Giant Spiders! The recent J. R. R. Tolkien movies (as well as Harry Potter films) have made giant spiders quite well known. If you are an old Dungeons & Dragons player like me, then you will remember the variety of sizes and abilities these creatures have. What I didn’t realize, or at least to what degree, the giant spider was an early Weird Tales thing. That old Pulp offered up some classic giant spiders for Horror and Fantasy fans before the works of Tolkien became known.
1920s
“The Hairy Monster” (Weird Tales, October 1923) by Neil Miller is the first appearance of a giant spider in “The Unique Magazine”. Doctor Carroll raises a giant spider in his lab. When the feeding schedule goes off, the professor disappears.
“The Spider” (Weird Tales, November 1923) by Arthur Edwards Chapman was the second appearance, only a month later. The narrator buys a number of antiques from a recently deceased Sir Nicholas Goldeby. Among these is a small golden spider with diamond eyes. The purchaser finds himself in a hypnotic trance that will not allow him to walk way without the spider. He even outbids a mysterious dark man from the Orient. Titherington, the narrator’s friend, chides him for thinking supernaturally and explains away his reaction.
That night the narrator can’t sleep. He lies in the dark room with his window open (despite Titherington filling his head with Wilkie Collins visions of Oriental killers coming to claim the Asian treasure.) No knifeman shows. Instead, the narrator hears a metallic scratching that precedes the appearance of the spider, now grown to the size of a bear. The spider hypnotizes the man but when the clock strikes twelve the spell is broken and he fights back. In the morning they find him collapsed on the floor, clutching a poker, with the golden spider smashed to bits.
Chapman sets the stage for what will be a popular theme in Weird Tales. A dozen more stories will be published, some horror, some science fiction and a few heroic fantasy, but all containing giant arachnids. Chapman’s tale is only a few thousand words long, like all the stories in the early days of Weird Tales, but he squeezes in the essentials. What would it be like to fight a spider one-on-one at its size. (Richard Matheson would shrink the man later in the 1950s.)
“The Monsters of the Pit” (Weird Tales, June 1925) by Paul S. Powers was the only story to receive a spider cover. Andrew Brosnatch shows a man armed with a fire ax taking on a giant spider in its web. With the old cliche, the story told in a men’s club, we find out how Scott lost his left arm. The story is set in Africa, in the bush outside Port Said. Scott, an engineer, falls for a beautiful white woman, Irene Denham. Scott’s man, Kali, warns him that the girl’s father is crazy. Professor Denham is a scientist. The only hint of trouble is when Irene accidentally slips, saying “He hates the world — he plans to destroy–“
Scott meets the man and doesn’t like him. His eyes are cold and scheming. After dinner, the Professor shows Scott his specimens, germs grown to the size of cats. The two men are interrupted by the boss of Denham’s blacks. Virtual slaves, the blacks are on the point of revolting. Denham gives the man a gun and tells him to kill anyone he must.
Now Denham opens a door to a stairway. Scott enters the dark space while Irene tells him not to go. Too late! The Professor pushes him onto a giant web. Giant spiders surround him. He is about to die when Irene shows up with an axe. She kills one of the spiders, when her father tries to intervene. Irene saves Scott while her father is killed by one of the monsters. Escaping, Scott is bitten on the hand.
Fleeing the estate, now on fire by angry locals, Scott’s arm swells up and turns blue. Irene raises the axe and chops three times…
Powers wrote about his years in the Pulps, with a mention of his four horror pieces for Farnsworth Wright. Sadly, he doesn’t talk much about the experience, only laments how much money he lost, having given up all rights, when his stories were reprinted in books.
“Spider-Bite” (Weird Tales, June 1926) by Robert S. Carr is one of the most famous (though not often reprinted) stories from Weird Tales. Carr, like Tennessee Williams, is famous for having gotten his start in Weird Tales. He later wrote The Rampant Age, that won him a writing gig in Hollywood. He may be best remembered for a 1975 interview in which he claimed to have seen an alien autopsy, adding fuel to that urban legend.
“Spider Bite” opens with Phil, a student of Professor Ashbrooke, convincing his master to take another look at a chamber in a pyramid. The two men discover a secret door and a stairway into a dark, wet chamber. Phil goes in first because the aperture is too small for the robust Ashbrooke. Inside, he suddenly goes silent. Ashbrooke has the native servants break into the chamber, allowing him to find Phil still alive. A mechanism knocked him unconscious. The device was supposed to kill any intruder with a sharp blade. (Very Indiana Jones!)
Inside the chamber they find a mummy slung up over a well. Unlike most mummies, this corpse has not been embalmed and wrapped in bandages. Phil does some secret experiments and discovers that if he covers the body with the juice of a local plant then inject it with the venom of the white tomb spiders, the body can be resurrected. The two archaeologist bring the mummy of Za to life. Using hieroglyphics they communicate with the man who has been dead for three thousand years. Phil asks him where the legendary gems are hidden. Za indicates the well. The white men pull a chain that unplugs the bottom of the well. The water leaks out, revealing a chest filled with wealth.
Phil and Ashbrooke jump into the well pit. Za takes that moment to attack them by throwing heavy objects on him. His evil designs are thwarted when a tomb spider falls on his neck and bites him. The two treasure seekers jump out of the well to find Za dead, and: “Trooping up out of the foul subterranean darkness of the great square drainage hole at the bottom of the pit, came countless thousands of great white spiders!” They grab what they can and flee.
It is interesting to compare this story with Anthony M. Rud’s “The Place of Hairy Death” eight years later. The hand-sized, white tarantula was an effective image for horror writers.
In “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (Weird Tales, August 1926) by Edmond Hamilton, an archaeologist seeks out the forbidden city of Mamurth, where he finds a temple made of invisible bricks. Inside the temple dwells the old god the Mamurtans worshiped, an invisible spider of gigantic proportions. Caught inside an invisible maze, he must find a way to safety. I wrote about the story here.
Hamilton adds the invisibility to make it more fun. His invisible temple may have inspired H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling’s “In the Walls of Eryx” (written January 1936, but appeared in the October 1939 issue of Weird Tales), where a similar maze on Venus kills its captives by slow starvation rather than giant spiders.
“The City of the Spiders” (Weird Tales, November 1926) by H. Warner Munn is a Science Fiction masterpiece that readers may not be aware of it. Munn became famous for werewolf stories in Weird Tales. This story explains why humans hate spiders. An explorer discovers a land ruled by giant spiders, once the masters of all the earth. I wrote about the story here.
“The Cave of the Spiders (Weird Tales, November 1928) by William R. Hickey is a shorter tale about an expedition to Peru. A married couple named Seton and a man named Graves go to the mountains but only Mrs. Seton and Graves return. The narrator suggests that Mrs. Graves is an evil person. Graves tells what happened at lunch one day. The explorers had been seated around a big campfire in the jungle when a dark cloud shaped like a vampire spooks them. Mrs. Seton says it is a premonition of death.
A few days later, in the mountains, Mrs. Seton comes running into camp, clutching her .30-30. Disaster has struck. She takes Graves to a cave where her dead husband is being eaten by giant spiders. The man makes no attempt to retrieve the body. The party heads back to civilization. Graves says there was no point in trying to recue the dead man’s body. The narrator surprises him by telling him that later he had gone back to Graves’ spot in the mountains and retrieved the corpse. Seton had been shot through the head with a .30-30.
The last part of the tale says the narrator received two telegrams. Graves has gone to live in California. And Mrs. Seton has been arrested.
1930s
“The Net of Shamleigh” (Weird Tales, January 1930) by Lt. Edgar Gardiner is a story worthy of Kipling. Billy Singleton is an Eastern adventurer who is waiting to hear from a horse-trader named Mahbub Ali. The man knows of a rope made from some silk-like material that could revolutionize the fabric industry and make Billy’s company rich. When the man doesn’t show, Billy walks down dark alleys looking for him. Instead he finds a native man beating a child. Billy steps in, knocks out the villain and takes the boy away. His name is Chota Lal.
Later he learns the man he struck was Sikhander Khan, his rival, and that the horse-trader has been murdered. The man and the boy backtrack Mahbub Ali’s movements to the Chini Valley and its cursed hills. Sikhander Khan follows. When they encounter Khan again he is trapped on the hillside under a net, a gigantic spider web. The thing that made it:
“Huge, leggy, bristly, it flashed toward them. Its legs covered a fifteen-foot circle; its body was a globular bag, gleaming iridescently with blues and greens and blacks, mottled with vivid red splotches the size of a man’s head. In a sort of spiny plate on its front were set six gleaming black eyes that glinted redly in the golden haze. The plate and bag were borne on those huge spiky legs four feet or more above the net.”
Billy crawls under the trapped man and watches as the giant arachnid stabs Khan with a needle-like bite and drains his blood. Billy pulls his automatic and shoots the monster three times. Later he and Chota Lal find the creature under a boulder, dead. So much for the strange silk business.
Things aren’t quite over yet. A gunman in hiding shoots Chota Lal in the hand. Billy spends an hour in a game of cat and mouse, but it only ends when the boy exposes himself as bait, allowing Billy to shoot the sniper. The white man takes the brave little urchin as his son.
“The Wand of Doom” by Jack Williamson (Weird Tales, October 1932) has a thought projection machine that can make what you imagine real. Just don’t fall asleep with it on and have spider dreams! The narrator has to solve the mystery of why his friend has giant spider bites in his head. I’ve written about this story here.
“The Tower of the Elephant” (Weird Tales, March 1933) by Robert E. Howard is famous for its elephantine alien but the real terror of the tale is a giant spider the size of a mastiff. The thief Taurus of Nemedia is not as quick as the Cimmerian. Tom Shippey feels the monster was inspired by Lord Dunsany. I’ve written about this story here.
“The Place of Hairy Death” by Anthony M. Rud (Weird Tales, February 1934) is an account by a Mayan guide to two white Americans, Jim Coulter and his friend Lester. The men want to go into an old gold mine under Croszchen Pahna in Quintana Roo to retrieve Spanish gold. He tells how the two men had to evade the albino tarantulas:
That was the first of the sickly-white spiders, the conechos. I had warned the two young men, of course; but until one sees those horrible, sightless, hairy monsters, and learns how they can leap and dodge–even a swift bullet, some maintain!– there can be no understanding of the terror they inspire in men.
The Mayan waits in the Room of Craters while the Americans proceed to the gold chamber. Jim digs out the wall, while Lester twitches in fear. When Coulter gets trapped then bit by one of the spiders, all the other spiders come to the signal, covering him in white death. Lester flees, surviving but insane. His father collects him but a year later the Mayan sees him again. Lester wants to go back down to get Jim’s body. The Mayan doubts the twitching wreak of man could do such a thing. The guide refuses any offer of money.
Later that night, after the Mayan cleans out all the spider webs from his hut, Lester dies. He cries for he has been bitten by one of the albino killers. When the guide opens his dead hand, he finds a crushed mouse.
“The Seven Geases” (Weird Tales, October 1934) by Clark Ashton Smith is a tale set in ancient Commoria. Smith’s hero goes on a quest but in doing so encounters some creepy gods including Atlach-Nacha:
The dark form ran toward him with incredible swiftness. When it came near he saw that there was a kind of face on the squat ebon body, low down amid the several-jointed legs. The face peered up with a weird expression of doubt and inquiry; and terror crawled through the veins of the bold huntsman as he met the small, crafty eyes that were circled about with hair. Thin, shrill, piercing as a sting, there spoke to him the voice of the spider-god Atlach-Nacha…
“Death in Twenty Minutes” (Weird Tales, January 1935) by Charles Henry Mackintosh is a short two-pager. A jealous Egyptologist plans to kill his rival, Doctor Barrion by placing a poisonous Hawaiian spider in the wrappings of a new mummy. Later a ghostly figure, Doctor Barrion, appears bearing the killer spider. The spider bits again!
I think I should mention that J. R. R. Tolkien only appears this late in 1937 with The Hobbit and his giant spiders. Almost all of the Weird Tales spiders have already appeared.
1940s
With 1940, Weird Tales changed owners, editor and location. From New York, Dorothy McIlwraith took over from Farnsworth Wright (who died shortly after). Ms. McIlwraith must not have liked the spiders for her selections include tales with little spider business in them. Her one selection of note was Fritz Leiber’s infamous “Spider Mansion”.
“Spider Mansion” (Weird Tales, September 1942) has a giant spider that has been created by a mad dwarf (who has also made himself very large). Leiber works pretty hard to fit in all the cliches. And the giant spider had become a Pulp cliche by 1942. I’ve written about this story here.
Cliche or not, giant spider stories did appear later in both magazines and in comics, but these belong to publications other than Weird Tales. “The Unique Magazine” ended their spider reign with Leiber’s odd homage to all the spiders who came before.
