Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 3 (1925-09).djvu/129



UR readers have put the stamp of their heartiest approval on our newest department, the monthly "Weird Story Reprint" of one of the masterpieces of weird fiction. Numerous suggestions are coming in. Strangely enough, many demands are received for the better known masterpieces, and, in response to several requests, we have scheduled Fitz-James O'Brien's What Was It? for an early issue. We may even take the ban off Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales we had specifically excluded because we had thought that all lovers of weird fiction were already acquainted with the bizarre stories of this great master. Let us know what masterpieces of weird fiction you think your fellow readers of would enjoy, and we will do our best to follow your wishes.

Meantime, the editor wishes to call your attention to the reprint in this issue: The Furnished Room, by O. Henry, on page 337. O. Henry so frequently wrote in a light, flippant style, that many will doubtless be surprized at the poignant tragedy and pathos of this exquisite tale of suicide and spirit return. The Furnished Room is O. Henry at his artistic height, and it deservedly ranks as one of his very best stories.

Laura O. Tuck, of Weeping Water, Nebraska, writes: "I would suggest that you reprint some of Francis Marion Crawford's stories, for instance Man Overboard, The Upper Berth and The Screaming Skull. By pure accident I ran across last January: it is just what I have been looking for for years. I have looked in vain for this kind of stories in other magazines and digging in odd comers of libraries, but now I know just where to go to get 'my' kind of stories. Please let us have more stories like The Lure of Atlantis (in last April's ), which is my favorite of all the stories I have read so far."

Writes James March, Jr., of Seelyville, Indiana: "The Werewolf of Ponkert, my favorite story in the July issue, is something different. Up to this time we have had hints, shadows and glimpses of werewolves. In this story we see them from a direct angle. In other words we almost live with the 'hated things' as we read, which makes this story all the more realistic."

"The vigorous stories found in ," writes Earl C. Comer, of Los Angeles, "are certainly of tonic value, and especially is this fact realized more when one tries to wade through the sea of flaccid and utterly inane 'literature' of the present day. The stories in the July issue run the whole gamut of weirdness and of unusual situations in far corners of the earth, from the werewolf tale to the utter depravity of dope-users and back again. A good plot in psychic phenomena is Farthingale's Poppy by Eli