The Other Worlds, an anthology by Phil Stong and Garden City Publishing, is a Pulp snapshot of the industry of fantastic literature before 1942. Where other publishers and editors ignored the wealth of material lying in old Pulps, Mr. Stong did otherwise. He even acknowledged the publications at the beginning of the book: Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, Amazing Stories, Westminster Magazine, Esquire and Thrilling Wonder Stories, as if TWS belongs beside Esquire. I am sure a few eyebrows were raised….
But this is good. It means the editor looks at the stories, not the cover between which it sits. Stong is not some fan-boy though, as his comments on Seabury Quinn will prove. He could acknowledge that something was popular with readers at the same time that it was awful.
He starts the book off with an anecdote about a black man named Bennings, who has a premonition and doesn’t go to work. Later that day, the mill burns down, killing many. This real life example sets up a book filled with the weird and fantastic. Stong explains the world of Pulps, singling out the fantastic magazines as something a little different.
It is needless to reiterate that most of our very greatest writers in every age have indulged in these fancies. But without disturbing the classics it may be added that even in our times some very respectable gentlemen have taken moments out to do excellent bits for the little magazines that timid people hide under their arms for fear of being thought eccentric. August Derleth, who has given me assistance on this book…
The timing of this is interesting. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei started Arkham House in 1939. By 1942, when Stong’s book appears, he had published Lovecraft and others but he had yet to do an actual “anthology”. The first was Sleep No More in 1944. Derleth went on to do twenty-eight or so, in Horror and Science Fiction. Was Stong’s book a bit of an experiment? Did it guide Derleth in that direction?
That is an idea for a different article, but I think we need to acknowledge Derleth’s assistance here. Publishers weren’t hungry for horror anthologies like they would be in the 1960s. The only editor mining the Weird Tales treasury was Christine Campbell Thomson in the UK with her popular Not at Night series. The editors of Weird Tales bought all rights so writers got no cash for the re-sale of their work. Farnsworth Wright was quite happy for this subsidary income. The magazine was never a big money-maker. WT was sold in 1940 when Wright left and later died. Stong would have found the new owners from New York, equally willing.
Strange Ideas
Stong divides his collection into three parts: Strange Ideas, Fresh Variants and Horrors:
The “Strange Ideas” are simply short story notions involving the fantastic that I had never heard of before…This is as good a place as any to shake a finger at the editors— then if they care to use a carefully placed thumb and waving fingers at this editor no damage has been done and no blood shed. Two of the stones in this volume have never been published before because they suffer the dreadful stigma of intrinsic humor. Some of the very best fantastic stories have
been humorous stories—a whole volume of “Humorous Ghost Stories” was collected some years ago, containing some of the better tales of Daudet, Irving, Brander Matthews, Oscar Wilde, Hoffman (a neglected and very delightful writer),
Mark Twain and so on.
“The Considerate Hosts” (Weird Tales, December 1939) by Thorp McClusky
“The Man in the Black Hat” (Esquire, February 1934) by Michael Fessier
“Naked Lady” (Weird Tales, September 1934) by Mindret Lord
“The House of Ecstasy” (Weird Tales, April 1938) by Ralph Milne Farley
“Escape” (Weird Tales, July 1938) by Paul Ernst
“The Adaptive Ultimate” (Astounding Stories, November 1935) by Stanley G. Weinbaum (as John Jessel)
“The Woman in Gray” (Weird Tales, June 1935) by Walker G. Everett
“The Pipes of Pan” (Unknown, May 1940) by Lester del Rey
“Aunt Cassie” (1941) by Virginia Swain is original to this anthology.
This section is dominated by Weird Tales. It’s nice to see Paul Ernst included because he is one of my favorites that never gets much coverage. The Science Fiction in this section and the one coming up usually features stories from F. Orlin Tremaine’s Astounding. Stong did know of John W. Campbell but picks from his Unknown. Later in 1946, Healy and McComas would publish the landmark SF anthology, Adventures in Time and Space, and have first dibs on all the John W. Campbell stable. I don’t know if Stong disliked it, had no access to it or simply was unaware of what was happening in the most important SF mag of the time.
Fresh Variants
The second group, “Fresh Variants,” is of much the same genre, except that the ideas of origin are of earlier use, though pleasantly and ingeniously diverted into new channels and conclusions…The other “variants” derive from the most ordinary notions of imaginative fiction but do not use them enough to be tiresome. It takes as much skill to write a new story from an old notion—as Shakespeare’s works prove—as it does to start from scratch.
“A God in a Garden” (Unknown, October 1939) by Theodore Sturgeon
“The Man Who Knew All the Answers” (Amazing Stories, August 1940) by Albert Bernstein (as Donald Bern)
“Adam Link’s Vengeance” (Amazing Stories, February 1940) by Otto Binder (as Eando Binder)
“Truth Is a Plague” (Amazing Stories, February 1940) by David Wright O’Brien
“The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator” (Astounding Stories, December 1935) by Murray Leinster
“Alas, All Thinking!” (Astounding Stories, June 1935) by Harry Bates
“The Comedy of Eras” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, September 1940) by Henry Kuttner (as Kelvin Kent)
“A Problem for Biographers” (1941) by Mindret Lord is original to this anthology.
This Science Fiction section is dominated by Tremaine and Ray A. Palmer’s Amazing Stories. It almost feels like Stong had very few issues to select from. Why take “Adam Link’s Vengeance” when you have better Link stories to choose from? Why two stories from Amazing Stories, February 1940? The only title of any real importance is Harry Bates’ tale, which will be reprinted again.
Horrors
The third part, “Horrors,” is the most conventional—it is simply the old quivery or shivery story in its best new presentations…The final desideratum of the horror story is that this feeling should be translated to the hair on the back of the neck—that is, physically experienced. This feat is accomplished about once in a literary coon’s age, so that it is not strange that in the following collection only one has this effect on me. I shall not name it; but I think the reader will discover it.
As a friend of Derleth, it is no surprise that Stong is a Lovecraft fan:
The author of the first story, “In the Vault,” deserves a special note for several reasons. H. P. Lovecraft died some months ago, after having created one of the strangest cults in fantastic literature. He wrote its entire content and generously permitted his colleagues in the fantastic fraternity—for the men in it take their work with a seriousness that is frequently justified and are personal friends as well as literary acquaintances— to use it as they pleased. They are still using it and it seems probable that they will continue to use it for years to come.
He spends two pages explaining the Cthulhu Mythos, then turns around and picks “In the Vault” (a non-Mythos tale) and one of HPL’s most hack potboilers. Why not “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Outsider” or others? I assume he had access to a large number of Weird Tales stories, so why this one? Stong explains he doesn’t like Lovecraft’s overly Poe-esque vocabulary: “In the Vault” suffers very little from words like “poignantly” for “sharply,” and “retardation” where “dragging” would have been much better, and so on.
Stong does have the acumen to apologize for not including Clark Ashton Smith and David H. Keller. Again, all of Weird Tales at your finger tips and…
“In the Vault” (The Tryout, November 1925) by H. P. Lovecraft (reprinted in Weird Tales, April 1932).
“School for the Unspeakable” (Weird Tales, September 1937) by Manly Wade Wellman
A contrary judgment can be put down for Seabury Quinn. He is, this anthologist may remark gratefully in payment for the use of his story, the worst fictional opportunist in the business. He cheats, he steals—always from himself—; he imitates—always himself—; he will get a happy ending on a story if he has to call in every Irish policeman, holy Father, yogi, clairvoyant, prizefighter, Surete detective and naked blonde in the longitude of the horribly vampire-beset precincts of the accursed Harrisonville, N. J., presumably an aristocratic suburb of New York.
Stong’s criticism of “he will get a happy ending on a story… ” is legit. The tale has a mad doctor who surgically alters people into freaks. As a kindness, Jules de Grandin sets the house on fire to kill all the unfortunates. How do you get a happy ending here? Two of the freaks were lovers. They cry out their love to each other as they die. This was Quinn’s 76th de Grandin tale.
“The House Where Time Stood Still” (Weird Tales, March 1939) by Seabury Quinn
“The Mystery of the Last Guest” (Weird Tales, October 1935) by Jean Ray (as John Flanders)
“The Song of the Slaves” (Weird Tales, March 1940) by Manly Wade Wellman
“The Panelled Room” (The Westminister Magazine, September 1933) by August Derleth
“The Graveyard Rats” (Weird Tales, March 1936) by Henry Kuttner
“The Return of Andrew Bentley” (Weird Tales, September 1933) by August Derleth and Mark Schorer
The last section, in my opinion, has the best selections. Two by Manly Wade Wellman, two by Derleth, Jean Ray, Henry Kuttner. Again I wonder at the multiple selections. Why not take one Wellman and include Clark Ashton Smith or Fritz Leiber or….
All the criticisms aside, The Other Worlds does give us a snapshot of what the Pulp field looked like in 1942, or to be more accurate, before 1942. It is the Farnsworth Wright Weird Tales (all except “Song of the Slaves”), the F. Orlin Tremaine Astounding that ended in 1938, the Ray A. Palmer Amazing and John W. Campbell Unknown that began in 1939. There are many omissions besides John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction (Strange Tales, Strange Stories, Planet Stories, Startling Stories and many others appeared before 1942). Despite that, Stong does capture a glimpse of what stories people were reading and what editors thought of those tales. It is not a comprehensive examination but a snapshot, a sudden, startling banquet from a literature that had only ten more years to live.
