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2023. godine obeležen je pun
vek od izlaska prvog broja najvažnijeg horor magazina koji je ikada postojao, i
u kojem su svoja glavna dela objavili neki od najznačajnijih horor pisaca tog
doba, kao što su Lavkraft, Klark Ešton Smit, Robert E. Hauard i mnogi drugi.
Jedan od načina na koji je to
bilo obeleženo jeste i veliki temat o tom jubileju, u najboljem svetskom horor
magazinu, RUE MORGUE (br. 210, Jan-Feb. 2023). Njega sam sam ja priredio,
osmislio i napisao – uz pomoć nekih velikih horor imena koja sam tim povodom
intervjuisao.
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Konkretno, u ta tri međusobno
povezana članka mogli ste, vi koji redovno pratite RUE MORGUE, pročitati
odgovore na moja pitanja od strane takvih majstora kao što su teoretičari i
experti, S. T.
Joshi (The
Weird Tale, The Modern Weird Tale) i Bobby
Derie (Weird Talers: Essays on Robert
E. Howard and Others, Sex and the
Cthulhu Mythos), i dva vrhunska današnja pisca u čijim je delima očigledan
dug pričama iz Weird Tales, a to su: Ramsey
Campbell & Laird Barron.
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| (c) Rue Morgue |
Pored
njih, za mene govori i Darrell
Schweitzer, istaknuti urednik koji je priredio monumentalnu antologiju The
Best of Weird Tales, vol. 1, na 700 strana, za Centipede Press
(bila je najavljena za početak prošle godine, ali se do danas još nije
pojavila).
I zašto vam sad ja sve ovo
pričam, kad je to bilo još pre godinu dana i kad ste svi vi to odavno lepo
pročitali?
Pa, evo, ima i novi momenat: nominovan sam za nagradu RONDO HATTON
(iliti 22nd ANNUAL RONDO HATTON CLASSIC HORROR AWARDS!), upravo za ovaj tročlanak. A ako glasate
za mene, možda i ove godine dobijem tu nagradu – kao što sam je već jednom
dobio, prošle godine, takođe za članak o strogodišnjem jubileju (povodom filma
HAXAN, 1922-2022). Da vas podsetim, sve o tome imate OVDE..jpg)
ŠTA? NISTE ČITALI TE MOJE
ČLANKE o Weird Tales?
Bez sekiracije, evo, okačiću
ih ispod, da ne biste glasali naslepo, na neviđeno, na poverenje, nego da
glasate znajući pouzdano zašto i za koga glasate!
Dakle, slobodno pročitajte
članke ISPOD, a zatim obavezno GLASAJTE!
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KAKO?
MNOGO LAKO!
Kliknite na OVAJ LINK,
i tu ćete naći spisak nominacija.
Sa tog spiska ODABERITE za šta
ćete glasati (uopšte ne morate glasati u svim kategorijama, možete npr. i samo
u 2-3, ili 5-6, od ponuđenih preko 20).
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To što odaberete, prema tamo
datim uputstvima, pošaljite na mejl koji imate tamo. Za sve to neće vam trebati
više od 5 minuta – a možete, tom
jednostavnom akcijom, pomoći da i ove godine RONDO dođe u Srbiju! Ovu
nagradu izglasavaju fanovi horora: ako takvih ima ovde, sada – šta čekate? Glasajte! Ovo su možda
jedini pošteni izbori na kojima ćete moći da glasate ove godine!
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(P.S. Mada, u teoriji, možete
da glasate i samo za mene, savetujem da to ipak ne činite. Mora da vam se barem
neki film ili serija od ponuđenih sviđaju… Glasajte za RUE MORGUE magazin gde
god ga vidite – još nekoliko autora otuda nominovano je za Ronda.)
Dakle,
kad pročitate ovo moje, ispod, ako vam se svidelo, idite ovde i glasajte: https://rondoaward.com/rondoaward.com/blog/
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Krajnji
rok za glasanje je 16. april, ali
nemoj da ste toliki Srbi da čekate zadnji dan: zaboravićete! Idite i glasajte SADA.
A
evo i zašto.
WEIRD TALES, the
influential magazine of horror fiction that gave birth to the literary careers
of H.P. LOVECRAFT, ROBERT E. HOWARD, RAY BRADBURY and others, celebrates a
centenary.
RUE MORGUE sits
down with authors RAMSEY CAMPBELL and LAIRD BARRON and scholars S.T. JOSHI and
BOBBY DERIE to look back at…
100 WEIRD YEARS
(c) Rue Morgue, Dejan Ognjanović
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When the first
issue of Weird Tales appeared on
stands, in late February of 1923 (dated March), it was truly, as its subtitle
claimed, “The Unique Magazine”. Few other publications at the time would consider
more than a hint of the supernatural. Detective stories thrived, as did
westerns, adventure yarns and science fiction, yet horror was the pulp
magazines’ red-headed stepchild. Then J.C. Henneberger, the creator of this magazine,
saw a niche and made it his own.
It was not just “The Big Three” – H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith
and Robert E. Howard – for whom Weird
Tales was the major outlet: anyone writing weirdness who mattered, or was
about to matter, was published there, from genre stalwarts like Frank Belknap
Long and Henry Kuttner through young Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury to odd
surprises, like Tennessee Williams and Val Lewton.
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Lovecraft declined the offer to edit Weird
Tales in early 1924 because he was married and reluctant to move to
Chicago, where the office was based. Farnsworth Wright undertook editorship,
heralding the stellar years (1924-1940) and making WT the major horror publication
for decades. Being a trailblazer is no easy feat, but the magazine survived
various hardships, debts, The Great Depression, even the Second World War,
before it folded, after 279 issues, in 1954.
Weird Tales came after the “Golden
Age of the Weird Tale” (Machen, M.R. James, Blackwood) and before the birth of
the modern horror in the 1950s (Bradbury, Richard Matheson). The 1924 editorial
titled “Why Weird Tales?” claimed that their main endeavour was “to find and
publish those stories that will make their writers immortal.” From the distance
of a full century we can safely confirm that this aim was achieved.
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The Weird Tales legacy is
palpable, and we summoned several authors and experts to discuss this
magazine’s importance – and afterlife. We are honoured to have input from
leading scholars, S. T. Joshi (The Weird
Tale, The Modern Weird Tale) and Bobby Derie (Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos), and two living
legends whose fiction is indebted to the Weird
Tales: Ramsey Campbell and Laird
Barron.
Rue Morgue: Weird Tales magazine has been
associated with “pulp”, which was synonymous with bad writing. Was that really
the case? How many of its stories can be defended and read today?
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Bobby Derie: There was a lot of terrible, hackneyed writing in the
pulps—perhaps the bulk of it—but that made the really good writing stand out
all the better. Many great writers got their start in the pulps, including
Tennessee Williams, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Robert Bloch, and Ray
Bradbury. I wouldn’t defend any of them, because that would suggest they were
wrong: good or bad, they were stories of a particular market and time, and
should be read as such.
Ramsey Campbell: In our own field, the likes of Lovecraft and Clark
Ashton Smith demanded a high degree of literacy from their readers (or at the
very least access to a good dictionary), and we may note how many letters in
the letter columns enthused about them. Robert E. Howard was less of a stylist
but brought enormous vigour to his best work. There certainly is bad pulp – fiction
where the author’s imagination fell short of engagement or was perhaps incapable
of it, producing under-motivated characters and stock situations devoid of
life, not to mention prose infested with clichés in which (to quote my old and
much-missed friend Peter Straub) nothing is ever really seen or felt—but I
think it fair to say that Weird Tales gradually left this sort of thing
behind in the main, as the magazine and its best contributors attracted writers
of comparable worth.
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Laird
Barron: I’m a staunch advocate of Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety-percent of everything
is terrible regardless of literary niche. Not difficult to proceed to a
conclusion that a majority of pulp wasn’t terrific. Nonetheless, while it’s
true that “pulp” is often used as a blanket pejorative, I prefer to think of it
simply as shorthand for a particular mode of narrative. Pulp is colourful,
action-oriented, and favours broad strokes in regard to characterization. I
adore its primal, bombastic elements. Pulp was designed to be eminently
readable. That element shines through the dust and clutter of archaic style.
R.M. Who are the great Weird Tales authors, or single
first-rate stories, worth digging up from obscurity?
Bobby Derie: There were always more single good stories in Weird
Tales than there were authors; while the individual authors would
rarely make a best-of list, Edmond Hamilton’s “The Monster-God of Marmurth,”
Everil Worrell’s “The Canal,” and Arthur J. Burks’ “The Bells of Oceana” are
among the best things WT ever published. C. L. Moore and E.
Hoffmann Price had relatively few stories in Weird Tales, but those
stories are exceptional.
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Laird Barron: Manley Wade Wellman, August Derleth, Robert Bloch. There
are others, but I like the symmetry—blow-for-blow, this latter trinity had its
moments and lives on in the annals of the genre.
S. T.
Joshi: Lovecraft himself identified several authors or stories that deserve
commendation: Everil Worrell’s “The Canal” (December 1927), the stories of
Henry S. Whitehead, etc. Robert Barbour Johnson’s “Far Below” (June/July 1939)
appeared just after Lovecraft’s death. It is one of the most powerful and
artistically fashioned weird tales of that era. Even such a prototypical pulp
hack as Anthony M. Rud produced a splendid specimen, “Ooze,” published in the
first issue of Weird Tales (March
1923).
Ramsey Campbell: C. L. Moore was a remarkable fantasist whose work
embraced the atmospheric weird (her Jirel tales) as well as alien eroticism
(“Shambleau”) and a Lovecraftian sense of other worlds in the Northwest Smith
tales generally. Her husband Henry Kuttner started out Lovecraftian (the
tersely gruesome “Graveyard Rats”) but soon became his enviably innovative
self. The pre-war work of Frank Belknap Long is uneven but often showed real
inspiration, not least in “The Space-Eaters”. August Derleth’s best weird work
is in the ghostly tale—he generally fell short of the cosmic, a peak his
one-time friend and fellow contributor Donald Wandrei often scaled—and Weird
Tales published most of his finest. Mary Elizabeth Counselman was an
inventive writer whose “Three Marked Pennies” is a classic conte cruel. Everil
Worrell could be excellent—“The Canal” is a powerfully atmospheric vampire
tale, and “The Hollow Moon” borders on the surreal. Carl Jacobi and Joseph
Payne Brennan often displayed real imaginative power and originality. Manly
Wade Wellman drew on or invented folk traditions to add authenticity to his
strange tales. Margaret St. Clair and Leah Bodine Drake both made memorable
contributions to the last years of the magazine, “Brenda” (St. Clair) and
“Mop-Head” (Drake) in particular. Let’s not forget fine infrequent
contributors such as Robert Barbour Johnson (“Far Below”) and P. Schuyler
Miller (“Spawn” and “Ship in a Bottle”).
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R.M. What was the greatest
contribution of Weird Tales magazine
to the evolution of horror literature?
S. T. Joshi: Given
that Weird Tales was, at the time of
its initial publication, the only magazine to focus on the weird and the
supernatural, it provided a valuable outlet for authors whose work would have
been difficult to place elsewhere. Mainstream magazines in the US and UK,
influenced by the literary “Modernists”, scorned weird fiction as unrealistic
and escapist fiction. Even other pulp magazines rarely published weird fiction.
Weird Tales had few rivals during its
long run, so it became the “go-to” venue for weird writers of all stripes.
Ramsey Campbell: I believe it was a crucial link between the classic and
modern period. Lovecraft developed and codified a new approach to the uncanny,
merging it with science fiction, an approach we may see echoed in work such as I
Am Legend. Writers like Fredric Brown (“Come and Go Mad”) and Robert Bloch
(his work from the late forties onwards) helped bring the prose of our field up
to date and applied modern psychological insights to their fiction. Fritz
Leiber mostly carried on such work over at Campbell’s Unknown magazine,
but contributed to the forward movement of the field in Weird Tales too
(“The Hound”, for instance). As for Matheson and Bradbury, both had roots in
the magazine. I’d argue that a significant amount of modern horror derives from
the magazine or indeed was published there.
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Bobby Derie: Weird Tales (1923-1954) trained a generation of
weird fiction writers, and raised at least two generations of weird fiction
readers. It gave fantasy and horror a market almost through the entire pulp
era, and provided the raw material for the popular horror anthologies which
were drawing from the contents of WT. The fans that wrote to
Lovecraft and Howard in the ‘30s like Donald A. Wollheim and James Blish became
editors and publishers in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Laird
Barron: Oxygen. Pure, life-giving oxygen. It’s easy to get tangled up in
literary movements, or to speak of particular authors as saviours, but lacking
a platform, writers are shouting into a void. Weird Tales provided a
foundation, walls, and a ceiling for horror, fantasy, and weird fiction to
flourish and to mutate into new forms.
We
can’t overlook the importance of influence. Those who arrived later, the early
modern writers, surely took sustenance from the works and authors supported by WT
and similar magazines. Any artist worth their salt seeks to build upon and
renovate tradition. I behold shades of Clark and Howard when I crack Karl
Edward Wagner’s Kane stories, or Leiber’s Swords and Deviltry. Lovecraft
may be enjoying a moment too. Short fiction is a devalued currency in the
contemporary marketplace. That it survives even in a diminished state is
directly attributable to Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, The Magazine
of Fantasy & Science Fiction, et al.
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R.M. Are the Weird Tales type of stories entirely a
thing of the past?
Ramsey Campbell: These stories were part of a developing tradition, just
as today’s stories are. Cosmic horror, for example, is surely here to stay as
long as writers feel inspired to reach for it, and sword and sorcery hasn’t
gone away. Good fiction doesn’t, and I hope imagination never does.
Bobby Derie: There will always be weird tales, and always
people hungry for something different. The stories we remember from Weird Tales generally aren’t the
prosaic cave-man stories or weird crimes, they’re the strangest, the most
original, brilliantly imaginative, and outside-the-box. Readers wanted
something different, and Weird Tales delivered
that.
Laird
Barron: Fragmentation of the written word and cinema means some categories
currently assumed dead might simply be dreaming. Weird Tales has
reincarnated at least three times during my lifetime—helmed by Scithers and
Schweitzer; then Ann VanderMeer; and lately, Jonathan Maberry. I note there
were publication gaps between these iterations. The ebb and flow of weird
fiction, space opera, and sword and sorcery charts to other venues as well.
There’s something to the notion that this genre recedes, but the tide
inevitably comes in again.
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S. T.
Joshi: I do not think it is possible for writers today to write a “Weird Tales story” except as an exercise
in nostalgia. Such a story—featuring generally wooden characters, stereotyped
scenarios, and a relatively simple and straightforward prose style—would have
little resonance today, where readers have far different expectations for weird
literature. That said, some elements of the Weird
Tales style may still be viable: the focus on the weird phenomenon itself
rather than on the human characters in the story; a narrative drive that
carries the story on from beginning to end; and a prose idiom that does not
dwell excessively on the characters’ fluctuating mental states. So some of the
lessons of Weird Tales writing can
still be learned, if properly adapted to today’s very different intellectual
and social climate.
*
Is there a better way to celebrate a century of
Weird Tales than with a huge
selection of their best stories? Behold three such anthologies!
WEIRD VOLUMES
(c) Rue Morgue, Dejan Ognjanović
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In early
2023 Centipede Press, famous for their luxury special editions of horror
classics, publishes a monumental 700-pages anthology The Best of Weird Tales, vol.
1. It is edited by Darrell Schweitzer, writer, editor, and critic who
co-edited Weird Tales’ new incarnation
(1988 – 2007), which earned him and his editorial colleagues the
1992 World Fantasy Award.
Centipede
will publish three volumes in total, devoted to 1920s, 1930s, and one for the
1940s and 1950s. Schweitzer is also collaborating with John Betancourt, another
ex-WT editor and effectively the
founder of the revived Weird Tales,
on a series of anthologies by the year: The
Best of Weird Tales:1924 is in
progress at Wildside Press now. In his selection of stories, Schweitzer is aiming
to strike a balance between the historically essential and those that many
readers may not have seen:
“Of
course a representative WT anthology
must have a Lovecraft story in it, but they are widely available. I chose “The
Outsider” because it is extremely famous and
short. There would not be much point in reprinting a longer story such as “The
Call of Cthulhu” one more time when those pages could be used for less familiar
material. For example, I am reprinting the original novelette of “The Werewolf of
Ponkert” by H. Warner Munn, which hasn’t been seen much lately.”
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One
other criterion, alas, is avoidance of overt racism which was taken for granted
in the 1920s, e.g. Arthur J. Burks’s series of stories set in Haiti, popular in
the day, are not reprintable now.
“Literary
value of course matters”, Schweitzer adds. “Not all the stories in WT were exactly sterling masterpieces. I
would define WT’s standards thus: It
did not always insist on good writing but it would allow good writing. Most pulp magazines didn’t. They wanted
strictly formula writing in a uniform, jaunty style.”
Digging
through the dusty old issues certainly brought some surprising discoveries, but
the biggest re-evaluation concerns his increased respect for Farnsworth Wright,
the editor who made the magazine immortal.
“The
Edwin Baird issues [from
1923] are pretty bad,” Schweitzer
admits. “But the quality of the magazine goes up sharply once Wright took over
[in 1924]. He was an energetic and imaginative editor, who didn’t just take what
came in the mail, but reached out and got stories by prominent and often
foreign writers, such as Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, and E. F. Benson, an important British
ghost story writer. He also got a story by Algernon Blackwood, and even one by
Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor. His WT
was a treasure-trove, which is why so much of what he published is still being
read.”
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Another
unique aspect which the editor hopes to bring out in the three big Centipede
anthologies, through a generous selection of verse, is that Weird Tales was the only pulp magazine
of any sort to develop a school of poetry. As for the significance and legacy
of its prose, Schweitzer has no doubts.
“Weird Tales laid the foundations for the
whole field of supernatural fiction in the 20th century, and also for
sword and sorcery and other subgenres. Most of the important fantasists of the
mid-20th century, like Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury, got their starts or
significant early boosts to their careers in Weird Tales. Without Weird
Tales there would have been no Lovecraft and none of the Conan stories of
Robert E. Howard. Consider the cultural and literary impact of just those two.”
*
The Art of Weird
Tales was a significant, though sometimes controversial contribution to the
genre
PULP PANIC
(c) Rue Morgue, Dejan Ognjanović
Weird Tales was open to fresh,
unknown writers – but also artists. Some of the giants of fantasy and horror art,
like Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok, sold their first professional works to Weird Tales and helped create an unmistakable
visual impact which distinguished it from the crowd.
Finlay was best known for his detailed black-and-white line drawings,
but he could work wonders in colour, too, when given opportunity (e.g. the
cover inspired by Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Garden of Adompha”). Since Smith’s
stories were popular with the readers, the multi-talented author was allowed to
illustrate a few of his own WT
contributions, although those drawings are not among his best.
Bok, on
the other hand, leaned as far towards Surrealism and Abstract
Expressionism as a commercial venue would let him, with an art which jumped
from the page with its illusion of depth and dimension.
In the magazine’s heyday the sales were boosted with titillating covers
featuring dames in peril, nude or barely clad, or equally under-dressed femme
fatales, both threatening and attractive. C.C. Senf and Hugh Rankin were
experts for this type of artwork, but it was a female artist, Margaret Brundage,
who specialized in those and became a star illustrator, contributing 66 covers
to the mag.
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“I have no objection to the nude in art”, Lovecraft complained in a 1936
letter, “but I don’t see what the hell Mrs. Brundage’s undressed ladies have to
do with weird fiction.”
But he was in minority. Readership, predominantly young males, thought
otherwise. The issue which sold out the quickest boasted Mrs. Brundage’s cover
with a semi-nude woman whipping a chained, fully naked girl (illustrating R. E.
Howard’s “The Slithering Shadow”).
Interior artwork, however, contained genuine creepiness by some
masterful artists. Boris Dolgov was one of the most prominent: he achieved striking
grainy effects with brushes, very stylized. Frank Utpatel was another WT regular worth noting. Fred Humiston
was great for depicting the blend of fantasy and horror promoted by Weird Tales.
Lee Brown Coye was a specialist for blood-curdling. He also illustrated
non-fictional topics, like full-page features on witchcraft in 1948, where he
did not shy away from such tasteful details like a bloodied dead baby next to a
witches’ cauldron. He also provided some of the best covers in WT’s final years.
In the magazine’s later days, when Dorothy McIlwraith became the
editor, the covers tended to stress horror rather than eroticism. Whether
titillating or creepy, crude or subtle, sensationalist or arty, one thing is
for sure: the Weird Tales covers were
never dull. They did their business, attracting readers and appealing to their
imagination… And in many cases they left a stamp upon it far more lasting than
the stories they illustrated.
* * *
Za
slučaj da vas zanima kako sam ja glasao, evo vam i to, kao mustra:
22nd ANNUAL RONDO HATTON CLASSIC HORROR AWARDS
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1) BEST FILM OF 2023
— TALK TO ME
2) BEST TV PRESENTATION (only seasons from 2023)
— WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, FX.
3) BEST BLU-RAY OF 2023:
— THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK (1962; Radiance)
4) BEST BLU-RAY COLLECTION
— THE PSYCHO COLLECTION 4K LIMITED EDITION (Arrow).
5) BEST RESTORATION OR UPGRADE
— GOTHIC (BFI). Upgrade to high-definition of Ken
Russell’s 1986 film.
6) BEST DVD EXTRAS
— THE DUNWICH HORROR (Arrow): ‘Door into ‘Dunwich,’
w/ Stephen Bissette, Stephen Laws; ‘Sound of Cosmic Terror.’ David Huckvale on
Les Baxter score.
7) FAVORITE COMMENTATOR OF 2023
— Tim Lucas (Barbarella; Black Sunday AIP; Count
Yorga)
8 ) BEST INDEPENDENT/STREAMING FILM
— BIRTH/REBIRTH, directed by Laura
Moss. Morgue technician reanimates a young girl.
10) BEST DOCUMENTARY
— DARIO ARGENTO PANICO, directed by Simone Scafidi.
In-depth retrospective of Italian director’s career.
11) BOOK OF THE YEAR (non-fiction)
— A MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark
Dawidziak
12) BEST CLASSIC MONSTER FICTION
— THE BOOK OF RENFIELD, by Tim Lucas (Riverdale Press, hardcover, 340
pages, $29.99). Revised and expanded tale of Dracula’s disciple.
13) Best Magazine of 2023
— Rue Morgue
14) BEST ARTICLE (You can pick two)
— ‘The End Is Fear,’ a special report by Rue Morgue
editors and writers on A.I.’s coming impact on horror, RUE MORGUE #214.
— ‘100 Weird Years,’ by Dejan Ognjanovic, RUE MORGUE #210.
Retracing Weird Tales, including interviews with Ramsey Campbell and S.T.
Joshi.
15) BEST INTERVIEW
— Guillermo Del Toro (Parts 1-8), by Alan Jones, THE
DARK SIDE
16) BEST COLUMN
—- It Came from Bowen’s Basement, John Bowen, RUE MORGUE
17) BEST COVER
Rue Morgue #214
by David Seidman
22) BEST GRAPHIC ARTS PRESENTATION
— THE ART OF THE ZOMBIE MOVIE, edited by Lisa Morton
(Applause). More than 500 posters, stills and pressbooks.
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