Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 04.djvu/127

Rh sort of strange paralysis. I just couldn't realize that I would read no more of his faultless masterpieces or receive another letter in his small, unusual hand. Yes, he even found time to write to an ordinary person like myself. No one can ever take his place. Stories as good as his may be written, but no one author can equal his string of A-1 weird tales. The Ocean Ogre was easily the best tale in the issue. I always liked sea horrors especially anyway. Graveyards, vampires and werewolves are fairly familiar, in fact they seem like old friends to me; but the sea, with its slimy slithery beings from the deep dark depths, always frightens me. In man's own element, land, most any fear can be borne, but the alien atmosphere of the water has two strikes on you to start with. The Hounds of Tindalos runs a close second, and is the best story I've yet read by Long. The angles and curves business was something new to me and heightened the interest quite a bit. The Whistling Corpse cops the yellow ribbon. It is reminiscent of Marion Crawford's Upper Berth. The living fog put in an eery touch."

C. R. Forster, of Bardon Mill, Northumberland, writes: "It is almost exactly a year since I discovered my first, in an English book shop. I am a science-fiction fan, and it was with some doubt, and with unpleasant memories of various horror and terror magazines, that I started into it. But I liked that issue and subsequent ones so well that I started to get the magazine regularly from your English agent. WT is now my favorite magazine and I wouldn't miss an issue for anything. I was lucky enough to get hold of a few scattered back numbers for the years 1928-30. Although they contained many excellent stories, I believe that the magazine of today is an improvement over them, both in contents and appearance. This in itself was a pleasant surprize, for my experience with science-fiction magazines has been pretty much the opposite. My favorite authors are (or were) H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and Seabury Quinn. These five stood on a pinnacle above the rest, and the loss of Lovecraft and Howard is indeed a blow to fantasy-lovers. I hope you will reprint many of their best stories. Of Lovecraft, in particular, I could