2026 read #45: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Issue 4.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Issue 4

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury (1:4)

80 pages

Published 2024

Read from August 31 to September 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

It’s been a hell of a bad summer. Fixation on a new partner, followed by lingering heartbreak after the relationship abruptly ended. Not to mention our rapid decline as a nation to new depths of fascism, and the escalating natural disasters as our planet reaches the climate tipping point. The last issue of New Edge that I read was way back in May, and I’ve only read like fourteen books since then. It’s been a bad time.

I’ve been putting off this issue for a while, then. Don’t know why, other than sometimes my ADHD rebels and refuses to indulge my autism’s hyperfocuses. Demand avoidance gets so much worse when I feel stressed and overwhelmed. Regardless, I’m looking forward to new installments from Jonathan Olfert, Dariel R. A. Quiogue, and June Orchid Parker, and also I spy a byline from Harry Turtledove, so this should be a fun time.

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“Gaze Upon the Beating Dark” by Jeremy Pak Nelson. I found this one a bit slow paced (fans of classic MST3K will understand the perils of extended rock climbing scenes), but ultimately it proved to be weird and enjoyable. It was nice to see an older couple in a starring role.

“White in the Eye” by Jonathan Olfert. A vivid and absorbing tale of sorcery and exploitation that (pun intended) hits the ground running. Fluent and satisfying.

“The Concord of the Outhar” by Kirk A. Johnson. Solidly enjoyable Sword & Soul tale.

“A Portrait in Ivory” by Michael Moorcock. This might be my favorite of the (admittedly few) Elric of Melniboné stories I’ve read so far. It’s also the farthest from Sword & Sorcery of any I’ve read so far. Elric even leaves his sword behind as he sits for a possibly sacrilegious bust.

“Hunter” by Oliver Brackenbury. I can recycle my review of Brackenbury’s “Something Oath-Like,” his story in issue 3: “Included as a fundraising reward, this piece from the editor is a bit busy and breathless, penned in the voice of someone who’s read a lot but hasn’t necessarily written much fiction on a professional level.” I can assure you we don’t need onomatopoeia transcribing our heroine’s breathing.

“The Jesting Jann” by Harry Turtledove. Turtledove can feel like a well-meaning liberal uncle who perhaps doesn’t understand the expectations of sensitivity in our present era. I love this story’s setting, the seldom-talked-about period of Jewish and Christian strife in 6th century Arabia. It isn’t much of a Sword & Sorcery tale to my mind, but it’s mostly enjoyable until the historian’s groaner at the end.

“Battle of the Nine Waters” by Dariel R. A. Quiogue. Another rip-roaring Orhan adventure, as we’ve come to expect from Quiogue. This installment reminds me quite a bit of classic Conan, as pseudohistorical geopolitics and warfare intersect with necromancy and death worms. My favorite story so far this issue.

“A Serpent from the Ash” by June Orchid Parker. This story of Astartha is built around a particularly blunt allegory, but it works magnificently (and movingly). Plus we get a Big Snake, always a welcome addition to any S&S tale.

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Moving on to the nonfiction selections of this issue.

First, we get another biographical sketch from Cora Buhlert: “Tanith Lee: Mistress of the Weird.” I’ve loved every Lee story I’ve read, but I have yet to make any concerted effort to read her books, in large part because they’re so expensive nowadays. (I miss when they filled shelves at Half Price Books.) Interesting as always.

Next, an essay from Nathaniel Webb: “Axes at the End of History: Sword & Sorcery & Heavy Metal.” Webb’s central thesis is that both genres are working class outsider art.

The inevitable interview from editor Brackenbury follows: “Lofty Heights and Profound Depths: An Interview with Bryn Hammond.” This is the first interview that is original to the magazine and not a transcription from Brackenbury’s podcast. I would love to be this conversant with the history of my genres. Good interview. Hammond’s responses gave me a lot to think about while crafting my own upcoming S&S.

Lastly, a book review from Doris V. Sutherland: “Review: Swords in the Shadows, Edited by Cullen Bunn.” It’s an anthology of Sword & Sorcery horror, which is always a fun mix (and one true to the subgenre’s roots). 

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And that’s it! Kind of silly that I put this off for so long, but then, my behavior since April has been kind of silly. (NRE hits doubly hard when your lover has BPD, and the crash is three times worse than usual.) Glad I finally got around to reading it!

2026 read #43: Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf.

Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf

317 pages

Published 2021

Read from August 3 to August 25

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

We’re anhedonic as fuck but we’re gonna keep reading, baby! Back at it again with another British Library Tales of the Weird volume, this time one I bought at retail price at Barnes & Noble right after a breakup just to feel something.

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“The Sphinx” by Edgar Allan Poe (1846). As a precocious reader at the turn of the 1990s, I was excited to find a dusty collection of Poe when I stayed in my family’s ancestral farmhouse one summer. Countless Looney Tunes had primed me to expect macabre frights in its pages. The actual experience of reading Poe, of course, disappointed me even then. I remember tearing through this brief anecdote, growing excited by the appearance of the ominous beast, and correspondingly let down by the denouement. A faintly comic bauble, only a classic thanks to inertia.

“The Blue Beetle: A Confession” by A. G. Gray, Jun. (1857). Basically Frankenstein, except shorter, less poetic, and about a guy who inadvertently makes a beetle. The most interesting thing about it to me was the narrator’s search for a singular “germ” of life, two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. We tend to forget how the common origin of life and its subsequent diversification was already in the popular European zeitgeist even before Darwin.

“The Mummy’s Soul” by Anonymous (1862). The editors’ introduction to this story positions it as the earliest “mummy curse” story as we know it in English literature. I was excited to read it. Alas, it’s amateurish and plodding, and peppered with little nuggets of racism. I will say the story’s second half prefigures the Weird Tales vibe in the narrator’s feverish visions.

“After Three Thousand Years” by Jane G. Austin (1868). Rather rote Victorian romantic melodrama that happens to include a scarab necklace. I know I’m depressed right now, but I could not sustain any interest in this piece.

“A Dream of Wild Bees” by Olive Schreiner (1895). Brief moral fable with just a touch of eeriness about it. Moderately interesting.

“The Moth” by H. G. Wells (1895). An especially Wellsian ghost story, in which a quarrelsome entomologist is troubled by a moth that resembles his recently deceased rival. It’s fine enough.

“The Captivity of the Professor” by A. Lincoln Green (1901). This is more like it: an early weird fic about cerebral ants who Ratatouille various animals to perform functions and use them to construct ant civilization in the remote Amazon. The story, unfortunately, resides in the catalog of “white slave” narratives, but the pseudonymous Green doesn’t get especially egregious with the theme. In general weirdness and interest, this might be my favorite story so far.

“The Dream of Akinosuke” and “Butterflies” by Lafcadio Hearn (1904). Two fables from the exoticized East, in classic Nineteen-Oughts fashion. Hearn had an interesting life that landed him in Japan, where he married and became a citizen. These two entries purport to be examples of Japanese folktales. They’re fine enough, especially the myrmecological pageantry of the first, albeit filtered through the customary Orientalist norms of Western publishing of their time.

“Caterpillars” by E. F. Benson (1912). There’s an interesting occult story somewhere in this tale of supernaturally carcinogenic caterpillars infesting an Italian villa, but it’s buried under anachronistically stiff, comma-laden prose.

“An Egyptian Hornet” by Algernon Blackwood (1915). A cheeky Man vs Nature affair, as an Anglican reverend confronts a big hornet in a hotel bathroom. Doesn’t really qualify as a weird fic story at all, despite the editors’ insistence that the reverend’s point of view magnifies the insect’s malignity into something diabolical. I will say the character’s puritanical anxiety over the bug’s snatched waist made it a worthwhile read.

“The Blue Cockroach” by Christopher Blayre (1921). A trifle about the bite of a blue cockroach momentarily dissipating habitual English reserve. Had that annoying prose trick from this time where Random Words are capitalized for humorous Emphasis.

“The Wicked Flea” by J. U. Giesy (1925). We finally reach the era of Weird Tales proper, the original venue for this silly mad science caper. There’s a modest quantity of pulp entertainment value to be found in the tale of Xenophon Xerxes Zapt and his experiments with hypertrophied fleas, but the story goes on much too long.

“The Miracle of the Lily” by Clare Winger Harris (1928). Self-serious scientifiction in the early Amazing Stories style, which feels like an inevitability given the chokehold “man vs insects” had on the first years of that magazine. It tries to be an epic account of two thousand years of future history, but just reads as silly today. Harris offers a criticism of modernism and the destruction of beauty and sentiment in the name of “efficiency,” but inevitably, the usual modernist concerns (“struggle is essential for the race!”) crop up as well.

“Warning Wings” by Arlton Eadie (1929). Inoffensive little tale about a moth transmitting an SOS to an ocean liner.

“Beyond the Star Curtain” by Garth Bentley (1931). One of the things that keeps me coming back to old SFFH stories is encountering the standard tropes much earlier than I expect. This is a space-faring time dilation tale that sees our square-jawed adventurers landing on a far-future Earth after a trip into a parallel universe. They find themselves in a man’s-life wonderland: a planet overrun with giant insects, fungal jungles, and the occasional damsel in distress. It’s silly pulp fun.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants” by Carl Stephenson (1937; English translation published 1938). A more quotidian man’s-life affair in the Amazon, pitting a cocksure colonial planter (and his four hundred indigenous workers) against a rampaging migration of ants. It has all the casual bigotry one might expect, and is much too long. Bum note to end on.

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So yeah. I don’t know if it’s the depression talking, or if this was just an unusually disappointing entry in the Library of the Weird series.

2026 read #37: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.

The House on the Borderland: From the Manuscript, discovered in 1877 by Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog, in the Ruins that lie to the South of the Village of Kraighten, in the West of Ireland. Set out here, with Notes. by William Hope Hodgson

Introduction by Ann VanderMeer

204 pages

Published 1908

Read from July 12 to July 17

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Long-time bots (the only regular readers of this blog) know my fascination with the development of what we now call fantasy fiction. In recent years, I’ve expanded that interest to encompass the related and parallel but still distinct evolution of weird fiction.

The House on the Borderland is a major weird fic milestone, predating the more famous cosmic weird of Lovecraft (and, for that matter, Weird Tales itself). In a remote part of Ireland, two anglers on holiday follow an unmapped river to an uncanny pit where it disappears into the earth, and the mysterious ruins that perch on a projecting crag above the drop. There they find a weathered manuscript of strange events penned by an old man who lived in the house before it was ruined.

Borderland is an exercise in atmosphere, forming a missing link of sorts between the early Dying Earth of the late chapters of The Time Machine and the “I traveled through space and time in a dream” of Olaf Stapledon. As a novel, it feels like a string of sketches held together by its flimsy framing story (which emphasizes how Hodgson felt it would be best not to “edit” the manuscript). Cosmic-scale Dying Earth material segues into an interminable siege by swine-men, which leads to a half-hearted dungeon crawl in the bottomless pit, and then we loop back to a protracted retread of the first and last time travel scenes from The Time Machine. A mysterious, supernal “Her” is randomly introduced halfway through and treated as if she’s always been in the narrative, lampshaded by a footnote from “editor” Hodgson.

Hodgson, like many of his contemporaries, is wrestling with the vastness of time and space only recently delineated by science. There is an element of pantheism to his thinking, though even the great pagan gods of old Earth are reduced to creatures crawling under the darkness of the dead sun. There are hints of samsara, perhaps, in the continued joys and agonies of drifting souls. But mostly it’s a surfeit of prose poetry about turn-of-the-century cosmology, full of giant dying suns and black nebulas. It’s pretty, but goes on perhaps a few chapters too long for my taste.

There are glimmers of interest here and there, strange visions and luminous wounds, vast wordless mysteries in between its half-stated ideas. It is a first draft of several subsequent genres, rough and overlong but fascinating.

2026 read #35: The Dead Hours of Night by Lisa Tuttle.

The Dead Hours of Night: Stories by Lisa Tuttle

Introduction by Lisa Kröger

233 pages

Published 2021

Read from July 1 to July 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’m still trying to read short stories (whether in anthology, collection, or magazine form) at least every fifth book this year. Which really puts into relief how slow my reading pace has gotten of late. What do you mean the last short stories I read were back in May? What do you mean this is only the fifth book I’ve read in two months?

Anyway, I picked up Dead Hours pretty much randomly at the library way back in May (or was it April?). I’ve read just two of Tuttle’s stories before this: “Jamie’s Grave” (read and reviewed here) and “Where the Stones Grow” (read and reviewed here), the latter of which appears again in this volume. Still, the titles and range of publication dates in this collection seemed interesting enough.

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“Objects in Dreams May Be Closer than They Appear” (2011). A weirdly old-fashioned story for its publication date. In its structure and rhythms, it brings to mind 1930s or ’40s short horror, despite its plot hinging on Google Street View and sat-nav. “Weirdly idyllic house that no one can find” feels like a plot straight out of that era, as well, as is the denouement. Still, it wasn’t a bad story.

“Closet Dreams” (2007). I remember reading stories from the 1980s horror boom and feeling scornful of “exploitative” pieces, stories from comfortable white male writers who used crimes against children for shock value. In the decades since, horror has become the genre for the oppressed and traumatized. This rumination on sexual violence and PTSD is thoughtful and feels far from exploitative.

“Born Dead” (2013). A stab at literalizing grief, but it’s too prim and managerial class for me, and I felt the ending didn’t land.

“Replacements” (1992). Obviously not every piece of feminist writing is going to be queer or inclusive — hell, this publication date puts it firmly in Second Gen territory — but this story is much too heterosexual and gender essentialist for my taste. Tuttle’s upper middle class professional milieu continues to alienate me, as well.

“A Birthday” (1993). Moderately enjoyable tale of a middle-aged woman’s “change of life.”

“My Pathology” (1998). A chilling examination of how men use women as objects of convenience, which sees an alchemist isolating and manipulating the narrator into growing and birthing the Philosopher’s Stone. Quite good.

“Food Man” (1994). Based on this collection so far, Tuttle’s bread and butter (pun intended) appears to be literalizing a social issue generally associated with women or girls, and seeing where it leads. This time the issue at hand is anorexia. I’m not sure that “a teen accidentally cures her anorexia by fucking a man made of the rotting food under her bed” is, perhaps, the most sensitive path Tuttle might have taken. All the same, I do think it holds up as a story, especially when contrasted against contemporary horror fiction. It certainly isn’t the most awkward social allegory I’ve read from the Nineties. Possibly my favorite entry here so far.

“Mr. Elphinstone’s Hands” (1990). In a change of pace, we switch from contemporary-set pieces to a tale of Spiritualism and PTSD in nineteenth century New England. It’s a fascinating allegory that uses ectoplasm as a proxy for revolting, nonconsensual male touch, and explores the lack of support from fellow women in a patriarchal society. It’s a bit long, but effective.

“The Dream Detective” (2013). Aside from some mild amusement at the noirish touches, this tale was an upper middle class shrug for me.

“Where the Stones Grow” (1980). I read and reviewed this one in Circles of Stone. There, I called it “ Well-written but just a tiny bit silly, as 1980s horror frequently was.”

“Vegetable Love” (2017). Another tale of vague heterosexual dissatisfaction leads to our protagonist turning into Japanese knotweed. More or less.

“The Book That Finds You” (2015). Finishing on a slightly livelier note, this is a rambling tale of books and fixations and the reputations of our literary heroes. It meanders without much emotional impact, but it was a fine enough read.

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And that’s it! That’ll teach me to take a chance on a full collection from a writer I barely know. (I kid, I kid.) I didn’t dislike anything here, but so much of it puttered along in one gear and didn’t build to anything.

2026 read #30: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Summer 2024 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Summer 2024 issue (1:3)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

80 pages

Published 2024

Read from May 8 to May 11

Rating: 4 out of 5

Out of this first batch of issues, this is the one I’ve been most excited to read. Not only do we get a new, officially-approved-by-the-estate Jirel of Joiry story by Molly Tanzer, we also get Sword & Sorcery tales from Premee Mohamed and Thomas Ha, two of my favorite contemporary authors. There’s also an array of flash fiction that sounds intriguing.

Saša Ðurðević’s cover painting of Jirel, cape billowing across a stark white background, is instantly iconic, so much so that it’s used in NESS’s promotional materials to this day.

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“Beating Stars, Dying Hearts” by Matt John. Crisply paced and evocative Dying Earth-adjacent tale, full of weird creatures, towering ruins, and inventive details. A solid story and a fun start to this issue.

“The Betrayal of the Rhinoceros” by Premee Mohamed. A fortress under siege faces a new peril: huge fucking ants with human faces climbing its walls. I’m honestly shocked I’ve never read an S&S story with giant ants before (though I’ll admit I haven’t read many of the pre-1970 classics). Of course, this being Mohamed, there’s some emotional depth to it, as well as themes of climate disruption and the corruption of authority. Loved it.

“St. Fario’s Feast” by Thomas Ha. This story is everything you’d expect from Ha: a sumptuously fucked up fairy tale of rabbit men, otherworldly abominations, and dark rivers of cosmic magic. It successfully expands what Sword & Sorcery can be, while never losing that S&S flavor. Superb.

“Gravediggers of Carsonne” by John R. Fultz. Serviceable tale of would-be grave robbers running afoul of an undead wizard, and one agreeing to do an errand for him to earn back their lives.

“Something Oath-Like” by Oliver Brackenbury. Included as a fundraising reward, this piece from the editor is a bit busy and breathless, penned in the voice of someone who’s read a lot but hasn’t necessarily written much fiction on a professional level. A sample: “Her scream had barely begun when, satisfied, Enmed pulled on the iron rod in his one-cubit-deep closet of stone.” I’m not sure whether the effect is meant to be comedic or not.

We begin a section of flash fiction pieces with Samantha Rich’s “The War-God’s Hound.” I was curious to see how Sword & Sorcery would be handled in a flash format; Rich packs ample atmosphere and hints of a wider world in this brief piece. Well done.

“Sister Soldier” by R. L. Summerling is another flash piece, well-written and evocative.

“Of Cabbages and Stone” by Timaeus Bloom brings fairy tale energy to a yarn about an aged ex-sorcerer who has no time to entertain disrespect.

“Against the Witch-Prince of Emdal” by W. O. Balmer also packs in a lot of atmosphere, suggestive of a bigger story beyond the vignette.

“High Water” by James Estes is another solid flash piece, an enjoyable anecdote of an undead saint visiting a delightfully Venetian city. Felt somewhat Riverside-esque.

“The Ferry-Man’s Price” by Melissa Burlock is another expertly done flash piece, a Sword & Soul number that sprinkles in references to past events to expand the story far beyond its word count. My favorite flash here.

“Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” by Molly Tanzer. One last fiction piece, an all-new Jirel of Joiry tale officially approved by C. L. Moore’s estate. Tanzer evokes Moore’s prose and storytelling pace while producing something fresh, the story’s more updated touches cleverly integrated into the plot. Loved it!

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That brings us to the nonfiction section of this issue. We begin with Jay Wolf’s essay “The Untrammeled Wilds,” which is about disability and the possibilities (and pitfalls) Sword & Sorcery offers in its portrayal. It’s a really good essay.

Next, Bryn Hammond brings us a biographical essay on “Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Amazon,” editor of the classic Amazons anthology series. A fascinating subject, and another solid essay.

The obligatory transcript from editor Brackenbury’s podcast is “Cock & Bull: An Interview with Kirk A. Johnson.” It’s always interesting to see how contemporary S&S authors got into the genre, and the ideological background they bring to their own writing.

Lastly, Robin Marx brings us a “Review: Shared World by Jonathan Ball, GMB Chomichuk, James Gillespie, and Chadwick Ginther.” Marx’s review is solid, but I gotta say, the book itself doesn’t sound like one I’ll seek out.

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And that’s it for this issue! Overall, it felt like a mighty leap forward in story quality and editorial panache. My favorite NESS issue so far.

2026 read #25: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Winter 2023 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Winter 2023 issue (1:2)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

80 pages

Published 2023

Read from April 21 to April 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

Back at it again with my read-through of New Edge’s back catalogue! As with the official “first issue,” the artwork remains absolutely next level here, with a fun pulpy cover and superb black-and-white pieces throughout the issue.

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“The Demon of Tashi Tzang” by Dariel Quiogue. A welcome return to Quiogue’s Central Asian pastiche, and his hero Orhan Timur. “Demon” isn’t quite the zippy pulp adventure we got with our first Orhan story (“The Curse of the Horsetail Banner” in NESS issue 0), but once it gets rolling, it’s still a fun time.

“Fang” by Jacquie Kawaja. Otherwise routine Nordic excursion given depth by its two disabled leads (as well as its late swerve into pronounced body horror). I ended up liking it quite a bit.

“Revelstoke” by Gemma Files. Where the previous story went all-in on body horror, this one cranks up the fantasy ultra-violence (and also body horror). It’s another pseudo-historical Viking piece, this time with a “my D&D party would make for a great story” vibe, not my favorite combination. Like “Fang,” it becomes more interesting as it goes, but first you have to get over the hump of too many characters getting thrown at you all at once in the opening.

“A Debt Forgotten, a Debt Unpaid” by Jeremy Pak Nelson. Pacing issues blunt this sanguinary number, in which a captive demigod, his blood tapped for magical weaponry, finally puts escape in motion. The narrative never seems to develop a sense of urgency. And while it falls under the general umbrella of weird fantasy, I personally wouldn’t consider it Sword & Sorcery.

“The Eyes of the Demon” by J.M. Clarke. Another Sword & Soul outing from the author of “Vapors of Zinai.” Clarke fully understood the assignment, giving us a pulpy, propulsive adventure of a larger than life swordsman facing an elemental threat. We even get “thews” thrown in. The most enjoyable story so far.

“Water, Which Laughs at All Things” by T. K. Rex & L. Ann Kenyon. Another beautiful, SoCal-flavored eco-fantasy from Rex, always a highlight in any magazine. My new favorite story in this issue.

“Atonement for a Resurrected God” by David C. Smith. The fourth author from the volunteer proof-of-concept issue zero to get a paid story slot in this issue. This one is an improvement over “Old Moon Over Irukad”; “Atonement” at least makes an effort to build atmosphere, even if it is your standard “hired swords protect an eldritch item aboard a ship” scenario.

“How Many Deaths Till Vengeance?” by June Orchid Parker. This is an assured outing, a pulpy masterpiece of personal and social justice that hits the perfect tone right from the title. “The axe is the tongue with which I’ll speak to him,” our heroine Astartha says, and Conan himself couldn’t deliver on it better. This might be my favorite piece in this issue, which is saying a lot in an issue with a T. K. Rex tale. And somehow this is Parker’s first published story!

All in all, while there wasn’t a story I disliked here, and there were a good number of solid pieces (including Parker’s “Vengeance,” which is a top two favorite story from NESS’s whole run so far), it seemed like there was a disproportionate number of outings that didn’t elicit much enthusiasm. Maybe that’s once again on me and my anhedonia, who knows?

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Now onward into the nonfiction pieces!

First, a brief essay by Jonathan Olfert: “Neurodivergence in Sword & Sorcery.” I enjoyed it, and added some stories and a book to my reading list as a result of it.

Milton J. Davis brings us “Sword & Soul Brothers,” a moving personal essay on Charles R. Saunders and the history of Sword & Soul.

Next, the de rigueur transcript from editor Brackenbury’s podcast: “Sword & Silk: An Interview with Dariel Quiogue.” I’m always skeptical going into these segments (isn’t transcribing your own podcast as page-filler a bit self-indulgent? couldn’t this be another story slot?), but I have to admit they always tend to be interesting, and this is no exception. This interview in particular was inspiring: Quiogue offers so many cool perspectives on Sword & Sorcery and its overlap with historical fantasy.

Lastly, Kris Vyas-Myall gives us a review of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Return of the Sorceress. They point out important themes of class consciousness that were missing from my review.

And that’s it! A solid batch of essays, all in all. And a solid issue of NESS. Onward to the next!

2026 read #15: OTHERSIDE, March 2026 issue.

OTHERSIDE, March 2026 issue (1)

Edited by V.M. Ayala, M. R. Robinson, Ash Vale, Rukman Ragas, Emily Yu, Jess Cho, and Angel Leal

127 pages

Published 2026

Read from March 4 to March 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is the very first issue of what I hope will be a long and rewarding run for this brand new queer SFFH magazine. I was fortunate enough to have a poem of mine selected for this debut. I fully plan to buy paper copies once they’re available, but I don’t want to wait until then to read it, so I’m starting in on my digital contributor’s copy.

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“blessing for molly grue.” by Elisheva Fox is a gorgeous poem weaving together unicorns, Judaism, and sensuality. An excellent start.

“This Is Not Your Extinction Event” by Elena Sichrovsky. Thinly disguised Marvel multiverse fanfic; the two leads are even named Robert and Chris. I didn’t expect I’d like it as much as I did. The central emotional question (what do you do after your partner’s multiversal twin tortures you?) has substance and unexpected relevance, and the multiversal portions are vast and strange and incredibly queer.

“The Vetala of Crystal Vellam Inlet” by Simo Srinivas (originally published 2022). Vibrant and absorbing tale of a young wizard’s attempt to contain a plague. Tinged with body horror as well as gentle humor. Quite good.

“Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen” by Ann LeBlanc is a poem every bit as stimulating as its title. Excellent.

“Vitrification” by Ishmael Grey. The author’s first published story, it is beautiful and heartbreaking.

“The Claywife” by Tanadrin. Spellbinding tale of animated clay and a young woman on the run. The narrative voice is superlatively rendered, sorrowful and beautiful and perfectly strange. It feels like a timeless story, as likely to be the best story of 1986 as it is to be the best story of 2026. My favorite piece so far.

Next is a poem I wrote: “Vulture bees transfigure the man I tried to be.” It will never be comfortable including a piece of mine in a review. Rereading my work is awkward at the best of times, let alone in such magnificent company. I’m partial to the subject matter, naturally, and I do enjoy how I played with sound and assonance here.

“Your First Days Back in the Court of Arthur” by Abigail Eliza. Queering the story of the Green Knight. For such a brief piece, published so close to the cultural memory of the Dev Patel movie, it unexpectedly moved me to tears. Delicately beautiful.

“Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain” by Sarah Pauling (originally published 2023). Another solid entry, set in a high-concept fantasy creation: a completely transparent pyramid housing a kingdom, from royalty to commoner, without a glimmer of privacy. In the heart of the mountain shines an ageless princess. It’s a unique (in my experience) spin on a fairy tale.

A poem: “Eat It Out” by Cypher. Queer body horror triumphant over internalized queer shame. I liked it.

“Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive” by Nadia Radovich. Another unique spin on a well-worn topic, this time a YA-ish post-pandemic apocalypse survival tale that manages to feel fresh and strange and moving.

“Situationship” by Seoung Kim. A time-loop story set on a doomed spaceship, given depth and emotional substance with a deceptively light touch. Brief but terrific.

Nico Santana’s poem “Electrolysis” is vivid, a gallop of impressions.

“The Homeowner’s Bride” by Ayida Shonibar. Another banger of a tale, this time told from the perspective of a house displeased at being disturbed. At turns deliciously erotic and devastating.

We close with a nonfiction piece: “He Is Survived by His Wife” by Jackie Hedeman. It’s a well-written essay at the intersection of one person’s experience of queerness and the broader erasure of queer experience in obituaries and other public markers of life.

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And that’s it for the debut issue of OTHERSIDE! All in all, an amazing achievement, an exemplary first issue. It’s rare to have this level of quality so early in a publication’s lifespan. I expect such great things from this place!

2026 read #6: My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen.

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen

379 pages

Published 2024

Read from January 29 to February 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

This year, I hope to read books I truly want to read, instead of bulking up my numbers with disposable pulp that just happens to be brief. Reading for numbers has had a regrettable effect on what I read. I’ve been completely neglecting contemporary full-length fantasy, one of my favorite categories. I think I only read a couple of them all last year. Time to change that!

My partner R read this book just about a year ago, and loved it enough to recommend it in the highest terms. After reading it, I have to concur. Van Veen’s prose is understated yet beautiful, dispassionately depicting horrors of living and dead alike. The Dutch countryside is a character all its own, vividly described, haunted by the misty ghosts of wetlands.

As an abused young girl in the aftermath of World War II, Roos becomes attached to a spirit she names Ruth. Ghosts, in van Veen’s inventive worldbuilding, only linger when the body itself does; Ruth’s body has tanned for centuries in a bog, giving her spirit the classic appearance of a bog body. A mysterious widow named Agnes purchases Roos’s autonomy from her horrid guardian. It turns out Agnes, too, is attached to an ancient spirit of her own. But that’s just the beginning of Dreadful’s Gothic turns.

My favorite thing about this book is the conceit of truly ancient ghosts. More stories should incorporate ghosts from millennia ago. But even without that particular niche interest, this is a beautifully rendered tragedy of obsession, possession, and trauma. An outstanding book.

2026 read #5: Queens of the Abyss, edited by Mike Ashley.

Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird, edited by Mike Ashley

350 pages

Published 2020

Read from January 25 to January 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

I collect old magazines. I have a lot of them. I want to make a point of reading some of them this year, especially as I make progress on my current novel project and hope to focus my energies back on short story writing later this year. So I plan to read short stories, ideally in the form of old magazines I own, for at least 20% of the reviews I write this year—the collapse of my nation, of course, permitting.

Naturally, I’m beginning this pattern with an anthology instead of a magazine.

This is another entry in the British Library Tales of the Weird series, featuring a selection of women authors from the heyday of pulp short fiction. I’ve read just one of these stories before, which is unusual after all the anthologies I’ve encountered in recent years. My partner R got it for me for the holidays, and I’ve been looking forward to it. Or as much as one can look forward to anything days, I suppose.

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“A Revelation” by Mary E. Braddon (1888). The author’s life is more interesting than this story, which is a rote gothic ghost number featuring clumsy descriptions, amateurish exposition, racist caricatures, and a see-through plot. It ends with an absurdly convenient twist and a middle aged man marrying his dead friend’s teenage child. It’s very much 1880s magazine fare. Not a promising start. F

“The Sculptor’s Angel” by Marie Corelli (1913). This medieval tale of an artistic monk who takes advantage of a poor young woman, only to be visited with dramatic irony after her death, is at least a step up from the previous story. We get some ever-relevant commentary on “the pitiless egotism of men,” though I think the narrative lets the sculptor off too easily. Perhaps a solid D

“From the Dead” by Edith Nesbit (1892). After his new wife confesses a past deception to him, our narrator, against his own conscience, gives her the cold shoulder. She disappears, only to summon him to her deathbed some months later. This being the type of story it is, he arrives too late. Macabre melodrama though it may be, it serves as an empowerment fantasy: maybe, somehow, even if by paranormal means, men might be made to suffer the consequences of their actions. I think we all can vibe with that right now. C-

“The Christmas in the Fog” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1914). This quasi-autobiographical anecdote begins with about seven pages of justification (almost a third of the essay) for why a quasi-autobiographical anecdote is worth writing down and being read. The incident itself sees the author, referring to herself in the third person as the Romantick Lady, stuck for three days in an unusually Londonish smog on the Mersey. She decides to scrape together some kind of Christmas gift for each of the 150 immigrant children down in steerage. It ends with her musing whether her self-appointed charity might have “planted the seeds of pauperism” in the poor children. Horrors! All in all, you couldn’t get more pre-war 1910s than this.

“The Haunted Flat” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1920). Banal self-improvement-aided-by-a-spirit yarn. I liked the small domestic details of a young working woman setting herself up in a rental flat. The identity of the helpful spirit is an absurd coincidental twist of the sort beloved by religious revivalists (including, in this instance, Spiritualists). D?

“A Modern Circe” by Alicia Ramsey (1919). Ramsey lays it on a bit thick with Italian stereotypes, up to and including labeling Italians a “primitive race,” but otherwise her writing is quick and modern, her descriptions evocative, and the titular “Mad Virgin” is positively delightful after a slog through generic ghost tales. Possibly C-

“The Nature of the Evidence” by May Sinclair (1923). Another piece inclined to Spiritualism, this time an account of well-to-do heterosexual unhappiness involving the man’s late first wife. Well-written, and interesting for hinting at ghost-fucking at such an early date, but otherwise forgettable. D+

“The Bishop of Hell” by Marjorie Bowen (1925). This story begins with more promise and unique vibes than anything else in this anthology so far. A defrocked priest in the late 18th century, so dissipated that his intimates give him the nickname in the title, hatches a desire to corrupt the bride of his generous cousin and benefactor. The story is twenty shades of purple, but enjoyably so. C

“The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (1949). I read and reviewed this story in Women of Weird Tales. There, I said, “I enjoyed the element of loom-weaving; the hidden message in the antimacassar was an interesting touch that deserved a better story.”

“White Lady” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1933). Brought down by clumsy prose and absurd dialogue (“Now, as always, you prefer your unnatural flowers to me”), this story of a woman competing with an anthropomorphic flower for the affections of her fiancée gets points for embracing its own pulpy ridiculousness. C

“The Laughing Thing” by G. G. Pendraves (1929). The prose and atmosphere of this Hudson Valley-set haunting were fine. Pendraves’ dialogue was another matter, hammering obvious plot points into the ground; it takes the better part of two pages for an old man, fleeced on a land deal, to fully articulate just how hard he’s going to haunt the place once he’s dead. (“Wha-a-a-at?” responds the swindler.) Still, a solid example of its type. C-

“Candlelight” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1931). I believe this tale of middle class philandering is meant to be humorous, or at least ironic. An awkward dinner party is interrupted by the arrival of a Romani girl from the woods, who gets goaded into telling their fortunes (and spilling all their tawdry secrets). Altogether on the wrong side of 1930s pulp, and felt interminable to boot. D-

“The Wonderful Tune” by Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1931). Snowed in at a Swiss inn, the narrator and his companions find themselves in the company of a master violinist, who plays elf music that compels all things to dance—including the avalanche-crushed corpses stashed in the other room. Somewhat ridiculous in the way all the “OooOooh, watch out, a corpse!” stories were, but not painfully bad. D+?

“Island of the Hands” by Margaret St. Clair (1952). Out of every story on the TOC, I’d been looking forward to this one the most. Immediately, we find ourselves in the hands (hehe) of a storytelling professional. Garth is a watery planet that feels remarkably like a midcentury floatplane-and-cabana getaway. That’s just set-dressing for a standard (but well-written) Weird Island story. Aside from the inevitable skeeviness of midcentury heterosexuality, I enjoyed this one quite a bit. If only more of the anthology had been like this! B-

“The Unwanted” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1951). Our narrator is climbing Alabama hills for the census when she happens upon a broad Appalachian stereotype (because boy howdy did midcentury writers love Appalachian stereotypes). The mountain man points a gun at her and tells her to leave. But the woman of the house invites her up to chat, and we quickly find ourselves in a gentle, sad, unclassifiable tale of motherhood and lost children. Just as quickly, this story went from forgettable page-filler to a minor wonder (however dated and iffy it might be for modern readers). B-

“The Seventh Horse” by Leonora Carrington (1943). A surreal little fable about a horse (or a woman?) in a garden. One of the best (and weirdest) stories I’ve ever read from the 1940s. B+

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And that’s it! After slogging through so many forgettable ghost stories, the last few entries were an unexpected delight.

2025 read #95: Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, edited by August Derleth.

Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, edited by August Derleth

418 pages

Published 1947

Read from December 9 to December 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

Spanning from the era of anonymous traditional ballads to the 1940s, this ambitious collection purported to be the first to anthologize fantasy and horror verse. It samples broadly across time, from William Blake in the 1780s to Dorothy Quick in the 1940s, and has at least one poem from each decade in between.

I decided to read it for three reasons: 1) to expand my poetry education; 2) to maybe find cool public domain lines to turn into titles; 3) to pad out each of the relevant decade tags here on my reading blog. (Hey, it’s particularly hard to find anything I want to read from the 1800s, 1810s, and 1820s. I’ll do what I must to bulk those tags up.) I was successful at 1 and 3.

There’s no way I could individually review over two hundred poems. I do want to single out a few noteworthy entries from each era, though:

Anonymous traditional ballads

Anyone familiar with Steeleye Span would know most of these selections. I’ve published a story inspired by “Twa Corbies” and a poem queering “The Wee Wee Man,” so of course I’m going to be fond of them. One new to me was “William and Marjorie,” a ghost visitation with a nicely folkloric three-sets-of-three climax, which ends with a rare triumph for the woman.

1780s-1790s

William Blake’s “Fair Eleanor” (1783) is so archetypal in its turgid gothic style that I could have sworn I read it before, but apparently not. It’s interesting to see an old poem structured more or less like a modern short story: in media res opening, followed by filling in the backstory, then climax.

Robert Burns’ “Address to the Deil” (1786) is a banger, recalling the greatest hits of Scottish Twitter as the narrator sarcastically flatters and taunts the Devil with the casual familiarity of one drinking at the same tavern.

Walter Scott’s “The Eve of St. John” (1799) is an extended variant on a common ballad trope — the fair lady wife trysts with the rival of the lord, only this time the rival is already dead — but the narrative (and its rhyme scheme) is solid.

1800s

The book’s lone selection from this decade is “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” by Thomas Moore (1806). It’s fine. I like the imagery of the firefly lamp and the white canoe.

Why are there so many good Anglophone writings from the eighteenth century, but so few from the first couple decades of the nineteenth? Not just in this anthology, but in general.

1810s

There aren’t that many more offerings from this decade, so I’ll have to single out James Hogg’s “Kilmeny” (1813), a long narrative poem about a mortal woman who visits the land of the spirits before returning to the Scottish greenwood. Some quite lovely descriptions here.

And of course I should mention “Kubla Khan or a Vision of a Dream” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1813). Everyone quotes the opening stanzas, but the rest of the narrative is oddly unremarkable. Anticlimactic, even.

1820s

Of the two selections from this decade, I’ll have to go with John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (initially 1819, but revised in 1820, so I’m still counting it). I’ve wanted to read Keats ever since I obsessed over Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos as a fledgling adult, back in the early ’00s. I even bought a collection of Keats’ poems back then, which followed me through several moves, only to be donated unread. “Dame” turns out to be a solid enough tale of getting caught in a fae lady’s thrall. A promising introduction.

1830s

There are four poems included from this decade, the most memorable of which is Richard Harris Barham’s “The Hand of Glory” (1838). Truth be told, the narrative felt rather puerile.

1840s

Inevitably, we must single out Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” (1845). It’s one of those cultural fixtures so incessantly referenced and parodied that every kid knows about it. I read it, in fact, as a child, maybe 10 years old, expecting a tale of terror equal to its cultural ubiquity. It is, of course, nothing at all like what my childhood self expected. Rereading it for the first time as an adult, I’m impressed with the fluency of it, the seeming effortlessness of Poe’s meter and rhyme. A classic worthy of the title, just not what a preteen in the 1990s might consider “scary.”

Poe’s “Dream-Land” (1844), which I hadn’t heard of until now, reads like a draft sketch that would, via William Hope Hodgson, Weird Tales, and the 1970s adult fantasy boom, evolve into the familiar fantastic vibe of D&D. I enjoyed it!

Thomas Hood’s “The Haunted House” (1844) is excessively long to my taste, but I enjoyed the opening depiction of fauna and flower taking refuge on the grounds of the namesake haunted house.

Another one of Hood’s ghostly narratives, however, “Pompey’s Ghost” (1842), is remarkable for how racist it is. Most of the poem is spent trying to cram in puns on the word “black.” Imagine the Predator meme format, with “1840s” and “1940s” shaking hands, and the handshake is labeled “Racism.”

This was a weirdly hopping decade for poetry, at least in this book. I also want to mention “The Sands of Dee” by Charles Kingsley (1849), which makes excellent use of repetition to build atmosphere.

1850s

After the glut of poetry in the previous decade, there isn’t much to pick from in the 1850s.

“The Witch Bride” by William Allingham (1850) is a slight but well-written retread of a familiar theme.

Richard Garnett’s “The Highwayman’s Ghost” (1859) is another fun trifle with a self-explanatory title.

1860s

“The Legend of the Glaive” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1863) is interesting as a prototype of the heightened language of classic Sword & Sorcery and its imitators. We  get a reference to the hero’s “quivering sinew,” as well as catch an inkling of the far-off Conan within a ghostly Norseman’s “Gigantic sorrow.”

Another standout is one I’ve already reviewed on its own: Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1862). It’s the first poem in this entire collection known to be written by a woman.

1870s

James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874) is an interminable meander through typical Romantic shades of mortality, but beginning in section IV it becomes unexpectedly compelling, repetition fashioning an uneasy map of lands between Heaven and Hell:

As I came through the desert thus it was,

As I came through the desert: Hell is mild

And piteous matched with that accursèd wild

In its own fatalistic immensity, “City” bludgeons the reader into respect, and even an occasional slip of atheistic awe. Plus it uses London as a metaphor for being alive in a godless universe, which is just about the most 1870s thing I can imagine.

1880s

James Whitcomb Riley’s “A Glimpse of Pan” (1883) is our earliest, uh, glimpse of Pan. It pre-dates Machen’s The Great God Pan by eleven years. It isn’t much, but it does what it says on the tin, as the saying goes.

1890s

Slim pickings again for this decade. The best I can scrounge up is “Luke Havergal” by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1897), which is middling except for the astonishing couplet:

God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,

And hell is more than half of paradise

1900s

Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “A Windy Night” (1906) is unexpectedly modern, jumping from the small town mundane by the firelight to the fey hunt outside. Quite good.

1910s

“The Superstitious Ghost” by Arthur Guiterman (1918), while fine, isn’t really my cup of tea. But its humor feels like a preview of the earliest issues of F&SF thirty years in the future.

“Dave Lilly” by Joyce Kilmer (1914) jumped out at me for its Berkshires setting, name-dropping North Adams, a town my partner R and I almost moved to. The poem is otherwise unremarkable, a pleasant tale of a ghost fisherman fishing for ghost trout on the side of Greylock.

“The Sorceress of the Moon” by William Rose Benét (1914) has to take its place among the prototypes of 20th century fantasy. So much Sword & Sorcery-adjacent imagery!

1920s

Another brief bit of magic from Lizette Woodworth Reese, “Bitters” (1928) casts a botanical spell after my own heart.

Amy Lowell’s “A Dracula of the Hills” (1923) is both the first non-rhyming poem on the table of contents, and the earliest example I’ve ever read of taking a common fantasy or horror trope and setting it in the hollers of Appalachia.

Another rambling free verse poem from Lowell, “The Paper in the Gate-Legged Table” (1924), is notable for its Weird Fiction quality, presenting a tale of grass (that metaphor for mortality) coming to consume us all, and the man who strives with crazed desperation to avoid the common fate:

The terrible, blind grass, feeling its way

With little patting hands. Feeling its way

Slowly, horribly, over all mankind.

There is no safety anywhere at all

Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Hashish-Eater: or, The Apocalypse of Evil” (1922) is notable for how pompously it reads in the present day. Smith’s antique hyperbole equates being stoned to cosmic perception, and goes on longer than a doom metal track. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to enjoy here. Almost any line could inspire a painting on the side of a van:

…And I read,

Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,

The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote

With gall of slain chimeras; and I know

What pentacles the lunar wizards use…

But Smith blathers in a similar vein with little variation for some seventeen pages. It’s a lot. It took me the better part of a day to work my way through it. (In Smith’s defense, it was a really bad day.)

Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Metropolitan Nightmare” (1927) is a marvelously evocative (and prescient) poem of climate change in New York City. Unfortunately, I detect a Jazz Age anxiety about the city becoming “African.”

Robert E. Howard’s “The Harp of Alfred” (1928) is straightforwardly effective at what it sets out to do.

1930s

It’s rare that I’ll encounter a folkloric or fantastic idea that’s entirely new to me. Roy Helton’s “Lonesome Water” (1930) dishes up one such concept: a man drinks the titular water and finds himself bound to the Appalachian hillside. Quite interesting.

H. P. Lovecraft’s “Psychopompos” (1937) is famous and widely considered a classic. I see the artistry in its lengthy recitation, but I felt it was a pretty basic Weird Tales medieval fantasy revenge plot gussied up with rhyming couplets.

Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence (published individually over the 1930s; collected and published in 1943) is treated here as a single poem rather than thirty-six separate sonnets. Reading them together, this makes sense, as the first ten form a consecutive narrative, and the rest are variations on the theme. I have to acknowledge the craft that went into writing a short story in sonnet form; goodness knows I’ve yet to write a rhyming sonnet to my own satisfaction. If I could write a cycle of connected sonnets, I’d consider it my greatest accomplishment as a poet.

Ashton Clark Smith’s “Outlanders” (1937) is a fun sonnet about barbarian adventurers.

“The Singer in the Mist” (1938) is another solid poem by Robert E. Howard. He certainly had his niche. Most of his offerings here committed to his hypermasculine fatalism / nihilism schtick, and didn’t land so well as this one.

1940s

There was a healthy selection of poems from this decade. I can’t tell if I felt most of them were a step down from the rest of the book (editor Derlith’s own poems left me unimpressed), or if I’m just too depressed from recent life events to appreciate them. I did like some of them, though:

Vincent Starrett’s “221B” (1945) is at once charming and tragic, a bit of Sherlock Holmes fan-fiction that yearns for pre-war innocence.

Dorothy Quick’s “Tree Woman” (1946) is a neat sonnet about a woman in a Druidic wood.

Leah Bodine Drake’s “Changeling” (1942) feels adjacent to a picture-book in its rhymes and repeated refrain, but I liked it. The exact same review applies to her “Wood Wife” (also 1942).

Lastly, “The Goats of Juan Fernandez: A Note on Survival” by Coleman Rosenberger (1947) could pass for 2020s ecopoetry, particularly its closing line.

—

This has been surprisingly enjoyable, all in all. You know me, I love a wide-ranging anthology that collects from all different decades. Too bad about the unrelated turns life has taken while I read it, though.

2025 read #80: Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones.

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

102 pages

Published 2017

Read October 29

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Writing a story, particularly a supernatural story laden with tragedy and the specific indignities of impoverished childhood, from a child’s point of view can go wrong in so many ways. It could be treacly, or patronizing, or heavy-handed.

This novella of a father’s ghost and the ripple effects it has on his family takes that risk, and crafts a stunning miniature masterpiece from it. Jones’s sharply observed prose catalogs the powerlessness and sympathetic magic of a marginalized childhood; the ghosts at its edges seem no less real, or unreal, than drifts of cigarette smoke in the car on the way to a clinic. Heartbreaking and superb.

2025 read #79: Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore.

Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore

212 pages

Published 1977

Read from October 27 to October 28

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I read Moore’s first story of Jirel, “Black God’s Kiss,” in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales (reviewed here). A pioneering work of Sword & Sorcery starring a capable and vengeful woman warrior, it was far and away my favorite fantasy short story from the 1930s, and quite likely my favorite written before 1979 (when the genre underwent its metamorphosis and became recognizably modern). Naturally, I just had to read the rest, here collected in a reprint volume.

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“Black God’s Kiss” (1934). In my earlier review, I said, “[T]his is classic weird fiction at its finest, crossing gritty Dark Ages warrior fantasy with alien world cosmic horror,” and gave it a rare A

“Black God’s Shadow” (1934). Printed two months after “Kiss,” this one opens by recontextualizing its ending, removing any ambiguity and underlining that, in disappointingly 1930s fashion, silly Jirel had actually loved the hateful Guillaume. God forbid a woman simply hate a man for conquering her fortress, killing her troops, and sexually assaulting her. (To quote one of my favorite current memes: God forbid a woman do anything.) All this serves as a flimsy pretext to send Jirel right back down into the otherworldly plane deep beneath her castle’s dungeons. It takes several pages for “Shadow” to feel like anything other than a rote retread of the superior original. Even then, it never feels as creative, or as beautifully bizarre, as the first story. Maybe C+

“Jirel Meets Magic” (1935). We get some of the original spirit back with a fresh change of scenery. Pursuing vengeance after an ambush kills some of her soldiers, Jirel conquers the castle of the wizard Giraud, only to find he has fled through a magic window into an unearthly woodland, where a great sorceress protects him. The story is fun and weird and toys with all sorts of 1930s tropes. (Doorways open to both dinosaur lands and a Dying Earth, though Jirel herself doesn’t go through them.) B

“The Dark Land” (1936). Jirel lies on her deathbed, having received a grievous wound in battle. But otherworldly bullshit isn’t done with her. Some supernatural jerk named Pav spirits her bodily to his kingdom, the dark land of Romne, to force her to be his bride. Jirel resists, and demands the opportunity to kill him before he claims her. Moore takes the gender norms of her time (submission is a woman’s default state in a relationship; a man “conquers” a woman; women will compete for a man, even if one of them was literally kidnapped by said man; etc.) and, while not really subverting them, does more interesting things with them than I’ve seen in stories this old. B-?

“Hellsgarde” (1939). I really dug the way this story opened, laying out Jirel’s quest and motivation with efficiency far ahead of its time. I also enjoyed the opening’s distinctly proto-D&D vibe: a cursed castle in a marsh, home of an undead lord, guarding a mysterious treasure. Unfortunately, the rest of the story doesn’t live up to that initial promise. Jirel finds the castle occupied by intangibly “deformed” people, and of course at this date, deformity = evil. In place of a dungeon crawl, we get a haunted house narrative with a ghost that does not respect consent. A bit disappointing, but still adequate, especially for the time period. I found the climax unexpectedly creative. C+

—

And that’s it for this collection! While nothing matched the initial greatness of “Black God’s Kiss,” this might be the most consistently enjoyable series of stories I’ve ever read from this era.

This book lacks one original Jirel story, “Quest of the Starstone,” cowritten with Henry Kuttner, which was published in the November 1937 Weird Tales. The cover story for that issue, alas, looks like some Orientalist garbage from Seabury Quinn. Nonetheless, I’m enough of a completionist that I’ve downloaded the issue and plan to read it sometime soon. And of course, I'm looking forward to the authorized continuation of Jirel’s adventures by Molly Tanzer in an issue of New Edge Sword & Sorcery. That’ll be a treat to read.

2025 read #78: A Spectre is Haunting Greentree by Carson Winter.

A Spectre is Haunting Greentree by Carson Winter

Illustrated by Matt Blairstone

155 pages

Published 2024

Read from October 25 to October 27

Rating: 2 out of 5

My partner R recommended this book when I asked for a short horror read I could squeeze in before Halloween. It’s a folk horror piece with vengeful scarecrows and the stirrings of class consciousness. How could I say no?

At times, particularly during the viewpoint chapters of abusive antagonist Steve Calico, Greentree has an unfortunate throwback quality, reminding me of what white dudes wrote in the 1980s and ’90s in the name of “showing life like it is.” In particular, there’s a scene where Steve goes to the “bad” part of town to hire an underage Black sex worker, a whole chapter that is unnecessary to the story (and also written with a white guy’s idea of Black urban dialect). I nearly quit the book at that point. A shitty violent man can be a meaningful choice of perspective, but it can also reveal some of the author’s own unconscious assumptions.

Once we finally get to Greentree, a suspiciously prosperous small town in rural Oregon, the story settles into a solid rhythm. I wouldn’t ever call it an amazing book, even by indie press horror standards, but it does what it sets out to do.

2025 read #77: A Light Most Hateful by Hailey Piper.

A Light Most Hateful by Hailey Piper

279 pages

Published 2023

Read from October 20 to October 25

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

My first exposure to Hailey Piper was her indie horror novel, The Worm and His Kings. That book showed considerable promise underneath the usual foibles of small press publication. This book comes to us from a more mainstream press, and it’s clear that more polish went into it. I still found Piper’s prose flat, but there are glimmers of something luminous scattered here and there. As a story, however, Light seems to me like a downgrade.

Where Worm gave us a dreadful sense of place and a thematically consistent threat, Light gives us a generic small town and preternatural evil that ranges from a jock-eating snake-woman to zombie-making rain to glass that spreads and immobilizes its victims (and that’s just in the first sixty pages). Eventually the pieces do come together and make more sense; even the generic nature of the town has an explanation. Unfortunately, the story feels padded with a lot of running back and forth. I didn’t think it made the best use of its central motif.

Maybe that last paragraph overstates the case a bit. The book is fine, really. I think I’m disgruntled because I had genuinely high expectations for Light. The cover blurbs, in particular, made it sound next level: “A fully-formed goddess of a novel,” and so forth. That’ll teach me to believe in blurbs at my old age.

2025 read #76: Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies, edited by Marvin Kaye.

Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies, edited by Marvin Kaye

589 pages

Published 1988

Read from January 7 to October 20

Rating: 2 out of 5 (being generous)

When classic stories from Weird Tales land for me, they hit a certain sweet spot of musty pulp entertainment that’s hard to replicate. The memorable ones, “good” to my tastes or not, keep me coming back for more, despite how they’re invariably outnumbered by formulaic, turgid, or outright racist schlock.

This collection, compiled by the anthologist behind Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, commemorated one of the magazine’s many short-lived relaunchings. Kaye describes his editorial process here as a sampling of each of Weird Tales’ eras, avoiding its most-reprinted highlights in favor of lesser known stories, and selecting only one piece per author. I’d be happier with an anthology of the best stories, well-known or not, from the magazine’s first era alone, but I’ll take what I can get.

—

“Interim” by Ray Bradbury (1947). An effective flash fic about unquiet dead sharing some good news. B-

“The House of Ecstasy” by Ralph Milne Farley (1938). Well, we made it all the way to second story before we got a disgusting convergence of Orientalist stereotypes with sexual assault as a plot point. I’d say that the second person narration is an interesting touch, at least for a story this old; the way that it feeds into the ending is solid. But “Ecstasy” doesn’t deserve any positive notes from me. F

“The Stolen Body” by H. G. Wells (1898). Mildly diverting tale of astral projection gone wrong. A bit overlong for my tastes, considering how obvious the plot beats are to modern eyes, but Wells (when he wasn’t stuffing his future histories full of racist screeds) was one of the more capable genre storytellers of his time, so it still mostly works. Maybe C+

“The Scrawny One” by Anthony Boucher (1949). This brief tale of a man’s deal with a devil is thoroughly 1940s, which is to say, it takes a classic folktale motif, inserts it into Southern California, and adds exactly nothing else to the formula. Exactly what you’d expect from one of the founding editors of F&SF; it reads like the magazine’s first couple issues in miniature. D

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Lucian (sometime in the 100s; translated by Thomas More, early 1500s). Brief fable, really just a barebones summary of the classic story, barely a couple paragraphs. Scarcely worth reviewing.

“Skulls in the Stars” by Robert E. Howard (1929). I believe this is my first Solomon Kane story, in which Howard’s perennial cold-eyed barbarian archetype gets packaged in the garments of a Puritan and sent to roam the tracks of the Early Modern era. This is also the first Howard story I read that was free of revolting racism, making it my favorite Howard story at the time I read it. (I have heard from others, however, that racism is central to other Kane stories, because that’s just Howard’s métier.) I enjoyed the almost-but-not-quite folk horror atmosphere of the piece, with its demon-haunted moors and its fungal-garden swamps. Perhaps a solid C

“Eena” by Manly Banister (1947). Aside from the grotesquely 1940s treatment of its title character, this is a somewhat adequate werewolf tale. The North Woods atmosphere was a nice touch. C-

“The Look” by Maurice Level (1909). Brief melodrama about a pair of illicit lovers who let the woman’s husband die so that they might be together. Meh. D

“Methought I Heard a Voice” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1951). Pretty standard Gavagan’s Bar fare about a traveling Bible lecturer and the adherents who discover an ecstatic, zombie-like trance effect from his voice. It’s fine? Not really my thing. D+

“Off the Map” by Rex Dolphin (1954). Brigadoon but played for horror. Atmospheric, though it doesn’t really land; the denouement in particular felt like the author didn’t know what to do with it beyond the bare outline. Maybe C-

“The Last Train” by Fredric Brown (1950). Another tale that centers on a mediocre white dude at a bar. I did enjoy the ambiguity of its atmosphere: Is the denouement something supernatural, like Limbo, or have the bombs begun to fall? C-

“Ti Michel” by W. J. Stamper (1926). I’ve been dreading this one since the table of contents: a story set in Haiti, written in the 1920s and published in Weird Tales? Surely nothing good could come of that. To my surprise, this morbid little tale of vengeance centers on a sympathetic and dignified Black character. It certainly isn’t free of racist and colonialist vibes, but it’s much better than it could have been. D+

“In the X-Ray” by Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1949). Forgettable medical melodrama about an abusive sibling who refuses to let go, even after death. It’s fine. D+

“Speak” by Henry Slesar (1965). Extremely silly (though not actually funny) “humorous” bit about a dying man and his dog. Not worth the brief time it took to read. F

Didn’t read any of this book in February. It’s almost the middle of March now. I’m depressed and numb from the ongoing billionaires’ coup of the federal government. What will this country, or even my life, look like before I finish this book?

“The Pale Criminal” by C. Hall Thompson (1947). Turgidly macabre murder and mad science stuff in a German castle. Meh? At least it’s atmospheric. D

“The Sombrus Tower” by Tanith Lee (1980). Dreamlike and gorgeously haunting, this is pretty much the platonic ideal of a fantasy story from 1980, an exact midway point between the worn-out archetypal fantasy of the 1970s and the more immediate, grittier fantasy of the 1980s. It’s also pretty much a textbook Tanith Lee story (complimentary), with a knight riding on a quest toward his own doom, then masturbating into a fire. Best story in this book, by a wide margin. A-

“Mr. George” by August Derleth (1947). Five year old Priscilla, heir to a small fortune, is in the malign clutches of her late mother’s cousins. She receives supernatural assistance from Mr. George, another recently deceased former caregiver. This story is a bit overlong for my tastes, and a touch predictable, but it’s a solid and professionally-done streetcar gothic. Maybe C+

“The Terror of the Water-Tank” by William Hope Hodgson (1907). A typically aquatic tale from Hodgson. A man is strangled atop a suburban water-tank; his prospective son-in-law narrates the attempt to solve the mystery. Between the title and my own genre awareness, I had the solution pegged on the second page, but it’s still a solid outing for its time. C+

“The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller” by Gustave Flaubert (1877; English translation 1928). A cynical spin on hagiography, depicting the cruelty and lust for murder behind a “miracle.” It’s a fascinatingly modern document, halfway between a 19th century historical romance and a 20th century fantasy. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. C+

“The Hoax of the Spirit Lover” by Harry Houdini (1924). A famous essay exposing a case of Spiritualist fraud. Interesting as a historical document, but nothing particularly remarkable otherwise.

“Seed” by Jack Snow (1946). A botanical horror piece, somewhat predictable but competently written and atmospheric, with a whiff of A. Merritt about it. Interestingly, the archetypal “famous and dashing explorer” in this story is a woman. That doesn’t make her African adventures any less racist, of course. C-

“Masked Ball” by Seabury Quinn (1947). A typically ’40s number centering on the horniness of its white male protagonist. Some dude visiting New Orleans wanders the streets, and finds himself so hopelessly attracted to a ghost girl that he’s able to mingle with the dead at their ball. The atmosphere elevates what is otherwise a desperately heterosexual piece. D

“The Woman with the Velvet Collar” by Gaston Leroux (1924; English translation 1929). Sanguinary melodrama of Corsican revenge, mixing elements of the Terror and the trope of ribbon holding a woman’s head in place. It was fine? D+

I abandoned this book for several months. At first I was too focused on my own writing, then I was distracted by the state of the world on top of my usual summertime busyness. Love to review books during the downfall of civilization! Anyway, onward into October now.

“Mistress Sary” by William Tenn (1947). Much like “Ti Michel” above, I’ve been dreading this tale of voodoo and an albino child ever since I flipped through the TOC. Unlike “Ti Michel,” it’s as bad as I expected. Not a great reintroduction to this collection. F

“The Judge’s House” by Bram Stoker (1891). A young man, desiring quiet and solitude while he studies for exams, rents an isolated house with a local reputation. To quote one of my favorite old TikTok audios, it falls into the “scary castle with one hundred rats” category. Mildly amusing, though not particularly well-written. Maybe D+

“The Bagheeta” by Val Lewton (1930). Overlong yarn of a virgin boy sent to kill a supposed were-leopard in the Caucasus. There’s a weak attempt at an anti-establishment message, depicting masculinity as a game in which men repeat other men’s lies to gain status, which was mildly interesting. Still not an especially good or enjoyable story, though. D-

“Ghost Hunt” by H. R. Wakefield (1948). The most charming aspect of this brief, rather silly supernatural bauble is its narrative conceit: ghost hunters with a live radio program. The story doesn’t do much of note beyond that. D

“Funeral in the Fog” by Edward D. Hoch (1973). Weirdly antiquated (and tediously long) Christian bullshit that felt straight out of the 1930s (derogatory). Simon Ark, a priest who’s battled the minions of Satan for hundreds of years but comes across as a direct-to-video Christian alternative to Sherlock Holmes, takes up the case of some white dude who stumbles into an evangelical fever dream of Satanic Peril in Java. One twist—that the instigating death has a mundane explanation—is obvious a mile away, and does nothing to undo the shitty religious trappings at the heart of the story. Just a crummy read all around. F

“The Damp Man” by Allison V. Harding (1947). Editor Kaye introduces this one as “purplish” but praises it for “one of the most compellingly original villains in all fantasy literature.” Said villain, an obsessive stalker with the funds and privilege to pursue a young woman at will, isn’t original at all; any woman would be familiar with him and his activities. The story is much too long for what it is, well over thirty pages; ten probably would have sufficed. But far from being purple, Harding’s prose is actually more vibrant and interesting than most of Kaye’s other selections here. C

“The Lost Club” by Arthur Machen (1890). Pleasantly surreal little mood piece. C+

“Wet Straw” by Richard Matheson (1953). Thoroughly Mathesonian, thoroughly midcentury, thoroughly heterosexual ghost story. Not exactly bad, but I can’t scrape together more than a C-

“Mysteries of the Faceless King” by Darrell Schweitzer (1988). This anthology was meant to commemorate one of the many revivals of the Weird Tales magazine. This story is from the 1988 relaunch issue, penned by one of the revival’s editors. With that pedigree, I didn’t expect much. Surprisingly, this is a perfectly solid late ’80s fantasy, a tale of fathers and brothers that wouldn’t be out of place, stylistically speaking, in a 1988 issue of Asimov’s. Something about this story (quite possibly the massive bandit armed with an equally substantial hammer) even reminded me of Fable 2. Maybe B?

“More Than Shadow” by Dorothy Quick (1954). Thoroughly silly business about a fae poodle. D-

“The Dead Smile” by F. Marion Crawford (1899). Turgid gothic production about a dying man’s buried secrets, which were so obvious by the second page that the whole affair felt trite and ridiculous. F

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Robert Bloch (1949). Midcentury slop about a developmentally disabled young man who falls in with a touring stage magician, his cheating wife, and their sordid affairs. Because it’s written passably well, I’ll give it a generous F+

“Chicken Soup” by Katherine MacLean and Mary Kornbluth (1973). Flimsy little humor piece about cooking and witchcraft. It was fine. I think I’m at the stage where I resent any additional story this book is making me read. D

“The Haunted Burglar” by W. C. Morrow (1897). Nothing objectionable, strictly speaking, but this tale of a burglar whose left arm is possessed with a murderous spirit seems destined for the silly pile. D?

Another family emergency—the second along the same lines in twelve months—has gotten in the way of my plan to finish these stories by mid-October. I was reading another Marvin Kaye collection last time this happened, too.

“Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral” by Edgar Allen Poe (1845). Antique “humorous” piece. The humor has two modes: mocking literary criticism, and describing trivial things in an absurdly grandiloquent style. Meh. D-

“He” by H. P. Lovecraft (1926). Lately there’s been a movement to rehabilitate Lovecraft’s image away from the internet’s “He saw an Italian and lost his mind” meme, positing that, later in life, he showed signs of growth and broadening horizons, cut short by his premature death. That could even be accurate for all I know; I haven’t delved much into his work, in large part due to its reputation for racism. But then you get a story like this, in which our blue-eyed narrator arrives in New York City hoping to absorb poetry, and instead collapses in horror because the streets are crowded with swarthy immigrants. The diverse and bustling city is, to our narrator, a corpse “infested with queer animate things.” You can’t get more “saw an Italian” than this story. We do get a tiny glimmer of the possibilities of early urban fantasy as our narrator gets drawn into labyrinthine alleyways and finds a rural manor house preserved, through eldritch means, in the urban heart of Greenwich. It’s interesting, just not interesting enough to overcome the rancid vibes. F+? 

“The Brotherhood of Blood” by Hugh B. Cave (1932). This otherwise rote vampire piece commits to being entertainingly pulpy, which is enough to make it a standout in this portion of the collection. C-?

“The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” by Clark Ashton Smith (1932). A Hyperborean tale from Clark Ashton Smith, which means we have a pompous dickweed (in this case, a miserly usurer) getting punished for his transgressions (refusing a beggar) in an absurdly cosmic fashion (pursuing some runaway emeralds into the depths of the earth). “Weird” is much less creatively convoluted than Smith’s comparable “The Seven Geases” (reviewed here), but it’s still passably entertaining, and an early forerunner of D&D’s vibes. Let’s give it a C

“Men Who Walk Upon the Air” by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. (1925). Memorably strange historical fantasy, in which real life 15th century poet-rogue François Villon promises a woman he will rescue her revenant husband from a walking gibbet. The effect is somewhat spoiled for this modern reader when the rogue inevitably pressures the woman to give him more than a meal in payment, and then blames her in the aftermath. D-?

“A Child’s Dream of a Star” by Charles Dickens (1850). Treacly Victorian sentimentality, scarcely worth noticing (let alone republishing). D

“The Perfect Host” by Theodore Sturgeon (1948). Right when I’m most ready to wrap up this collection, the final story turns out to be a hefty novella written in a choppy midcentury “describe things but don’t actually say things” style. Sturgeon lays out the mystery of why a woman jumped from a hospital window, only to disappear when she hits the ground, in serial first-person reminiscent of interviews or perhaps oral history, which puts us at some remove from the story. That said, I did actually quite enjoy this. The breadth of different narrative voices was solid storytelling. We probably didn’t need every single POV Sturgeon could think of (his fourth-wall break feels particularly goofy by 21st century standards), but the variety of quotidian impressions helps build suburban reality around the self-described fantasy at its heart. C+?

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And that’s it! No sword & sorcery, barely any sci-fi, no C. L. Moore or Greye La Spina—hardly what I’d call a thorough overview of Weird Tales. Clearly, Marvin Kaye and I had widely differing tastes. I think he should have tried anthologizing good stories, rather than lesser known ones. But that’s just me.

Kind of a bummer how much of a slog this turned out to be, much like the year I read it in.

2025 read #75: Sundown in San Ojuela by M. M. Olivas.

Sundown in San Ojuela by M. M. Olivas

348 pages

Published 2024

Read from May 5 to October 6

Rating: 4 out of 5

As with Kay Chronister, author of Desert Creatures, I had the honor of publishing one of M. M. Olivas’ early short stories in my sporadic career as an indie press editor. Her “The Man Who Fed Dilophosaurs” is a standout in The Mesozoic Reader. If I had a nickel for every time I published early work from an up-and-coming genre author who would go on to write critically praised horror novels set in or around SoCal, I’d have two nickels, etc.

Sundown is an ambitious first novel, nonlinear prose-poetry layered with different perspectives. First person, second, third, flashbacks ranging from characters’ childhoods to the depredations of the conquistadors—we got a bit of everything. You never know, from one chapter to the next, what thread the story will follow. This can make for dense reading at times. (Especially when your attention span frays partway through, and you want to get back into it months later. Though that’s on me, not this book.)

In no surprise to me, Olivas’ prose is lushly sinister, making you taste and feel the desert wind as well as the hostility boiling out of racist assholes in town. Sundown pulses with magic bloody and beautiful. Hungry gods haunt the night, while ICE preys through the day. Sisters Liz and Mary are brought back to Casa Coyotl after the death of their Aunt Marisol, but San Ojuela’s secrets are deep, ancient, and full of bones; there is always more hurt, more trauma and betrayal, the further one digs. A hemisphere’s worth of injustice demanding redress.

2025 read #68: Weird Tales, October 1934 issue.

Weird Tales: A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, October 1934 issue (24:4)

Edited by Farnsworth Wright

132 pages

Published 1934

Read from September 17 to September 18

Rating: 2 out of 5

I want to write better sword & sorcery, which means I want to read a lot more of it, both contemporary and classic. C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry series is foundational to S&S. This issue of Weird Tales features the first Jirel story, as well as entries from Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Could be a fun issue!

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“The Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore. This story fucking rules, in a “throwing the horns while playing D&D in the basement” kind of way. Her castle conquered by the grinning Guillaume, Jirel escapes only to delve into the extradimensional dungeon beneath, braving a realm worse than hell in order to gain a weapon of vengeance. It is a story of a woman’s agency at a startlingly early date, but above all, this is classic weird fiction at its finest, crossing gritty Dark Ages warrior fantasy with alien world cosmic horror. By 1934 standards, this gets an A!

“The Seven Geases” by Clark Ashton Smith. First an unearthly idol, now geases and strange gods—this one issue seems to have been a major source for D&D all on its own. This is a Hyperborean tale of a cocky hunter trespassing in a sorcerer’s mountain fastness. Smith throws as much weirdness as possible at the wall; some of it even sticks. Being me, I was particularly taken with the references to dinosaur leather, extra-planar allosaurs, and the fact that the sorcerer’s familiar is an Archaeopteryx, which is just enough to add it to my list of dinosaur fiction. Maybe B-?

“Old Sledge” by Paul Ernst. After two extravagantly imaginative cosmic fantasy pieces, we’re brought back down with this ho-hum eccentric inventor story. Cantankerous old man Sledge invents a machine that enables him to see any point in the coming five hundred years. He attempts to gain the help of our narrator, a fellow-boarder who happens to be a writer, to write the history of the future. An unremarkable story. C-

“The Sleeper” by H. Bedford-Jones. Crossover in the Orientalist cinematic universe. Mystical powers of bodily control attributed to India share a facile storyline with an Egyptian sarcophagus. The best I can say for it is, it’s not as racist as something with these trappings could be expected to be in 1934? Maybe D+

“The Pistol” by S. Gordon Gurwit. Interminable ghost romance set in an Old Southern mansion, sprinkled with all the casual racism that implies. Tedious. F

A poem, “The Hill Woman” by Frances Elliott, is pretty good for its time.

The next story is part four of a seven(!) part serial, “The Trail of the Cloven Hoof” by Alrton Eadie. Rather than beginning in the middle, I decided to read the first part instead, which was published in the July 1934 issue of Weird Tales. Young new doctor Hugh Trenchard, walking on a misty night in wild Exmoor, hears gunshots and runs to help. He stumbles into what I’m supposing is a rustic Island of Doctor Moreau scenario, though one given an occult gloss appropriate to the 1930s. Purple, pulpy, and prone to tedious quips, but mildly entertaining. Rather reminiscent of old black and white movie serials, with that same geography of fresh twists rising from a sea of padding. Who knows, I might try to read the rest soon (though how are there six more installments?). Maybe C-?

Another poem: “Children of the Moon (The Moths)” by A. Leslie. It’s kind of cheesy, but amusing.

“Supper for Thirteen” by Julius Long. An eccentric host holds a macabre dinner party, himself and his twelve guests strapped into electric chairs. This has the vibe of a Weird Tales clip show, as the guests recount a variety of murder tales but fail to entertain their host, who relishes the idea of murder for murder’s sake. You’ll never guess what happens next! Yawn. D-

Another poem: “Old House” by Marvin Luter Hill. Rhyming poetry about ghastly ghosts in a house. Fully in keeping with the magazine it’s in, but reads like children’s Halloween verse now. Imagine a mid-’80s Tim Curry, paying his rent in a made-for-TV warlock costume, is reading it to you.

Another installment of a serial follows: part two of three of Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black Circle.” We turn instead to the September 1934 issue to read part one. Conan gets tangled in court politics and sorcerous betrayals at the foot of the “Himelian” mountains. The setting is a jumble of vaguely subcontinental names and Orientalist vibes, but the first installment, at any rate, lacks the grotesque full-bore racism I’ve come to expect from Howard. A solid start; I certainly want to read the rest at some point. B-

“At the Bend of the Trail” by Manly Wade Wellman. Botanical horror besets white explorers in generic Africa. Quite predictably racist in a colonial cliché sort of way; not much else to it. F

“The White Prince” by Ronal Kayser. Set in the Great War, apparently based on (credulous) contemporary reports. Serbs hurl ethnic and religious invective at Turks occupying a castle on the high ground, until an ethereal folk hero appears to lead the charge. Nationalist drivel, and not well-written. F

“Fioraccio” by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani (1886). A translation of an Italian tale of a fencer of stolen goods who lives a blasphemous life and dies, but won’t stay buried. I think I’m impatient to finish this issue; this didn’t charm me. F+

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And that’s it for another issue of Weird Tales! It started out strong, only to peter out at the end. Still, surprisingly solid overall.

2025 read #66: Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley.

Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley

319 pages

Published 2020

Read from September 13 to September 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Another installment of the British Library Tales of the Weird anthology series, this one naturally centers stories set in London. Dearnley’s introduction is especially interesting, evoking the danger and weirdness of befogged London, a shifting terrain of social anxieties amid tumultuous change. Her story introductions also provide vital context to the authors and the topics they addressed.

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“The Telegram” by Violet Hunt (1911). This story was a bit of a speed bump right at the start of the anthology. I went into it expecting a specific vibe from these Tales of the Weird collections, which this literary character study of a woman who just wants to enjoy her own life and flirt with men without settling for any of them did not meet. It’s a good story, a fascinating document from a leading writer of the New Woman era, and its eventual ghostly turn plays well with the story’s examination of women’s autonomy. But I had to get into the right headspace for it, and the story itself sure takes its time. B-

“In the Séance Room” by Lettice Galbraith (1893). Sociopathic men and patriarchy are the horrors of this piece, which portrays both with a frankness all too rare even today. More so now than ever, I understand the fantasy of supernatural justice depicted here. Heavy-handed and melodramatic as fiction of this era often was, it still works. Kinda. C+

“The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen (1941). Wartime retelling of the namesake ballad, brief but atmospheric. C+

“The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth” by Rhoda Broughton (1868). Suspiciously cheap apartments in Mayfair lead to supernatural death. Mildly entertaining, ends rather abruptly. C+

“War,” an extract from London in My Time by Thomas Burke (1934). Fascinating essay on London’s attitudes during the Great War. It’s an eccentric choice for an anthology of London Weird, with the surreality of zeppelin raids and dimmed streetlights supplying the weird, but it’s not entirely misplaced.

“Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf (1927). Another creative non-fiction piece, a sensorium of walking and daydreaming through interwar streets, rather reminiscent of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem. Dreamlike and mostly enjoyable. Like Mirrlees, however, Woolf can’t resist throwing in some riff on marginalized populations, here making a spectacle of the disabled segment of society for several paragraphs. 

“Pugilist vs. Poet,” an extract from A Long Way from Home by Claude McKay (1937). My first exposure to McKay’s writing, a too-brief extract on his experiences in London in 1919. Scintillating. I want more!

“N” by Arthur Machen (1936). I read and reviewed this story in the British Library’s Weird Woods anthology. There I wrote: “Machen’s primary interest here appears to be the art of reproducing rambly conversations between older men. All of which is a roundabout path to not much in particular. Only the last page hints at the story this could have been, had Machen been inclined to tell it instead of what we got.”

“The Lodger” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1911). An early novelette treatment of what, a couple years later, this author would turn into the very first novel about Jack the Ripper. Working-class protagonist Mrs. Bunting, onetime foundling and former maid, wants to avoid the obvious conclusions after her lucrative new lodger proves suspicious. The story is less of a murder mystery and more of a complex psychological study in how financial insecurity leads to complicity. B

“My Girl and the City” by Sam Selvon (1957). An absolutely stunning mood piece about the fluctuating city. Again, not sure why it’s in a Tales of the Weird collection, but it’s lovely. A

“The Mystery of the Semi-Detached” by Edith Nesbit (1893?). Quite brief but well-written mood piece of suburban unease. B-?

“The Old House in Vauxhall Walk” by Charlotte Riddell (1882). A disinherited young gentleman, kicked out by his father that morning, shelters for the night in the antique grandeur of a Vauxhall house lately turned into a rental. The hauntings of the house pervade his dreams, and he decides to stay and find the late miser’s treasure. Interesting mainly as a document of how useless the upper classes are without working folk to take care of them. C+

“The Chippendale Mirror” by E. F. Benson (1915). A more conventional eerie tale, in which a secondhand mirror discloses glimpses of the murder it witnessed. Perfectly adequate. C

“Spring-Heeled Jack” by Anonymous (1884). Straightforward write-up of the titular urban legend, detailing alleged exploits then fifty years in the past.

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And that’s it for London Fog! A major departure from other Tales of the Weird volumes, which all tended to feature tales of the, well, weird. Not much eeriness to speak of, but a good collection all the same, if you ignore its title and the vibe of the rest of the series.