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Weird Tales rates high among old Pulp fans but it wasn’t the first try at a Horror Pulp. That honor goes to Harold Hersey’s The Thrill Book, a bi-weekly magazine edited by Hersey and later Ronald Oliphant. Sixteen published issues with a seventeenth left unseen, it features authors familiar to later Weird fans. It also published one of Science Fiction’s great novels, Francis Stevens’ The Heads of Cerberus. The contents were not exclusively fantastic with “thrilling” Westerns, Oriental adventures and other ordinarily exciting fare. This mixed contents was the norm in the 1890-1930s with the Soft Weeklies like Argosy. And all this happened in eight months in 1919.
Greye La Spina
Francis Stevens has been recognized as an author of the same caliber as A. Merritt, with a similar style, but the Lady of the House was actually Greye La Spina, who had the first story in the first issue and appeared six more times.
“Wolf of the Steppes” (March 1, 1919) has a mysterious European girl fall into the lap of some nice people. She turns out to be hunted by werewolves.
“The Inefficient Ghost” (May 1, 1919) as Isra Putnam is a one column filler.
“From Over the Border” (May 15, 1919)
“The Haunted Landscape” (June 1, 1919)
“The Wax Doll” (August 1, 1919) as Ezra Putnam
“The Ultimate Ingredient” (October 15, 1919)
“The Bracelet” was to appear in December 1919 but remains unpublished. Greye’s next story would be “The Tortoise-Shell Cat” (Weird Tales, November 1924) beginning her career in that publication. Everything she wrote here is of the same vein and quality.
Perley Poore Sheehan
“The Hank of Yarn” (April 1, 1919) this killer plant story was written by one of the Pulps better workmen.
“Down the Coast of Shadows” (April 15, 1919 and May 1, 1919)
Robert W. Sneddon
“Magic in Manhattan” (May 15, 1919) by Robert W. Sneddon is different in that Sneddon did not go onto Weird Tales but Ghost Stories, another Harold Hersey attempt in 1926 to 1931, and WT’s first big competitor.
“The Conqueror” (July 1, 1919)
Tod Robbins
“The Bibulous Baby” (July 1, 1919) is the first of seven Tod Robbins tales. This Horror writer would go onto Weird Tales but also Hollywood with the film Freaks (1932). His stories were collected into five volumes, largely forgotten today.
“A Voice From Beyond” (July 15, 1919)
“Fragments” (September 1, 1919)
“Undying Hatred” (September 15, 1919)
“An Eccentric” (October 1, 1919) as Roy Leslie
“Crimson Flowers” (October 1, 1919)
“For Art’s Sake” was to appear in the seventh issue (December 1, 1919) which never happened but it did appear in Silent, White and Beautiful and Other Stories (1920).
Murray Leinster
“A Thousand Degrees Below Zero” (July 15, 1919) was the first of several tales by Will F. Jenkins under the Murray Leinster name. Leinster was selling to Argosy by this time with his first SF piece being “Atmosphere” (The Argosy, January 26, 1918). Jenkins wrote all kinds of fiction including adventure, even romance. The Murray Leinster pseudonym eventually became associated with his SF primarily.
“The Silver Menace” (September 1 and 15, 1919)
“Ju Ju” (October 15, 1919)
“The Great Disaster” was to appear in the last issue in December 1919 too but was published long after in First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (1998)
Don Mark Lemon
“The Whispering From the Ground” (July 15, 1919) by Don Mark Lemon is the first of two from this early Horror writer. He would go on to write one story for Weird Tales “The Autobiography of a Blue Ghost” (Weird Tales, September 1923), his last.
“The Spider and the Fly” (August 1, 1919)
Francis Stevens
The Heads of Cerberus (August 15- October 15, 1919) is a novel about parallel worlds. Groff Conklin in “Galaxy’s 5 Star Shelf” (Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1952) said “…perhaps the first science fantasy to use the alternate time-track, or parallel worlds, idea.” Being an early novel, this is done through a magical dust rather than a machine. The trio ends up in a future Philadelpia of 2118. The book satirizes authoritarianism.
“Impulse” was to appear in December 1919 issue but remains unpublished. Stevens (who was really Gertrude Barrows Bennett) left writing in 1923, returning to secretarial work. Our loss.
Singles
“In the Shadow of the Race” by J. Hampton Bishop (March 1-April 1, 1919) is an evolutionary lost race tale in an SF vein similar to “The Valley of the Teeheemen” by Arthur Thatcher (Weird Tales, December 1924, January 1925) and others in SF Pulps like Amazing Stories.
“The Web of Death” by Clare Douglas Stewart (March 15, 1919) the first of two killer spider stories. (The other was Don Mark Lemon’s “The Spider and the Fly”.)
“The Clasp of Rank” by S. Carleton (April 1, 1919) is for me the personally the reason to read The Thrill Book. S. Carelton was Susan Jones, a Canadian writer and a master at the Strange Northern. This is one of a trio of werewolf stories she did.
“The Stone Image” by Seabury Grandin Quinn (May 1, 1919) is an early tale by Weird Tales’ most prolific writer. This story would get a do-over in a Jules de Grandin story. For more, go here.
“Crawling Hands” by P. A. Connolly (May 15 and June 1, 1919) has severed hands in a haunted house.
“The Unseen Seventh” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (June 15, 1919) is another author who will write for Weird Tales and other SF magazines. A pretty conventional ghost story here.
“The Seventh Glass” by J. U. Giesy (July 1, 1919) is not a supernatural tale but was written by one half of the famous team that produced the Semi Dual ghostbreaker stories (starting in 1912). Giesy’s partner appears below.
“The Dead Book” by Harold Hersey (July 15, 1919) is a tale by the former editor/publisher that hints toward Lovecraft.
“The Man From Thebes” by William Wallace Cook (August 15, 1919) is a resurrected mummy story from one of the biggest Pulp writers ever to be forgotten.
“The Unexpected” by Junius B. Smith (September 1, 1919) is the other half of the Semi-Dual team with another non-supernatural tale.
“The Red Lure” by Frank L. Packard (September 15, 1919) is a big name in 1919. Packard was another Canadian, who wrote the Jimmy Dale series, one that would inspire all the great Hero Pups of the 1930s.
“The House of the Nightmare” by Edward Lucas White (September 15, 1919) is a classic Horror tale. Lovecraft mentions ELW in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1917) in his section on new writers:
Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and short-story writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose themes arise from actual dreams. “The Song of the Sirens” has a very pervasive strangeness, while such things as “Lukundoo” and “The Snout” rouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a very peculiar quality to his tales—an oblique sort of glamour which has its own distinctive type of convincingness.
“Mr. Shen of Shensi” by H. Bedford-Jones (October 1, 1919) is another coup for Hersey. Bedford-Jones was the top writer of the Pulps, publishing in Argosy, Short Stories and in the Slicks. He would have had a second tale, “Medusa’s Venom”, in the unpublished December 1, 1919 issue.
Conclusion
You might ask what else was published in The Thrill Book? There are many other stories, some non-fantastic thrillers and other ghost stories I haven’t mentioned. (One story has men bringing baseball to the remote tribes of Alaska!) There was a series of stories by Clyde Broadwell about “The Double Man”, a psychic investigator that ran for five episodes. (He deserves his own post I think!) These are also worthy of consideration but don’t quite rank with the aforementioned masters who would go on to Weird Tales and Ghost Stories.
All sixteen issues of The Thrill Book can be found here. We can only wish that one day that 17th issue is published.
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