Weird Times 9: Religion and the Occult

Weird Times 9: Religion and the Occult

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Aleister Crowley in 1925.
This is the fifth post in a series reflecting on the world of 1920s as a background for discussing the early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? Or about the stories they tell?

It’s tolerably likely that you’ll see a church. The 1926 US Census of Religious Bodies will find one church for every 220 Christians, and one synagogue for every 1309 Jews. Places of worship for other religions were rarer. For example, one source states that “the first known American mosques were established in Biddeford, Maine, in 1915; in Ross, North Dakota, in 1920; in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1923; and in Michigan City, Indiana, in 1925.” Those would have been the first specific buildings for prayer, as opposed to meeting-places in, for example, private homes; the same source notes that “by the 1920s, American Muslims were widely diverse and dispersed throughout the United States, with South Asians, Albanians, Turks, Bosnians, as well as people from Syria-Lebanon, scattered in small communities throughout the U.S.”

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Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1955: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1955: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1955. Cover by Mel Hunter

It’s time for another retro-review of Galaxy Science Fiction!

This issue is from May, 1955 and features cover art titled “U-Turn Takeoff” by Mel Hunter. I used to be more stressed when driving to new places and trying to follow a GPS because I didn’t want to miss an exit or end up on the wrong road. But my wife shrugs if I make a mistake and says, “Just do a U-turn. I do it all the time.” Maybe the spaceship captain needed to adjust his launch like how my wife and I adjust our routes.

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Forgotten Authors: Harl Vincent

Forgotten Authors: Harl Vincent

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Harl Vincent

Harl Vincent born Harold Vincent Schoepflin on October 19, 1893 in Buffalo, New York to Ida (nee Kuntz) and Reverend William Schoepflin. Vincent married Ruth F. Hoff in 1911. They had a daughter, Jane, in 1913 and a son, Guy, in 1925.

He debuted in the June, 1928 issue of Amazing Stories with the story “The Golden Girl of Munan” and he published in Amazing, Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, Astounding, and other magazines into the 1930s. He managed to continue to sell to Amazing after Hugo Gernsback lost control of the magazine, often bringing a sense of wonder to the stories, even if they were not particularly innovative. Walter Gillings noted that Vincent was not particularly successful at adapting to Amazing’s “thought-variant” demands of the time.

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Dark Muse News: JANGAR! Beastlord of Muu – #1 and 2 by Logan D. Whitney

Dark Muse News: JANGAR! Beastlord of Muu – #1 and 2 by Logan D. Whitney

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Jangar! by Logan D. Whitney, Issues #1 and #2, Cliffhanger Press, 2026. Cover art by Mike Hoffman

Dark Muse News has been a fan of Rogues in the House podcast and their books (i.e., A Book of Blades Vol I and Vol II); one of those rogues is Logan D. Whitney. This June and July, he released the initial entries of an expected six chronicling his lone jungle warrior: Jangar! These are fantastic, compact adventures that somehow balance immediate crazy challenges (i.e., save a princess from a sacrificial ritual, and survive gladiator combat viewed by cannibalistic harpies) with the more chronic concerns (seeking vengeance for the slaughter of family members, and overcoming the decline of civilization).

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Mad Scientists and Rich Bastards: The Din of Celestial Birds by Brian Evenson

Mad Scientists and Rich Bastards: The Din of Celestial Birds by Brian Evenson

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The Din of Celestial Birds by Brian Evenson (Weird House Press, June 19, 2026)

Being a reviewer of regular horror fiction I confess I wasn’t familiar at all with Brian Evenson, a writer working mainly in the area of “magic realism.”

Truth be told I wasn’t aware of that while reading the first section of the present collection, where I especially enjoyed the following tales.

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Introducing: Kindle Plus. Thanks. I Hate It.

Introducing: Kindle Plus. Thanks. I Hate It.

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Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I was today years old when I learned that Kindle Unlimited has now become Kindle Plus. The change was made in the tail end of October. A rebrand is nothing new for companies. Hell, HBO has done it more times than I can count. The rebrand in and of itself is not the issue. The problem is that it appears that it’s packed full of AI slop; most especially the audiobooks. And this is by design.

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Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing (November 2026)

Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing (November 2026)

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Tomorrow, I am going to see Blade Runner: The Final Cut, on a giant screen, in a showplace which opened in 1926, with live musical accompaniment. Squee!!!!!I just finished the 3rd edition of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner – which I read in first edition form 30 years ago. Hopefully I will be writing about Blade Runner next week.

But that’s for then. I’ve been playing Fortnite regularly since 2021 or so. Mostly solo, or with my son. He quit playing a couple years ago (Call of Duty took over). And the constant updates were overpowering my Asus gaming laptop, so I quit playing it last month. It’s been fun, but I don’t miss it. I’d just been grinding for quests since my son quit.

I often find myself out of sorts when I switch games. I can’t figure out what I want to get into next. Same experience when I finish reading a book, or multiple ones from the same author. I can’t ‘hit my spot.’

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Beasts of Burden Omnibus by Evan Dorkin, Jill Thompson, and Benjamin Dewey

Beasts of Burden Omnibus by Evan Dorkin, Jill Thompson, and Benjamin Dewey

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I wanted to write a haunted house story, but not along traditional lines. After a few false starts I hit on the idea of a haunted doghouse, which became my pitch for “Stray.”

Evan Dorkin

The Beasts of Burden Omnibus (2025) brings together all the stories of the supernatural investigators of the town of Burden Hill as written by Evan Dorkin and illustrated by Jill Thompson and Brian Dewey. What separates the protectors of Burden Hill from others in their field like John Silence or Carl Kolchak is that they are animals. Dogs, in fact, mostly, with a few cats enlisted along the way.

Let me start by providing several warnings for this review. First, I love psychic investigator stories. I watched the Kolchak tv show with my mom when it premiered and I was 8, and Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer is one of my absolute favorite series of stories. Second, I’m very fond of talking animals, from Wind in the Willows to Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy books (well, at least the first half-dozen or so). Third, and finally, I’m friends with Evan Dorkin. We’ve known each other for, well, a very long time. Nonetheless, before I go any further, let me say, while I might have been predisposed to enjoy Beasts of Burden, there was no guarantee I’d like it as much as I do. It also means I got to ask him a couple of questions about the his stories and the series’ evolution.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, July-August 1923 (Volume 2, Number 1), Part 1

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, July-August 1923 (Volume 2, Number 1), Part 1

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Weird Tales, July-August 1923, front and back covers.
The fifth issue of Weird Tales was cover-dated July-August 1923, meaning for practical purposes that the magazine had skipped publishing in the month of July. With the skipped month the first volume of Weird Tales came to an end after four issues; the fifth issue began Volume 2, which would last for four months. Then the magazine skipped the month of December, and the January 1924 issue began Volume 3, which would run for another four issues. Things got a little confusing at that point, as we will eventually see.

The second volume doesn’t have any major differences in format from the first, which is to say the July-August issue physically resembles the June one. It’s the same size, with the same logo. The cover illustration’s black-and-white instead of colour, but is a definite step up in craftsmanship. The image is signed ‘Mally’ above the initials ‘RLM’ in a circle, and is likely the work of George William Mally, perhaps in collaboration with his wife Ruth Lena Mikelson Mally. It’s solid draughtsmanship and looks reasonably dramatic, though it’s unclear what story it’s meant to be illustrating.

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So Much Potential: Lords of the Ultra-Realm by Doug Moench and Pat Broderick

So Much Potential: Lords of the Ultra-Realm by Doug Moench and Pat Broderick

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Lords of the Ultra-Realm by Doug Moench and Pat Broderick (DC Comics six-issue mini-series, 1986)

I started scouting for sword and sorcery in the spring of 1974, after stumbling upon Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian #39 (March 1974). At the time, Robert E. Howard’s most famous creation was known to few beyond the then-small and -deviant subcultures of comics and fantasy.

How obscure, in my adolescence, was the Cimmerian? I mistook the cover’s loincloth-clad, axe-swinging character for a Tarzan knock-off. How wrong — how delightfully wrong — I was. More like this, please!

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