Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 4 (1926-10).djvu/142



O OFTEN, in our search for bizarre and unusual stories to publish in, we come across a manuscript that has an excellent basic idea for a weird plot, but the writer does not know how to build the idea into a weird tale that will thrill the readers of this magazine. For instance, the editor recently received a very well-worded manuscript from an author whose stories appear in many good magazines; in this story a physician experiments with a lizard that grows new limbs to replace the limbs it has lost, and prepares a serum from its blood; he tries the serum on animals, and finds that it grows new limbs; so to try it out on a human being he drags a girl and cuts off her arms and legs, but the girl dies from loss of blood, and the doctor goes insane from disappointment. That's all there is to the story. It might thrill someone who had never read, but the imaginative treatment that builds up a fascinating plot is entirely lacking. The story was returned to its author, for it did not have the touch. The theme of growing new limbs on a human being has been used before, and is not in itself a story; it needs to be worked out in an imaginative and bizarre plot, as Romeo Poole handled this theme for in A Hand From the Deep; then it makes a story to be remembered.

Mere weird material does not constitute a plot; and many a bizarre plot is spoiled by unimaginative treatment. You, the readers of, demand something more. You have long ago passed the stage where you hang with breathless interest on a ghost tale which merely describes how a ghost appeared and its appearance threw the spectators into a panic. This happened in Lovecraft's tale, The Outsider, but was a mere incident in the story; the author with consummate literary artistry made of the ululating ghoul who crept out of the tomb a character that will live in the memory when most other stories have faded into oblivion. But most of the ghost stories that flow to the editor's desk merely picture a wailing ghost, and have the people who see it fall into several kinds of terror merely because it is a ghost. That is trite, and the stories are returned to their authors. But when the ghosts talk and act like real people, and re-enact their crimes to the stunned horror of the spectator whom they (the ghosts) have lured to their cabin, as in The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee by Lieutenant Burks, again you have a story that fascinates the reader.

Likewise we constantly receive sea-serpent stories in which the whole action consists in a fight between monsters of the deep, and panic among the ship's passengers who witness it—just that, and nothing else. Kipling took