Justin Howe's Blog, page 13

THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 08: THE GRAY KILLER

Have you ever spent a night in a hospital?

Confined to your bed with nothing but that empty quiet to listen to and the faint repetitive sound of some life-assisting machine? And there in that quiet somewhere you hear someone walking, their soles scratching slightly across the tiles as they come closer to your door.

That’s not a doctor.

It’s …

It’s your boi CC Senf with the girlies again!

“The Gray Killer” by Everil Worrell (November 1929)

Hey! Look at that. The first of the st...

THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 07: MOONAGE JUNK DREAM

Now comes the good trash.

Last week’s Everil Worrell story was a bit of a bust, but this week’s story (and next week’s) has her back playing to her lurid, morbid best. They are exactly the sort of stories I imagine when I think of weird pulp fiction: pure id mixed with feverish psychological drama all blended to a frothy mess that is both inviting and intoxicating. Does it need to make sense? No. All it needs to do is get under your skin and make you squirm. This week’s story is one of th...

THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 06: THE INEVITABLE RUCKUS

Art by C.C. Senf

Welcome!

Time for another installment of The Women of Weird Tales. This week’s story is “Vulture Crag” by Everill Worrell. It’s another one that brings to mind old Universal horror films*. It’s also a call back to our first story, Greye La Spina’s “The Remorse of Professor Panebianco” because we get another foreign scientist and his fascinating soul-juicer.

“Vulture Crag” by Everill Worrell (August 1928)

Let me start by saying this story is a mess. It’s full of expos...

THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 05: “STREAMING SUNLIGHT, POLLUTED AND SOILED”

Art by CC Senf

This week’s story, “The Curse of a Song” by Eli Colter, is an American twist on the English ghost story that also has a bit of Western in it and a bit of the psychic detective in it. Overall, it works. Mostly. There’s a bit of a frame narrative that’s supposed to give a twist at the end but doesn’t; that might be the biggest misstep in it.

The Curse of a Song by Eli Colter (March 1928)

Armitage and Morgenthaler are two learned gentlemen sitting around having a smoke. Armi...

THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 04: “A LURID PHOSPHORENCE OF THEIR OWN”

Art by Hugh Rankin

The next few posts should be fun. We are almost at a bunch of Everil Worrell stories, and as we saw in “Leonora”, she is great for delivering that weirdly modern creepy sensationalism. This week’s story is no exception.

The Canal by Everil Worrell (December 1927)

Our narrator is a joe-everyman sort of guy, a young and single office worker, prone to driving aimlessly around his already starting to decay industrial city. He feels vague and alienated, beset by a mood of ...

THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 03: “BRING OUT YOUR DEAD.”

Art by C.C. Senf

While reading The Women of Weird Tales I noticed a few tendencies among the selected stories. One was the morbidly sensational story. The second was the old school style that harks back to a tradition of English ghost stories. The third were child vampires. And the last I don’t know what to call except “ideas Phillip K. Dick stole”.

This week’s story is very much the second classic ghost story sort.

“The Dead-Wagon” by Greye La Spina (September 1927)

It’s a tale as ...

THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 02: VERY MORBID, BUT ALSO KIND OF HORNY

Art Credit: CB Petrie, Jr.

Ray Bradbury in his Zen in the Art of Writing mentions his journey as a writer, and how he needed to write away from the imitation Poe “locked in a tomb with a dead body” style stories of his youth. Once he did that, he believed he’d begun to mature as a writer. Many years later Jessa Crispin in her introduction to Mary MacLane’s 1902 teenage memoir I Await the Devil’s Coming talks about how boys get the benefit of boundless desire and can dream lives of rage, passi...

THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 01: “ASSERVATED THE DOCTOR, MUSINGLY”

And welcome!

Here we are in the first installment of this year’s book club. A quick note: there will be spoilers throughout the whole series. On the other hand, maybe that’s why you’re here. You want me to read the book, so you don’t have to. That’s fair.

The first book we’ll be looking at this year is The Women of Weird Tales: Stories by Everil Worrell, Eli Colter, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Greye La Spina with an introduction by Melanie Anderson. It is the second book in Valancour...

BWBC 39: And Now the End is Near

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And lo, the deed has been done. The beast vanquished. The dragon slain. The old anthology read. I skipped last week, because *cough*mutter*mumble* but finished the book this week as planned. So here we are, the last three stories.

An Invitation to the Hunt by George Hitchcock

The problem with this story is that its not Shirley Jacksons The Lottery. Its an okay story, but it reminds you enough of the Jackson story that you realize her absence from the collection is one of the worst marks...

BWBC 38: Panic! At the Villa

Italian landscape by Johann Wilhelm

This week’s story is an example of a skilled writer writing an unlikable character well. That the character is as unlikable as he is may or may not have been Forster’s intention. After all, my patience for Upper Class British men hectoring adolescent boys to make men out of them so they might continue to shoulder Empire and all that is not really what it once was.

“The Story of a Panic” by EM Forster

Our narrator is a very proper British gentleman on ...