Just the other day Terry Zobeck did up a list of pretty much everything Hammett ever wrote or edited, including a single anthology — of horror fiction. Creeps by Night. Take a gander at the cover for a British paperback reprint of the same, lifted from Doug Draa’s new online survey of fiction from the pulp Weird Tales that made it into wraps. And he also includes various incarnations of the title that appeared as paperback originals. Anyway, a cool little survey, worth it for the vintage cover images alone.
Weird Tales has been much on my mind lately as I’ve been assisting Haefele’s Heretics in completing a little project (you’ll see the name August Derleth on several of the vintage covers, plus other names with arch-associations with the Cthulhu Mythos such as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long and Robert E. Howard ). Impossible to say if the Mythos would have jumped to eldritch life if the magazine Weird Tales hadn’t been there as the major watering hole for Shoggoths and Deep Ones, but I’m sure it would have been much harder to get the concept going without that marketplace for the interplay between Lovecraft and his peers and protégés. Even if the erratically capricious (or capriciously erratic) editor of the day, Farnsworth Wright, did reject many of Lovecraft’s major tales.
And still the Mythos grew. . . .
Draa is assisting with the most recent incarnation of WT — which came to life with a Mythos issue (#360) and just announced an Undead theme for #362. You can get print versions and also — would a bookman of Derleth’s stripe have approved??? — ebook versions.
As always, I’m leery of ebooks over books, though I admit they take up less room. You could be an incredible hoarder of ebooks and no one need ever know.
