Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 03.djvu/106

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 * young writing marvel, Robert Bloch, has never written a stranger or more thrilling story than this. It is a story of Egypt, a gripping tale of flaming weird jewels in the eye-sockets of a withered mummy, an eery narrative that will hold your breathless interest to the end.
 * story rises to a climax so unusual, so weird and fascinating as to make it unique in literature. This unforgettable tale will be published complete
 * | in the April issue of
 * story rises to a climax so unusual, so weird and fascinating as to make it unique in literature. This unforgettable tale will be published complete
 * | in the April issue of
 * | in the April issue of

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J. Mackay Tait writes from Bridgetown, Nova Scotia: "In my humble opinion, the most thoroughly enjoyable stories that appear in WT are those by such writers as Seabury Quinn and Robert E. Howard (how I miss that boy!), in which there is a little humanity, a little humor, a little happiness. Poe's works are abnormal, the product (admittedly so) of a diseased mind. They aren't true to life. They are literary lunacy, analogous in art to the works of Dali, or in sculpture to those of Epstein. There is never any situation, no matter how desperate, in which all hope and humor are entirely absent. I served four years with the Canadian infantry during the war ... and although we lived in terror a great deal of the time—particularly I—I never once found myself in a position where it was all fear and horror. In this month's WT there is a story by Nictzin Dyalhis, The Sea-Witch, that I believe to be one of the best ever to appear in our magazine. And my opinion is not influenced by the really splendid cover design by Virgil Finlay—a vast improvement over some of the misproportioned females who have displayed their impossible charms on covers of the past, even if the girl has misplaced her navel. The story deals with the occult, it has horror, it has suspense; but it also has love, tenderness, humor (not funniness), and a delightfully unexpected happy ending.... Another criticism (I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb) I have to make of a great many of your stories, although not only of the Poe style, is directed at the obviously labored attempts at maintaining an atmosphere of gloom and impending evil throughout the narrative. Why should this be necessary? Because a man walking along a lonely country road in a rainstorm is to encounter, half a mile farther on, a grisly werewolf is no reason, that I can see, for the limbs of the trees to appear like skeleton arms reaching out for him, or for the raindrops to fall with the sound of hissing snakes bent upon his destruction, or for the wind to howl at him with the voices of a thousand haunted spirits. Unless he is mentally abnormal, neurotic or a confirmed and industrious disciple of Bacchus, a country road would be a country road and nothing more. It may be the tradition to write weird stories in that way, but it is illogical nevertheless. Horror rarely sets the stage before descending upon us. I wish it did! When it strikes, it strikes suddenly,
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