in 1893 by Henry Cuyler Bunner and inspired by Guy de Maupassant. It’s interesting to be able sometimes to trace a writer’s probable lines of inspiration.

At any rate, next comes “The Hideous Face,” by Victor Johns, who had published a story in Argosy All-Story Weekly the previous year, would publish another in Argosy in 1925, and otherwise is largely unknown to the internet. That’s a shame, as “The Hideous Face” isn’t bad.

In Marseilles our narrator, Bayard, meets an old acquaintance, an artist named Lawrence Bainridge. Bainridge is nervous, affected by something as innocent as the smell of roses. When Bayard notices a man he thinks has been wounded in the Great War, with terrible scarring on one half of his face, Bainridge unfolds to him a hideous story in which a man who modelled for him played a practical joke, leading Bainridge to exact a disproportionate revenge. Later, Bayard observes further events himself.

The story moves crisply, and has moments where Johns effectively evokes atmosphere. There are some dicey reflections on a Portuguese immigrant community in New England, but that can reasonably be ascribed to the narrator. Like “The Tortoise Shell Comb” and “A Square of Canvas,” we get a narrator being told a story by another character, only for the narrator to provide a final piece of information that concludes events; that’s an effective structure, but three times in an issue (with “Beyond the Door” having a similar inset story) begins to seem a bit much.

What is really notable here, though, is the emotional atmosphere. For better or worse, I don’t incline to reading queerness into stories; perhaps as a function of my asexuality, it’s not usually a part of how I approach fiction. But in this case I found that it was hard not to read a queer subtext into the tale, and indeed that subtext significantly improved the story.

If you see a lovers’ tension between Bainridge and his model, the action makes much more sense than if it’s simply one man taking disproportionate revenge on another. I’d argue it’s consistent with what we’re told of Bainridge’s background, notably his breaking off a marriage engagement on flimsy grounds; and consistent as well with how he talks about his model. And I think it makes the story an engagingly strange mix of sublimated sex and death.

Unfortunately, it’s followed by one of the weaker stories in the issue, “The Forty Jars” by Ray McGillivray — a pen-name of Anthony M. Rud. This one follows an American historian, Roberts, leading an expedition in Inner Mongolia. Pursued by bandits in the desert, the expedition encounters a white man, Bowen, who tells them he’s escaped from sadistic lepers after a long captivity. Those lepers have also captured two members of Roberts’ expedition. Based in the ruins of a section of the Great Wall, the lepers want to infect the world with their leprosy. Roberts, at Bowen’s urging determined to save the members of his expedition who are “white men … like you or me,” decides to raid the lepers’ lair, at which point Bowen reveals that there’s a cure for leprosy hidden therein.

A moderately effective dungeon-crawl follows; Roberts and Bowen free Roberts’ men and then find the cure, at first sneaking around and then engaging in a running gun battle with the lepers. There’s a feverish atmosphere that I suppose effectively creates a sense of danger, but the story’s undermined by a few problems. Firstly and most obviously, there’s a pervasive exoticism and racial othering. Secondly, the motivation of the characters is overdetermined — Roberts wants to rescue people, and also he wants to find a cure for leprosy, and also his expedition’s threatened by the lepers, and also the lepers want everybody to get leprosy. Finally, while sneaking around the leper base, the heroes use guns without the noise drawing everyone in the place, which in turn undercuts the tension of the adventure.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to sympathise with a main character who says things like “I can’t stand by and see a white man kill himself” and “It will be terrible suffering for you, but you are a man—a white man!” This is the sort of action story that requires an unironic identification with the heroic lead, and if you’re estranged from the lead by his obnoxious racial attitudes, the story’s not going to work. There’s nothing else notable in it.

It’s followed by “The Wish,” a short-short story by Myrtle Levy Gaylord. Gaylord would go on to a career as a journalist, poet, and fiction writer for romance pulps, but would not have another story in Weird Tales. This story’s an anecdote about a woman blessed as a baby by a fairy; the blessing takes the form of an absence of emotion, which leads to a bad end. It’s not terribly convincing, in part because it’s too short to make its central idea credible, and in part because the depiction of character isn’t stong enough. And there’s a logical contradiction, in that the action the main character takes at the end is presumably driven by emotion, which the rest of the story insists she doesn’t feel.

Next is the cover story of the issue, the first part of “The Whispering Thing,” by Laurie McClintock and Culpeper Chunn. Chunn was a prolific pulp writer who had survived a suicide attempt but was partially paralysed; McClintock, a frequent collaborator, may have been his nurse. Chunn would have a number of stories in Weird Tales‘ sister magazine Detective Tales, but only one more publication in “The Unique Magazine” itself. This story in fact is a detective yarn, if one with an uncanny atmosphere.

Our lead character is a private detective, the head of his own agency, named Jules Peret. Born in France, he came to America, worked for the police, and then branched out on his own. Small, described as “effeminate,” he is an excitable Francophone detective with a moustache; it is worth noting that Hercule Poirot had been introduced to the public just three years before (in The Mysterious Affair at Styles). Because of Peret’s success in bringing criminals to justice, the underworld nicknamed Peret “The Terrible Frog,” and it is sadly typical for 1923 that a character’s superhero name should be an ethnic slur.

At any rate, he happens to be passing by a house when there’s a scream; a man leaps through a window, convulses, whispers a word to Peret, and dies. Peret sends a bystander to a nearby drugstore to call the police, but when he returns with a doctor, the doctor also dies and the bystander’s apparently attacked by an invisible creature. The bystander describes hearing a strange whispering. What horror is on the loose?

As it turns out, nothing too interesting, though that doesn’t become clear until the second part of the story. The plot’s formed out of coincidence and improbabilities, and the solution to the mystery of the whispering thing is a tremendous cheat — and uninterested in delivering on the weirdness promised by a ‘whispering thing.’ Stereotypes stand in for characters. All the questions raised in the first part of the story are answered in the second in the flattest way possible and with the least evocative solutions possible. At least the cliffhanger in this issue’s decent, but it’s barely enough to make this half of the story interesting, and nowhere near enough to make the tale worthwhile as a whole.

The first part of “The Whispering Thing” is followed by the second and final part of Otis Adelbert Kline’s “The Thing of a Thousand Shapes,” which I covered in a previous post. It’s a step down from the first half of the story, tying things up too neatly.

Then that’s followed by career pulp writer Ted Olson’s “The Conquering Will,” a more unpleasant story than it intends to be, and one that feels as though it ends when the dramatic action should just be beginning. Told in first person, a man named Malcolm Rae dies after a terrible accident in northern Canada, but he chooses to live on nevertheless. His spirit returns to Jane, the woman he loves, and takes over the body of a mutual friend, Gordon Paige. This is the majority of the story; in the last few paragraphs the narrator says he married the woman he loved, but never told her he was Malcolm and not Gordon.

It’s not clear why he doesn’t tell her the truth about himself, but then the woman’s an underdrawn character to start with. There’s no consideration of any ethical issues around hiding his identity, but it also doesn’t seem to aim at generating horror from Malcolm’s deceit. That is, the story presents Malcolm pretending to be Gordon as an unproblematic happy ending. I suppose you can view the story as the product of an unreliable narrator, but that requires the reader to do a lot of heavy lifting and to read the story almost against its main effect. The point of the story, I think, is Malcolm’s extended and doomed struggle to survive, demonstrating the strength of his will and establishing how his spirit’s able to live on.

The style’s over-heated, and because Jane’s not developed as a character the idea that Malcolm’s driven by love doesn’t work. A brief prologue tells us that the text’s a letter left behind after the death of ‘Gordon Paige,’ but it’s not clear why Gordon died or whether we’re supposed to assume Malcolm lived on yet again. There are some nice moments of description, including a sequence in which Malcolm’s spirit watches hungry wolves devour his own dead body. But it never quite comes together, and doesn’t seem to understand what it’s doing.

It’s followed by Carroll K. Michener’s “Six Feet of Willow-Green.” It’s the story of a Chinese man, Ssu Yin, with a snake he believes holds his dead wife’s spirit; and an American who saves the lives of Ssu Yin and his snake; and the tragedy that results from the interplay of indebtedness and base desire that follows over the years after the American gets addicted to opium. Michener was an experienced pulp writer, and turns some nice phrases. The title comes from a description of the snake, “a poisonous six feet of willow-green relieved by the satin-white ribbon of its belly,” while elsewhere Ssu Yin’s described as believing his wife’s soul is reincarnated “within his snake’s scaly longitude.” Unfortunately, the racism of the story’s central to its effects, which turns on the exoticising of Asian characters and settings (with an incidental swipe at a superstitious Irishman to boot). The description of the climactic tragedy is also confused, and the result is less a coherent narrative than an odd sequence of events, not especially engaging in itself and kneecapped as entertainment by its own unpleasant attitudes.

Next is Francis D. Grierson’s “The Hall of the Dead.” Grierson had been writing for the pulps since 1912, with several stories published in Detective Tales. He’d go on to write two more stories for Weird Tales; this one’s a bit more than six pages, and relatively straightforward. On the first page a woman’s hired as secretary by a British Egyptologist whose “rambling old house on the outskirts of London” is filled with Egyptian antiquities. We then get two and a half pages of description of the professor and his habits, and we learn that his former secretary disappeared under mysterious circumstances. This sets up a revelation about the new secretary, who is conspiring with the law to find out what happened to the missing woman.

The last pages of the story depict a séance, which tries to get the truth out of the professor. It succeeds, and the end of the tale gives us the horrific fate of the secretary. I break the story down like this because I think the structure’s interesting; it’s a horror story, and the question of what happened to the secretary and whodunnit aren’t really at issue. The story’s close description of the professor and his house is the draw, developing an atmosphere that has to carry the story. It doesn’t, but the straightforward spookiness of the oddball professor who fills his house with the past and a room he calls “The Hall of the Dead” does give it some excuse for existing. The unfolding of the story’s convenient, but builds to a suitably melodramatic final tableau. It’s pulp horror: old-fashioned, because it was written more than a hundred years ago, but also energetic even when it’s not especially inspired.

The next story is C.E. Howard’s “The Parlor Cemetery: A Grisly Satire.” It’s a simple darkly humorous story in which our narrator is a man going house to house to get names and addresses for a city directory (not necessarily a telephone directory, incidentally, as city directories long predated phone books). He has a talk with an old woman in her parlor, and finds she’s a widow many times over, who has had her husbands cremated and stored them on her mantlepiece in containers appropriate to their names and lives — a man named Mason in a mason jar, for example. The story’s humour comes from the gags of finding unlikely containers for each man’s final resting place. It’s simple enough, but reasonably effective, because Howard gives us enough individual description of each man from the old widow that there’s some kind of contrast with the ashes in their unlikely urn-equivalents.

The last story of the issue is “Golden Glow,” by Harry Irving Shumway, another veteran pulp writer making his only appearance in Weird Tales. Two men, first-person narrator Edward Triteham and his friend Doctor Wilbur ‘Hunky’ Hunneker, go to the country on a fishing trip. On a whim, they pause to stretch their legs and investigate a run-down house in the middle of a patch of Golden Glow coneflowers. The house turns out not to be uninhabited; an “evil-looking” old woman pulls a new-looking gun on them, and they manage to calm her down and get back to their car.

Soon after they stop into a grocery and filling station, where a local tells them that the house is abandoned. They verify this with the local District Attorney, who conveniently happens to be in the store; he investigates and finds the house is empty but someone had been in it; this leads to the DA, Triteham, and Hunneker investigating a railway wreck near the property, which is being cleared by a work crew. The three decide to wait, and that night a gang of men attack the work crew. Our three heroes take the attackers by surprise, and find they’ve captured a group of bootleggers who were smuggling liquor from Canada by rail. The ‘old woman’ in the house was actually one of the bootleggers, planning to store the liquor in the old house. Why, Hunneker asks, the disguise?

The last paragraph of the story is as follows:

But the fellow wouldn’t telL And he never did say, as far as we ever could learn, why he had chosen to play the part of an old woman. Perhaps he had figured that in that role he would be better able to avert suspicion if he had been seen around the deserted farm house. Perhaps it would have worked, too, had he not made the mistake of holding us up with that suspiciously new and modern gun.

Fair to say, I think, that the story reads differently now than it would have read at least to most people in 1923. Unfortunately, the ending’s the most interesting thing about it by far. The plot unfolds jerkily, with various coincidences and contrivances, and the confrontation with the bootleggers lacks in suspense and tension. The characters have a bit of life, and the dialogue’s smooth, but there’s no particular depth — other than whatever we might choose to project onto the villain of the piece.

How does the second issue of Weird Tales hold up as a whole? It falls off as it goes along, and in all is a notable step down from the first issue. There are some good, solid stories; I liked “Beyond the Door,” “The Tortoise Shell Comb,” and “A Square of Canvas,” while “The Bodymaster” and, especially, “The Hideous Face” have interesting aspects. And there are a couple genuine oddities, like “Golden Glow” and “The Snake Fiend,” the latter made interesting by the knowledge that the writer would go on to edit the magazine for years.

That’s only seven stories out of twenty, though. That leaves a lot of poor writing. And much of it isn’t fantastika of any kind. A few are uncanny, in the sense of leaving open the possibility of the fantastic; most aim at the horrific, and at a Poe-like sensibility. That’s not to say that they attain it, but the magazine’s clearly more interested in the macabre than the fantastic.

Imprisonment continues to be a major theme for the magazine, if in many different forms. Death and spiritualistic stories about survival beyond death are also prominent, and present much of the fantasy content of the magazine. And stories about insanity are frequent.

This sounds depressing — an issue that’s mostly poorly-written stories about bleak subjects. But it isn’t. There’s at least an energy here, a punchiness that comes from a directness of style. That directness, in turn, is sometimes a function of a writer’s limitations. On its own, the energy I find in the issue isn’t enough to make it stand out; if the rest of Weird Tales’ run read like this we wouldn’t be talking about it today. But I suspect in the context of 1923 it would have been something distinctive, something that stood out in the fiction marketplace. If so, then perhaps the identity created in these early issues helped carry the magazine along until it found its eventual golden age. Unfortunately, that would be a little while in coming.

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.