Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 4 (1924-12).djvu/177

176 The following, from Charles Godfrey Osgood, Fitchburg, Mass., is a sample of the letters received:

"Permit me to express my appreciation of George Bayly's 'The Sunken Land,' in the Anniversary Issue. That was a most absorbing tale. The spectacle of a whole forest of trees endowed with life and predatory, octopus-like feelers was truly, to say the least, awe-inspiring. It reminded me, in a way, of that wonderful, incomparable tale of weird adventure called 'The Willows,' which I read long ago, wherein, though there was not a breath of wind stirring, a vast forest of ghostly willows is made to give forth a rustling sound."

We agree with Mr. Osgood that "The Sunken Land" was an unusual story. And there are others, too, that hold the reader fascinated. But we believe that we have even a richer treat in store for our readers than they have received in the past, for a feast of unusual stories is scheduled for the forthcoming issues.

Seabury Quinn, author of "Weird Crimes" and "The Phantom Farmhouse," besides preparing a series of "Noted Witchcraft Cases" for you, has a bugwolf story in next month's issue that will fairly make your hair stand on end. And Frank Belknap Long, Jr., author of "Death-Waters," is at his very best in the same issue with "The Ocean Leech," where a strange creature of the sea oozes over the side of a ship and fastens its suckers upon the seamen, in the shadowy lagoon in which the ship is becalmed. H. P. Lovecraft, author of "The Rats in the Walls" (what a marvelous story that was!), has written a number of fantastic bits of eery fiction for the next few issues, including "The Temple," a tale of ancient Atlantis and a modern German submarine.

Just to list the good things in store for you in within the next few months would take up more space than the editor has at his disposal. We can tell you only of a few of them; but we must mention the series of "Strange Tales From Santo Domingo" by Arthur J. Burks, who writes under the pen name of Estil Critchie. He wrote "Thus Spake the Prophetess" in the November issue and "Voodoo" in the current number. Powerful stories, these are, for Lieutenant Burks gathered the local color for his stories at first hand in the Black Republic and in Santo Domingo.

"The Lethal Lilies," a novelette by Arthur Thatcher, will be eagerly awaited by those who have followed the fortunes of the people of Teeheemen in the present number. It tells about the people of the Valley of Sleep, where the lilies have an anesthetic influence that puts to sleep those who come within the influence of their perfume. But the story itself will ward off the slumber that overcame the explorers inthe story, for it is filled with thrills and surprizes.

The inclusion in this issue of the first of two cavemen stories by C. M. Eddy, Jr., gives rise to reflections regarding a type of caveman story which we have never seen in print, but which ought to afford opportunity for plenty of thrills. Why has not someone written of a fight between a Cro-Magnon caveman and a Neandertal man?

We get plenty of manuscripts dealing with fights between dinosaurs and pterodactyls on the one hand and cavemen on the other, but we send them all back because these strange creatures had disappeared from the earth before the first great anthropoid apes rose to the stature of manhood, according to the records of the rocks as read by the geologists. But Neander-