The Women of Weird Tales Read online

  About the Authors

  Everil Worrell was born in Nebraska in 1893. She later settled in Washington, D.C., where she got married and worked for the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a stenographer and secretary. At night, in her free time, she would write weird and supernatural stories, many of which were published in Weird Tales, though some also appeared in Ghost Stories, and – because Worrell sometimes used pseudonyms – other stories may have appeared elsewhere. At least twenty-four stories have been credited to her, including nineteen in Weird Tales, five of which appear in this volume. Her best-known tale, “The Canal” (1927), was adapted for a 1973 episode of Night Gallery. She died in 1969.

  Eli Colter was the pen name of May Eliza Frost, born in 1890 in Portland, Oregon. At thirteen she temporarily went blind; after her recovery, she set out to educate herself and began a career as a writer, playing piano and organ in movie theaters to support herself while she followed her dream. Her first story seems to have appeared in 1922 in Black Mask magazine; she would go on to publish some fifteen stories in Weird Tales and several in Strange Stories. Her works also include tales of adventure and Western stories. She died in 1984.

  Mary Elizabeth Counselman was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1911. She wrote numerous short stories, many of which appeared in Weird Tales, though she also published poetry and stories in mainstream periodicals like the Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping. Her most famous tale, “The Three Marked Pennies,” was reprinted numerous times, translated into at least nine languages, and adapted for both radio and television. She died in 1995.

  Greye La Spina was born Fanny Greye Bragg in 1880 in Wakefield, Massachusetts. She is credited with over one hundred short stories, which appeared in Weird Tales, Black Mask, and many other magazines. Her werewolf novel Invaders from the Dark, originally serialized in Weird Tales in 1925, was published by Arkham House in 1960. She died in 1969.

  THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES

  Stories by

  Everil Worrell, Eli Colter, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and Greye La Spina

  Introduction by

  Melanie R. Anderson

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Women of Weird Tales

  First edition 2020

  Compilation and artwork © 2020 by Valancourt Books

  Introduction copyright © 2020 by Melanie R. Anderson

  “Monster, She Wrote” trade dress designed by Andie Reid, copyright © 2019 Quirk Books. Used under license. All rights reserved.

  The stories in this volume all originally appeared in Weird Tales magazine as follows: “The Remorse of Professor Panebianco” (Jan. 1925); “Leonora” (Jan. 1927); “The Dead-Wagon” (Sept. 1927); “The Canal” (Dec. 1927); “The Curse of a Song” (March 1928); “Vulture Crag” (Aug. 1928); “The Rays of the Moon” (Sept. 1928); “The Gray Killer” (Nov. 1929); “The Black Stone Statue” (Dec. 1937); “The Web of Silence” (Nov. 1939); “The Deadly Theory” (May 1942); “Great Pan is Here” (Nov. 1943); “The Antimacassar” (May 1949)

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover by M. S. Corley

  Introduction

  Live burial, curses, the risen dead, ghosts, women who turn out to be vampires, mad scientists so obsessed with their studies that they sacrifice their beautiful wives to the work, mad artists who create art no matter the cost to the subject, and townspeople held hostage under bizarre circumstances. Upon reading this list of plot details, classic horror fans may immediately think of Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. P. Lovecraft, and maybe Rod Serling. These fictional incidents, however, come from stories by women who published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales from the 1920s to the 1950s. This is a selection of stories by four of them: Everil Worrell, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Eli Colter, and Greye La Spina.

  While these women and their fiction have faded into history, they were not the only women writing for the first incarnation of Weird Tales (1923-1954). They are part of what scholar Lisa Yaszek calls the “missing link” of women genre writers between the nineteenth and later twentieth centuries. Women had been producing these types of stories for hundreds of years, from Margaret Cavendish in the 1600s to British Gothic writers like Ann Radcliffe in the 1700s to Mary Shelley and all the women writing ghost stories in the 1800s. This tradition of women genre writers continued into the early twentieth century, when women published fiction and poetry in Weird Tales from its very first issue. According to historian Eric Leif Davin’s count, 114 women authors had work printed in the magazine before 1933, and these pieces were published in 107 of the 117 issues produced during that time span. In the 1920s and 1930s, three of the women in this collection had stories listed as the most popular with readers: Greye La Spina, Everil Worrell, and Mary Elizabeth Counselman.

  In addition to the women submitting work to Weird Tales, women were involved in the editorial process and the crea­tion of cover art for the individual issues. In 1938, Dorothy McIlwraith, who had previously served as editor of Doubleday’s Short Stories, became the associate editor to Farnsworth Wright when the company that employed McIlwraith acquired Weird Tales. She became the editor in 1940, and she brought on numerous new writers, like Ray Bradbury, Margaret St. Clair, and Fritz Leiber, to join the already established stable of talent writing for the magazine. In the visual arts, Margaret Brundage was one of the most influential pulp cover artists of the time. Her vibrant, and revealing, portraits of women characters were stunning and sometimes led to controversy. Davin has noted that she created 66 covers for Weird Tales in the 1930s alone, 39 of which were consecutive. Her covers included characters such as Robert E. Howard’s Conan and C. L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, and her work on covers was in demand by readers and writers alike.

  The four writers whose stories you are about to read were part of this larger group of women involved in the production of Weird Tales. Everil Worrell was talented in writing, music, and painting, and she worked as a stenographer and secretary for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Her story “The Canal” (1927) was adapted for an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. She skillfully subverts the narrative of the “hysterical” woman in “Leonora” (1927) and “The Gray Killer” (1929) by using the Poe-esque convention of presenting a protagonist’s journal entries. Mary Elizabeth Counselman was a southern writer of fiction and poetry who taught for many years at what is now Gadsden State Community College in Alabama. Her stories often lie in that area of horror known as the weird where inexplicable happenings transcend human understanding. Eli Colter, the pseudonym of May Eliza Frost, was the one woman included here who regularly used a pen name for her fiction, which ranged from mysteries to horror to Westerns, and sometimes blended all three. In “The Curse of a Song” (1928), we see her turn her hand to a ghost story set in the Pacific Northwest. A young woman finds herself haunted by a particularly mean-spirited apparition who believes he was thwarted in love. An intensely private person, Colter’s life is the most shadowed of these four writers. Last, but not least, is Greye La Spina. Born in Massachusetts, she worked in New York City as a photographer and stenographer, and then ended up in a small town in Pennsylvania where she took up weaving as a hobby. She described “The Dead-Wagon” (1927) as one of her most popular stories.

  The work of these
and other women writers in the pulps has been missing for many reasons, including the dismissal of genre writing in the twentieth century by the academy and some parts of the reading public and the temporary nature of the pulps. These women were publishing stories in paper magazines that were created for cheap and quick consumption. No one was anticipating the need for archival records. After the pulps, if women’s work made it into paperback anthologies of genre fiction, these books were not intended as permanent evidence of the era’s writing either. These issues, combined with gender discrimination in the larger society, led to what Yaszek calls the myths about women writing for pulp magazines: that they didn’t exist at all, or always had to use male pseudonyms, or had to write narratives similar to what men were publishing at the time. While some women did write genre fiction with similar plots, or even, sadly, the same prejudices, as male writers of the time, many produced work that blended multiple genres. They also used the flexibility of fantasy and the weird to write from their perspectives, revise themes, and develop more complex women characters. Their work continued the trajectory of women’s horror and speculative fiction from the foremothers of previous centuries to the voices that we read now.

  Melanie Anderson

  July 2020

  Melanie R. Anderson is the Bram Stoker Award and Locus Award winning co-author of Monster, She Wrote (Quirk Books, 2019) and the co-host of The Know Fear Cast and Monster, She Wrote podcasts. She is an assistant professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. Her academic publication Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2013) was a winner of the 2014 South Central MLA Book Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in American literature.

  The Remorse of Professor Panebianco

  Greye La Spina

  “Cielo, what an enormous crystal globe, Filippo!” exclaimed Dottore Giuseppe del Giovine, regarding the great inverted glass bell that hung over the professor’s dissecting table. “What’s the idea of that?” he added curiously.

  The professor’s black eyes rested upon the globe with the fondness of a parent. He pushed the table more centrally under the opening at the bell’s lower extremity, then pulled on a chain operating a valve at the top.

  “The purpose of this globe is to win me such recognition from the world of science as no man has ever enjoyed and no man after me can ever emulate,” he responded, with a kind of grim enthusiasm.

  “But how?”

  The doctor was intensely interested.

  “You are aware that Elena and I have long experimented on animals, to ascertain if that thing men call the ‘soul’ is at all tangible? We have now arrived at a very advanced point in our studies, so advanced that we are at a dead stop because we cannot obtain the necessary subjects for our next experiment.”

  “One can always find mice—or cats—or monkeys,” said the doctor.

  The professor shook his head decidedly.

  “Such animals are things of the past, caro amico. We have seen the soul of a drowning mouse emerge from its body, in a spiral coil of vapor that wreathed its way out of the water to lose itself in the etheric spaces that include all life. We have watched the soul of a dying ape emerge in one long rush of fine, impalpable, smoke-like cloud that wound upward to become invisible as it, too, amalgamated with the invisible forces of the universe about us.”

  “I myself once saw what I believe might have been the soul of a dying man, as it departed from his body,” asseverated the doctor, musingly. “Ah, if one could but detain that fine essence of immortality, what wonders could not one work in time? What mighty secrets would perhaps be discovered!”

  “You understand, then, Giuseppe mio, what I await with anxiety? The subject for the most tremendous experiment of all! It is futile for me to attempt to make it upon one of the lower animals, since they do not possess the power of reason, and their souls would therefore be by far too tenuous for a successful experiment. I have been trying for months to obtain possession of the person of some criminal condemned to death, that I might subject him to my theory as his dying breath fled, bearing with it his soul—that about which all men theorize, but which none have yet seen or conceived of as have I.”

  “The idea is tremendous, Filippo. What have the authorities done about it?”

  “They refuse to assist me. I cannot tell them all that I desire to do, naturally, or my rivals would try to get ahead of me. Their stupid, petty jealousy! Quanto è terribile!”

  “Exactly what do you wish to do, and how is this bell to serve you?” inquired the doctor, a puzzled series of lines drawing across his forehead.

  “I have observed, caro mio, that the vaporous soul of the lower animal is so much lighter than the ether around it that it withstands the pull of gravity and rises, swaying with whatever currents of air are in the atmosphere, always to a higher level, where it dissipates into invisibility.

  “I have been trying to possess myself of a living human being whose life was useless to the world, that his death might be made of transcendent value through my scientific knowledge. I constructed this crystal bell for a wonderful and stupendous purpose. It is intended to hold the tenuous wraith of the subject of my experiment.

  “The valve above, open at first, will permit the air to escape at the top of the bell as it becomes displaced by the ascending essence of the dying man’s soul. Then, when I pull the chain, thereby closing the valve, the soul would be retained by its own volatile nature within the bell, being unable to seek a lower level.”

  “Filippo, you astound me!”

  There was something more than astonishment in the doctor’s face, however, as his eyes searched the countenance of the professor sharply.

  “My idea is indeed awe-inspiring, caro dottore. Your wonder is very natural,” said the professor graciously.

  “It must be trying to have to wait so long for a suitable subject for your experiment,” ventured the doctor, with a side glance.

  “Ah, how I shall love and venerate that human being who furnishes me with such a subject!” cried the professor fervently.

  A deep sigh followed closely upon his words. The curtain hanging before the doorway was pushed to one side, as Elena Panebianco walked slowly into the room.

  “How you will gaze upon that imprisoned soul!” cried she, with a passionate intensity that startled the doctor anew, as he turned his regard from her husband to her. “If it were a soul that loved you, how happy it would be to know that your entire thoughts were centered upon it, within the crystal bell! To see your eyes always fixed upon it, as it floated there within!”

  She leaned weakly against the dissecting table, and her great eyes, dark with melancholic emotion, stared wildly out of her thin, fever-flushed face.

  “Tu sei impossibile!” cried the professor. “What tragic jealousy is yours, Elena! A jealousy of things that do not as yet exist!”

  Elena did not reply. She loved too deeply, too passionately, too irrevocably. And the only return her husband made was to permit her assistance in his laboratory work. Her eager mind had flown apace with his: not that she loved the work for itself, but that she longed to gain his approbation. To him the alluring loveliness of her splendid body was as nothing to the beauty of the wonderful intellect that gradually unfolded in his behalf.

  In private, Filippo complained to the doctor that his wife was too demonstrative. She thought nothing of distracting his attention from important experiments, with pouting lips clamoring for a kiss, and not until he had hastily brushed her lips with his would she return to her work.

  “I am obliged to bribe the woman with kisses,” cried the professor, despairingly.

  Elena had gone so far as to affirm to her husband that she was even jealous of his research, his experiments. That was unwise. No woman can interfere between a man and his chosen life-work. Such things are, as D’Annunzio puts it, “piu che l’amore” (greater than love), and prove relentless Jug
gernauts to those who tactlessly disregard the greater claims.

  “He is worn out,” said Elena to the doctor. “He has flung himself into his work to such an extent that nothing exists for him but that. He studies all night. He works all day. I have to force him to stop long enough to eat sufficient to maintain life.”

  “Go on, Elena, go on! When my head swims, I tie cold wet towels about it. When my brain refuses to obey me, I concentrate with inconceivable force of will upon my goal. Oh, Giuseppe mio, my very existence is bound up in this last experiment, which, alas! I am unable to complete because the authorities will not permit me to make use of the death of some criminal—a death that must be entirely useless to the scientific world, through their blind stupidity.”

  The doctor shrugged, with a gesture of his slender brown hands. His eyes sought Elena’s face. Since he had been away the Signora Panebianco had altered terribly. She looked too delicate; she had faded visibly. Hectic roses flamed in her cheeks. Her thin hands, too, had been too cold when she touched his in greeting. Her constant cough racked her slender body. It seemed to Giuseppe del Giovine that she had become almost transparent, so slender had she become from loss of flesh. As she went from the room slowly with a gesture of helplessness, he turned to the professor.

  “Your wife is a very sick woman,” he declared, abruptly.

  “I suppose she must be,” Filippo responded absently. “She’s very nervous, I know. She disturbs me inexcusably with silly demands for kisses and caresses, actually weeping when she thinks I don’t see her, because I refuse to humor her foolish whims. I’ve been obliged, more than once, to drive her away with cold looks and hard words, because she has tried to coax me to stop work, insisting upon my talking with her.”