Avon Fantasy Reader No. 7
Edited by Donald A. Wollheim
Avon Publishing Company, Inc.
1948
1st Printing
A stunning cover, this time illustrating the cover featured Rohmer story. Kind of looks like Bogart in the background, don't it?
Although Wolheim's introduction is cut to a single page, the 7th issue of the Reader features another good mix of stories, with some genuine rarities and oddities.
For rarity, there is the Sax Rohmer piece. Rohmer is best remembered as the creator of Fu Manchu, one of the great villains of genre fiction. What is not as well known, however, is that Rohmer had a lifelong interest in Egypt, that some of his earliest fiction was set in the Middle East, rather than the Orient. "The Curse of a Thousand Kisses" falls into this former group and is a romantic tale of Grainger the mysterious woman known as Sheherazade (apparently no relation to the same named woman of Arabian Nights fame). In the introduction to the story, Wollheim claims that Rohmer had named this tale as his favorite.
The A. Merritt piece in the issue, "When Old Gods Wake", is an oddity, in that it is not a short story, but the truncated first chapter of a novel that Merritt was working on at the time of his death. By the time this issue of the Reader was published, all of Merritt's work had been printed, so, in the fashion of the Howard revival of the 70s, Wollheim decided to use this fragment, thereby being able to present "unpublished" Merritt material.
The rest of the issue falls into the formula of the previous issues. C. L. Moore's "Shambleau", her first published story, is a mixture of SF and horror and is presented here for the first time since its only appearance 15 years before. Robert E. Howard's "The Cairn on the Headland" is straight horror, as is "The Were-Snake" by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. Clark Ashton Smith has a fantasy story with unpronounceable names, Lord Dunsany has a tale of Mars, Fritz Leiber, an author usually associated with fantasy, contributes a horror tale and an SF tale by Wollheim entitled, "Aquella," pretty well rounds out the issue.
There is one more oddity, however, a horror story by Frank Gruber, an author mostly associated with tough detectives and westerns, "The Gun", one of only two stories which, according to the author, "represent my complete and total contribution to the art of scaring the hell out of people."