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Black magic! What horrors these two words suggest, and yet what fascinating pictures as well! It was by black magic that the medieval devil-worshipers sought to subdue the powers of nature to their purposes, and spread,the empire of that personal devil to whom they had promised their souls. In the Faust-legend, it was black magic by which the old seer summoned Mephistopheles before him; it was black magic by which men hoped to attain dominion over the Earth and subdue their fellow-men. And it was by black magic that they hoped to force the infernal legions of evil to grant them life eternal here on this Earth, and push back the grave.
Stories of black magic held a peculiar power over the minds of men in the Middle Ages, when witchcraft was accepted as unquestioningly as we accept the fact that the Earth moves around the sun. And now H. P. Lovecraft has dipped his pen into the ancient legends and written for the readers of Weird Tales two remarkable stories of black magic, in which the ancient dark arts are given a modern setting in our own America. Those readers who recall The Rats in the Walls]], published in this magazine last year, will find in Mr. Lovecraft's newest story, The Horror at Red Hook, all the dark terror and weird mystery that made the earlier story a masterpiece of eery fiction, with an even more vivid portrayal of the evil rites of the devil-worshipers, and a climax of subterranean horror that is utterly breath-taking. This story will be published soon, and also a companion story called He, about a New Yorker who remained alive for centuries through his black arts, only to be overwhelmed by the legions of evil he had sought to control.
W. Elwyn Backus' interplanetary serial, The Waning of a World, seems to have caught the fancy of our readers, many of whom have written in enthusiastic praise of it. There is something immensely stimulating to the imagination in the thought that man can sometime visit neighboring worlds, and the stories on this subject that have appeared from time to time in Weird Tales have all been very popular with you, the readers; for instance, Draconda, Invaders From Outside, and When the Green Star Waned. Will Smith has written an interplanetary story that strikes an entirely new note. It is called Other Earths, and will be published soon.
"There was only one thing that I hated most abnormally about The Waning of a World," writes John W. Pelton, from Fort Sam Houston, Texas, "and that is the three words 'TO BE CONTINUED'. Why did editors invent such words as these? Just when it was most interesting you cut it off completely."
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