What’s So Weird About Weird Tales?

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A pulp magazine of horror and the supernatural, Weird Tales has had an on-again, off-again publication history that spans from 1923 to the present. In its tumultuous career, the magazine has published many authors whose names have subsequently earned fame in a variety of fiction genres.

Weird Tales cover art by Hannes Bok.

Among the names that one can drop in relation to Weird Tales are those of Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Theodore Sturgeon, and Tennessee Williams. (Yes, the Tennessee Williams.)

During its history, the magazine also has provided opportunities for a number of illustrators to showcase their artwork, both on its covers and within its pages. Included among their number are Margaret Brundage, Virgil Finlay, and Hannes Bok.

Weird Tales cover art by Margaret Brundage.

A selection of Weird Tales’ current stories includes Jay Lake’s “Thomas Edison and His Telegraphic Harpoon” (“The steam ram City of Hoboken moved like a drunken bear in all weathers, pistons groaning with the pain of metal as the great machine walked the prairies”); Karen Heuler’s “Landscape, With Fish” (“He never actually saw the fish take off — he always caught them flying, instead — but he had to assume they did a kind of leap first, so he put up a higher fence”); Mikal Trimm and Marcie Lynn Tentchoff‘s “In the Company of Women” (“Seamus stared down into the grave, shaking from more than just the frost-tinged air. She’d been pretty once, true, but not now, surely not now”); and Lisa Mantchev’s “Six Scents” (“Men find it hard to fall in love with a dead girl. They tell her it’s a turn-off that they take her hand at the movies and a finger lands in the popcorn”).

Weird Tales cover art by Virgil Finlay.

The genre’s writers, it seems, are increasingly women, and the stories’ tone has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Weird Tales’ stories have stopped taking their own genre seriously, a fact which marks the passing of a once-great source of superior pulp fiction of the horror kind. Today, unfortunately, that’s about all that’s weird about Weird Tales.