The new format Weird Tales adopted for its third issue reached right into the table of contents, which dropped from two pages to one, with of necessity a more cramped layout. One extremely short story isn’t listed, but the magazine makes sure to promote “Nineteen Thrilling Short Stories” along with “Two Complete Novelettes.” That’s actually an increase over the last issue, which had sixteen short stories and two novelettes. So, having discussed the format in a previous post, let’s now look closely at this issue’s fiction.

And it is necessary with this issue to talk about race in Weird Tales, starting with the first story in the magazine (so this post will include quotations and mentions of period racism). “The Moon Terror,” by A.G. Birch, is promoted by a cover blurb; it’s 30,000 words long, 20,000 of which appear in this issue, with the conclusion in the next month’s magazine. It’s a textbook example of Yellow Peril racism, in which sinister East Asians menace white people and the Western world. In this case, the villains are a secret Chinese society who threaten the planet as a whole with increasingly powerful earthquakes.

The story, the only genre story by Birch in the Galactic Central bibliographies, begins with the world minding its own business when radio stations around the western hemisphere detect undecipherable signals being broadcast from an unknown location. Things escalate; small earthquakes begin to strike after each mysterious broadcast. After a month, major geological upheavals begin. Meanwhile, our first-person narrator’s on vacation, taking a hunting trip in Canada with his friend, astronomer Ferdinand Gresham; they don’t know that leading scientists were called to an emergency meeting in Washington, much less that the meeting was disrupted by a message from a mysterious figure named Kwo who claimed to be behind the earthquakes. Kwo demanded the disarmament of all the nations of the Earth, and the handing over of mass quantities of gold.

But when Gresham returns to the United States, he at once understands what’s happening: Kwo is the leader of the Seuen-H’sin, a four-thousand-year-old secret society of Chinese wizard scientists, who have a prophecy that when a second moon appears in the sky, China and the Seuen-H’sin will rule the world. The earthquakes will ultimately split the Earth and create a second moon; of course, if the Seuen-H’sin can get power without breaking up the Earth, so much the better. Disasters continue, and after Gresham gets an audience with the President of the United States, he sets off with the narrator in search of a secret Seuen-H’sin base in Alaska. They find it, infiltrate it, are chased, and the first part of the story ends on a cliffhanger.

The second part (again, published in the next issue of Weird Tales) is less imaginative. It’s a straightforward shoot-out in the Seuen-H’Sin base, with much sneaking about and combat and use of racial epithets. The first part occasionally hits an imaginative note; the conclusion’s rote, and the mysterious leader of the Seuen-H’Sin never becomes a presence as a character, remaining a vague copy of Fu Manchu. The first part also has a genuinely odd structure, as Gresham and the narrator — who themselves never quite get away from feeling like pale imitations of Sax Rohmer’s Denis Nayland Smith and Flinders Petrie — hardly appear in the opening chapters. The story’s about the worldwide panic and the mysterious happenings. As soon as it narrows its focus to the human level, it becomes less interesting.

You can spend a lot of time poking holes in the story. Why do the mysterious earthquakes caused by Kwo come 11 minutes and 6 seconds apart? Presumably, because that’s 666 seconds; but there’s no other significant mention of Christianity, so what’s the point? And you can note that the story’s not especially well-written on a sentence-and-paragraph level, with a lot of one- and two-sentence paragraphs. Surprisingly, this doesn’t help the pacing, or make the final battles feel more exciting. The thing’s too leaden, and too lacking in any imaginative staging.

But the story was selected for mention on the cover and leads off the issue. In 1927, a different Weird Tales editor, Farnsworth Wright, selected “The Moon Terror” as the title story for an anthology collecting several tales from the magazine. It impressed some readers, at least. Why? And why was this of all tales selected to represent Weird Tales as a whole?

To answer that question I find it useful to compare this story with the next one in the magazine, “The Secret Fear,” by veteran pulp writer Kenneth Duane Whipple. It’s not as ambitious as “The Moon Terror,” but in this context it’s instructive. The narrator’s a journalist who happens upon a police acquaintance on his way to a nearby murder scene. They investigate the scene of death; onlookers pass by, including the captain of a commercial ship; and a patrolman arrests a nearby lurker, a recent immigrant named “Big Jim.”

Most of the story takes the form of the captain telling the story of what happened to the dead man. It turns out that he was a morbidly superstitious Irishman named Terence McFadden, with a particular fear of apes; when Big Jim grabbed him from behind in an attempted mugging, the hirsute arms of the immigrant led McFadden to think he’d been grabbed by an ape, causing him to die of fright. The story compactly unites stereotypes of the Irish and of European immigrants into one unpleasant failed attempt at humour.

There’s nothing good to say about “The Secret Fear.” The structure’s unengaging, introducing a crime scene immediately explained in detail. The characters barely exist, beyond their ethnic stereotyes. The pacing’s not good, the prose isn’t memorable, there’s a coincidence involving an earlier incident with a gorilla that’s unlikely and needless. It’s not a well-executed story.

It also doesn’t have something that “The Moon Terror” does, and that is a quality of imagination. “The Moon Terror” is arguably the weirdest thing to appear in Weird Tales so far. The fantasy elements are much more prominent than in other stories, and there’s an apocalyptic tone to them that has to be called weird. If “The Secret Fear” is straightforwardly racist, “The Moon Terror” adds a twist of oddness to its racism — a several-thousand-year-old secret society of wizard-scientists plotting to send a chunk of the Earth into orbit as a second Moon in accordance with ancient prophecy is at least slightly original. The Yellow Peril elements overwhelm the strangeness of the concept, but there is in fact strangeness there that doesn’t exist in “The Secret Fear.” Both are bad stories, but to me “The Moon Terror” has an element that does do something interesting though it in no way redeems or mitigates its racism.

There are signs Birch read at least one book on China; he gets the names of legendary emperors right, and there’s a muddled reference to the myth of Fusang, here ascribed to The Book of Changes instead of The Book of Liang. The story reads as though Birch was inspired by a book of ancient Chinese history and myth, and came up with a story that has some genuine weird touches — not many, and they’re soon smothered by stereotypes and plot conventions, but there is the occasional moment of strangeness here not like anything the magazine’s published so far:

“I have seen them,” he went on. “I have crossed the Mountains of Fear, whose summits tower as high as from the earth to the moon, and I have watched the stars dance at night upon their glaciers. I have starved upon the dead plains of Dzun-Sz’chuen, and I have swum the River of Death. I have slept in the Caves of Nganhwiu, where the hot winds never cease and the dead light their campfires on their journey to Nirvana. And I have seen, too”—there was a strange, entranced look on his face as he spoke—“I have seen the Shadow of God on Tseih Hwan and K’eech-ch’a-gan! But in the end I have dwelt in Wu-yang!

“Wu-yang,” he continued, after a brief pause, “is the center of the Seuen-H’sin—a wondrous dream city beside a lake whose waters are as opalescent as the sky at dawn; where the gardens are sweet-scented with a million blooms, and the air is filled with bird songs and the music of golden bells.

“But forgive me,” sighed the doctor, rousing himself from his ecstatic train of thought; “I speak in the allegories of another land!”

Which is a nice peroration, but this sort of thing lands one way when the place-names are meant to conjure up the Hyborian Age (or Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, or the far-future lands of Xothique) and quite a different way when they’re meant to evoke actual geography on this present-day Earth,. (I will confess that I have nowhere near the knowledge of Chinese geography or Romanisation systems to guess at what actual specific places Birch has in mind, if any.)

I’ve spent so much time on these two stories because I think that they represent something important in the nature of Weird Tales and also a real flaw; look at the two of them and you can see weirdness in one highlighted by the nullity of the other, and you also see how that weirdness is diluted and overwhelmed by racism as well as by mediocrity of craftsmanship. These problems will return, in this issue and later ones.

The third tale, for example, is “Jungle Beasts” by William P. Barron, a Texas writer who in 1923 was near the start of a solid short fiction career. It’s another tale of Chinese magic; a man in an insane asylum writes out the story of his life, describing his hatred for his grandmother’s cat, Toi Wah, brought home by his grandfather from China with a strange inscribed collar. Allegedly “descended in an unbroken line from the cats of the Royal Household of Ghengis Khan,” Toi Wah was stolen by the narrator’s grandfather from Buddhist monks who viewed tending to these cats as a religious duty. Overwhelmed by fear of the cat, the narrator kills her kitten, and is cursed in return; he later kills Toi Wah, but not before he has a vision of a past life in which Toi Wah as a sabre-toothed tiger killed his child. Then, years later, as an adult he returns to his grandmother’s house with his new bride; he soon fears his bride has been possessed by the spirit of Toi Wah, and become a vampire.

There’s a frame story which doesn’t add much to the tale, but this is a case where the best thing about the story is also one of its main technical flaws: a moderately effective evocation of the narrator’s obsessive fear of the cat also slows the pace of the story. There’s some implication of a fear of sexuality and parenthood involved in the narrator’s horror of the cat, but I didn’t find it emerge in any coherent way. There’s a stereotyped portrayal of a Chinese servant, and the Chinese mythic material is oddly flat. The story has some ideas, and you can just about see how it could have been good if it had been significantly rewritten and reimagined, but it doesn’t particularly work as it is.

Next comes “The Golden Caverns,” from Julian Kilman, marking his third appearance in Weird Tales in three issues. It’s another story flawed by racism, but it does also contain some real pulp thrills. It takes place in South America, as scientific explorers in the Amazon, beset by a hostile indigenous nation and (somehow) a lack of water, stumble on the secret caverns of a legendary lost Asian people, containing great treasures of gold and gems. They explore the caverns, struggling with death traps and an evil Spaniard, and eventually arrive back in Rio de Janeiro only to face more dangers at the hands of the officials who’d backed the Spaniard.

The style’s distinctive as pulp writing goes, with a reasonable rhythmic variation and a fairly wide and precise vocabulary. Characterisation is archetypal but functional. The action’s effective, and the plot’s mostly successful in alternating danger and exploration. There are some adventure stories in which exploration acts as a kind of level marker — the protagonists are moving in an unknown space, face a series of dangers, and after getting through the dangers have as a reward the discovery of things previously unknown to them. That might be new territory, or artifacts outlining previously unsuspected history, or the resolution of a mystery. “The Golden Caverns” gets the balance of danger and discovery right much of the time.

Unfortunately, the plotting dexterity fades as it goes on. The idea of explorers returning to a city to find even more dangers is a good one, but the escape from Rio is too simple, and the conclusion of the story too pat. The ending also makes Indiana Jones look like a model of responsible archaeological exploration and care for the historical record.

And then there’s the racism. The party has a half-dozen indigenous and mixed-race labourers, and when one or another of them dies they’re not particularly mourned. They’re extras who exist to support the actions of the white main characters. They aren’t given names, while one of the mixed-race men is suicidally greedy and another traitorous; examples of the stereotype of mixed-race characters being of low character. Unsurprisingly, the indigenous inhabitants of the terrain the narrator and his party explore are presented as straightforward faceless dangers. (Also, the story seems to assume that the main language of Rio is Spanish, or at least a newspaper the characters read is Spanish.)

More complex is the treatment of Zangaree, a Black member of the exploring party. He’s described in patronising terms and depicted as childlike (“sleeping in his giant strength as a child,” for example), but also as consistently if unobtrusively competent. The story gets several pages in before he’s explicitly described as Black — when he discovers a treasure chamber, the narrator described him tossing gems in the air “in pure Afric joy” — which means at least it avoids using slurs to describe him (the mixed-race characters mentioned above aren’t so lucky). He’s depicted as faithful and loyal to the white explorers, and the narrator always thinks of him as separate from that main group, but there’s some hint of interiority to him.

Add it all up, and it’s a story which I can’t really recommend but which does some good things. Even beyond the casual racism which scars it, the ending’s disappointing. But there are some moments of good pulp adventure, if you’re prepared to dig for them.

The next story’s one of the more interesting tales in the issue. “Vials of Insects,” by Paul Ellsworth Triem, represents a good-faith effort by a white writer to represent a wholly admirable hero of another race. It doesn’t entirely work, but the attempt’s worth respecting. The story begins with a (white) drug-smuggler, Burke, betraying and killing another; that man’s the best friend of one Lee Hin, a Chinese scientist studying “fungology and the bacteriology of fishes” who decides to use these skills to avenge his friend. The story divides its focus between Burke and Lee Hin, climaxing with Lee’s revenge.

The story moves along smoothly; Triem, already a published writer and fictioneer, would go on to a successful career in pulps for another quarter century. But the most fascinating aspect is the character of Lee Hin. At a time when Yellow Peril villains were a pulp stereotype, Lee’s unambiguously heroic. We’re told, for example, that “there was a subtle magnetism about the Oriental: a radiation of power, which marked him as a born leader of men.”

You can see the problem in that phrase, too; even the neutral terms whites used for Chinese people at that time now read as dated and offensive. More than that, though, some of the terms used to describe Lee (“inscrutable,” “yellow, mask-like face”) are stereotypes. He has a tendency to speak in high-flown proverbial epigraphs. And one might argue that his vengeance, coming through the use of uncanny poisoning abilities, is too much like contemporary imagery of Chinese villainy.

But Triem’s casual description of Lee’s “intellectual superiority” over an otherwise basically admirable white character, principled distaste for opium smuggling, and ability to play on white stereotypes to gain access to Burke are all things that stand out in a good way. Burke uses outright racial slurs, but that marks him as the villain. In all, this is a well-constructed story that at least tries to do something worthwhile, and if it doesn’t entirely hold up a hundred years on, that’s a very long time for any tale to last.

It’s followed by G.W. Crane’s “An Eye For An Eye,” a straightforwardly poor story. A miserly landlord dispossesses a girl and her sick mother, who dies; the miser, unrelated to the foregoing, develops a fear of being buried alive; he makes odd arrangements for his coffin accordingly; apparently dies; and receives a final comeuppance. There’s no subtlety to this story from the first sentence (“‘But mother is too sick to be moved!’ the girl said imploringly”) to the last (“And no one ever thought to associate the gentle young school teacher with the fiendish laughter which had floated over the cemetery”). The plot’s a mess of incident, the style’s unsubtle even for pulp, and the payoff’s obvious. I suppose if you want to stretch for something to praise, there’s a touch of horror atmosphere in a bit near the end where the miser’s body is dug up. Otherwise, best to pass on.

Especially since the next story’s the finest of the issue. “The Floor Above,” by M. Humphreys, is a highly effective slow-burn horror story that would draw praise from H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to the editor. Humphreys’ first name is unknown; the story has been reprinted as by M.L. Humphreys, but that may have been an error. Humphreys is only known to have written one other story; one wonders if there are others, possibly under other names.

Our narrator, Tom, gets a letter from an old friend, Arthur, whom he hasn’t seen in ten years. The letter’s an invitation to come for a visit and stay a while at Arthur’s house, and it hints at a mysterious problem or ailment. Tom does so, but finds something off about Arthur, who is dull and listless. Strange incidents pile up, as Tom passes time by translating a Latin text on botany and starts to feel the same depression as Arthur, who has a tendency to forget that ten years have passed and it’s no longer 1912. Threats build, the sense of supernatural oppression grows, and it comes to an effective climax.

The story’s extremely well-crafted. Horror stories written in a first-person diary format sometimes have difficulty with endings which have to be written after a climax; Humphreys neatly avoids that here. The build of strange and increasingly disturbing events is extremely well-done, with mystery developing around Arthur and also around the house. Atmosphere therefore evolves quite nicely. The story’s brief, less than five full pages, but does a lot in a short space. I think it’s the best non-reprint story in the issue.

Vincent Starrett’s “Penelope” makes for a charming follow-up, though. Starrett was a veteran pulp writer who would write several more stories for Weird Tales across a lengthy career, with two more stories in 1923 alone. “Penelope” is a charming thought-experiment, proto-SF with the science cheerfully handwaved away. It’s recounted by a man named Raymond to his friend Haswell, our skeptical first-person narrator; Raymond tells him of his trouble with a star named Penelope, Raymond’s “natal star.”

Raymond’s father, an astronomer who died in an asylum, warned Raymond to beware of Penelope’s influence at its perihelion (Penelope apparently orbits the Sun). Sure enough, Penelope recently came around to perihelion, and as Raymond tells it, the star’s gravity affected him and only him, so that he wakes up to find himself on the ceiling of his room, with the floor over his head. Naturally, Raymond decides it would be fun to go for a walk. How he manages that, and what happens after, makes up the meat of the story, along with a surprising romantic conclusion.

The story works, complete with its absurd coincidental ending, because it’s told in a spirit of good fun. It’s not necessarily comedic, but there’s a faint tinge of absurdity to Raymond’s predicament which the story embraces. It’s quite pleasant, and tonally unusual for Weird Tales. It’s unusual structurally, too. There’ve been a fair number of stories in these first three issues of Weird Tales which take the form of a story told to somebody, who turn writes it up for us to read. Usually, I think, this serves to give the story an edge of unreality that heightens whatever uncanniness or extreme mental state the main action of the story’s about. Sometimes the writer goes on to find or hear something that undermines the told story. This is one of the only cases I can think of in which we’re encouraged to suspect that the whole thing’s made up as a lark, a droll joke Raymond plays as a means of introducing to his friends a certain change in his life. It’s not the most gripping tale, but it’s effective and a nice bit of variety for the magazine.

The next four stories are all quite short, and all have a similar weakness. In each case there’s an interesting situation, and reasonable ideas for how that situation could develop dramatically and thematically. But in each case the writing isn’t strong enough to make the story work, underplaying or hammering away at the basic idea while failing to create an engaging character.

“The Purple Heart” is the second and last recorded story by Herman Sisk, though he may be the same Herman Sisk who wrote a number of plays. Our first-person narrator is wandering in a desolate area when he finds a cabin where he decides to stay for the night. There’s an old man in the cabin who welcomes him, then tells him to expect some strange supernatural manifestation, and then mysteriously vanishes. The narrator finds he can’t leave, and that night has a vision of a strange purple heart. (Note that the American military decoration of that name isn’t established until 1931.) The next day he finds some passersby who give him some explanation of what went on, though many mysteries remain. The story’s direct, but there’s too little established about the narrator for the vision to be meaningful, and how he’s able to overcome the danger of the cabin isn’t explained; the plot, simple as it is, doesn’t hold together.

“Feline,” by journalist and veteran fiction writer Bruce Grant, gives us a scene from an unhappy marriage, in which Myra thinks she hears a cat outside in a blizzard while husband David tries to ignore her. He reflects that she’s obsessed with cats since their own pet died. Myra gets a speech about cats knowing when they’re not wanted, and says that she wouldn’t be surprised if an unloved cat knew enough to go out into the terrible weather; she goes out after the cat she thought she heard; David gets over his frustration with her and goes out to look for her, but has no luck. You can see what the story’s trying to do, and the parallelism of woman and cat is not an inherently terrible idea, but the complete lack of subtlety sinks it.

E. Thayles Emmons’ “Two Hours of Death” is next. Our narrator, Thornton, recalls strange events thirty-five years previously that led to the madness of his then-friend, scientist Felix Sayres. Sayres had developed a drug capable of causing “instantaneous and simultaneous separation of every mind atom from the physical atoms” of a human body. As Thornton describes events, Sayres doses him with the drug, causing his spirit to leave his comatose body. Then it turns out that Sayres blames Thornton for preventing him from winning fame and the woman he loves. As Sayres goes to kill him, Thornton manages to make his spirit visible, causing Sayres to collapse.

Nothing makes sense in the story. Sayres’ desire to kill Thornton comes out of nowhere. The same with Thornton’s ability to stop Sayres, who appears to collapse after finding out his invention actually works. The point of the story appears to be the description of Thornton’s disembodied state, but it’s not distinctive or interesting enough to make even a two-and-a-half-page story worthwhile.

Then comes “Midnight Black” by Hamilton Craigie, Craigie’s third appearance in Weird Tales in three issues. This story’s just about two pages long and the plot’s simple: a woman in bed hears someone break into her home, and after a period of flashback-filled tension her husband attacks the intruder. The flashbacks we get through her point-of-view make the story more or less work, as she’s instantly certain that the intruder’s her lover, and she’s torn between wanting her husband and her lover to win the fight that breaks out in darkness. The tension’s interesting, but the story’s undercut by Craigie trying to keep his lead character virtuous despite the dramatic necessity of her feeling passionately drawn to her lover. Still, the internal conflict’s effective at short length, and the resolution, if not surprising, at least does resolve the lead’s emotional tension. It’s not a great story, not even really a good story, but it’s an interesting try at a structure that just about succeeds for two pages.

The reprint of Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Haunted and the Haunters” follows, then after that is the disappointing conclusion of Laurie McClintock and Culpeper Chunn’s “The Whispering Thing.” After that comes F.K. Moss’ “The Death Cell.” Most of the story is the “strange narrative” a psychologist named Doctor Armand tells to a group of acquaintances at a regular get-together at his apartment. We’re told that there was “no more entertaining speaker than the scholarly Armand,” but the tale’s told as part of a discussion on the application of scientific laws to the brain, mind, and soul, with Armand observing that the story presented a case that turned upon an unusual set of events. Thus forewarned, the plot moves forward quickly enough.

There are two friends, James McKay and William Larsen, who live together and do everything together. A woman comes between them; McKay kills Larsen over her and is sentenced to death. His friends concoct a scheme to keep McKay alive through the hanging, and succeed only to find to their surprise that when McKay wakes up it is actually the spirit of Larsen that has returned to McKay’s body.

There’s some 1920s technobabble about the hemispheres of the brain, but still the implication is that the man of science believes that a spirit has taken up residence in another body rather than that a man’s suffered a break from reality following an extreme physical trauma. This is an odd choice in that the story as written doesn’t require a supernatural explanation; the idea that McKay’s reacted to events by creating a defensive delusion is perfectly consistent with events as described. It’s not even hinted at as an explanation, though. The audience isn’t given a choice between a supernatural and a rational explanation of events, only presented with a single pseudoscientific rationale given the sanction of a scientist and scholar.

The story’s not terrible but not especially memorable, either. The framing sequence doesn’t do much for good or ill, and the style’s neither strong enough to pull a reader in nor weak enough to be distracting. It’s a solid enough tale that hinges upon the quick action of a group of friends for one of their own, which is nice enough. I will note that the friendship between McKay and Larsen is described in ways which read as queer to a modern audience (“Possibly there could not have been found a more glorious example of the love of one man for another than this one”), but it is worth noting that one does find a plot structure in fiction from around this timme in which two extremely close male friends are set against each other by one of them falling for a woman. A happy ending in these stories usually involves the two men reconciling; here the structure turns to tragedy, effectively enough. Is this gay-coded, or period misogyny? You could make an argument either way, I think, but I’ll merely observe here that this story isn’t alone in using this kind of plot.

“The Devil Plant” by Lyle Wilson Holden follows. It’s a straightforward story about a Spaniard, Rodriguez, whose rival Silvela Castelar repeatedly ruins his life and steals his lady-love, leading Rodriguez to kill him. Or, more charitably, to lead Castelar to a point where his own obsessions lead to his ruin. There’s a bit of a manic air to the story, but then it’s not what you can call subtle in any way. Neither is there any surprise in the unfolding of the plot. It’s all about atmosphere and the state of mind of the narrator, and while both are handled reasonably well by the standard of 1920s pulp fiction, there’s nothing especially notable here.

“Hootch,” by William Sanford, is a short-short story filling out the bottom of the last page of “The Devil Plant.” It aims to build up a solemn and despairing atmosphere before undercutting it with a twist. It’s a reasonable structure, and at least it does what it does well enough.

Next comes “The Thunder Voice,” by F. Walter Wilson. I can’t find much about Wilson; this seems to have been his only professionally published story, though the Tellers of Weird Tales blog suggests he may have been a journalist in Boston. I’m interested because the tale’s set in a part of the world a branch of my family comes from, Québec’s Eastern Townships, which is rarely otherwise to be found in English fiction. Unfortunately, the story’s uneven at best, and at points quite ugly.

It opens with an unnamed narrator recalling stories he was told by his grandfather of things that happened “away back in the early days — when scattered Indians hunted the forest” around the (fictional) Valley of Trelane, which we eventually find is located somewhere in the Eastern Townships. The stories have to do with a strange screaming voice villagers heard on nights when thunder pealed. At one point a hunter went out to track down what the people of the valley assumed was a wild animal, and barely escaped with his life from an unseen foe. Then some while later a schoolteacher, Margaret Kingsley, disappeared. Other women and girls had close encounters with a monster one schoolgirl described as a “big hairy man.” But the spring brought drenching rains, and the creature wasn’t heard from after that.

The narrator finds evidence corroborating these stories later in life, when studying for a medical degree. As he learns, a pregnant woman named Delloux was fascinated by the gorilla in a travelling circus and that fascination apparently affected her fetus. (The idea of maternal impression had been discredited by the time of the story, but perhaps was more of a live issue in folk belief.) Many years after this, the narrator receives a letter telling him he’s received an inheritance from relatives living in the Trelane Valley. He promptly goes to the valley, explores, and finds a cave with two bodies and a diary. The diary was written by the missing teacher, explaining that she freely chose to live with the Delloux child, who had grown into a tender creature who loved her. The strong spring rains flooded the cave, trapping them and leading to their death (either by drowning or starvation; pick your unpleasantness). The narrator then closes the story with a bit of gratuitous racism and misogyny, recalling an exhibition in London of a group of “black, repulsive-featured cannibals” who had drawn so much attention from “a concourse of well-dressed women of apparent refinement” that they had to be removed from the exhibition, thus illustrating “the peculiar warped trait which so often causes a woman gifted with all the refinements of civilization to become infatuated with a male who is, in every sense, a barbarian.”

Ugly, as I say, but the depiction of the Townships has some points of interest, and I am self-indulgent enough to want to explore them a bit. There are some oddities, too; the narrator gets a letter from a lawyer “in a small town to the north of Quebec” telling him of his inheritance, while the Townships are, broadly, south and east of Montreal, stretching north from the American border. That’s relevant because it hints at an explanation for a chronology that might seem jumbled. The narrator describes one of the villagers in the childhood stories as an “old pioneer,” while other details of the time when the Thunder Voice stories took place seem to refer to a later time — notably the presence of a circus with a gorilla. The pioneer reference almost makes sense, though (if an unusual word in a Canadian context generally). The area now called the Eastern Townships were until 1763 effectively between the often-hostile New France and New England, meaning that there was very little European settlement. The Townships in fact get their name from townships granted to United Empire Loyalists coming northward after the American Revolution, in particular to settlers who didn’t want to relocate to what were then called the ‘Western Townships’ in the area of Kingston, Ontario. So it is just possible to describe on old man in the early nineteenth century as a ‘pioneer,’ if you assume he was a Loyalist who settled where no European had settled before; though I admit I haven’t come across that usage anywhere else I can recall.

What does seem right is the depiction of the Townships as home to both Anglophone and Francophone characters. Notably, the unnamed Delloux youth could only speak “a few words of the French language,” while the missing schoolteacher is an Anglophone; their relationship is technically cross-cultural. On the other hand, the way that Delloux is dehumanised, and described in terms of his wild and uncivilised nature, calls to mind a trope in Canadian literature involving relationships between ‘civilised’ characters and characters representing nature and the wilderness. Of course, in this case, the happy relationship of the two characters in a state of nature is cut short by death due to the power of nature.

There are interesting aspects to the story. In particular the structure, in which the narrator remembers legends from his youth and then in later life stumbles on evidence of the truth of the stories, is interesting though not dramatically effective; it establishes the events of the story as a fairy tale, a fable, but also distances them from the narrator in a way that drains tension. The style is reasonably workmanlike pulp prose. Overall, I can’t recommend the story unless you happen to share my specific and fairly narrow historical interests.

Next comes “Case No. 27,” by Mollie Frank Ellis, who had already had a relatively lengthy career as fiction writer by the time this story was published; her first work was published in August 1905. She would, unfortunately, only publish another three stories after this one. It’s another tale of a visitor to an asylum who hears a tale from an inmate, only for a staff member to tell the visitor the real truth of things. In this case the visitor, Wayne, is an old friend of one Doctor Maynard, who leads Wayne to Case 27, a Mrs. Howard who tells Wayne the story of her relationship to her husband; after their children were killed in a road accident, they both grew mentally troubled, she got addicted to morphine, and then in her telling she murdered her husband. The twist of the two-page story is, as Maynard tells Wayne, that she did not in fact kill him, and the husband is now busily planning a divorce. The story ends as Wayne, troubled, leaves Maynard.

For such a brief story, there’s a fair amount going on. Mrs. Howard’s voice comes across quite strongly — there’s some use of eye-dialect (the representation of an accent through spelling), which is usually less effective than through careful word choice, but in this case it mostly works. The structure of the story is strong, with the inset tale only about half of the whole story, so Maynard and Wayne’s relationship is as much the point as the Howards’ tragedy. And the two things counterpoint each other nicely, leading one to meditate on gender roles and the way friends fall in and out touch and friendship. It’s quite a nice brief story.

The last original story in the magazine is another two-pager, W.M. Merrit’s “The Finale.” This is the only recorded professional story by Merrit, and I can find nothing else about him. I have to say I found the story relatively undistinguished. The narrator visits his old friend Thornton Stowe; some time before Thornton’s lady-love Josephine Thralton had left him for Lakeland, the ugly and wicked political boss of the town, and some time after that Thornton had killed Lakeland in self-defense. The narrator meets Thornton on a grim November day, and they go to Thornton’s atmospheric and depressing house, decorated in sickly shades of green. There, Thornton explains the truth of the killing of Lakeland, which he had in fact premeditated, and then kills himself; the narrator decides not to reveal the truth of matters.

It’s not a terrible story, but not particularly good. The plot’s straightforward and the characters not especially distinct. The central idea is the atmosphere of the grim meeting and the house entirely coloured in green, the same colour as the fatal absinthe Thornton drinks. But the writing’s not really good enough to sell the atmosphere, which in any case feels like a hand-me-down from Poe without Poe’s energy. Still, at least the story has an idea of what it wants to do and sets about doing it.

After that story is only the reprint of “The Closed Cabinet” and the editorial section. So how does the third issue of Weird Tales hold up, all in all?

Not terribly well, I’m afraid. There’s one quite good story, “The Floor Above,” a few that are solid (notably “Penelope” and “Case No. 27”), some that do interesting things but are to some degree flawed, and some that are simply poor. There’s more racism than in the first two issues. You could reasonably argue that the two reprints are the highlights of the issue, along with “The Floor Above.” One wonders if editor Edwin Baird had used up whatever stock of superior stories he’d gathered before the magazine’s debut. I do note what seems like a large number of stories by writers who are not known to have published any other fiction. But then Baird’s also relying on some of his favourite contributors — each issue has a story by Hamilton Craigie and one by Julian Kilman, while the first two each had tales by Harold Ward, Farnsworth Wright, and Anthony M. Rud.

Still, the tone of the magazine is fairly consistent. Humour is limited and usually fairly dark or even macabre in execution. Horror predominates. The sense of confinement so common in the first two issues isn’t as frequent, but does turn up from time to time. There still isn’t much sense of the wildly fantastic; “The Moon Terror” has its moments, but “Penelope” may be most interesting in that regard, presenting a science-fictional thought experiment with a real sense of whimsy. Overall, there does seem to be a higher percentage of supernatural or near-supernatural stories — fiction that feels like it belongs more to a magazine named Weird Tales than to one named, say, Detective Tales.

Still, one notes, across three issues, a lot of stories presented with frame sequences; a lot of stories told to a friend or to an audience. And, in particular, several stories told by the inmate of a lunatic asylum. There are also a lot of stories that try to derive a weird colouring from being set in other countries, on other continents, or that involve some foreign belief or magic being brought to America. This is a specious weirdness, a weirdness that happens to be outside the conventional culture and understanding of the presumed audience, rather than the genuine weird of the fantastic and the visionary. That would come, though, in time.

Add it all up, and the third issue feels like Baird’s developing a vision for the magazine in the choice of reprints and the use of illustration, but is being let down by the fiction submitted to him. The overall feel is solid, but the actual quality of the stories has declined issue by issue. There are promising signs, but also a worrying trend. What, you might well wonder, will the future bring?

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.