Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 5 (1926-11).djvu/142

716 Space is a dandy, and it is not beyond the possibility of such things happening. The Bird of Space is another whiz. I am enthusiastic in my approval of your stories of planets and cosmic space, and hope you will give us more of them. There is one thing I as a reader would add, namely: heretofore the supposed inhabitants of other worlds have been described as more or less human, but I would like to have someone create a new theme in which these inhabitants are anything but human, giving them as much unearthliness as possible. The human resemblance makes them seem too much of this earth."

Joe D. Thomas, of St. Louis, votes against The Bird of Space on the grounds that it is really a continued story masquerading as a complete short story: "If this isn't a serial," he writes, "then I'm a green-eyed monkey." Miss Beatrice Cookney, of Oakland, California, comments as follows on the same story: "The Bird of Space, I think, is the best story you have ever printed. I am waiting anxiously for the sequel. I only hope we can have more like it by the same author."

Harry E. Balch, of Blaine, Washington, protests against Greye La Spina's serial story, Fettered, because it is "based on ridiculous superstitions; the story might have been good, but such trash as a cat jumping over a dead man is too rank to be considered as a good weird story. Seabury Quinn's stories are always the best in the book, and no matter what any weak-nerved readers may say, his House of Horror was very good. Some of the readers complained that the story was 'ugly and horrible.' When I finished that story all I could do was marvel at the power of Seabury Quinn's pen—that story was not too horrible, it was just right—just the kind of story the real lover of weird tales likes. For a final word, I wish would not publish any more stories that put forth superstition as truth, as does Fettered."

Greye La Spina's serial, however, seems to have won a firm hold on the affections of the readers, for the comment has been almost entirely favorable—and most of it enthusiastic in commendation of the story.

Writes Albert Elmo Morgareidge, of St. Louis: "There is only one drawback to your magazine, you do not publish enough stories, and we have to wait so long for the next issue. But as long as you have some of Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin stories, we can stand a long wait, for they are worth the purchase price of the magazine, alone. But as a printer by trade, and a newspaper man, I will add that The Night Wire was the best story in the September issue."

The showing made by The Night Wire, by H. F. Arnold, in the voting was one of the agreeable surprizes in the balloting for favorite story in the September issue. This story was only a four-page "filler" story, buried in the magazine without even an illustration, yet it drew so many votes that it ranks right behind the three leaders in popularity with the readers. The Night Wire is the type of utterly "different" story that we are always looking for, the type that causes the editor to chortle with glee when he gets one in the day's mail. And such utterly bizarre and "different" stories are as nectar and ambrosia to the reader who is sated with the humdrum magazine fare of today.

Writes E. Hoffmann Price, author of The Peacock's Shadow in this issue: "Your September number presents some interesting types which move me to comment. Two interplanetary stories in succession should keep the Schlossel fans from gnashing their teeth! The Easter Island atmosphere of the serial is distinctly novel. I have often wondered, as has most of the world, at the