Imaginary Worlds - 100 Years of Weird Tales

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

When the March 1923 issue of Weird Tales hit newsstands, many people didn’t know what to make of this new magazine. But 100 years later, Weird Tales has had a huge influence on modern day sci-fi, fantasy and horror. I talk with authors John Locke and Will Murray, former Weird Tales editor Darrell Schweitzer, current Weird Tales editor Jonathan Maberry, and art collector Steve Korshak about how a scrappy publication often on the verge of bankruptcy inspired a cultural revolution.  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp and ExpressVPN. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here or email us at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Imagine this. It's 1923. Winter is winding down. You're on your way home from work, or maybe you're out doing errands. You stop by your local newsstand. You always read the major magazines, Collier's, Harper's. There's a new one called Time Magazine that's supposed to be good. And pulp magazines have something for everybody. A western, a detective story, an adventure tale,

a romance. You can pass them around the whole family. Then you notice a pulp magazine you've never seen before. Weird Tales. The story on the cover is called Ooze. The artwork shows a woman and a man fighting for their lives against a giant creature. And you're thinking, where did this come from? A hundred years later, Weird Tales is not a household name. A lot of people didn't buy that first issue, March 1923. But so many different fantasy subgenres were born in the pages of Weird Tales. How did a scrappy publication that was often on the verge of going under spark a cultural revolution? I've done episodes about artists and writers whose careers began in Weird Tales, but I haven't told the story of the magazine itself. Now, as I mentioned, pulp magazines used to have a variety of stories. Around this time, publishers started experimenting with pulps

dedicated to a single genre, like just detective stories or just westerns. They were selling well. So the publishers J.C. Henneberger and J.M. Lansinger took a chance on a magazine dedicated to spooky stories about the supernatural and the occult. John Locke wrote a book about Weird Tales, and he says this was a risky move. Horror, which didn't even exist as a genre name then, horror was considered newsstand poison by the commercial magazine editors. And the people knew

about horror, but in a very 19th century sense, the novels Frankenstein and Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Edgar Allan Poe stories, and so forth. By the 1920s, those stories were considered old-fashioned. They were full of gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages. The publisher, J.C. Hennenberger, wanted to update those spooky stories to the age of telephones, electricity, and automobiles. Will Murray is a writer and a historian of pulp magazines, and he says Henneberger was not the only person with this idea. All the writers of his acquaintance said we would love to be able to write stories that are outside of our typical styles and genres, but the market is thin. Writers' trunks were full of rejected manuscripts that were perfectly fine for that genre, just not suitable for the all-fiction

magazines, at least not in a large quantity. Also, they thought the magazine would do well because spiritualism was huge at this time. The country had just come out of a pandemic and a war that took the lives of millions of people. There was a yearning to connect with the other side. So they launched the magazine in 1923. And it flopped. They lost money from the get-go. Again, John Locke. So they continually experimented with it over the first year and nothing helped. And then the magazine kind of imploded around the anniversary issue. And then there was a five-month hiatus with a lot of bickering behind the scenes. They also had trouble attracting mainstream advertisers.

To make up for the lack of ads, they had to price the magazine very high, and the cover price was a turnoff. But they did have a pretty big fan early on, Harry Houdini. He wanted to help them out, maybe even become a potential investor. The catch was they had to make the content more about him. He wanted to help them out, maybe even become a potential investor. The catch was they had to make the content more about him. So they gave it a try. But it was kind of an odd direction for Weird Tales.

If you think of fantastic fiction, you want to believe in the fantastic elements for the fiction to be effective. and for Houdini to get drawn in was to go the other direction. Daryl Schweitzer was an editor of Weird Tales from 1987 to 2006. He says it's amazing the magazine ever made it past its first year. The magazine was bankrupt by the end of the first year. They were like $50,000 in debt. And indeed, Mr. Hennebarger, the founder, and so on, found himself shoved to the margins because the majority of the stock was now owned by Mr. Cornelius,

who was the printer. The idea was that if the magazine never made enough of a profit, they would give the stock back. This never quite happened. So therefore, at various times, they had to persuade Mr. Cornelius not to shut the magazine down. Eventually, they brought in a new editor, Farnsworth Wright. Wright turned things around, and he ran the magazine all the way up to World War II. That's also when they settled into their tagline, Weird Tales, a magazine of the bizarre and unusual. And John Locke says Wright connected

with the material in Weird Tales on a personal level. Wright was a very interesting guy. He was conversant in Esperanto, the universal language. He also had experienced a lot of loss in his life, the loss of both parents. And he was very close to his mother. That was a big blow to him when she died. And he also, in college, he went swimming in Puget Sound with a roommate. And they got into some trouble. swimming in Puget Sound with a roommate, and they got into some trouble. And the roommate, who was a good swimmer, drowned. Wright, who was not a good swimmer, survived for some strange reason. Then Wright started writing short stories himself, and the stories just seem infused with the psychological underpinnings of his turmoil.

It sounds like he had survivor's guilt that that kind of helped fuel his interest in this kind of fiction. Yeah, that's very possible. And Daryl says Wright knew what he was doing as an editor. Farnsworth Wright was able to balance genuine artistic vision. I mean, he would actually talk about literature and use the L word in his editorials. At the same time, he understood the commercial realities and that, you know, you're in the popular entertainment business. And it needed an editor who had precisely this combination of artistry and cynicism to make it work.

Wright developed a staple crop of writers. And they already had a breakout star, H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a perfect example of the kind of writer who might have remained unpublished if Weird Tales never existed. And Lovecraft submitted his work to them right after they launched, even when they were floundering. He sent in five stories all at once, all of them single-spaced, and a letter, which you can find quoted in various sources. In fact, they quoted it in the magazine itself out of amusement. A letter which was sort of a masterpiece of anti-salesmanship. Dear editor, dear editor, I write as a hobby.

Probably this is not any good. I pay no attention to commercial concerns. And by the way, if you change even one comma, I'm not interested. And the editor was apparently sufficiently amused by this that he actually published Lovecraft's letter first. Now I've done two episodes about Lovecraft.

In 2016, I did an episode called When Cthulhu Calls. Cthulhu is one of Lovecraft's ancient beings that humanity can never defeat. And if you try to confront Cthulhu, you'll go insane. The editor, Farnsworth Wright, sometimes worried that Lovecraft's stories were too weird, even for weird tales. Lovecraft's stories were too weird, even for weird tales. In fact, he actually turned down Call of Cthulhu and some of Lovecraft's other famous stories before changing his mind. But Lovecraft was beloved by many of the other writers in the magazine. And Will Murray says Lovecraft set the template for the kind of stories they were aiming for. And he often talks in terms of reading stories and writing stories of trying to recapture the exquisite thrill of terror. For him, terror is

kind of like a mental orgasm. If you can create a story where the reader is transported into a place, well, what if this is true? What if this could be true? Or what's lurking outside of the five senses? You read Weird Tales to kind of push the boundaries on what's real and what's not real. There is another side to Lovecraft's legacy. He was racist and generally xenophobic. In many ways, Weird Tales was ahead of its time. But when it came to offensive stereotypes, the magazine was unfortunately very much of its time, especially in the early days. In fact, in 2020, I did an episode called Inverting Lovecraft, where I talked with writers of color who still find his work compelling, and they're writing new stories that take place in his cosmic universe of horror, while also condemning his racism from within their stories. But there was more than just Lovecraft and his imitators in Weird Tales.

I like to think of the magazine as Pangea. You know, 300 million years ago, all the continents were stuck together in a land that scientists called Pangea, and eventually they drifted apart. So Weird Tales was kind of like the Pangea of speculative fiction as we know it today. And Will says that was by design. By the nature of being a magazine, it had to experiment. It couldn't be limited to, we do ghost stories, werewolf stories, vampire stories, and occasionally, you know, serial killer stories or Ouija board stories. And it's the push for variety, just the practical reality of you needed variety that caused Farnsworth Wright to accept things that were, you know, at one point they had a little vogue of caveman stories, Cro-Magnons versus Neanderthals. Mind transference stories was another thing.

You know, a scientist comes up with a way to transplant either someone's human brain into a monkey or vice versa, or the brain of a man into the brain of a woman, or the mind of a man into the mind of a woman. And so they're always looking for something that works, something that gets a reaction from the reader. And if something got a reaction from the reader, let's do more of those. Let's see if this is a subgenre.

For instance, in 2019, I did an episode called The Man Behind the Sword. It was about Robert E. Howard, who wrote Conan the Barbarian stories for Weird Tales. Howard was developing a genre that we now call sword and sorcery. The world of Game of Thrones may not exist if it weren't for Robert E. Howard and the other writers in the magazine who were following his lead and telling stories about dark magic,

brutal palace intrigue, and gritty sword fighting. Also, years before Amazing Stories became the premier science fiction magazine, science fiction subgenres were being developed in Weird Tales. And one of the early pioneers in science fiction was an Ohio writer named Edmund Hamilton, and he was the one who turned science fiction from War of the Worlds, Invisible Man type of stories to interplanetary and intergalactic battles. They called him the world wrecker or the world saver because he wrote the first space opera stories. And he wrote them on a galactic scale sometimes so that entire

planets were being destroyed or suns were crashing together and being annihilated. And this rippled into the main science fiction magazines and became space opera which turned into Forbidden Planet and Star Trek and Star Wars and you name it. You know, Battlestar Galactica

beyond Weird Tales. People don't think of that because they don't think of Weird Tales as a science fiction magazine, but it was. And one of the most popular writers in the magazine was Seabury Quinn. He wrote stories about a detective named Jules de Grandin who solved crimes that had a supernatural element to them. John Locke says, He wrote a lot of these, and he often got the cover illustration for his stories. So very popular. But Lovecraft reviled him, and he definitely went against Lovecraft's definition of weird. He was too conventional, too predictable, or formulaic for Lovecraft's taste.

Not truly weird. But the formula worked. The TV show Kulshak the Night Stalker from the 1970s was basically a modern update of Jules de Grandin. For at least a few days I was away. Far away in the hands of men with no faces and no names. And that show went on to inspire the X-Files. Now when convention and science offer us no answers,

might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility? By the way, you might be noticing that this episode has a lot of guys in it. The stories in Weird Tales were pretty male-focused. But Will Murray says that doesn't mean all the writers were men. A lot of stories were written by women using pseudonyms or initializing their first names. From the beginning to the end, Weird Tales was supported by women writers. That was very unusual. But the nature of the story, since Weird Tales was ghost stories, fantasy stories, sometimes weird crime stories, science fiction stories, and anything that the editors

of other magazines would call off-trail or different, different being in quotes, it attracted a different type of stable of writers. And of course, there was the artist Margaret Brundage. In 2019, I did an episode about her groundbreaking cover art. Her illustrations were, and still are, sexy and subversive. And some writers got fairly cynical about how to get on the cover. Again, Daryl Schweitzer. Robert E. Howard would do this. The reason there's, say, a woman-on-woman whipping scene in The Witch Shall Be Born is because Robert E. Howard wanted to get the cover. Basically, Seabury Quinn would always make sure there was, if possible, a naked lady somewhere in one of his stories so that it could be illustrated on the cover.

There are actually three major illustrators in Weird Tales, Margaret Brundage, Virgil Finley, and Hannes Bach. I want to focus on Hannes Bach because, like Margaret Brundage, he was the kind of person who could thrive creatively in Weird Tales. Steve Korshak is an art dealer who wrote a book about Hannes Bach. He says that Bach first met the editor Farnsworth Wright at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. This was the first fan convention as we know it. Hannes Bach and Farnsworth Wright were introduced to each other by a mutual acquaintance, a 19-year-old kid named Ray Bradbury. Bradbury would go on to write for Weird Tales.

Wright was enthusiastic as soon as he saw this portfolio that Bradbury shared with him. And Bach made his professional debut in the December 1939 Weird Tales with both the cover and interior illustrations. So this is pretty late. Weird Tales started in 23, so it's pretty, it's been, he'd probably been a fan since he was, what, like a teenager? Yes, Bach was an early fan. In those days, a lot of fans did what we call crossover between being a fan and wanting to be a professional.

And Bach was drawn into the field as a fan and then became a professional later on. drawn into the field as a fan and then became a professional later on. A lot of the other artists in the magazine had a more classical or realistic style, even if they're doing fantasy stories. Bach's artwork was more animated and fantastical. Bach was a master of monsters. His monsters were very terrifying. One of the best monsters he made was for a story called Pickman's Model. In that painting, there's a monster that's holding a naked man, and you see just the whites of the eyes of the monster. He's almost godlike.

Bach was gay in a time when it was not socially accepted. And the images in some of his artwork, for example, one called The Power Series, are very sexual and anatomically suggestive. But his women were not sexy or very realistic. They were a little whimsical. But his tenure at Weird Tales was rocky. He often fought with them over artistic control or deadlines. Eventually... The artist who started as a fan started to sour on the whole field. He was dissatisfied with the low pay offered that the pulp magazines paid. And he also became dissatisfied with the fans themselves.

The fans would barge into his apartment at all hours of the day and night, snoop through his closets and dresser drawers, read his mail. They wanted him to give them original artwork simply because they liked it. There was a sense of entitlement because they were fans. And this all started to grate on him over the years. And what did he do in reaction to that? Or how did he react? He became bitter. He was frustrated.

He was being neglected. His art wasn't, he had a show in New York, which was not well received. And so a bitterness turned in. He started turning increasingly to mysticism and occult philosophy. At 49 years of age, Bach died of an apparent heart attack. He was alone, broke, and unnoticed. He had become a recluse by that point. If it hadn't been for his friend, Clarence Peacock, who took all of Bach's things that were left on the sidewalk by the landlord, the original art would have been gone. But the strength of Bach's things that were left on the sidewalk by the landlord, the original art would

have been gone. But the strength of Bach's images and his influence in the field persevered, and he's considered one of the top fantasy illustrators of all time. Many of the people involved in Weird Tales were outsiders. I mean, today that seems like a commercial premise. Just about every Tim Burton project is about a quirky misfit that we root for because society doesn't understand them. But back then, Will Murray says, that was a hard life. Oh, absolutely, because Lovecraft used to use the term conventional. because Lovecraft used to use the term conventional, conventional pulp readers and conventional people with their conventional thinking who could not imagine cosmic ideas

or were afraid of mere ghosts, when Lovecraft conceived of something more gigantically threatening. Another interesting thing about Weird Tales is because it was called Weird Tales and because the covers were sensationalistic, writers who were better writers and who had better markets sometimes sold to them under pen names or their own name and they used pen names elsewhere. once his first story to Weird Tales under his full name of Thomas Lanier Williams. I once met a Weird Tales writer named Morris Hirschman who said he sold Weird Tales a story or two under a pen name. And I asked him, this is the 70s. I said, what was the pen name?

He wouldn't tell me. Even all those years later, he did not want his name associated with the magazine. Why do you think even by the 70s it was considered like it's still considered kind of unsavory it may have not so much have been unsavory is that he had a reputation as a certain kind of writer you know you know another thing if you wrote for a high-paying magazine and if an editor saw you slumming in Weird Tales, they say, well, you know, hey, they pay a half a cent a word. Why am I paying you a penny and a half a word? Maybe you're just a penny a word writer after all. The magazine may have been flourishing creatively under Farnsworth Wright, but financially, it still never found its footing. I heard so many stories of writers or artists who couldn't believe how long it took them to get paid,

and they weren't getting paid much to begin with. Working for Weird Tales was a labor of love. Meanwhile, Farnsworth Wright had been struggling with Parkinson's disease for years. He left the magazine in 1940 and died several months later. By the 1950s, pulp magazines were in decline. Comic books and paperbacks were becoming more popular

and profitable. Television was giving the publishing industry a run for its money. And Daryl Schweitzer says science fiction was all the rage. When the whole pulp field was dying, science fiction was still prospering. And so a lot of publishers switched to science fiction so that by about 1953,

there were over 50 science fiction magazines on the newsstand. And that was too many. And they were crowding each other out. It was too late at this point for Weird Tales to try to reinvent itself again. They stopped publishing in 1954. But that wasn't the end. After the break, the magazine rises from the grave. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection

free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Weird Tales may have stopped publishing in the 1960s, but you could still see its influence everywhere. A lot of writers who began in the magazine were changing pop culture, like Richard Matheson, who wrote some of the most famous episodes of The Twilight Zone,

or Robert Block, who wrote the novel Psycho, which obviously the movie was based on. They'll see and they'll know and they'll say, why, she wouldn't even harm a fly. Fans of the magazine tried to revive it in the 1970s, and it finally gained momentum in the 1980s. Daryl Schweitzer co-edited the magazine during this time and led it into the 21st century. It was hard. I mean, they switched publishers more than once,

and the issues didn't come out as often as they did in the old days. Well, it's not any deep, dark secret that the editors weren't getting paid. We were hoping to get a share of the profits. It never happened. My friendly artist, Jason Van Hollander, once explained to me, each issue is a good deed that you put in your death boat to justify yourself before the gods in the afterlife. The purpose was merely the magazine became its own cause. But what was the cause? What would you say that it was?

Okay. Our real accomplishment, not counting any of the individual stories we published, was that we basically revived Weird Tales. It's been published continuously, more or less, erratically but continuously, since late 1987. And the magazine is still going. This is the most sustained revival there's been.

And Weird Tales is basically an institution. It's practically a sacred trust. But now there is an overwhelming amount of science fiction, fantasy, and horror content out there. Do we still need Weird Tales? Well, I'd like you to meet the current editor, Jonathan Mayberry. Writing the magazine has been a lifelong dream. He first learned about Weird Tales as a kid. His mentor was the classic sci-fi fantasy writer, Elspreg de Camp. I was at a house party with him and a bunch of other writers, and a little statue of Cthulhu fell off the shelf and hit me in the head.

So I was attacked by Cthulhu. And then he and Harlan Ellison got into a long discussion explaining to me who Cthulhu was and what Weird Tales was and so on. Wow. So you didn't descend into madness after being attacked by Cthulhu? I'm not making that claim, no. And I had gotten to know Sprague through my middle school librarian, who was a secretary for a club of writers he was in. So I was Kit to know Sprague through my middle school librarian, who was a secretary for a club of writers he was in. So I was Kit, and Sprague lent me a whole bunch of original copies of Weird Tales to take home and read. He gave me a long lecture about bringing them back in the same condition they went out.

I read them and fell in love with the stories and was off and running, and I've probably read three-quarters of the issues of Weird Tales that have ever been published. Now he's in charge of selecting stories for Weird Tales. So I asked him, what's his criteria? What is a Weird Tale today? If it doesn't fit into any standard genre, like if it's a horror, but it's fairly conventional horror, and there's a lot, I mean, mind you, I'm not using conventional as a pejorative. If it's fairly conventional horror, vampire, people go to fight the vampire, that's not Weird Tales. Weird has some element that makes it uncomfortably different. That little X factor that makes it just the sort of thing

where an editor of a conventional magazine would go, you know, that's a little out of our range. Well, that is our range. That's, you know, we're the bullseye in that. Yeah, because I was thinking, too, about, I mean, there are certain qualities that Lovecraft had that sort of became a template. Stories that were unsettling. They were subversive. And I feel like the either fear or fascination with the unknown seems to be a big thing, too. It is a big thing. And also good guys not winning at the end is a big thing. You know,

we don't promise in weird fiction a happy ending. I'm also looking to expand the range of voices that are presented in Weird Tales because, you know, for the first X number of years, Weird Tales was primarily written by white writers. But I like bringing in voices of all kinds. People of color, writers of color. Not only do they have different cultural histories than, say, I do, that cultural history has its own richness and storytelling traditions that can inform their stories and allow them to be so noticeably different that, say, somebody like me reading it for the first time wouldn't be able to predict what the third act is going to be. I don't know where it's going to go because I'm not familiar with the territory that's going to get me there. So I look for people

to tell what scares them and to write about it richly, and they can tell that. So whether it's a different cultural background, different physical background, different gender background, the things that cause them to be afraid and cause them to be uneasy and which are then used as the basis for their stories, that's what I'm doing with the new generation of Weird Tales. The magazine always struggled in the print economy, but now it can take on whatever form it wants. The current version is available in print, digital, and each story has an audio version. Jonathan wants to go much further than that. We are discussing a lot of things, and there are some things I can't be specific on, but we're discussing graphic novels because I was one of those people that learned to read more from comics than from prose.

So we're going to be doing graphic novels. And that brings in another type of storytelling because depending on the artist-writer combination, you can get some incredibly wonderfully moody pieces that the art adds a new dimension that just prose would not. We are very heavily invested in film and TV right now, some of which I can't talk about. We're doing a novel imprint, so we'll be doing longer form. We're also talking about gaming and

other things. There's almost no platform for storytelling or story involvement that we're not exploring at this point. And we're growing in little bits and pieces, but we're about to grow bigger pretty soon. On one hand, you have this 100-year-old magazine trying to rebrand itself in a vastly different media landscape. On the other hand, it's almost like a homecoming. Here's John Locke. almost like a homecoming. Here's John Locke. I think Weird Tales should get a lot of credit for reshaping the landscape of our popular culture. It took a long time for that to happen, and they lost a lot of money along the way.

But they did get the best kind of legacy, which is the cultural legacy. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to John Locke, Will Murray, Daryl Schweitzer, Steve Korshak,

and Jonathan Mayberry. In my next episode, we're looking at another trailblazer in science fiction and fantasy. And we're going back much further in history, all the way back to 1666, where a noblewoman was called Mad Madge because she wrote about flying machines, parallel universes, subatomic creatures, and zombie armies.

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