Dorothy Quick was one of almost three hundred women who published fiction and poetry in sci-fi and horror pulp magazines before 1960.
Have you heard of her?
—”Introduction: A Place for Wild Women” in Requiem for a Siren (2024) 1
The pulp reprint anthology has long had a place in genre fiction. In the 1920s and 30s, the Not at Night series and its imitators mined Weird Tales to package pulp stories for audiences in hardback. In the 1960s and 1970s, as fantasy and science fiction boomed, authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith found a strange afterlife alongside the paperback reprints of The Lord of the Rings and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels. Editors like Helen Hoke, Margaret Ronan, and Betty M. Owen were not above reprinting pulp tales to fill out their anthologies for youngsters, and as copies of pulps decayed and rose in price, anthologists like Sam Moskowitz and Peter Haining saw a market in reprinting classic tales from the pulps.
They were right. There was a market for repackaging the best of Weird Tales from the 30s in hardback or paperback, and readers were eager to read the science fiction of the 40s, or themed anthologies of evil plants, drug use, vampire tales. Anthologies proliferated, and continue to proliferate—because now many of the contents of those original pulps have entered the public domain, their text has been scanned, transcribed, and posted online. Every laptop is capable of word processing, layout, and desktop publishing work that used to take an entire office, or at least a some dedicated space in the garage; print-on-demand publishing and ebooks mean it has never been easier for free content to be collated, packaged, and presented for sale at prices that range from the bargain-basement for a cheap ebook with content pulled from Wikipedia to a substantial sum for a high-end hardback, like Weird Tales: The Best of the 1920s (2024, Centipede Press).
The question presented is one of value: what have the editors and publishers provided in their anthology that makes it worth the reader’s hard-earned dollars? Does it save them time or effort? Is there some unique insight provided in the way of explanatory essays? Or is it merely a luxury good, designed to be enjoyed as an aesthetic experience for its own sake, and priced accordingly?
Personally, I tend to be leery of cheap pulp reprints in the print-on-demand era. The return on investment for the cheapest work seems to be low, so the folks attracted to that market are either bottomfeeders or rank amateurs, and the products reflect that. Aim a little higher, however, at the level of some of the self-published scholars and small independent presses, however, and some much more interesting books start to emerge.
Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation (2023, Paradise Editions), edited by Eric Williams, is a collection of the non-English weird fiction that was translated and published in Weird Tales during the 20s and 30s, with explanatory essays and notes on the works. While you could go out and find the individual stories, these aren’t works that were ever published together before, and the essay adds history and context to why and how they appeared in the Unique Magazine.
So too, the women of Weird Tales, who so often never got collections of their own during their lifetimes when their male counterparts did, are finally getting some posthumous recognition in print. Today, those who want to read Francis Stevens can pick up The Citadel of Fear (2022, Flame Tree) with scholarly introduction by Melanie R. Anderson; Everil Worrell’s The Canal and Other Weird Stories (2023, Weird House) with introduction by S. T. Joshi; Greye la Spina’s Fettered and Other Tales of Terror (2023, From Beyond Press), with introduction by Michael W. Phillips, Jr.; Dorothy Quick’s The Witch’s Mark and Others (2024Sarnath Press), also introduced by Joshi.
Collecting these disparate stories from half-forgotten authors and bringing them together with a bit of information about their lives and works produces a whole that is more than the sum of the parts, because it effectively presents these women authors of weird fiction in the same way that their male counterparts have often been presented. In effect, it gives readers a chance to get to know an entire body of work by an author, instead of randomly running across a story or two, often presented without context.
Requiem for a Siren: Women Poets of the Pulps (2024, From Beyond Press) is representative of the best of this impulse to not just reproduce the work of women pulpsters in danger of being forgotten, but to arrange and comment on them in a way that highlights both the publishing history of poetry in pulp magazines and the lives of these women. While many of the poems are taken from Weird Tales, including “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman and “The Eldritch One” (1948) by Pauline Booker, the collection also includes science-fiction poetry from the pages of Amazing Stories and other pulps. Much of the background information for the women is credited to Terence E. Hanley’s Tellers of Weird Tales blog, which is good as Hanley has put in tremendous work into his biographies of the authors and artists of Weird Tales.
Full disclosure at this point:
I would like to thank Bobby Derie, proprietor of the blog Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein (deepcuts.blog), for his invaluable assistance in researching the introduction to this chapter, and Timaeus Bloom for reading an early draft.
—Requiem for a Siren (2024) 1
My help consisted solely of a few brief discussions on social media, to try and help provide a few sources; I had no input into the selection or editing process. The final product is due to the hard work of the editors Haclyn Youhana Garver & Michael W. Phillips Jr., who made an effort to present a representative core sample of poetry by women in the fantastic pulps, covering not just multiple genres and themes, but tone and mood. The black humor of Lilith Lorraine’s “Mutation” to the fey rhythms of Frances Elliott’s “The Hill Woman,” the utter silliness of Julia Boynton Green’s “Radio Revelations” to the somber antique mystery of Alice I’Anson’s “Teotihuacan.” The brief biographies and introductory essays in between sections are functional and sometimes insightful.
Is it a perfect volume? I would have preferred an index of titles and/or first lines, to assist in finding a particular poem again without having to flip through the whole book. The selection is overall solid, but certain names predominate—as was the case in Weird Tales. Poets like Leah Bodine Drake, Dorothy Quick, and Cristel Hastings dominate a bit. If I had my druthers, I would have included more fan poetry, include Virginia “Nanek” Anderson, and perhaps Lilith Lorraine’s “The Acolytes” (1946) or “The Cup-Bearer” (1951)—but that would have been going outside of their own self-circumscribed ambit. This was a look at the women pulp poets, not all genre poetry from the period.
Requiem for a Siren: Women Poets of the Pulps provides value for the money. More than just saving the reader the time of flipping through thousands of pages of pulp magazines and reading a vast amount of dross, this curated collection of poetry is presented in a way to highlight not just some of the best weird and science fiction poetry of the period, but to highlight the women poets as well.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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