Major Acid's E-Rag
What Else Is There?
Volume 1, Number 3
Weird Tales
Those (enlightened few) who become regular readers of this e-space will
quickly find that I am omnivorous in my magazine consumption. This is
balanced only slightly by an occasional and unaccountable taste for
continuity.
The first installment in this series coincided nicely with a debut mag.
Debuts are fraught with angst, especially in publishing, a world that
chews up, spits out and discards magazines both old and new at an
alarming rate. So it was nice to turn this week to an offering
proclaiming its “80th Anniversary Issue” – the current edition of Weird
Tales.
Weird Tales persists in its penchant for garish and somewhat
cartoon-like cover art that, not by coincidence, makes one think of the
Cryptkeeper who (which?) complete with a knowing smirk currently hosts a
TV version of ghoulish tales of death.
The magazine’s editors are smirking, too, with their 80-year claim.
Weird Tales #1 did, indeed, debut 80 years ago, but it has hardly
published continuously since. One might forgive a hiatus here or there,
to accommodate a new owner, perhaps; or to retool and rethink direction.
For Weird Tales to claim 80 years, though, is a bit over the top – it
didn’t publish at all for one stretch from 1954 to 1973, nearly 20
years!
Yet the name has survived, as has the principle mandate, that of being a
“supernatural-story magazine.” (The editor said this, really.) The
casual reader won’t find science fiction, literary fiction, romance
fiction, or any other sort of fiction that doesn’t touch on the
unexplainable – the supernatural – in one way or another. The reader
will find, however, tales like “My Name is Nancy Wood.”
“Wood” is by Gene Wolfe, and it was Wolfe’s name on the cover, not the
80th anniversary shill, that got me to pick up the magazine. Wolfe is
one of the very best writers active in the wider field of fantasy and
science fiction. His tetralogy The Book of the New Sun is a landmark
work, and his short fiction is usually engaging and well crafted.
All of which leads to some disappointment here. “Wood” is a slight
effort, to be charitable. It’s a curious tale of a patient who may be
dead, or not, and a nurse who can’t seem to tell the difference, and the
unsavoury fling that follows. As a one line description, that sounds
promising, but the result is short and banal.
Happily, there are other offerings to offset the bad taste that “Wood”
leaves, including a curious melding of Judas Iscariot’s 30 pieces of
silver with that staple of horror fiction, the werewolf, spiced with a
bit of unusual theology – well, the rest is yours to discover in “The
Melkart Coin” by horror vet Charles L Harness.
Tanith Lee, Thomas Ligotti and Keith Taylor also contribute to the 80th
anniversary edition, each with short stories, and there are the
customary odd (and generally regrettable) poetry offerings, too. At
least the poetry is short.
For me, however, it is not usually about the fiction anymore. I enjoy
the non-fiction, book reviews that might be helpful, or essays about
this or that in the field that add to my generally (and generally
sieve-like) knowledge base. And there are ads, too, which never fail to
amuse me. If you are so inclined, for example, you might want to send
something over $20 to Scarlet Succubus Press. Scarlet Succubus promises
to send you a nice new copy of John Salonia’s The Fellowship of the
Thing.
DNA Publications offers their latest, and Wildside Press is not at all
shy about telling you they are “the largest publisher of classic fantasy
novels and short story collections in the world.” If you are a fan of a
particular writer, this is helpful information, and in this issue
Wildside notes a collection of Lord Dunsany short fiction and two by H
Rider Haggard, one of which has three Alan Quartermain adventures.
There are other odds and ends as well, including some nice
illustrations. That, however, brings me back to Gene Wolfe. Not only is
“My Name is Nancy Wood” a disappointment as a story, I couldn’t take it
seriously from the get-go because of the illustration accompanying it. A
tattered sheaf of paper “stained by the products of decomposition” is
overlain by skeletal fingers. It reminded me of the opening sequence of
the film Young Frankenstein in which the skeletal remains of Viktor
Frankenstein engage in a tug of war with the family retainer for a
tattered book called “How I Did It.”
Eighty years is a long time, even with a 20 year vacation, but Weird
Tales has held up pretty much as it always has – with some good, some
bad, and a lot of the stuff in the middle. Which pretty much describes a
lot of 80 year-old humans, too.
Weird Tales is published by DNA Publications and sells for $6.95 CDN.
