by Robert Weinberg (1923)
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Imagine flipping open a dog-eared pulp magazine from 1923, the air thick with the scent of yellowed newsprint and forgotten ink, as H.P. Lovecraft’s shadowy tendrils first uncoil around the world in “The Call of Cthulhu.” That’s the electric jolt The Weird Tales Story by Robert Weinberg delivers—not as dry history, but as a feverish portal slamming open to the raw birthplace of weird fiction.
Weinberg drags you into the magazine’s chaotic pulse, from its shaky launch amid financial woes to its heyday under editor Farnsworth Wright, where Robert E. Howard hammered out Conan the Cimmerian’s blood-soaked rampages against serpent cults in “The Tower of the Elephant.” Feel the chill as Clark Ashton Smith’s hyperboreal horrors slither through Averoigne, or the defiant fire of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry storming hells in “Black God’s Kiss.” Weinberg doesn’t just list these; he resurrects the behind-the-scenes frenzy—artists like J. Allen St. John sketching Virgil Finlay’s intricate nightmares, writers like Fritz Leiber and his Fafhrd clashing swords with the Gray Mouser in Lankhmar’s fog-shrouded alleys, all while the Depression clawed at the magazine’s survival.
What sets this book apart in a sea of fantasy retrospectives? It’s no sanitized coffee-table gloss; Weinberg, a collector with stacks of original issues, pores over circulation charts, rejection letters, and pay stubs that reveal how Leigh Brackett’s planetary adventures rubbed shoulders with Seabury Quinn’s occult Jules de Grandin tales. You taste the desperation of contributors begging for a check, the thrill of a cover story boosting sales overnight. This is the unvarnished forge where sword and sorcery fused with cosmic dread, birthing genres that echo in every grimdark epic today—think the pulp grit fueling modern hits like The Black Company, but traced straight to the source.
If you devoured the lurid covers of Conan paperbacks or shivered through Lovecraft anthologies, craving the real dirt on how these legends ignited, this is your unholy grail. You’ve probably chased footnotes in The Shadow Over Innsmouth wondering about the magazine that birthed it—Weinberg hands you the full, unexpurgated map.
Grab The Weird Tales Story tonight, and let its pages summon the ghosts of pulp past to haunt your shelves forever.
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