C.L. Moore created the sub-genre of female swords and sorcery with her Jirel of Joiry character. Seabury Quinn’s crafted over ninety adventures of occult detective Jules de Grandin, many of which resulted in some of the more racy and lurid cover stories (often with artwork by the legendary Margaret Brundage). Two of his stories are included in this volume.

Other writers in those early issues made huge splashes with readers as well.

A. Merrit, one of several Weird Tales writers who was later inducted into the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, and his 1926 story, The Woman in the Woods (included here) was voted by readers as the most popular tale of that issue. He went on to write many excellent works of prose and poetry.

Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, is often credited with creating the slasher genre. He contributed fifty-four absolutely compelling stories for the magazine, many of which have been staples of reprint anthologies ever since.

August W. Derleth, who’s “Bat’s Belfry” was one of the first Weird Tales stories I ever read, and the tale that introduced me to his oeuvre, is included here. He was a friend and correspondent of Lovecraft’s, and it was Derleth (not, as many people insist, Lovecraft) who coined the phrase “Cthulhu Mythos.” And he was the first to collect Lovecraft’s stories following that author’s death. Derleth was a prolific writer and one of the earliest authors of popular pastiche fiction with his amusing and entertaining “Solar Pons” stories that had fun with and yet honored Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary Sherlock Holmes. He is also the writer who sold the most stories to the magazine…a whopping 101!

Edmund Hamilton, best known for his Captain Future stories, was also a fan favorite who penned seventy-six tales, often with a strong science fiction bias. And one of his earliest tales, “The Atomic Conquerors,” included here, is an alien invasion story with a real twist.

Poet and prose author, H. Warner Munn, was a meticulous craftsman of fiction who got his real start with a pair of stories that appeared in early issues of Weird Tales. “The Werewolf of Ponkert,” which is in the companion volume to this one; and the creepy “A City of Spiders” in this book. He wrote for a number of pulps, including Argosy, Air Wonder Stories, Astounding, and Amazing Stories, but much of his most inspired work was for Weird Tales.