One hundred years ago, on February 18, 1923, the first issue of Weird Tales hit newsstands across America. Subtitled “The Unique Magazine,” it was the first pulp magazine to specialize in supernatural and occult fiction, including horror, fantasy, science fiction, and everything else that was, well, weird. It was in Weird Tales that H.P. Lovecraft first published his Cthulhu stories, Robert E. Howard built up Conan the Barbarian, and an entire style of literature was flexed and honed and shared.
Since its first run ended in 1954, Weird Tales has been revived, killed, and revived again many times. The modern iteration has been publishing “more or less continuously,” as its editors put it, albeit with several changes in leadership and format, since 1988. This is why its new (unofficial) subtitle is “The Magazine that Never Dies.”
To celebrate the centennial of the first issue of Weird Tales, let’s take a look at some of the classic stories from the magazine’s glory days that are available to read right now. From Greye la Spina’s “The Remorse of Professor Panebianco” to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” to Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Dark Eidolon,” there are plenty of stories to choose from. But of course this is just scratching the surface, so feel free to leave your own favorites (with links if you’ve got ’em!) in the comments.
