I promise to write an article about that Great High God among fantasy authors, M. P. Shiel; much of the best science-fantasy, from a literary standpoint, has been written by him. Anyway, when you read "The Purple Cloud," "Dr. Krasinski's Secret," "This Above All," or any of the other two score novels penned by him, such little matters as scientific accuracy never enter your head (which does not by any means imply that his science is not correct to the N'th degree). A hypnotist with words is M. P. Shiel.

And he is—and has been—almost as much a Heaven-born genius as some of the characters he weaves through the pages of his novels. He is fluent with a half-dozen languages, is literally a master of all sciences, writes in a blinding, complicated style no one else on Earth could imitate—much less create!—and has written as many books as Haggard, Burroughs, and a few others combined. At 12 he wrote a novel; at 13, printed a newspaper; and at 15, wrote novels for serialization in large public papers.

Lester Anderson, fantastiac extra-ordinary of Hayward, California, is fortunate enough to count himself a very good friend and correspondent of the lexicographical (hah!) Clark Ashton Smith.

Speaking of whom: Smith and H. P. Lovecraft are great friends, by correspondence. Lovecraft refers to C.A.S. as "My good old friend and correspondent, Klarkash-Ton, Hierophant of Atlantis and High-Priest of Tsathoggua."

Again Bram Stoker! His latest to chance my way is "The Jewel of Seven Stars." With every reading of this English weird-tale master, I am seized in profound melancholia, despairing the fact that he did not live another twenty years, to pen another score novels. Not content with being a master of superb plot (involved plot too!) Stoker went to exquisite pains to instill that ultra-weird and chilling sense of the unreal so characteristic of his work.

In "Jewel of the Seven Stars," he spins a yarn of Egyptian queens who wield a strange and powerful influence over the lives of present-day people; of mummified cats walking again and striking in the dark, vampire-like; of hypnotic spells and influences; of developments so utterly mystifying and gripping, the reader cannot put the book down after once opening it. And Bram Stoker's novels are not the abbreviated two-hundred page book so much in evidence today; they are voluminous; though not, I might mention, as "infinite" as "Anthony Adverse."

Here is something—not strictly fantasy, but certainly of interest to all who make fantasy a hobby—which I have deemed worthy of passing on: about twenty years ago there lived in Honolulu, in the much-sung Hawaiian Islands, a man, W. D. Westervelt by name, who spent all his spare time in the collecting of legends and myths about volcanoes. Perhaps the best result of his efforts was a little book called "Legends of Hawaiian Volcanoes," small but crammed to the fly-leaves with fascinating historical, scientific, and mythological data. Others had the titles of "Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods," "Legends of Old Honolulu," "Legends of Maui," etc. No, not true fantasy, but they read like first-rate weird stories. Incidentally, this is a field for stories practically untouched; tales built around Hawaiian and other old native legends have been scarce.