Another favorite bio-bibliography is Donald Sidney-Fryer’s Emperor of Dream: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography. This book came out in 1978 from Donald M. Grant Books. Contents Introduction Acknowledgements Principal Facts of Biography Collections Clark Ashton Smith – In Memory of a Great Friendship by Eric Barker Poems
Lit-Crit/Culture Wars (Brain Leakage): They always featured their alpha male heroes in exotic locations, getting into fist fights, knife fights, and gun fights. The women were always fast and dangerous. The bad guys were always powerful and ruthless. The covers usually depicted some hard case with a gun, striking a tough guy pose with a […]
Lit-Crit/Culture Wars (Brain Leakage): They always featured their alpha male heroes in exotic locations, getting into fist fights, knife fights, and gun fights. The women were always fast and dangerous. The bad guys were always powerful and ruthless. The covers usually depicted some hard case with a gun, striking a tough guy pose with a […]
Pulp-Rev (Pulprev.com): “While the Pulp Revolution has been around for a couple of years now, it isn’t the only literary movement focused on pulp fiction. Indeed, it’s not even the first. Before PulpRev came New Pulp, which Pro Se describes as “fiction written with the same sensibilities, beats of storytelling, patterns of conflict, and creative use of […]
This chapter contains an absolutely first rate retrospective on Lovecraft’s works. And when the authors write that “Lovecraft is recognized as being one of the foremost horror writers of the twentieth century,” there are no ifs, buts, caveats, or footnotes. It is absolutely refreshing to have this stated so plainly. And I have not seen a […]
Of any member of the Lovecraft Circle, Robert Bloch was arguably the most successful. As the author of Psycho and a couple of Star Trek (original series), just about anyone would have some vague knowledge of his work. Bloch sold his first story (“The Secret in the Tomb”) in July 1934 right after graduating from […]
“The Haunter of the Dark” was H. P. Lovecraft’s last story. He wrote it in November 1935 right after finding out about the sale of At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow Out of Time” to Astounding Stories. It is a relatively short piece of fiction at 9,320 words in comparison to most of […]
Lovecraft followed up “At the Mountains of Madness” with “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” He wrote the story in November 1931 with a few different drafts. The story is 27,026 words long, so it is a little longer than “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Lovecraft wrote a story not about cosmic entities from other dimensions this time. […]
H. P. Lovecraft’s next story in Weird Tales, “The Whisperer in Darkness” appeared in the August 1931 issue. It had been over two years since a story has appeared under his name. Zealia Brown Reed’s “The Curse of Yig,” essentially a Lovecraft story was in the November 1929 issue of Weird Tales. The end result […]
Halloween is less than two months away. I generally shift my meager time for pleasure reading towards the weird and some horror as the days get shorter and nights get cooler. Last week I pulled out the big Barnes & Noble H. P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction to reread some H. P. Lovecraft. My introduction […]
In addition to the multi-author paperback anthologies reprinting Weird Tales fiction, there are some single author collections that can expand your reading experience. E. F. Benson is one of the great English ghost story writers. Benson had seven stories in Weird Tales from 1929 to 1933. You can find them in the Wordsworth Night Terrors […]
The 1990s had a sense of déjà vu when it came to Weird Tales reprints. Sword and sorcery and Cthulhu Mythos anthologies returned. Sword and sorcery underwent near extinction in mass market paperback form in 1985. Karl Edward Wagner had the idea of reprinting early pulp era sword and sorcery in a series of paperback […]