Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/138



CHECK of the thirty most popular stories published in reveals that you, the readers, insist on the unusual, and that you demand fine skill in the telling; for there is no truer index to your likes and dislikes than a careful tabulation and study of the stories that you have stamped with the seal of your approval. Considerably more than 300 stories have been offered to you in the year and a half that has been published by its present editors; and your thirty favorites, therefore, may be said to represent the cream of all the good stories published during that time. Many stories, equally as strange as those included among the thirty, have failed to reach this select group of favorite stories, because of a less adroit presentation of story materials, or because the personality of the author was not sufficiently stamped on his work. For one fact that stands out very prominently in studying these "most popular" stories is the high percentage of them that bear the seal of the author's personality, that are written in a distinctive style that shows individuality and genius. Stories of the fine literary merit of Munn's The Werewolf of Ponkert, Price's The Stranger From Kurdistan and Lovecraft's The Outsider rank very high in the list; and Nictzin Dyalhis, who has probably the most distinctively individual and "different" style of any of the authors, heads the entire list of favorite stories with his two tales of cosmic space. Colter, Long, Owen, Price, Lovecraft, La Spina, Burks—all have distinctive styles that are immediately recognizable, and all seven are in the list of favorites. Quinn has five stories in the select list; Dyalhis, Lovecraft, Colter and Schlossel each have two; and two more are the joint product of Will Smith and R. J. Robbins.

As to the themes—you, the readers, have included a wide range of subjects among your favorite stories, demanding only that the plots be weird and unusual, and well and thrillingly told. We shall try to follow your likes, as expressed in this poll of your favorite stories, and give you an increasing number of splendidly-written stories stamped with the personality and genius of the authors; and indeed, it is doubtful if a finer list of thirty stories could be drawn from the files of any magazine than this list of your favorite stories in the recent numbers of

The list of favorites contains four weird-astronomical stories; three tales of devil-worship; four werewolf tales; one Egyptian-spider story; three tales of communication with the dead, and two ghost-stories; two tales of underground tomb-horror; one reincarnation story; three tales of weird surgery (including De Las Cuevas' Aztec torture-tale); two weird tales of Atlantis; 425