Dr. Death is the title of the latest fantasy magazine to appear on the newsstands. It features a weird-scientific novel each month written by "Zorro," which is the pseudonym for Harold Ward. Rounding out the rest of the issue are three or four thrillers with a pseudo-scientific or weird background.... Donald Wandrei's latest Ivy Frost novelette, "They Could Not Kill Him," appears currently in Clues.... The April cover of Weird Tales will illustrate a scene in A. W. Bernal's "The Man Who was Two Men," and deals with an amazing development in radio after television.... Bernal, by the way, is a student in the University of California, and sold his first yarn, "The Man Who Played with Time," which appeared in March, 1932 WT at the early age of 15.
Farnsworth Wright brings up an interesting point regarding titles of stories. Hardly a month goes by that does not bring at least one story titled "The House of Fear," another entitled "The House of Living Death," and another entitled "Hands of Death." The commonest title on manuscripts submitted is "Retribution," but stories with the word "House" in the title are almost as frequent. Of course, these titles are changed if the story is accepted, to avoid repeating the same title that has been used in the magazine before. "The House of the Living Dead," by Harold Ward, appeared in WT for March, 1932. Quinn's cover design story for the February, 1935 issue had the same title, in manuscript, but the title was changed to "The Web of Living Death." Harold Ward's cover design story for the March issue this year was originally titled "Hands of Death," but this was too similar to Quinn's tale title, "Hands of the Dead" in the current January issue, so the title of Ward's story was changed to "Clutching Hands of Death."
SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
by H. P. Lovecraft
Part Sixteen
(copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook)
VIII. The Weird Tradition in America
The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognized as fruitful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer Moore has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged, the vast and gloomy virgin forest in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival—all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare.
Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school—the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical—was represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters—the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theater of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen, half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primary object with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach.