Monster of the Day #3129

Updated on November 16, 2020 By Ken Begg 11 Comments

I noticed some issues of Weird Tales for Kindle on sales over the weekend for .99. Plus I had some digital credits for a bunch of DVDs/Blu Rays I bought last week. These are reformatted for digital reading, so they don’t have ads or anything. PDF scans of the actual issues are available on the Net, though.

So I got the three issues for free, basically. I was gobsmacked by the amount of content you got for a dime back in the day. 27 stories for the first issue. Anyway, I thought Weird Tales covers would be fun. This is the second issue, but an oddly small number of covers features monsters or whatnot. A lot of them look more like your standard spicy adventure magazines, as scantily clad women are much more in evidence than BEMs.

On a side note, one thing I did buy last week was the 4th season of the Tom Baker era on Doctor Who on Blu Ray. That’s because it features The Talons of Wend-Chiang. More and more stuff is getting memory holed like Song of the South these days, so I thought I’d better get a physical copy of the series while I could.

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  • Beckoning Chasm

    There’s something off about that vampire. He looks like a dwarf. I wonder if the editor got the cover and made the artist re-do it, “I can’t see the fangs.”

  • Gamera977

    Sorry guys, been away on vacation/holiday and now Disqus wants to log me in on the old account. Love these old ‘Weird Tales’ magazines. I downloaded a pile of them, I’m on December 1940 now.

    And good idea there Ken, I’ve thought about picking up some copies of classic Doctor Who but I kinda hate giving any money to the BBC the way they’re going now.

    BTW: I took Manly Wade Wellman’s ‘The Complete John Thunstone’ by Haffner Press with me on vacation for a little light reading and it’s fantastic! I forget who recommended it to me here but BIG THANKS!!!

  • We bought the Baker set right away for the same reason. The memory hole-ing of everything that doesn’t meet this weeks ever-changing notion of acceptability is frankly terrifying.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Maybe it was me? I don’t have the Haffner edition but I love the Thunstone stories, along with most of Wellman’s works.

    Just a question:

    Do you prefer the Shonokin stories to the Rowley Thorne ones, or not? Just curious as I rather like both myself.

  • Eric Hinkle

    This will be an odd question for this site, but I trust you people more than most folks online, so: if you have someone following you around a store, yelling abuse at you and accusing you of ‘trying to kill everyone’ because your mask doesn’t completely cover your nose, how should you handle it? I mean, I can think of several ways, but they’d probably end in legal trouble.

  • Gamera977

    I like both but I really like the whole idea of the Shonokin. I mean we know there were other offshoots of humanity that were wiped out by our ancestors or just bad luck. So it’s kinda creepy to think of some of them still hiding out plotting revenge. It’s not really a new idea, it goes back at least to Authur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft, and even Robert E. Howard that goblins, elves etc are some other race of human forgotten to history. But still I really like how Wellman handled it- the Shonokin are really spooky guys. And he gives us enough information to creep you out and leaves enough unspoken that your imagination fills in the gaps- just like a good horror writer should!

  • Eric Hinkle

    The Shonokin get even better when you learn that Wellman said he got letters from people telling him, apparently in all seriousness, that they were surprised to see them appearing in his stories. Why? Because they said they thought the Shonokin were ‘just a local legend’ — a remark Wellman got in letters from places as widespread as New Jersey and California!

  • Eric Hinkle

    Oh, and talking ‘offshoots of humanity’ and Wellman, you may want to check out his Stone Age tales of Hok the Mighty (Neanderthals versus Cro-Magnons) and some of his Silver John novels. Including one that has good-guy ghost cavemen.

  • Ken_Begg

    Good work on getting a copy of that. It sold out immediately, so luckily I had preordered it. It’s pricey, but anyone who is interested might want to preorder the two-volume Silver John collection Haffner has in the works. That one won’t stay available long either.

  • Gamera977

    I pre-ordered the Silver John collection. I would have missed the Thunstone one except mine is marked as ‘dinged’ but I don’t see any issues with it myself.

    I’d already picked up the entire Silver John series as individual books, mostly discarded library stuff I bought from used online. I’d only read about half the Thunstone stories so they’re new to me. I’ll check out Hok the Mighty and any other of Wellman’s stuff- I love his writing.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I’d love to get their Silver John collection, but it’s far out of my price range. And I do already have all the short stories (in two collections) and most of the novels already.