The page worth $10

It was the name of a Ray Bradbury story too - okay, it was that to start with - but mainly it was a tiny, stuffy, absolutely brilliant science fiction bookshop tucked away in a maze of streets along of St Martin’s Lane. There was barely room to turn around between the shelves that were stuffed to bursting point with paperbacks from the US and copies of Galaxy, F&SF and Worlds of If. Every one of them priceless - and only seven shillings and sixpence.

It was there I discovered Coven 13, the Weird Tales of my generation for a brief, brief moment, but this isn’t a nostalgia trip. I want to talk about the value of giving stuff away. The value to the author, that is.

The shop was run by Derek ‘Bram’ Stokes, whose wife must’ve taken pity on a tubby schoolboy balancing a pile of books he could hardly see over, because she vanished out the back and returned with a load of stapled pages from SF magazines. The originals had got damaged in transit from the States, but they couldn’t bear to just throw them away so they'd salvaged the pages they could.

Okay, basically what I was being offered was a bunch of stories by the likes of Brunner and Moorcock and Pohl and Silverberg. For free. As long as I didn’t mind not having the covers. So, Moses, you want these tablets or not?

A few years ago, after moving to Surrey and then back to London, I was carrying boxes back into our renovated house when I came across that pile of salvaged stories. (Do I have hoarding issues? No no no, I sold my Stingray kit and my Corgi Aston Martin DB5 with box and secret code sheet.) Improvising a sofa out of cardboard boxes and the Ikea flatpacks I was supposed to be turning into bookshelves, I started reading “Wizard Ship” by F Haines Price, torn from the pages of Worlds of If for November 1968. And, you have to understand, this was from the days before Star Wars. SF was the real deal then - we even said it stood for ‘speculative fiction’ - and, despite its title, the story most definitely was not about sword-wielding heroes and mystical galactic princesses.

Anyway, just like that damned whodunit you find on holiday, the last page of the story was of course missing. After a gap of forty years, I could defer gratification no longer. Technology, though it withheld the flying cars and fusion drives we were promised, in the interim at least has given us eBay, so I only had to pay $10 and postage to see how the story ended. By curious coincidence, that's pretty much what 7s/6d would have inflated to over the four decades.

How does that sound as a sales model? You give away 99% of your story and people pay because, because… they just have to know. Okay, done just like that it mostly wouldn’t work. Too many other distractions, too many movies and books and music downloads demanding our time. But the idea of giving away the first third, say, of your story? That I like. If you’re gripped by what you’ve seen, you’ll want to read the rest. And if you aren’t - well, in that case we wouldn’t have done our job properly and we wouldn’t deserve your money, now, would we?

Final destination

We like locomotives. And we like things that are a bit unsettling. So check out this brilliant animation, Madame Tutli-Putli, by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski - interviewed here - and a whole talented team with too many consonants in their names to list here.

If this appeals, you may want to pop over to Wrong - the modern magazine in the tradition of Weird Tales, EC Comics and Warren - and Coven 13, of course. The idea of the magazine is that it is wholly owned by the creators themselves. Come and give it your support; dictatorships aren't toppled by people saying, "I might show my face next week."

The 1970s Weird Tales - when Coven 13 came back from the grave

Attentive readers, or those with nothing else to occupy their time, may recall that I’ve posted before about Coven 13, the New Yorker of horror, a uniquely flavored digest-sized magazine that flared and faded in the space of only a few months at the end of the ‘60s. I remember well my youthful disappointment when I arrived at Dark They Were & Golden-Eyed to ask after issue 5, exactly as editor Arthur H Landis had told us faithful readers to do as he signed off in issue 4, only to be told by proprietor Derek Stokes that it had folded.

Except: “that is not dead…” and after strange eons, or indeed just a year or two, Coven 13 returned like the departed loved one in a Poe story, or indeed a Kate Bush song, smiling with cold white lips and telling me that I had only to unlatch that bedroom window, or indeed send off a US postal order, and the days of delicious fear would return on swift wings.

Yet its time in the grave had brought about a change. What returned was not Coven 13 and soon discarded even the name, calling itself instead Witchcraft & Sorcery. Gone was Landis’s debonair brand of dry, whimsical and very sophisticated horror. In its place now, the more traditional brand of fantasy-horror populated by demons and werewolves. There was more blood, more action. Where Coven 13 had uncurled itself across the chaise longue of pulp literature with the sensuality of a Chandler femme fatale, Witchcraft & Sorcery offered a more immediate and red-blooded sort of gratification. Women took their tops off, guys got horny, there was screaming and there were tentacles… But it wasn’t at all the same delicate lacing of erotically charged horror you got in the Coven cocktail.

I didn’t complain at the time. I never knew the awful irony of the Monkey’s Paw. “Bring it back,” I was demanding of all the fates and gods. “I don’t care what shape it’s in, I don’t care how death has altered it. I just want it back NOW!” And so it returned, brought as it seemed by the mere and irresistible strength of adolescent will.

Its second incarnation had a new large-sized format that I wasn’t too sure about at first, but soon convinced myself that it gave a feel closer to the great days of Weird Tales. And so it did. Witchcraft & Sorcery was much more a close cousin to the honest, down-n-dirty pulps than Coven 13 had ever been. I ripped open the envelope and I breathed it in, that heady perfume of cheap print that Cloud 109 creator Peter Richardson has pointed out has no equal. And I read it cover to cover. And again. I could recite the stories. I copied the pictures. I knew the names of the current authors and the demigods of the ‘30s whom E Hoffman Price wrote about in his regular column. I may have even looked at the poems (they were by Robert E Howard, after all).

Oh, I knew now it wasn’t Coven 13. It was something new. A cheap showgirl who’d make do with candy rather than the champagne Coven would have insisted on. I still loved it.

After two issues Sorcery was already in financial trouble. The third issue (labeled #7, as they’d kept the Coven 13 numbering) was slimmer with a monochrome cover. The stiff white paper made it look more like a fanzine. But it was clearly a labor of love for the new editor, Gerald W Page, and that was enough for me. Then, as now, creative integrity earns my undying loyalty. Mr Page, I have to say, paid dearly for that loyalty because I bombarded him with letters. Whether there was an issue each month or not (usually there was not) he would get pages of correspondence from me, and stories too, battered out on my nigh-on indestructible typewriter. And he, sweet and patient man, would sometimes send me long replies, always kindly deflecting my submissions without ever straying over into anything so brutal as rejection. He gave me great advice on how to make my stories better. His letters were as precious to me as the magazine itself. I have them still, almost forty years later.

He published some fabulous stories, too. It wasn’t Coven 13, but it was something just as good. It was my Weird Tales, the next best thing to being transported back through time to 1930. (Actually, on reflection, very probably a lot better than going back to 1930, given the Great Depression and the lack of antibiotics and all.)

Mr Page’s own story, "Thirst", appeared in the seventh (that is, third) issue – took up most of it, in fact. I’d never read a vampire story like it. It was hard-boiled and grubby, the lead character just an ordinary working joe on his way home from a bar when he got bitten. He spends the story bewildered, frightened, obviously doomed. If it appeared today you’d call it modern; in 1972 it was as if that pale lamia tap-tap-tapping had lobbed a freakin' grenade into my bedroom. And the story was illustrated by Jeff Jones and Bernie (then plain Berni, he was still saving up for the e) Wrightson. That was it: my moment of heaven. And, so that you can share it, here are a couple of those pictures that, although I had not seen them for decades before I searched them out to scan just now, seemed like seeing my own face in a familiar photo, indelible as they are upon the surface of my mind. Enjoy!

Coven 13

Coven 13 was a magazine of horror and fantasy fiction that flared briefly and vanished after four issues from September 1969 to March 1970. The approach to scaring readers was fresh and sophisticated, taking Fritz Leiber's vein of modern urban horror and giving it a kind of cool late-'60s vibe. In Alan Caillou's "Odile", a young witch arouses violent feelings in the neighbourhood, but after she is murdered it all gets much worse. In Harlan Ellison's "Rock God" a Madison Avenue office block becomes the epicentre of prehistoric worship.

And the little lacings of whimsical fantasy amid the horror were of a distinctly Unknown flavour: imps that signed contracts over a Campari and soda, family ghosts that took out the trash, princesses with gold fur.

The mag (we didn't call 'em "zines" in those days) was edited by Arthur H Landis - for whom, incidentally, I landed a three-book deal with Donald A Wollheim when I was still in my teens. (I never saw a commission. Oh well.)

But the best thing about Coven 13 by a very long way? Almost all the art, including four fabulous painted covers, was by the legendary William Stout at the very start of his career. He obviously had a profound influence on the youthful Morris imagination - look at the opening image from Mirabilis episode 4 ("The World Turned Upside Down") which came to me full-blown out of a daydream, or so I thought at the time, and compare it to the cover of Coven's second issue, above. To think that was lurking in there all those years, waiting to be dredged up out of the subliminal mire. It fair gives you a shudder.

Dark They Were & Golden-Eyed

It was the name of a Ray Bradbury story too - okay, it was that to start with - but mainly it was a tiny, stuffy, absolutely brilliant science fiction bookshop tucked away in a maze of streets along of St Martin’s Lane. There was barely room to turn around between the shelves that were stuffed to bursting point with paperbacks from the US and copies of Galaxy, F&SF and Worlds of If. Every one of them priceless - and yet only 7s/6d.

It was there I discovered Coven 13 (and if you don’t know what that is then obviously I need to do a post about it very soon) but this isn’t a when-I-were-a-lad story. I’m talking about free content, just bear with me.

The shop was run by Derek ‘Bram’ Stokes, whose wife must’ve taken pity on a tubby schoolboy balancing a pile of books he could hardly see over, because she vanished out the back and returned with a load of stapled pages from SF magazines. The originals had got damaged in transit from the States, but they couldn’t bear to just throw them away so they'd salvaged the pages they could.

Okay, basically what I was being offered was a bunch of stories by the likes of Brunner and Moorcock and Pohl and Silverberg. For free. As long as I didn’t mind not having the covers. So, Moses, you want these tablets or not?

A year ago, after moving to Surrey and then back to London, I came across that pile of salvaged stories. (Do I have hoarding issues? No no no, I sold my Stingray kit and my Aston Martin DB5.) Improvising a sofa out of cardboard boxes and unopened Ikea flatpacks, I started reading “Wizard Ship” by F Haines Price, torn from the pages of Worlds of If for November 1968. And, you have to understand, this was from the days before Star Wars. SF was proper then; we even said it stood for ‘speculative fiction’. Despite its title, the story most definitely was not about sword-wielding wizards in spaceships.

Anyway, just like that damned whodunit you find on holiday, the last page of the story was of course missing. And naturally I then had to go and track the magazine down on eBay and pay $10 and postage to see how it ended.

That’s the ideal in free content. You give away 99% of your story and people pay because, because… they just have to know. Okay, it wouldn’t work. Too many other distractions, too many movies and books and music downloads demanding people’s time. But the idea of giving away the first third, say, of your story? That I like. If you’re gripped by what you’ve seen, you’ll want to read the rest. And if you aren’t - well, in that case we wouldn’t have done our job properly and we wouldn’t deserve your money, would we?