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SINCE Marco Polo came back to Europe early in the Fourteenth Century with his strange tales of far Cathay, Oriental tales have held extraordinary fascination for us of the Western world. They take the reader out of the ruts of humdrum everyday existence; they weave a spell of bizarre wonder; they transport us to a fairyland of exotic strangeness and romance.
The few Oriental stories that have been published in Weird Tales during the past year were popular with you, the readers, far beyond expectation, considering the proportion they bear to other stories. The gripping orientales of E. Hoffmann Price; the exquisite Chinese stories of Frank Owen; the tale of Chinese magic told by Soong Kwoen-ling and James W. Bennett in the April issue;—all these have found immediate favor. Murray Leinster's torture-tale of India, The Oldest Story in the World, published in the August issue, is fighting out first place with Lieutenant Burks' Haitian voodoo story, Black Medicine, in the voting for favorite story in that issue. So we are going to give you more Oriental tales. More Oriental stories and more semi- scientific stories (for these seem to be what you, the readers, desire); and fewer crime stories (for these seem to be least in favor).
You have asked for weirder stories, and we bow to your wishes. Our suggestion in the August Eyrie, "How about a few old-fashioned ghost stories?", brought an immediate flood of letters, all emphatically in favor of more ghost stories, many of them asking us not to spoil the mystic atmosphere of our ghost stories by twisting the plot into a rational explanation.
Again we bow to the readers. We will print the best ghost stories obtainable. But we ask your help, for good ghost-thrillers are the hardest stories to find. In this age of materialism, hardly anybody seems to write ghost stories any more, unless he exposes his ghost as a fake in the last paragraph. We have scheduled Frank Stockton's humorous ghost-tale, A Transferred Ghost, for our Weird Story Reprint series, and will include Sir Walter Scott's ghost classic, Wandering Willie's Tale, in the same series; but the new ghost-story manuscripts that flow to the editor's desk are for the most part silly, or else follow slavishly the trite example of the wailing ghosts of the past, and so they are regretfully returned to their authors. We have a few excellent ghost stories on hand, however. Lieutenant Arthur J. Burks has written a novelette called The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee, which is a regular corn-cracker. But such stories are rarer than hen's teeth. So we ask you: please send us some good ghost stories—tales that will make our hair stand on end and our teeth chatter and send the chills racing up and down our spines. We like 'em (don't let anybody tell you different!) and our readers like 'em, too.
