The Best of Weird Tales (1924)

The year 1924 nearly killed the most legendary horror magazine in American fiction. Drowning in debt, hampered by amateurish covers and an editor unequipped to recognize the genre forming under his nose, the publication staggered through its second year-and somehow printed a clutch of stories that would help define cosmic horror, occult mystery, and pulp-era weird fiction for the next century. The fourteen pieces gathered here trace that strange, transformative year. A quiet supernatural reverie. A notorious shocker that triggered a real-life censorship campaign against its publisher. An underground masterpiece of ancestral dread, now considered one of the most influential horror stories ever written. These stories and many more celebrate this transformative year in weird fiction, documented here for the very first time.