Everett and Shanks provide a challenging, provocative collection of essays on the legacy and importance of Weird Tales magazine, particularly from its inception in 1923 to the end of the 1930s, when other magazines (e.g., Unknown) stole some of its thunder by paying higher rates to authors for similar stories. The editors view the magazine as a discourse community—‘a unique and tightly knit community of editors, readers, illustrators, and writers,’ as they write in their introduction—and they place the magazine in relation (and opposition) to literary modernism at the height of its influence. H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard receive the lion’s share of attention (5 of the 14 essays treat their work at length), but other important writers are covered, including C. L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Bloch. The little-known author Harold Lawlor, whose work was never collected in book form, receives much-needed attention from Sidney Sondergard, who plucks this writer’s reputation from obscurity. The letters column the magazine published is also taken seriously, with its swirling controversy over what ‘weird fiction’ actually meant. No bibliography, but extensive notes make up for that. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

Choice Reviews

The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales . . . [is]a fascinating collection of essays. . . .This is a great volume for anyone who wants to understand why Weird Tales was so crucially important to the development of American fantasy, and the fan who’s just looking for recommendations on the best fantasy from the early Twentieth Century.

Black Gate

This volume was faithfully strong throughout. . . .[This book] is very much worth it if you are interested in delving into critical secondary works about some of the greatest popular (pulp) fiction writers of the early to mid-20th century. I highly recommend it!

On an Underwood No. 5

The collection’s greatest collective strength is in the brilliant moments when individual contributors place Weird Tales in conversation with scholarship on American pulp magazines.... Unique Legacy as a whole offers an important meditation on the literariness of the pulps, their place in interwar modernism and periodical culture, and much on the significance of Lovecraft and Howard.

The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts