Two magazines which offered their first issues in the summer of 1963; both were on newsstands in July. Both would offer a mix of fantasy (very much including horror), some sf and (as has often been the case with fantasy-fiction magazines over the decades) some stories that were more fantastic-adjacent than departures from consensus reality.
Both were produced on modest budgets, but Gamma featured a full-color cover and relatively good paper, if a saddle-stapled binding; the first issue of Magazine of Horror (the lack of article in the title has always seemed awkward to me) was on a lower grade of paper, but the first issue, at least, was perfect-bound (glued, with a spine), though not long after, the MOH would also go to staple-binding.
And, in their mix of new and reprinted content, the two magazines come off rather more similarly than one might expect, particularly as the Magazine of Horror was both economically but also by intent delving largely into public domain reprints from the pulps, most importantly Weird Tales, and earlier fiction from other sources, featuring reprints from Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Chambers and H.G. Wells along with the WT crew, while Gamma (with some if limited visual art within) was devoted to showcasing the "Little Bradburys" of the Los Angeles area, many of whom were screenwriters and not a few in Rod Serling's stable of contributors to The Twilight Zone...hence the prominence, aside from commercial good sense, in highlighting Bradbury's (reprinted) contributions, the Serling interview, and a piece of juvenilia by Tennessee Williams published in Weird Tales (and also conveniently in the public domain); the other reprints in Gamma include decade-old stories from other fantasy/sf magazines and one of the most prominent fanzines of the time, a poem from a regional magazine and one of a number of vignettes commissioned for an advertising series that ran in Scientific American. Chatty headnotes to the stories and other expressions of strong editorial presence are hard to miss in both issues.
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Gamma [v1 #1, #1, 1963] (50¢, 128pp+, digest, cover by Morris Scott Dollens) Editors: Charles E. Fritch, Editor; Jack Matcha, Executive Editor; William F. Nolan, Managing Editor
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Magazine of Horror and Strange Stories [v1 #1, #1, August 1963] ed. Robert A. W. Lowndes (Health Knowledge Inc., 50¢, 132pp, digest)
Both were produced on modest budgets, but Gamma featured a full-color cover and relatively good paper, if a saddle-stapled binding; the first issue of Magazine of Horror (the lack of article in the title has always seemed awkward to me) was on a lower grade of paper, but the first issue, at least, was perfect-bound (glued, with a spine), though not long after, the MOH would also go to staple-binding.
And, in their mix of new and reprinted content, the two magazines come off rather more similarly than one might expect, particularly as the Magazine of Horror was both economically but also by intent delving largely into public domain reprints from the pulps, most importantly Weird Tales, and earlier fiction from other sources, featuring reprints from Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Chambers and H.G. Wells along with the WT crew, while Gamma (with some if limited visual art within) was devoted to showcasing the "Little Bradburys" of the Los Angeles area, many of whom were screenwriters and not a few in Rod Serling's stable of contributors to The Twilight Zone...hence the prominence, aside from commercial good sense, in highlighting Bradbury's (reprinted) contributions, the Serling interview, and a piece of juvenilia by Tennessee Williams published in Weird Tales (and also conveniently in the public domain); the other reprints in Gamma include decade-old stories from other fantasy/sf magazines and one of the most prominent fanzines of the time, a poem from a regional magazine and one of a number of vignettes commissioned for an advertising series that ran in Scientific American. Chatty headnotes to the stories and other expressions of strong editorial presence are hard to miss in both issues.
Gamma [v1 #1, #1, 1963] (50¢, 128pp+, digest, cover by Morris Scott Dollens) Editors: Charles E. Fritch, Editor; Jack Matcha, Executive Editor; William F. Nolan, Managing Editor
- 4 · Editorial · The Editors
- 5 · Mourning Song · Charles Beaumont · ss
- 16 · Crimes Against Passion · Fritz Leiber · ss
- 22 · Time in Thy Flight · Ray Bradbury · ss Fantastic Universe Jun/Jul 1953
- 27 · The Vengeance of Nitocris · Tennessee Williams · ss Weird Tales Aug 1928, as by Thomas Lanier Williams
- 39 · Itself! · A. E. van Vogt · ss Scientific American Jan 1963
- 42 · Venus Plus Three · Charles E. Fritch · nv
- 60 · A Message from Morj · Ray Russell · vi
- 63 · To Serve the Ship · William F. Nolan · ss
- 69 · The Gamma Interview · Rod Serling · iv
- 76 · The Freeway · George Clayton Johnson · ss
- 88 · One Night Stand · Herbert A. Simmons · ss
- 94 · As Holy and Enchanted · Kris Neville · ss Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader Apr 1953, as by Henderson Starke
- 105 · Shade of Day · John Tomerlin · ss
- 113 · The Girl Who Wasn’t There · Forrest J. Ackerman · ss; revised from “The Lady Takes a Powder”, Inside 1953, with Edith Eide. Eide was not given byline credit on either version.
- 118 · Death in Mexico · Ray Bradbury · pm California Quarterly 1954
- 121 · Crescendo · Richard Matheson · ss
Magazine of Horror and Strange Stories [v1 #1, #1, August 1963] ed. Robert A. W. Lowndes (Health Knowledge Inc., 50¢, 132pp, digest)
- Details supplied by Douglas Greene.
- 4 · Introduction · Robert A. W. Lowndes · ed
- 7 · The Man with a Thousand Legs · Frank Belknap Long · nv Weird Tales Aug 1927
- 29 · A Thing of Beauty · Wallace West · ss
- 36 · The Yellow Sign · Robert W. Chambers · nv The King in Yellow, New York & Chicago: F. Tennyson Neely 1895
- 52 · The Maze and the Monster · Edward D. Hoch · ss
- 58 · The Death of Halpin Frayser · Ambrose Bierce · ss The Wave Dec 19 1891
- 72 · Babylon: 70 M. · Donald A. Wollheim · ss
- 80 · The Inexperienced Ghost · H. G. Wells · ss The Strand Magazine Mar 1902, as “The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost”
- 92 · The Unbeliever · Robert Silverberg · ss
- 99 · Fidel Bassin · W. J. Stamper · ss Weird Tales Jul 1925
- 107 · The Last Dawn · Frank Lillie Pollock · ss The Argosy Jun 1906, as “Finis”
- 118 · The Undying Head · Mark Twain · ss Life on the Mississippi, James R. Osgood 1883
Both magazines lead off with stories by the kind of writers who would predominate throughout their runs; unfortunately neither is a first-rate story. Frank Belknap Long's "The Man with a Thousand Legs" is in fact a tone-deaf attempt to do Lovecraftian overstatement (which Lovecraft himself wasn't so good at), clunking along through one clumsy turn of phrase after another (and exactly one good one, when it's suggested a shell game con-man will look upon a potential source of income as his oyster); Charles Beaumont, probably the most widely-respected of the group of writers dismissively tagged "little Bradburys" by some, but who notably could dig a bit deeper in his best work than Bradbury usually was able to, provides something very much like a Bradbury version of a Manly Wade Wellman story set among rural folk coping with a very old and eyeless man, replete with pet raven and guitar, who serves as a warning (harbinger?) of death when he comes down the hill and plays and sings his "Mourning Song" in front of the house of the soon-dead for however many days till the death actually occurs. By 1963, Beaumont was probably already dependent on his friends to finish when not completely ghost his work for him, as the early-onset Alzheimer's which would kill him was already making its presence known. Long's story is among his earliest work, but he did make some judicious rewrites at Lowndes's request (presumably excising some though not all the racist language in the original)...but not nearly enough of them.
Wallace West is next up in the MOH, with "A Thing of Beauty," a Weird Tales reject that presumably sat in a drawer for three decades, and perhaps deservedly, though it's certainly a better story than the Long; a hunchbacked functionary at a medical school becomes obsessed with the corpse of a young woman, a suicide-by-gas, one of those he's charged with preserving for purposes of med student dissection. His rhapsodies over her nude form allow West to have him recite no little Romantic poetry, the caretaker's other obsession. WT editor Farnsworth Wright supposedly rejected the story as too distasteful, though its frankness is one of its few strengths. In the Gamma issue, Fritz Leiber's "Crimes Against Passion" is a playlet, one of his surprisingly few explorations of that form (given his theatrical background and love of the work of Shakespeare and John Webster, among others). It's also an excuse to rummage about mostly in Shakespeare's plays and to a lesser extent those of Aeschylus, while making weak jokes at the expense of modern psychiatry...this piece is one of the weaker Leiber stories I've read, and feels like the kind of thing that usually would've gone to one of the more literate fanzines normally. Leiber is a better artist than West, but neither is swinging for the fences in these, even given the indulgence in hat-tipping to their literary favorites. The West isn' t horror fiction or at least is non-fantasticated; the Leiber is so much a stage jape that it barely registers as fantasy.
The next (reprinted) stories in each issues might mark an upturn, but I've yet to read them (an excerpt from The King in Yellow by Chambers, a Bradbury story from the end of his most productive period); the new Silverberg and Wollheim stories in the MOH are good examples of what these writers can do, and I'm looking forward to the Ray Russell original and Kris Neville reprint in Gamma particularly, while holding out less hope for the Ackerman collaboration, never published with recognition of that collaborative authorship, and supposedly rewritten from a 1953 appearance in the literate fanzine Inside. The Wells story and Twain tall tale are good work, from my memory of them, decades ago...this review will be updated over the next day or so...
For more of today's books (and perhaps more magazines or short fiction), please see Patti Abbott's blog.