The Fantasy Fan, Volume 2, Number 5, January 1935 / The Fan's Own Magazine
Date: 2021-03-27T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy fiction -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Fan magazines; Fantasy fiction -- Periodicals

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Fantasy Fan, Volume 2, Number 5, January 1935

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Title: The Fantasy Fan, Volume 2, Number 5, January 1935

Author: Various

Editor: Charles D. Hornig

Release date: March 27, 2021 [eBook #64942]

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FANTASY FAN, VOLUME 2, NUMBER 5, JANUARY 1935 ***

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

FORWARD
by Ye Ed

You will notice that this is the Special Weird Poetry Number.

The next issue will be the Special Short Story Number,
and the March issue will be dedicated to Weird Tales. By the way, F. Lee Baldwin, the author of our well-liked department, "Within the Circle," has compiled an excellent biography of H. P. Lovecraft which will appear in the Weird Tales number with a special wood-cut of the famed writer by Duane W. Rimel. Coming up is also volumes of material from Seabury Quinn, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, R. H. Barlow, Robert Nelson, and all your other favorite writers.

Upon suggestions from many of our readers, we are dropping "Our Readers Say" department with this issue. As H. Koenig points, continuous repetition of "I liked this" and "I liked that" does not make very interesting reading. Therefore, "Our Readers Say" will be replaced by this "Forward" each month besides fan articles made from the most interesting of our readers' communications.

Due to the huge influx of contributions, we find it very difficult to oblige all of our contributors by placing their material in print promptly. We intend to use the best material first and must ask the patience of all those who have sent us articles. Please remember our limited space.

MR. KOENIG CORRECTS

I have just had an opportunity to check up on Blackwood's "The Wolves of God," (writes H. Koenig). The book was written by Blackwood and Wilson as I indicated in my last letter. I find, however, that the only story credited directly to Blackwood was the last story in the book entitled "Vengeance is Mine" and not the title story. Hence, if you should publish my earlier letter, please make the correction. Incidentally, it may be well that Blackwood had a hand in the other stories. But if so, the Table of Contents does not so indicate.

A GRAND SLAM

You will remember that in our editorial for the November, 1934, number, we stated casually that the average intelligence of the general public was that of a moron. We have received a post-card containing the following from "One of the 'General Public'," post-marked Newark, N. J.:

"In recently wasting time glancing through that collection of waste paper which you honor with the title of a magazine, I noticed that you consider the general public—of which I am proud to be a member—a collection of moronic individuals, and the followers of your creed of a "higher type of intellect." I just hate to disagree with you, but if you investigate the reason for the small number of such creatures, you would probably find out that most asylums censor their inmate's mail. Unfortunately, lack of space and postal laws prohibit my expressing of my true opinion of both the (?-!—) and its readers. I challenge you to print this."

It is easy to see that the writer of this card is "one of the general public." Here we find the customary challenge to print it and the lack of signature, which must denote that the writer is either ashamed or afraid to append his name. Concerning asylums, however, we hadn't even thought of soliciting the inmates. That's not a bad idea. We'll have to take that point up at the next Director's Meeting. Which one are you in?

DREAM
by R. O. P.

Erubescent, the southern sky
With sunset pools of flaming foam
Like opened crucibles of Hell
Glows redly, as a burning Rome
Beneath its red malevolanace
Where swooning orbs recline
Are etched grotesque and curious trees
With shapes of strange outline.

WEIRD WHISPERINGS
by Julius Schwartz

Arthur B. Reeve, creator of the famous scientific-sleuth, Craig Kennedy, makes his bow to Weird Tales readers with a novelette in the May issue!... Jack Binder, brother of the popular author Eando Binder, will do most of the illustrating for Weird commencing with the April number.... C. L. Moore has pulled a "Clark Ashton Smith" and has drawn the illustration for her forthcoming yarn in WT "Julhui".... There will be no women on Weird Tales' covers for two consecutive issues this year, April and May!

Dr. Death is the title of the latest fantasy magazine to appear on the newsstands. It features a weird-scientific novel each month written by "Zorro," which is the pseudonym for Harold Ward. Rounding out the rest of the issue are three or four thrillers with a pseudo-scientific or weird background.... Donald Wandrei's latest Ivy Frost novelette, "They Could Not Kill Him," appears currently in Clues.... The April cover of Weird Tales will illustrate a scene in A. W. Bernal's "The Man Who was Two Men," and deals with an amazing development in radio after television.... Bernal, by the way, is a student in the University of California, and sold his first yarn, "The Man Who Played with Time," which appeared in March, 1932 WT at the early age of 15.

Farnsworth Wright brings up an interesting point regarding titles of stories. Hardly a month goes by that does not bring at least one story titled "The House of Fear," another entitled "The House of Living Death," and another entitled "Hands of Death." The commonest title on manuscripts submitted is "Retribution," but stories with the word "House" in the title are almost as frequent. Of course, these titles are changed if the story is accepted, to avoid repeating the same title that has been used in the magazine before. "The House of the Living Dead," by Harold Ward, appeared in WT for March, 1932. Quinn's cover design story for the February, 1935 issue had the same title, in manuscript, but the title was changed to "The Web of Living Death." Harold Ward's cover design story for the March issue this year was originally titled "Hands of Death," but this was too similar to Quinn's tale title, "Hands of the Dead" in the current January issue, so the title of Ward's story was changed to "Clutching Hands of Death."

SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
by H. P. Lovecraft

Part Sixteen

(copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook)

VIII. The Weird Tradition in America

The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognized as fruitful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer Moore has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged, the vast and gloomy virgin forest in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival—all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare.

Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school—the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical—was represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters—the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theater of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen, half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primary object with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach.

Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children contained in "A Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood Tales," and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street Ground. In "The Marble Faun," whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which caused the late D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner. "Septimius Felton," a posthumous novel whose idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished "Dolliver Romance," touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion; whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called "The Ancestral Footstep," shows what Hawthorne would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition—that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they walked—which appears incidentally in both "Septimius Felton" and "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret."

(Mr. Lovecraft tells you more about Nathaniel Hawthorne in the next issue. Don't miss Part Seventeen).

THE MONSTROSITY

(A True Experience)

by Hoy Ping Pong

(Apologies to Kenneth B. Pritchard)

Many people have seen freaks and monsters, both in the circus and in their nightmares, especially after a gay night, but this which I tell of happened when I was cold sober, on a crispy winter night in the middle of July. (Don't laugh—this might have happened in Australia—Editor).

I had returned from a party, and to be sure, I was half lit up, for I had dashed down several canters of buttermilk, but nevertheless, I was cold sober when I met the great adventure! I had just about reached home, when my sixth sense warned me that something was wrong. I looked about.

The snow covered the ground several inches thick, but as far as I could see, not a single footprint marred the beauty of it. I even turned to look behind me, but could not see my own tracks. Too peaceful. I had a grim foreboding of something evil. For want of something better to do, I bent over and tied my shoelace. And then I saw it!

For as I bent over, I caught a glimpse of a monstrous foot protruding from behind a nearby tree! Hastily, I assumed an innocent manner and straightened. I must not let the Thing know I had seen it! Nonchalantly, I lighted a Fizwig and blew smoke rings. And then it happened!

For the monster stepped out from behind the tree and approached me! He was the strangest thing I had ever seen! All of six foot tall, four queer limbs protruding from his body, a round, shiny cranium perched upon what I took to be shoulders, and a mass of hanging brown stuff sticking to the cranium. He had on some queer dress of blue material, with shoulder straps on each side. I mumbled in fear and awaited his approach.

For several seconds he surveyed me, and then, much to my absolute horror, he spoke. Spoke to me! My hair stood straight up in the air, my eyes rolled, and I fainted at those fearful words: "I say, old chap, could you direct me to the post office?"

A BEAM FROM THE SKY

(A True Experience)

by Kenneth B. Pritchard

On Saturday evening, October 21, 1933, a strange thing was noted by two friends and myself.

It was quite dark, for clouds were thick and hanging low in the sky.

From out of the east there flashed a beam as of a searchlight questing thru the atmosphere. It shone at intervals of a few seconds. These intervals were irregular, and sometimes the beam would last longer than at others. Once, it lasted easily ten seconds, and probably more.

At times this light seemed a reflection from the clouds; but then again, after the almost beam-like light had ceased, the light came directly from the clouds seemingly from someone in or above them!

There are no really high places in my city (Pittsfield, Mass.) to shine a light from that position.

Was it a search beam, a natural phenomena, or something from Beyond?

WITHIN THE CIRCLE
by F. Lee Baldwin

"The Ghoul," British weird tale of the screen, disappeared from Los Angeles screens the day Forrest J. Ackerman arrived there, playing no theater during all the summer months he looked for it. The morning he left, it came on again!

Jack Williamson is recuperating from an appendix operation and has done no writing for quite a while. He says: "—My drugged slumbers in the first few days after the operation bred some of the weirdest dreams yet, and I'm anxious to get back to writing".... When in Key West last winter, he and Edmond Hamilton had a few adventures such as capsizing a skiff out in the Atlantic and towing it behind them as they swam back to shore. Hamilton caught a monster jew fish.

Wright has bought "The Cyclops of Xoatl," featuring Two-Gun Bart Leslie and his pursuit of a cannibal monster in Mexico. The tale is by E. Hoffmann Price and Otis Adelbert Kline.... The two are now planning a story of Burma, about leopard men.... Pierre d'Artois, Price's veteran swordsman, is more or less a picture of his old fencing-master of long ago during his academic days.... Price says about "Queen of the Lilin": I ploughed through a good deal of research in order to present Lilith authentically. A good deal of the Lilith lore had to be cut out in the interests of brevity, which I regretted, as I felt that some of the fans would enjoy a closer acquaintance with the fascinating Queen of Zemargad.

R. H. Barlow is in Washington taking treatment for his eyes. He is also taking a light art course at the Corcoran Gallery.

Alonzo Leonard, who appeared sometime ago in "Believe It Or Not" for inventing a private language, is an authority on cults, ancient languages, superstitions, and strange beliefs. He has compiled a set of "books," 48 volumes, of all strange happenings and things of unusual nature. The collection is called "Encyclopedia Satanic."

FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH
by H. P. Lovecraft

(Hitherto Unpublished Verses)

III. The Key

I do not know what windings in the waste

Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more,

But on my porch I trembled, white with haste
To get inside and bolt the heavy door.
I had the book that told the hidden way

Across the void and through the space-hung screens

That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,

And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.

At last the key was mine to those vague visions

Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood

Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth's precisions,

Lurking as memories of infinitude.

The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling,

The attic window shook with a faint fumbling.

V. Homecoming

The daemon said that he would take me home
To the pale, shadow-land I half-recalled
As a high place of stair and terrace, walled
With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,
While miles below a maze of dome on dome

And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.

Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled

On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.

All this he promised, and through sunset's gate

He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame,
And red-gold thrones of gods without a name
Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.

Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:

"Here was your home," he mocked, "when you had sight!"

LATE REVENGE
by Duane W. Rimel

Spawn of the cellars, rising black,
Midst darkened doorways, out a crack;
To wither each bright blade of grass,
And smother flying souls that pass.

Spawns of the cellars; evil slime;
Heed not their calling, lest they climb
As rays of light upon thy face,
And steal thy spirit's resting place.

Wraiths of corruption, creep not in;
For though their minds be steeped in sin,
They hold a germ of terror yet,
That baffles every evil met.

Seed of the tombstone, enter now;

Their house is darkened to the mow.

Your chance has come to right the wrong,

That you have waited all too long.

Spawn of the cellars, rising fast,

To seek the hell-hounds out at last:

They cloudlike through the window creep,

On those who sprawl in drunken sleep.

Dread putrefactions, find your breed;
That you may pay that awful deed;
That you may spread your bloating jaws,
And sap their entrails through your maws.

Germ of corruption, speed ye fast.

A thing is rising to its last;

For greedy claws to grip around,

And carry back to that mouldy mound.

Spawn of the cellars, get ye back
To gulfs of darkness where no track,
Can trace you to that worming brood;
Or toss your bones in darkened mood.

Seed of the tombstone, floating black,

Back to the cellar through that crack.

And beings stare with sightless eyes,

Down black steps where a brother lies.

THE ALIEN
by Natalie H. Wooley

She is like living golden flame.

She knows not whence or why she came

Into this world ... and yet at times

I hear her call strange gods by name.

There is no warmth in her embrace,

Of human passions not a trace.

She seems remote, a thing attuned

To summonings from outer space.

And on each starry, moonlit night
She gazes long in rapt delight
Toward the skies ... while I weep
Lest the message come, and she take flight.

VOICES OF THE NIGHT
by Robert E. Howard

2. Babel

Now in the gloom the pulsing drums repeat,
And all the night is filled with evil sound;
I hear the throbbing of inhuman feet
On marble stairs that silence locks around.

I see black temples loom against the night,
With tentacles like serpents writhed afar,
And waving in a dusky dragon light
Great moths whose wings unholy tapers char.

Red memory on memory, tier on tier,

Builds up a tower, time and space to span;

Through world on world I rise, and sphere on sphere,

To star-shot gulfs of lunacy and fear—

Black screaming ages never dreamed by man.

Was this your plan, foul spawn of cosmic mire,

To freeze my soul to stone and icy fire,
To carve me in the moon that all mankind
May know its race is futile, weak and blind—
A horror-blasted statue in the sky,
That does not live and nevermore can die?

FRAGMENT
by Robert Nelson

With the red bewitchment of the moon canines collect

And feast and howl o'er carrion and orts and bones

In green and putrid grots that echo shrill sea-moans;

And huge and hoary plantigrades on crags most high,

Hearing the maddened carnal ravings of the hounds,

Huddle together on the topmost frozen mounds

To hurl immense boulders on them until all die.

THE ELDER THING

by William Lumley

Oh, have you seen the Elder Thing
That creeps upon the hill—
A fearsome Thing with lurid eyes
At night when all is still;
A horror wrought of withered moss
And foul primordial slime,
Wherein there fester monstrously
The evils of all time?

With phosphorescent glow like naught
That Nature might devise,
All the fell ancient lore of earth
Gleams hellish in its eyes.
As night by night this Elder Thing
Upon the hill doth creep,
Awakened by men's blasphemies
From out its age-long sleep.

By monolith and haunted fen
Down to the mandrake mere
It prowls to meet the sheeted dead
That squeak and gibber there;
And nameless things, not beasts nor men,
With bat-like creatures vie,
And loathsome reptiles writhe and hiss
Till daybreak pales the sky.

A thousand shapes the Things—
A thousand shapes or none—
All forms of Fear since Earth was born
It mirrors as its own;
It apes each rhythmic Elder Sign
As it doth onward creep,
Awakened by man's blasphemies
From out its age-long sleep.

THE GHOUL'S PARADE
by Lionel Dilbeck

When the bells toll midnight
And Dark Things begin to roam,
The old house shivers, and the
Walls begin to moan.

The rats stop their scurrying
And everything is quiet;
The moon rises, softly,
As if in fright.

The wind howls mournfully
Through the skeleton trees,
And the breath of corruption
Is borne in on the breeze.

The corpse in the cellar
Mouths a slobbering curse;
On those who have slit his throat,
And robbed him of his purse.

The maggots swarm in his rotten flesh,
And he howls in mad despair;
He shrieks and moans and rages
And tears his gristly hair.

He rages thus each night
From midnight until one;
And the maggots swarm and wiggle,
And have their hellish fun.

THE DEAD WORLD
by Richard F. Searight

I dreamed I stood atop a craggy verge

And scanned long miles of dreary, jumbled waste

That stretched, sharp-etched in airless, frozen surge

Beneath the sable, star-strewn vault it faced.

Black empty mouths of craters, grim and cold,
Yawned bottomless, abysmal pits of slag
Amid the desert stretching fold on fold
To distant jagged peak and sharp-thrust crag.

The desolation flooded through my soul—
No living thing relieved the dismal rifts
Of long-past cataclysms; the bleak roll
Of upflung ridge and tangled lava drifts.

It was as if a Titan band had played

With this dead world when it was young and fair,

And tired of the sport when they had made

A ruin and a wreckage past repair.

The cold of outer voids lay like a blight
Of cosmic hate across the planet's face;
And from the riven features I took flight
To seek relief in fairer realms of space.

A WEIRD BOOK
by P. J. Searles

"Lost Horizon" by Hilton.

Weird stories are so often bloody and gruesome that it is a delight to find one written in an urbane and restrained style. "Lost Horizon" tells of the stealing of a plane and its four passengers (two British consular agents, an American absconding banker, and an American missionary) during a tribal outbreak north of India and their intentional removal to a remote valley in Tibet where they find a semi-Christian and semi-Buddhist monastery, inhabited by a group of serene men and women who have achieved an indefinitely prolonged life.

The main portion of the story concerns life in the monastery and the attempt by its head to persuade the few prisoners to remain there, exchanging a hurried, confused, and short life in so-called civilization for calm, peace, and longevity in Tibet. Naturally, and inevitably, the denouement is a tragedy, indirect, but poignant.

Mr. Hilton is an urbane satirist (if that is not a contradiction of terms) who has produced a beautiful story, weird and unusual, but without the so-frequent accompaniment of vampires, ghosts, or the like. He writes delicately in a style reminiscent of Owens' "The Wind that Tramps the World." "Lost Horizon" is not for the blood-and-thunder reader; it has no "crashing suns," no "supernatural," no "unseen presences," no incredible "brain surgeons," no "werewolves," but it does have an unusual plot, weird in a faint and beautiful manner. For the not-too-hardened it will be a pleasure.

TRILOGY OF DEATH
by Robert Nelson

Death is a wheel....

Death is a wheel, grinding, rending, crushing. The little boy skipped gayly to the grocery store for his mother. Crossing the street, he did not see an oncoming truck. It was too late and—Death is a wheel, grinding, rending, crushing. Death is a wheel....

Death is a dollar bill....

Death is a dollar bill. A gust of wind swept a vagrant dollar bill into the gutter. It sped onward thru the streets. Onward to a jutting pier. Onward it went. A man espied it. He ran for it. Stumbled. Ran on. He came to the end of the pier. Fell into the water. But he grasped the dollar bill. "I've got it!" he cried. And then he sank beneath the waves. Death is a dollar bill....

Death is a dream....

Death is a dream. "Death, too, must be a dream," said the man in his dream. "Petty hills. Endless. Light all about. Light ... gladness ... music ... voices of women. But my throat. How tight. I am choking.... Breath, breath. My breath. Pretty hills. Endless. My breath. God, my breath. Light ... breath ... hills ... music ... voices of women. Breath...." Death is a dream....

SCIENCE FICTION IN ENGLISH MAGAZINES
by Bob Tucker

(Series Eight)

British science fiction, with the death of "Scoops," has just about gone pfft, to quote a New York columnist. The small four-cent magazines in the field do not run enough "science" fiction to make reading them worth your time.

The "Triumph" is still running the "Invisible Charlie" series, and they get no better each time. The "Wizard" has come forth with the "Worms of Doom." It's the old idea of the gent with a world-conquering mania again. He lets loose strange worms upon the world, said worms capable of devouring steel. Of course, they devour the most popular buildings first of all. It's funny how the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building taste better than ordinary ones.

"Amazing Stories" publishes a British Edition over there, so that helps somewhat. When questioned, "Wonder" and "Astounding" say that they don't publish such editions, but "Wonder" adds "as yet," so maybe someday....

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THE FANTASY FAN

AN ANECDOTE
by Forrest J. Ackerman

In the early days of science fiction when there were not many authors who wrote it and Amazing was chiefly a magazine of Verne-Wells-Poe reprints, Bob Olsen was writing and had a friend who thought he could too. Bob had two tales published in Amazing without mentioning the accomplishment to his friend who succeeded in having nothing accepted (he was not writing stf). Then, with the third story, Bob's name appeared on the cover, giving him quite a thrill. 'Stories by: H. G. Wells, Bob Olsen, Edgar Allan Poe', it read. "Uh, what do you think of that?" asked Bob proudly, now displaying his work, his name with Wells and Poe. The friend sized up a moment. Then, "They've got you just right, all right," he seemed to have to admit, Bob swelling with pride—"half way between a live one and a dead one!"

Bob still thinks he was a little bit envious, tho.

Tell your friends to read
THE FANTASY FAN

ALIER'S ALIBI
by Mortimer Weisinger

Years ago, when Hugo Gernsback's "Scientific Adventures of Baron Munchhausen" were appearing serially in the Electrical Experimenter, it occasionally transpired that an installment was omitted. At such intervals various ingenious excuses were offered to explain the missing chapters. Perhaps the gem of them all is the one which we are reproducing herewith, taken from a 1915 issue.

"Baron Munchhausen, as will be noted, has failed to make his appearance this month. Urgent wireless telegrams to his chronologist-in-chief, the Hon. I. M. Alier, of Yankton, Mass., disclosed the fact that the venerable old gentleman had contracted a virulent case of Atmospheris Marsianis, which sometimes attacks Interplanetary travellers not acclimatized to the peculiar Martian air. Mr. Alier, however, states that Professor Flitternix, the Baron's companion, advises him that Munchhausen will be back on the job next month. Of course we're sorry, but what can we do?"

ADVERTISEMENTS
Rates: one cent per word
Minimum Charge, 25 cents

Back Numbers of The Fantasy Fan: September, 1933, out of print; Oct., Dec., 1933—Jan., Feb., Mar., May, June, Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec., 1934, 10 cents each.

Nov., 1933—Apr., July, 1934, 20 cents each.

CLARK ASHTON SMITH presents THE DOUBLE SHADOW AND OTHER FANTASIES—a booklet containing a half-dozen imaginative and atmospheric tales—stories of exotic beauty, horror, terror, strangeness, irony and satire. Price: 25 cents each (coin or stamps). Also a small remainder of EBONY AND CRYSTAL—a book of prose-poems published at $2.00, reduced to $1.00 per copy. Everything sent postpaid. Clark Ashton Smith, Auburn, California.

BACK ISSUES of Weird Tales for sale, 1924-25-26 to date. State issues wanted. D. M. Roberts, 328 W. Willow St., Syracuse, N. Y.

Important! Many subscriptions to TFF expire this winter. Yours is probably one of them. Don't forget to send in your new subscription if you want TFF to continue monthly publication. Every dollar counts!

Watch for a
Sensational Announcement
regarding
FANTASY MAGAZINE
in the next issue

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FANTASY FAN, VOLUME 2, NUMBER 5, JANUARY 1935 ***

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Table of Contents

- FORWARD by Ye Ed
- MR. KOENIG CORRECTS
- A GRAND SLAM

- DREAM

- WEIRD WHISPERINGS by Julius Schwartz

- SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

- THE MONSTROSITY

- A BEAM FROM THE SKY

- WITHIN THE CIRCLE by F. Lee Baldwin

- FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH
- LATE REVENGE
- THE ALIEN
- VOICES OF THE NIGHT
- FRAGMENT
- THE ELDER THING by William Lumley
- THE GHOUL'S PARADE
- THE DEAD WORLD
- A WEIRD BOOK
- TRILOGY OF DEATH

- SCIENCE FICTION IN ENGLISH MAGAZINES

- AN ANECDOTE by Forrest J. Ackerman

- ALIER'S ALIBI by Mortimer Weisinger

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE