Today, July 10, marks the birth of three writers whose works I’ve enjoyed. They are Greye La Spina (1880-1969), John Wyndham (1903-1969), and Carl Jacobi (1908-1997).

Greye La Spina had a number of stories published in Weird Tales, including the one I want to look at to day, “The Antimacassar”.  It was originally published in the May 1949 issue and currently available in Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird and The Women of Weird Tales. It’s a short little tale about a woman who is looking for a coworker who went missing while on vacation. It deals with the lengths a mother will go to in order to provide for her daughter. And while the secret is pretty obvious, the execution is good. Greye La Spina has been getting some attention in recent years, along with other women writers of the pulp era. This is good to see. I’ve ranted before about how women authors have been memory holed in support of the narrative of a patriarchy that kept them from being published and locked out of the sff field.

British author John Wyndham is best known for his science fiction, but he did engage in the occasional foray into fantasy. And if you haven’t read The Midwich Cuckoos, it is one of the creepiest science fiction horror novels I’ve ever read. “Confidence Trick” was first published the July-August issue of Fantastic. A group of people on a crowded train suddenly find the train almost empty. Where they end up isn’t where they thought they were going. How they get out is what the title of the story refers to. I’m not going to spoil the story by giving away any of the details, even though the story is somewhat predictable. Wyndham handles the situation with a very British flavor. It’s currently available in The Essential John Wyndham: The Pulp Fiction Collection.

Carl Jacobi was a prolific author. For this post, I reread his classic vampire story, “Revelations in Black”. It was first published in the April 1933 issue of Weird Tales. It’s available in The Vampire Achives. I read it in a different anthology, but looking over the ToC of this book on the ISFDB, I’m going to have to get a copy.  In this one, a man finds a book in an antique store. The owner of the store says it was written by his brother, who was in an asylum, just before he died.

The man, who is the narrator and never named, discovers that the book is more than the symbolic ravings of a madman when he finds himself in the garden described in the book.

All three of these writers were good story tellers. They deserve to be read and remembered.