The early issues of Weird Tales are full of surprises. They leap out at you when you aren’t expecting them. The stories before 1935 are especially hard to locate unless they were written by Seabury Quinn, HP Lovecraft, or Robert E Howard. H Warner Munn’s short novel, “The City of the Spiders,” (Weird Tales, November 1926) is a case-in-point. This wonderful old story is largely forgotten despite being one of the best tales of giant spiders ever written. EF Bleiler says it was well crafted and unappreciated, unlike Munn’s more famous werewolf clan stories. I was completely unaware of the tale until I came across it in Famous Science Fiction #4 (Fall 1967). Once again I am indebted to Robert AW Lowndes for knowing better.
Appearing in that November issue of 1926, Munn’s work did not receive the cover, despite being the best story in the issue. The cover went to EF Hoffman’s “The Peacock Shadow,” a story that might have been better in WT‘s sister magazine, Oriental Tales; not yet created (1930-34). Hoffman’s tale would certainly have pleased Farnsworth Wright better, as Wright was always looking for a reason to put a half-dressed (or less) woman on the cover and Munn’s story has no love interest. But a little digging also found that the cover of June 1925 bore an Andrew Brosnatch illo for Paul S Powers’ “Monsters of the Pit,” featuring a man attacking a giant spider with an ax. Perhaps Wright simply felt that he’d “been there; done that”.
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2017/04/the-city-of-spiders-h-warner-munns.html
