Launched in 1923, the pulp magazine Weird Tales quickly became one of the most important outlets for horror and fantasy fiction and is often associated with writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Bloch, all of whose work appeared in the magazine. But often overlooked is the fact that much of Weird Tales’ content was by women writers, some of whom numbered among the magazine’s most popular contributors. This volume includes thirteen fantastic tales originally published between 1925 and 1949, written by four of Weird Tales’ most prolific female contributors: Greye La Spina, Everil Worrell, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Eli Colter. Ranging from science fiction to fantasy to horror, these classic tales of mad scientists, deadly curses, ghosts, vampires, and the risen dead remain as thrilling and sensational as when first published.
Authors
Mary Elizabeth Counselman was an American writer of short stories and poetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_El...
Greye La Spina was one of the few women to write regularly for the leading fantasy/horror pulps, and was a contributor to the very first issue of the first American pulp magazine devoted exclusively to tales of horror and the fantastic. Born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Methodist minister, she was a precocious child, publishing her own "small press" newspaper at the age of 10, with pages of poems and local gossip. As a teenager, she won a literary contest and had a story published in Connecticut Magazine. La Spina gave up writing to attend to her marriage and the raising of a daughter, but in her early thirties she was drawn back to it. In the 1920s and 1930s, La Spina worked as a journalist, and she was said to have been the first female newspaper photographer. Following the death of her husband, La Spina married again, to a deposed Italian baron.
Pseudonym of May Eliza Frost Aka May Eliza Harvey, Eliza Mae Harvey. May Eliza Frost went by the name Eli Colter, in print and in her private life. She adopted that name in the early 1920s and used it as her byline in hundreds of stories, serials, and novels, mostly Westerns, but also including what she called "problem life stories" and weird fiction. She was born on September 30, 1890, in Portland, Oregon, where she spent most of the first half of her life. She attended the Ladd School in her native city, but when she was thirteen, blindness struck. She regained her sight and—determined to become a writer—began a course of self-education. May Eliza played piano and pipe organ in movie houses to make her living. In 1922 she submitted a story to Black Mask Magazine. It was her first submission and her first published story. Over the next thirty years, the name Eli Colter became a fixture on the covers of pulp magazines and popular novels. Eli Colter wrote a dozen stories and serials for Weird Tales, beginning with "Farthingale's Poppy" in July 1925. The fourth part of her serial "On the Dead Man's Chest" was voted second most popular of all stories printed in Weird Tales in April 1926. She was in good company, for H.P. Lovecraft came in first with "The Outsider," while Robert E. Howard's "Wolfshead" received third place. Eli Colter topped her previous mark with the most popular stories in January 1927 ("The Last Horror"), August 1927 (part three of the serial "The Dark Chrysalis"), and August 1928 ("The Man in the Green Coat"). "The Last Horror" fell into seventh place among all-time most popular stories behind works by A. Merritt, C.L. Moore, H.P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, Nictzin Dyalhis, and Edmond Hamilton. It was also reprinted in the February 1939 issue and was voted fourth most popular story by readers of Weird Tales for that issue. Despite her popularity, Eli Colter never earned a spot as the author of a cover story for Weird Tales.
