by Matt Cardin
While these true-felt horror stories are arguably his finest productions, Wandrei’s best science fiction, like that of his friend Smith, is imbued with strong elements of horror as well. An exceptional set of otherwise widely different stories—“Giant-Plasm” (1939), “The Crystal Bullet” (1941), “Something from Above” (1930), and “The Monster from Nowhere” (1935)—finds characters terrified or destroyed by mere chance encounters with alien beings. The nightmarish intrusions here come not from the supernatural, but the abyss of space. One of Wandrei’s last works is a fine novel of cosmic terror, The Web of Easter Island (1948), which has been out of print for more than fifty years, though an early draft (Dead Titans, Awaken!) has recently been made available.
Beyond prose, the young Wandrei was an acolyte of Smith and George Sterling, and produced Dark Romantic and fantastically themed poems of considerable quality. As can be said of much of Wandrei’s work: these are difficult to find today, but are worth the search.
Steve Behrends
See also: Arkham House; Derleth, August; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Behrends, Steve. 1988. “Something from Above: The Imaginative Fiction of Donald Wandrei.” Studies in Weird Fiction 3 (Fall): 22–34.
Klein, T. E. D. 2009. “Donald Wandrei: A Haunted House.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 541–543. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press. Originally published in Studies in Weird Fiction 6: 35–36 (Fall 1988).
Ruber, Peter. 2000. “Donald Wandrei.” In Arkham’s Masters of Horror, edited by Peter Ruber, 64–68. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.
Schwartz, Julius. 2009. “Donald Wandrei.” In Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle, edited by John Pelan and Jerard Walters, 534–540. Lake Wood, CO: Centipede Press.
Tierney, Richard L. 1989. “Introduction: Donald A. Wandrei.” In Colossus: The Collected Fiction of Donald A. Wandrei, ix–xxix. Minneapolis: Fedogan & Bremer.
WEIRD TALES
Weird Tales was an American pulp fiction magazine published between 1923 and 1954 that, in its initial run of 279 issues, featured the work of most significant writers of horror and fantasy fiction in America in the first half of the twentieth century. Its impact on the shape and direction taken by modern weird fiction is incalculable.
Weird Tales debuted in March 1923 under the editorship of Edwin Baird, a fiction writer who also edited its sister magazine, Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories. Although Weird Tales was subtitled “The Unique Magazine,” the thirteen issues that Baird edited through the mid-1924 issue were full of mostly run-of-the-mill neo-Gothic potboiler stories. Baird published little fiction of note, but under his editorship he introduced readers to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Seabury Quinn, all of whom became distinguished contributors during the magazine’s golden age.
Having failed to find a supportive readership—even after enlisting the services of celebrity magician Harry Houdini, who put his name on several ghost-written stories published in the magazine in early 1924—Weird Tales went on hiatus after the May/June/July 1924 issue. It resumed publication with the November 1924 issue with a new editor, former contributor and first reader Farnsworth Wright. Unlike Baird, Wright was enthusiastic about weird fiction, and the magazine flourished artistically, if not financially, under his stewardship. The 1930s were the magazine’s greatest years as Wright published stories that attested to the diversity and variety of the weird tale as it had evolved in Weird Tales: Clark Ashton Smith’s imaginary world fantasies, Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery tales of Conan the Conqueror, Henry S. Whitehead’s tales of occult marvels in the West Indies, August Derleth’s traditional ghost stories, Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s Southern Gothic tales, Seabury Quinn’s psychic detective series featuring Jules de Grandin, Edmond Hamilton and C. L. Moore’s scientific fantasies, and stories by H. P. Lovecraft that would later be acknowledged as the foundation for the shared fictional universe known today as the Cthulhu Mythos. Contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos also helped to launch the careers of Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner, who would earn distinction for work independent of Lovecraft’s influence. It was during these years that Weird Tales also enlisted the services of artists whose names would become synonymous with that of the magazine: Margaret Brundage, who was known for her cover images of scantily clad, sexually alluring women, and Virgil Finlay, whose black-and-white interior art had a distinctive photorealistic character.
Weird Tales was sold in late 1938 and its offices moved from Chicago to New York. Wright continued to edit the magazine through the March 1940 issue, after which he was replaced by Dorothy McIlwraith, who also edited the new publisher’s general fiction magazine Short Stories. Nearly a year before Wright’s departure the magazine had shifted from monthly to bi-monthly publication as a cost-saving measure. Although the character of Weird Tales changed during the McIlwraith years, the magazine continued to feature work from a lineup of stalwart contributors including Bloch, Derleth (under his own name and his Stephen Grendon pseudonym), and Quinn. Manly Wade Wellman became a regular contributor with his tales of supernatural investigator John Thunstone, as did Ray Bradbury with his modern American Gothic stories. Other contributors of note included Fritz Leiber, Joseph Payne Brennan, Harold Lawlor, and Alison V. Harding. Many stories first published in Weird Tales by these authors would be collected in books published by Arkham House, a publishing company started in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei with whom the magazine developed a close relationship in the 1940s and 1950s. Faced with the same financial pressures and competition from paperbacks and comic books that killed off other pulp magazines, Weird Tales shrank to digest size with the September 1953 issue and ceased publication after the September 1954 issue.
Weird Tales has been revived several times since its original run: for four issues edited by Sam Moskowitz between 1973 and 1974, and for four mass-market paperback anthologies edited by Lin Carter between 1981 and 1983. The two issues edited by Gordon M. D. Garb between 1984 and 1985 were notable for publishing mostly new stories rather than reprints, a trend that continued with subsequent revivals. Between 1988 and 2016, Weird Tales published seventy-two issues under a variety of editors, including four issues published between 1994 and 1996 when the magazine’s name briefly changed to Worlds of Fantasy & Horror.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Arkham House; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Brennan, Joseph Payne; Derleth, August; Howard, Robert E.; Kuttner, Henry; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Pulp Horror; Quinn, Seabury; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wellman, Manly Wade; Whitehead, Henry S.
Further Reading
Everett, Justin, and Jeffrey H. Shanks. 2015. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Weinberg, Robert. 1999. The Weird Tales Story. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.
WELLMAN, MANLY WADE (1903–1986)
Manly Wade Wellman was an American writer who is best remembered today for his supernatural fiction, especially for his stories of John the Balladeer, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s and were collected in the Arkham House volume Who Fears the Devil? (1963).
Wellman was born to missionary parents in Portuguese East Africa (now Angola), where he lived with native children and spoke their language before he spoke English. His family returned to the United States, where he was educated in Washington, D.C., Salt Lake City, and Wichita, Kansas. In the 1920s he became friends with a noted folklorist and took many trips through the Ozark Mountains. Later, after a time in New York, Wellman settled with his own family in North Carolina. Culturally, Wellman was a Southerner and always identified himself as such.
He began writing for the pulps in his mid-twenties, with his first story appearing in Thrilling Tales in 1927. Soon he was contributing to Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder, Startling Stories, and We
ird Tales. He wrote one genuinely distinguished science fiction novel, Twice in Time, published in Startling Stories in 1940 and reprinted many times since, about a time-traveler who becomes the figure known to history as Leonardo Da Vinci. Wellman also contributed one novel in the Captain Future space-opera series, then moved on to comic books. He also wrote nonfiction and juvenile fiction about the South and its Civil War heroes.
His character John the Balladeer is a wandering singer who travels the backwoods of Appalachia, encountering folkloric spooks, many of which are the subjects of the songs that John sings. The lyrics quoted in the stories are more often than not Wellman’s own and are excellent examples of what folklore scholars call “fakelore,” that is, items or motifs that sound absolutely authentic but are not. In 2004 singer Joe Bethancourt released an album of the songs of John the Balladeer, with Wellman’s lyrics occasionally expanded by Bethancourt and set to traditional melodies.
Wellman’s other series characters, notably Judge Pursuivant and John Thunstone, whose adventures appeared in Weird Tales in the 1930s and 1940s, also regularly confront supernatural menaces. Pursuivant is retired, but, vastly learned in both legal and occult lore, he sallies forth from his home in West Virginia to do battle with evil. John Thunstone is a playboy Manhattanite who carries a sword cane, but he, too, is learned in the occult and adept at disposing of demonic menaces. Thunstone in particular is an idealization of Wellman himself, a huge, burly man with a moustache, a man of action who is also learned, sophisticated, and a proper gentleman. (Wellman was himself a large, muscular man with a moustache, educated, gracious, etc.)
The majority of the lore in the Wellman stories is by no means made up. Indeed, his greatest strength is the authenticity of the settings he depicts, drawn from those Ozark trips in his youth and from his own long residence in the North Carolina mountains. He was, like Stephen Vincent Benet, one of the genuinely American fantasy writers, drawing on uniquely American motifs and subject matter. Nevertheless, he does invent, sometimes very persuasively, most strikingly in the Thunstone series with the legend of the Shonokins, a dispossessed race that preceded the American Indians, perhaps descended from Neanderthals. The Shonokins are the ancient enemies of the rest of mankind, who work sinister magic but have strange limitations and seek to regain mastery of the Earth. As these stories appeared in Weird Tales at about the same time as Richard Shaver’s “Shaver Mystery” stories (which pretended to be based on fact, also involving sinister ancient races), some readers who were duped by Shaver also began to wonder if the Shonokins might also be real.
After a hiatus in the 1960s, Wellman returned to the fantasy field to much acclaim in the 1970s. He wrote five novels about John the Balladeer (this remained Wellman’s preferred term, despite the publisher’s coinage of “Silver John”). There were also three John Thunstone novels. An expanded volume, John the Balladeer, containing additional stories written later in Wellman’s career, appeared in 1988. Several of his stories have been adapted for television, most notably “The Valley Was Still” as “Still Valley” on The Twilight Zone in 1961. Who Fears the Devil? was filmed badly with the insulting title of The Legend of Hillbilly John in 1972. Wellman despised the film.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Arkham House; Dark Fantasy; Weird Tales.
Further Reading
Elliot, Jeffrey M. 1982. “Manly Wade Wellman: Better Things Waiting” (interview). In Fantasy Voices: Interviews with American Fantasy Writers, edited by Jeffrey M. Elliot, 5–18. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
Jones, Jeremy L. C. 2014. “Dark Hearts & Brilliant Patches of Honor: A Tribute to Manly Wade Wellman.” Clarkesworld 89 (February). http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wellman_interview.
Meyers, Walter E. 1985. “Manly Wade Wellman.” In Supernatural Fiction Writers, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 947–954. New York: Scribner’s.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “Manly Wade Wellman” (interview). In Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of the Supernatural, 93–101. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
WELLS, H. G. (1866–1946)
Herbert George Wells was a prolific British author and social thinker. Through his imaginative blend of science and speculation, Wells laid the foundations for twentieth-century science fiction and horror literature. One of the most popular writers of his day, Wells published dozens of books and short stories, beginning with his early science fiction in the late nineteenth century. In later life he devoted himself more frequently to realist novels and political tracts, writing new work until his death in 1946.
Wells was born to a lower-middle-class family in Kent. Originally a draper’s apprentice, the academically gifted Wells eventually succeeded in establishing a teaching career. After publishing short newspaper pieces, Wells produced a series of “scientific romances,” beginning with The Time Machine in 1896. These imaginative fictions, heavily informed by contemporary scientific discoveries, launched his literary fame.
Most frequently in his fiction and commentary, Wells attacked the complacency of polite society, seeking to fire the imagination of his readers with novel imagery and perspectives. As a futurist, Wells called up visions of technologically advanced civilizations, often under the control of powerful political oligarchies (When the Sleeper Wakes, 1899), as well as utopian states built upon rational lines (A Modern Utopia, 1905; The Shape of Things to Come, 1933). Most often, these visions of the future emphasize the alienating and violent consequences of technological progress, confronting everyday life with strangely transformed human beings (as in 1897’s The Invisible Man and the chemically produced giants of 1904’s The Food of the Gods), or the ravages of technological warfare. Wells is often credited as the source for such concepts as the time machine, the tank (“The Land Ironclads,” 1903), and the atomic bomb (The World Set Free, 1914).
From his training in biology, Wells also liberally applied concepts from natural history to his thought, most notably the pressures of evolution on humans and civilization (such as the splitting of humankind into two species in The Time Machine, or the Martian invaders of 1898’s The War of the Worlds, evolved into ambulatory brains). Wells repeatedly emphasized the startling commonalities between human beings and the animal world, most strongly in 1896’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Wells’s influence since his death in London in 1946 has been significant and wide-reaching. His works are continually adapted and retold, owing to the continued relevance of the ethical and practical problems of technology and human identity that he proposed.
Miles Link
See also: The Invisible Man; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Mad Scientist; The Night Land.
Further Reading
Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber.
Hillegas, Mark. 1967. The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wells, Herbert George. 1934. Experiment in Autobiography. London: Victor Gollancz.
West, Anthony. 1984. H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. New York: Random House.
WELTY, EUDORA (1909–2001)
In her ninety-two years, Eudora Alice Welty became a canonical American literary figure, who was also associated with the Southern Gothic genre. Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909 and died there on July 23, 2001. Southern settings constructed from both nostalgic dreams and twisted nightmares are a common backdrop for her fiction. She was an author who experimented with and had a complex relationship to genre fiction in its many forms. Some scholars, such as Mitch Frye, see traces of “Southern Fantastic” in Welty’s style. Frye defines this categorization as a “mutant form that borrows provocatively from the speculative fiction genres of dystopia, fantasy, science fiction, and the weird tale” (Frye 2013, 75–76). Indeed, her special brand of domestic horror lapses into dark fantasy and the weird.
Welty is generally considered proximal to the horror genre: an import
ant author who chose to “dabble in the supernatural and the psychotic” (Fonseca and Pulliam 1999, 24). Yet she had an understanding of and appreciation for horror fiction. As Suzanne Marrs has suggested, Welty’s prose can be humorous and simultaneously “hauntingly enigmatic” (Marrs 2005, ix). Welty’s narratives expose the deeply insightful within the everyday, through “the comic horror of the small town” (Marrs 2005, ix) or a “tortured interior monologue” (Marrs 2005, x). At times, as in “The Wanderers” (1949), her grotesque reflections juxtapose the horrors of life and love, always with a genteel, perceptive, and elusive lilt, even when decapitation is involved.
Welty produced a substantial corpus of literature during her lifetime, from her early short stories, such as “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Magic” (both published in 1936), to her later nonfiction, such as One Writer’s Beginning (1984). Her major creative works include two novels, four collections, and four novellas.
Of Welty’s vast literary output, critics such as David Pringle suggest that The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943) contains the best examples of her horror fiction. Darker elements run through “The Wide Net” that connect Welty’s allusions to the rape and murder of a pregnant woman to a still more grim tradition of horror tales. “A Still Moment” conveys, in the narrated perception of one of its characters, “horror in its purity and clarity” (Welty 1998, 238), punctuated by an ephemeral surrealist vision that reinforces her dark aesthetic. She plays with notions of time, distorting them to evoke suspense, dread, or terror. The Wide Net and Other Stories initially divided critics. At the time, some reviewers concluded that the collection was filled with impropriety, while others argued that Welty had developed “her vision of horror to the point of nightmare” by examining “the clear day-to-day horror of actual life” and “the horror of dreams” (Trilling 1943, 386–387). Joyce Carol Oates sees strong horror themes in Welty’s later works. She notes that Welty’s short story “The Demonstrators” (1966), with its “unfocused horror” and depiction of racial tensions, “is horrible” and that “the grotesque has been assimilated deftly into the ordinary, the natural” (Oates 1969, 57).
