The Magazine That Never Dies

On June 5, 2012, one of my favorite writers of fantasy and science fiction was translated to the next world, a little more than two months short of completing his ninety-second year on this planet. Ray Bradbury was a constant and a shining light in his literary genre, and his passing made me resolve to read my long-held Weird Tales anthology, published by Marvin Kaye in 1988.

Weird Tales was subtitled "The Magazine That Never Dies," probably because it failed, went out of business and was resurrected again so many times, from the 1920s to the (I think) 1980s. Mr. Kaye recalls that it was published under the aegis of Ms. Dorothy McIlraith from 1940 to 1954. This incarnation of the magazine was one of my earliest reading experiences. My grandmother, Sarah Dova Mullins Satterfield, subscribed to Weird Tales during my childhood years, probably until its 1954 demise. I read anything that anyone left lying around, anywhere I happened to be, so of course I consumed many of Granny's WT issues.

Last night, after sleeping four to six hours, I woke up. As I wandered around the house and fed Mo, my glance fell on the WT anthology that I had unshelved and left on top of my defunct printer. I picked it up and read Marvin Kaye's introduction and the first reprinted story in the collection, which was a very brief tale, almost a vignette, written by a very young Ray Bradbury.

Leafing through the book, I read titles of stories which, if I ever read them before, I have surely forgotten. Stories by the old guys and girls from Sir Thomas More to Edgar Allan Poe, from Charles Dickens to H.P. Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber ("der lieber Fritz!") and them. They made me realize, once again, how much has been written that I haven't read or don't remember, and that the recent hiatus in my reading is inexcusable.

So let the Weird Tales anthology, a two-inch-thick tome of pulpy pages with tiny print, restart my reading motor. Given a few more years, I may even finish reading The Great Books of the Western World.
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Before I read any more fantasy-sf stories, here are some that so impressed me that I haven't forgotten them:

Xong of Xuxan, by Ray Russell
The Last of the Spode, by Evelyn Smith
The Quest For Saint Aquin, by Anthony Boucher
The Ugly Little Boy, by Isaac Asimov
Now Inhale, by Eric Frank Russell
The Mezzotint, by Montague Rhodes James
The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
Four Ghosts in Hamlet, by Fritz Leiber
The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood
The Cask of Amontillado, by Edgar Allan Poe ("Montresor! Montresor!")
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury (which contained a germ that seems to have infected Stephen King.)
The Portable Phonograph, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
The Silly Season, by Robert A. Heinlein
Leg. forst., by Clifford D. Simak