Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/109

 satirical little piece; and I especially liked the illustrations for The Shunned House and The Long Arm. Trudy Hemken's reference to my bad grammar did not pass unnoticed, and Trudy may expect a call from Oliver, my pet ghoul, some fine evening. He told me he thought he'd drop in for a bite."

It Happened One Night

Manly Wade Wellman writes from New York City: "Mr. Joseph Allen Ryan's letter in October WT, anent the idea back of my short story, The Terrible Parchment, impels me to give the real genesis of the thing—even more unusual than Mr. Ryan's account. The idea came to me all of a sudden, rather late one night. I sat down at once and wrote it out roughly, with my apartment for setting and my wife and myself for characters. It was almost morning when I wrote 'The End,' and I laid it aside, then polished it up the following evening. After that I took it to Julius Schwartz, my agent. With him was Mort Weisinger. They glanced over the story, and their mouths fell open. 'Look here,' they said, both at once. 'Not five days ago we were discussing——' After that they told the story Mr. Ryan tells, of how they imagined the Necronomicon materializing through the combined mental effort of many readers of Lovecraft's tales. Yet neither had communicated with me, as both will be ready to testify. We laughingly decided it was a case of thought-transference—an unconscious mental message sent and received. I wonder if anybody has a better explanation."

A Conte Cruel

J. Vernon Shea, Jr., of Pittsburgh, writes: "The October number is another good issue. I read The Shunned House with a feeling of sadness, for the many references to Providence made it seem a post-delayed letter from H. P. L. The story is not quite of his best, for it has the over-slow approach and the lingering on technicalities that marked some of his last work; nevertheless, the culmination is startling, and the artistry veritably impeccable. I doubt if any of your writers will ever quite attain the high standard of Lovecraft at his best. Tiger Cat is one of the best things Doctor Keller has done, but the story falls into the genre of the conte cruel rather than of the weird tale proper. Nowadays the conte cruel is a little passe, for the horrors of war narrated in any newspaper far surpass the artificial horrors. Quinn's tale is better than usual, almost in the vein of his The Phantom Farmhouse; Wellman again rings the bell with The Golgotha Dancers, and Habl's The Long Arm is different. More European writers should be represented in. I read with distaste Peirce's The Homicidal Diary, an hysterical and cheap melodrama; to demonstrate its inadequacy, compare it with Mrs. Belloc Lownde's brilliant handling of a similar theme, The Lodger, or with such motion pictures as M and Night Must Fall. It occurs to me that the Eyrie readers might be interested in some statistics. For instance, which writer has appeared most frequently in WT? Quinn? Derleth? Howard? Why not give a chart, listing the most printed writers, and giving such data as number of serials, number of novelettes, number of short stories, number of 'short shorts,' number of poems, number of reprints?" [We fear that such statistical data would interest only a select few of our readers, and would take up space that could otherwise be used for stories.—.]

Happy vs. Unhappy Endings

Clifton Hall, of Los Angeles, writes: "I thought the second part of Hamilton's new serial, The Lake of Life, was the best story in the October number. It reminds one a little of a dime thriller, but makes fascinating reading. Tiger Cat, by Keller, stands second, in my estimation, although I think it was a mistake to reveal the nature of the cellar's contents by means of the blurb and the two illustrations. Third spot, I think, should go to Quinn's Pledged to the Dead. However, I have one criticism to make in connection with the de Grandin series: if I'd had as many dozen hair-raising experiences with creatures from another world as Trowbridge has had, I don't think I'd have to be convinced during every new adventure that 'such things are possible.' Yet I cannot recall a de Grandin story in which the Frenchman has not had to argue for some minutes with his skeptical friend before the latter realizes that the improbable is not necessarily the impossible. Lovecraft's last was okay, I guess, but I didn't think the climax stupendous enough to justify the long and at times tedious building-up