The Men Who Made Weird Tales Weird

When the history of fantasy and horror fiction is being discussed, the pulp magazine Weird Tales is inevitably mentioned.

Originally selling for just twenty-five cents on news-stands, and printed on low-grade ‘pulp’ paper, Weird Tales was the first magazine devoted exclusively to weird and fantastic fiction.

The three most important and influential writers to have their work published in the pages of ‘The Unique Magazine’ were Rhode Island horror writer H.P. Lovecraft; the Texan creator of Conon the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard; and the California poet, short story writer, illustrator and sculptor, Clark Ashton Smith.

In The Weird Tales Boys, award-winning writer and editor Stephen Jones explores the relationship between this trio of - in many ways flawed - friends, and how their work and lives became not just entwined with each other, but also with so many other authors and publishers of the period.

The legacy of these writers - Lovecraft, Howard and Smith - and the periodical in which their work appeared still has a profound influence on horror and fantasy fiction after more than a century, as the ‘Weird Tales Boys’ continue to cast their long, talented and sometimes controversial shadows over the genre today.

This is their story . . .