Part 1

THE FANTASY FAN

THE FANS' OWN MAGAZINE

Published Monthly

Editor: Charles D. Hornig (Managing Editor: Wonder Stories)

10 cents a copy $1.00 per year

137 West Grand Street, Elizabeth, New Jersey

Vol. 2, No. 3 November, 1934 Whole No. 15

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

A SAD, SAD STORY

Once upon a time, a year ago last summer, to be more specific, I had money to burn, but rather than burn it, I decided to launch an attack upon the fantasy-loving public in the form of a fan magazine. You've guessed it--the result was none other than THE FANTASY FAN. I placed enough capital in the venture to start it off. Needless to say, I was disappointed with the results, as far as circulation goes--it's always that way. Inexperience with the publishing game allows for pretty pictures of people just dying to send in their dollars to your new magazine, but the cold facts certainly throw ice-water on air-castles. Experience shows that a publisher must fight for every subscription. It is filled with disappointments and hard knocks. After all, magazines are luxuries, particularly fiction magazines, and even more particularly fan magazines--and people can't afford luxuries during times when they can just about secure money enough to live on. Fantastic fiction magazines have never been huge successes with the general public, whose average intelligence is that of a moron. The lovers of fantasy have a higher type of intellect, and are therefore very few in number. I doubt that there are 150,000 people in this country of 125,000,000 who can really appreciate the science and weird fiction that is published in contemporary magazines. They are what you call 'class' publications. And not one reader in five hundred of these fantasy magazines is the least bit interested in the "fan" angle--but those of them that are are loyal to the last. Each of them is worth fifty ordinary readers. They are the only ones that are interested in the fan magazines, so you can see why the aforementioned fan magazines will never boast of circulations comparing with _Liberty_ or the _Saturday Evening Post_ or pay $500 for a cover illustration. Therefore, the only way to keep fan magazines is to secure every available _active_ fan, those rare specimens, and keep them together in one big family. Of course, a few more spring up every here and there when otherwise normal people discover that there _is_ such a thing as fantasy fiction and fan magazines.

What I started out to say was that I had money to burn when I organized THE FANTASY FAN and didn't mind it running in the red for a year. And so it has. And so it continues. I kept putting money in, and putting money in, never taking a cent out--never regretting the loss (nor do I today, nor consider it loss). I have enjoyed sacrificing hundreds of dollars (and that's not sarcasm) and devoting much of my time to gathering and assorting material for each issue.

But--and here's the reason for all this quibbling--domestic circumstances now prevent from taking any more money from my own pocket to donate to the cause, and the only way that THE FANTASY FAN can continue publication is to pay for itself. Of course, the circulation has gone up way past the mark where it half pays for the issue, certain months--due to advertising in Wonder Stories Science Fiction Swap Column under cover and the mention that Farnsworth Wright gave THE FANTASY FAN is in the Eyrie in the September 1934 issue of Weird Tales, not to speak of the co-operation of the readers we already had--but that is not enough. Now, my printer is a very nice fellow and prints THE FANTASY FAN for a very low price that cannot be duplicated anywhere, and it really does not cost so much to run TFF, when compared to the more professional magazines. I can guarantee you one thing, though: if every reader we now have would subscribe (if he has not already done so) and secure at least one new subscriber, we could continue monthly publication indefinitely.

So, if you really like our little publication, will you do your best to help bring in the subscriptions? The next issue will be published in anywhere from three weeks to two months, depending entirely upon cash receipts. And here is an amazing fact--every dollar sent in actually brings the next issue _days_ nearer publication. What do you say? Wouldn't you hate to see THE FANTASY FAN break off publication, and right in the middle of Lovecraft's article, too? I know I would. It's become one of the family with me and if anything should happen to it, I believe I'd put a crepe on the door.

Your Sincere Friend, THE EDITOR

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CLARK ASHTON SMITH

An Autobiographette

I am inclined to think that my life is a pretty good exemplification of the theories propounded by Lester Anderson in his interesting and provocative article on Superstition. Anyhow, I was born on Friday the 13th, under Capricornus and Saturn, and have been flirting with most of the other orthodox jinxes ever since. I do not whistle in the dark, I have never gone in for Dream Books or psychoanalysis, and I make a habit of walking under ladders when it is more convenient to do this than circumambulate the obstruction. As to black cats--well, I have owned one for many years--a most sinister-looking creature, with all the aspects of an old-time wizard's familiar. Perhaps all this may help to explain the kumiss in the cocoanut, and may account for my ability to peruse the most horrendous stuff without batting an eyelash. Also (since there are modern superstitions as well as ancient ones) it may throw a light on my complete lack of faith in the Five year plan, EPIC, and all other cockeyed Utopian schemes. Moreover, it may help to explain my open mind in regard to all outre and inexplicable phenomena, and the fact that I can take the theories of Einstein, as well as of modern science in general, with a salutary pinch of saline seasoning.

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OUR READERS SAY

In order to save space for more articles, starting with this issue, letters will be abbreviated.

"You and your associates have done a highly commendable job under rather trying conditions and you may well be proud of your work."--H. Koenig, New York, N.Y.

"THE FANTASY FAN is showing itself, all white cover and everything. I find it more interesting to see a publication grown than to find a brand-new mag on the market that perhaps may not last six months."--Gertrude Hemken, Chicago, Ill.

"I wish to congratulate you for the start of a second year for THE FANTASY FAN and I hope it will continue for many, many more years."--Julius Hopkins, Washington, D.C.

"Your issue of articles, the First Anniversary Number, is one of your most interesting yet, I think--a fine selection of features for both weird and science fan."--Forrest J. Ackerman, San Francisco, Calif.

"The Anniversary issue, with the many new items and the glossy cover, certainly marks a big step forward, and any lengthening of Lovecraft's treatise is always welcome."--Duane W. Rimel, Asotin, Wash.

"THE FANTASY FAN has been improving steadily, and the first (and only) fault, that of too much science fiction material, has been eliminated."--Emil Petaja, Milltown, Mont.

"I was delighted with the First Anniversary Issue. It surely was neatly done and had a dandy line-up. However, I missed the usual bit of fiction."--F. Lee Baldwin, Asotin, Wash.

"I enjoyed all the articles in the last THE FANTASY FAN, as well as the fantasies by Barlow and Morse. The slick cover has a pleasing effect, indeed, though I liked the coloured ones, too."--Clark Ashton Smith, Auburn, Calif.

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WITHIN THE CIRCLE

by F. Lee Baldwin

"The Red Brain" by Donald Wandrei is one of a long cosmic series most of which is unpublished.

H. P. Lovecraft wrote 35 "Fungi from Yuggoth" in 1929 and 1930. _The Fantasy Fan_ is going to print some of those which WT didn't take.

Farnsworth Wright has been a visitor in Seattle, Washington.

During the month of August, Clark Ashton Smith fought a terrible wood and grass fire on his ranch.... He wrote fiction--of a more realistic cast than some of his present work--as early as 1910 and 1911; some of it appearing in the defunct _Black Cat_. He dropped prose entirely until 1925 when he wrote "The Abominations of Yondo" (rejected by WT and published in the _Overland Monthly_) and "Sadastor" (also rejected by WT but later accepted by them and published).

_Weird Tales_ has on hand "The Hand of Wrath" by E. Hoffmann Price.... He and Otis Adelbert Kline have collaborated in a Mexican weird novelette. It features Bart Leslie--Two Gun Bart--one of Kline's heroes. You will recall that he was featured in "The Demon of Tlaxpam" in WT a few years ago.... Price has also collaborated with Frank Belknap Long, Jr., on a weird novelette which is on a "visit" to _Astounding Stories_. He is about to write a serial and a novelette; interplanetary, and Far East, respectively.

Forrest Ackerman can produce, at his pleasure, hour long programs, of weird and fantastic voices and sequences. He has recently added to his set of sound-discs from "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", the complete set of records from the weird-scientific film drama, "Frankenstein". He also possesses the thrilling story of Im-Ho-Tep--the Egyptian, dead 26 centuries, returned to life--featuring the weird voice of Boris Karloff; "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and the grotesque "Old Dark House".

Two youthful Merritt fans burglarized the basement of a certain Carnegie Library and made off with old _Science and Inventions_ containing "The Metal Emperor".

Robert E. Howard's occupation is fiction-writing, though he helps his father (a physician) attend to a small farm on the outskirts of Cross Plains, Texas. He is 27 years old and has led a somewhat roving and adventurous life. He is an amateur athlete and boxer; is very fond of fighting and believes barbarism to be preferable to civilization. He is a profound historic student, and an authority on the folklore and tradition of the Southwest.

August W. Derleth is 24--U. of Wis. graduate and lives in Sauk City, Wis. He is gaining fame in magazines of select quality with serious reminiscent regional fiction and poetry. He writes mystery books besides fantasy.

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ON FANTASY

by Clark Ashton Smith

We have been told that literature dealing with the imaginative and fantastic is out of favour among the Intellectuals, whoever they are. Only the Real, whatever that is or may be, is admissible for treatment; and writers must confine themselves to themes well within the range of statisticians, lightning calculators, Freud and Kraft-Ebbing, the Hearst and McFadden publications, NRA, and mail-order catalogues. Chimeras are no longer the mode, the infinite has been abolished; mystery is obsolete, and sphinx and medusa are toys for children. The weird and the unearthly are outlawed, and all mundane impossibilities (which, it may be, are the commonplaces of the Pleiads) have been banished to some limbo of literalistic derision. One may write of horses and hippopotami but not of hippogriffs; of biographers, but not of ghouls; of slum-harlots or the hetairai of Nob Hill but not of succubi. In short, all pipe-dreams, all fantasies not authorized by Freudianism, by sociology, and the five senses, are due for the critical horse-laugh, when, through ignorance, effrontery, or preference, they find a place in the subject-matter of some author unlucky enough to have been born into the age of Jeffers, Hemingway, and Joyce.

Let us examine these amazing dicta, fathered, as they must be, by people whose literal-mindedness can be surpassed only by that of their "four-footed betters." Surely it is axiomatic that in thought or art we deal not with things themselves, but with concepts of things. One may write, like Villon, of Muckle Meg and the Fair Helm-Maker; or, like Sterling, evoke Lilith and the blue-eyed vampire: in either case, only figments of the poet's mind are presented. It is for the creator, not the critic, to choose that image or symbol which suits him best. People who cannot endure anything with a tinge of trope or fantasy, should confine their reading to the census-returns. There, if anywhere, they will find themselves on safe ground.

To touch on other considerations: Why this thirst for literalism, for nothing but direct anthropological data, which would proscribe the infinitudes of imagination, would bar all that can lift us, even in thought, above the interests of the individual or the species? Does it not imply a sort of cosmic provincialism, an overweening racial egomania?

Indeed, if all things fantastic or impossible are to be barred as literary subject-matter, where is one to draw the line? Many thinkers who lived before Freud, and some who live contemporaneously with him, have maintained that the world itself is a fantasy; or, in De Casseres' phrase, a "superstition of the senses." Gaultier has pointed out that we live only by illusion, by a process of seeing ourselves and all things as they are not. The animals alone, being without imagination, have no escape from reality. From paretic to psychoanalyst, from poet to ragpicker, we are all in flight from the real. Truth is what we desire it to be, and the facts of life are a masquerade in which we imagine that we have identified the maskers. The highest intellects have always delighted in poetic fantasy and philosophic paradox, knowing well that the universe itself is multiform fantasy and paradox, and that everything perceived or conceived as actuality is merely one phase of that which has or may have innumerable aspects. In this phantom whirl of the infinite, among these veils of Maya that are sevenfold behind sevenfold, nothing is too absurd, too lovely, or dreadful to be impossible.

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SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

by H. P. Lovecraft

(copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook)

Part Fourteen

The collaborators Erckmann-Chatrain enriched French literature with many spectral fancies like "The Man Wolf," in which a transmitted curse works toward its end in a traditional Gothic-castle setting. Their power of creating a shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous despite a tendency toward natural explanations and scientific wonders; and few short tales contain greater horror than "The Invisible Eye," where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which induce the successive occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang themselves on a crossbeam. "The Owl's Ear" and "The Waters of Death" are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar overgrown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists. Villiers de l'Isle Adam likewise followed the macabre school; his "Torture by Hope," the tale of a stake-condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs of recapture, being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short story in literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself--the so-called _conte cruel_, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living writer Maurice Level, whose very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily to theatrical adaptation in the "thrillers" of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of fact, the French genius is more naturally suited to this dark realism than to the suggestion of the unseen; since the latter process requires, for its best and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of the Northern mind.

A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden branch of weird literature, is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical inclinations; and the wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in ghettoes and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally imagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy explaining the universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving the existence of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world, of which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet--a circumstance which has imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the past, and when more thoroughly studied is likely to exert considerable influence on weird fiction. The best examples of its literary use so far are the tale of "The Golem" by Gustav Meyrink, and the drama "The Dybbuk" by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym "Ansky". The former, widely popularised through the cinema a few years ago, treats of a legendary artificial giant made and animated by a medieval rabbin of Prague according to a cryptic formula. The latter, translated and produced in America in 1925 describes with singular power the possession of a living body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dybbuks are fixed types, and serve as frequent ingredients of later Jewish tradition.

(The next issue of THE FANTASY FAN will be dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, in which will be published an instalment of Mr. Lovecraft's article about four times as long as this one, all dealing with this father of the fantastic. Don't miss part fifteen.)

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Subscribe to THE FANTASY FAN only a dollar a year Insure yourself of your copy only a limited number printed and the supply does not last long

"Our Readers Say" is open to all--use it Your suggestions, criticisms, and opinions are always welcome

The Best Authors of Weird Fiction contribute regularly to THE FANTASY FAN Tell your fantasy friends about it

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THE DEMONIAN FACE

by Clark Ashton Smith

About 1918 I was in ill health and, during a short visit to San Francisco, was sitting one day in the Bohemian Club, to which I had been given a guest's card of admission. Happening to look up, I saw a frightful demonian face with twisted rootlike eyebrows and oblique fiery-slitted eyes, which seemed to emerge momentarily from air about nine feet above me and lean toward my seat. The thing disappeared as it approached me, but left an ineffaceable impression of malignity, horror, and loathsomeness. If an hallucination, it was certainly seen amid appropriate surroundings; if an actual entity, it was no doubt the kind that would be likely to haunt a club in one of our modern Gomorrahs.

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Back Numbers Of THE FANTASY FAN are still available See the ad in the rear of the magazine for issues available and prices

WEIRD TALES is the only magazine on the market today presenting really literary weird fiction masterpieces of the macabre and unearthly Boost it and help its circulation by securing new readers

Tell Your Friends about TFF

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WEIRD WHISPERINGS

by Schwartz and Weisinger

_Pen Names_

Ronal Kayser, who has been writing for _Weird Tales_ under the pen-name of Dale Clark, has now dropped his pseudonym and will hereafter use his own name.... Greye La Spina had five stories in the first issue of that old fantasy magazine, _The Thrill Book_.... Four of these tales appeared under various pseudonyms, but the cover design story was published under her own name.... G. G. Pendarves, famous weird author, is the pen-name of an English_woman_.... Her real name is Miss G. Gordon Trenery; she is now selling stories to some of the English magazines under the name of Gordon Trenery.... And remember Hugh Davidson, author of "The Vampire Master," "Snake Man," and other WT thrillers? Well, Davidson is the pseudonym for none other than Edmond Hamilton!

_Weird News_

Winford Publications' new weird magazine, out in about two months, will sell for fifteen cents a copy, and is tentatively titled _Mystery Novels Monthly_. It will feature a book-length mystery novel each issue, but all the shorter stories will be of a strictly weird nature. J. Silberkeit is the editor.... Miss C. L. Moore has returned to 'Northwest' Smith as a character in a new story titled "Julhi," which will probably appear in the February WT.... Nat Schachner, besides writing science fiction and weird-mystery yarns for _Astounding_, _Dime Mystery_, and _Terror Tales_, likewise writes quite regularly for _Super Detective_.... E. Hoffmann Price sells consistently to the new mag, _Spicy Detective Stories_.... _Tales of the Uncanny_, a new English magazine, features weird yarns by such well known authors as Algernon Blackwood, H. G. Wells, John Buchan, Hugh Walpole, Michael Arlen, H. R. Wakefield, and Somerset Maughan.

_The Edmond Hamilton Lowdown_

Here's the story behind the discovery and making of Edmond Hamilton as related by Farnsworth Wright:

"Hamilton's first story, entitled 'Beyond the Unseen Wall' was rejected by me ten years ago, but I liked its possibilities so well that I sent Hamilton a three-page typewritten letter with the rejection, telling him how I thought the story might be fixed up; because it sagged in the middle and was rather unconvincingly set forth. I did not know Hamilton from Adam's off ox, but a year later he sent the story back again, rewritten and so much changed that I hardly recognized it. I accepted it immediately, and I suggested "The Desert God" as an acceptable title. Hamilton wrote back suggesting a new one, "The Monster-God of Mamurth," which is the title under which we printed it in _Weird Tales_. Hamilton has not had a reject from us since then. Up to the present, he has had 43 stories printed in _Weird Tales_, and several more are in our hands and will appear soon."

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The Primal City

by Clark Ashton Smith

In these after-days, when all things are touched with insoluble doubt and dereliction, I am not sure of the purpose that had taken us into that little visited land. I recall, however, that we had found explicit mention, in a volume of which we possessed the one existing copy, of certain vast prehuman ruins lying amid the bare plateaus and stark pinnacles of the region. How we had acquired the volume I do not know; but Sebastian Polder and I had given our youth and much of our manhood to the quest of hidden knowledge; and this book was a compendium of all things that men have forgotten or ignored in their desire to repudiate the inexplicable.