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Viking Adventure
Vikings have captured our imaginations in a way that no other people in history have done. Maybe we have ancestral memories of their falling upon us without warning, taking what they wanted and burning...
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C. Hall Thompson (1923-1991)
Né Charles John ThompsonAuthorBorn March 17, 1923, Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaDied February 11, 1991, presumably in PennsylvaniaC. Hall Thompson's name came up the other day while I was writing about...
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Who Was Arthur Pendragon?
The other day I wrote about C. Hall Thompson, who contributed Lovecraftian pastiches to Weird Tales in the 1940s. I also wrote that there is at least one person who speculates that Thompson was the man...
View ArticleThe Thompson-Pendragon Controversy-Part One
The story so far:Charles John Thompson (1923-1991), who published under the pen name C. Hall Thompson, contributed four stories to Weird Tales in 1946-1948. Despite his small output in the field of...
View ArticleThe Thompson-Pendragon Controversy-Part Two
According to Robert Weinberg and his co-editors (or Mr. Weinberg alone), C. Hall Thompson's stories in Weird Tales were among the first Cthulhu stories "written by an author who was not personally...
View ArticleThe Thompson-Pendragon Controversy-Part Three
Of C. Hall Thompson's four stories for Weird Tales, three are set in the Northeast and two of those in New Jersey. The main action in all four stories takes place in a remote and lonely house, a...
View ArticleThe Thompson-Pendragon Controversy-Part Four
C. Hall Thompson's four stories for Weird Tales:"Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Nov. 1946) is novelette-length and told in the first person by the character James Arkwright, a man convicted of murder and...
View ArticleThe Thompson-Pendragon Controversy-Part Five
Arthur Pendragon's two stories in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination:"The Dunstable Horror" (Apr. 1964) is a long short story told in the first person by a character called Thomas Grail, a British...
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The Thompson-Pendragon Controversy-Conclusion
H.P. Lovecraft was by all accounts generous. In a final act of generosity, he gave his work to all of us by allowing it to lapse into the public domain. He didn't intend for that to happen, I guess,...
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The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales by John Locke (2018)
This month, March 2019, marks the 96th anniversary of the publication of the very first issue of "The Unique Magazine," Weird Tales. That first issue was big: 196 pages and twenty-six stories all...
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Brundage and Ingres
No, those are not emotional states. ("I take Brundage at your remark!" said Margaret. "I am in turn Ingres at you!" replied the Frenchman.) They are the names of artists. Margaret Brundage (1900-1976)...
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Fires Before Easter
For the second time in less than a year, a great work of culture, art, and history has burned. First it was the the National Museum of Brazil in September of last year. This time, of course, it was the...
View ArticleAnd Explosions on Easter
Holy Week began with fires atop the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris and ended with terror and murder in Sri Lanka. Predictably and almost on cue, people on the leftist/socialist/statist end of the...
View ArticleEaster Stories
The holiday is past us. Now people all over the world will have to wait until next year to worship Easter again. Hopefully their holy colored eggs and sacred chocolate bunnies will last for a while. In...
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Miscellany No. 1
Here is an item from "The Bizarre Mystery of M.K. Jessup and the Allende Letters" by Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour in Flying Saucers Have Arrived!, edited by Jay David and published in 1970:On June...
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Miscellany No. 2
Here is a quote from The Lurker at the Threshold (Ballantine Books, 1971, 1976), which August Derleth wrote mostly on his own but tried to pass off as a collaboration with his master, the recently...
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Speaking of Behind the Flying Saucers by Frank Scully, there is mention of a teller of weird tales in that book. I have the Popular Library paperback edition of 1951, and there she is, on page 56. In a...
View ArticleMiscellany No. 4
In his recent book The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, 1923-1924, author John Locke reprinted Farnsworth Wright's poem "Self-Portrait," from Fantasy Magazine, April 1935. Wright...
View ArticleMiscellany No. 5
Also in The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, 1923-1924, author John Locke reprinted an essay called "Writing the Fantastic Story" by Otis Adelbert Kline, originally in The Writer...
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Problems in Science Fiction-No. 1
A long time ago, I wrote about Fritz Leiber, Jr., and the problem of the weird tale. The problem was and is this: How do we write convincingly about the supernatural, the rural, and the irrational in a...
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