Part 1 of "Wentworth's Day!"

Here we have the contents page & first half of "Wentworth's Day," which I read when I was nine or so, and was my first known exposure to anything having to do with that Great Old One, HP Lovecraft.

Wait!  I take that back!  BEFORE I read this story, I had read Ray Bradbury's story "Pillar of Fire," in which a reanimated corpse goes into the library of a sanitized future society and askes for a book on Lovecraft.  "Is that a sex book?" inquires the librarian.  When I first read Bradbury's story, I had NO IDEA that this exchange was a dirty pun, a joke on Bradbury's part.

Anyway, here are the first pages of Eerie13.  This story, "Wentwoprth's Day," is kind of like an unholy spawn of a Lovecraftian "strange book in an old house" tale and a standard EC corpse-revenge story.

Unlike some of my childhood crushes, these Eerie stories retain their cheesy charm.  I guess that means I grew up cheesy too.

We leave you know with salesman Hadley beginning to learn more than he wishes about the accident that happened to Nahum Wentworth.

The rest of this shaggy bog story on Monday!

Page-by-Page through Eerie #13

This issue of Eerie magazine, one of several scare-mags from Warren Publishing, is cover-dated February 1967.  That means it came out just after I turned ten years old.

I bought my copy from the Git-N-Go about a half mile from our house, next to the creek where I caught crawdads.  This was in Bartlesville, in northeast Oklahoma.  Here's somebody's photo of the Git-N-Go sign as I remember it from the 1960s:

Well, here are the front outside & inside covers for this fun little piece of newstand seduction. 

Only the outside front & back covers were in color; all the other pages and inside covers are B&W.  And what's wrong with that?  In the same way that the crime noir films or classic monster movies are praised for their monocolor starkness, I really enjoy these stories as they are.  They wouldn't be improved by throwing buckets of colored ink on them.

Of course, the cost of color interiors would have really jacked up the forty cent cover price.

As to the records sold inside the front cover, I'm not familiar with any of them.  Many were repackaging of radio shows, as you can tell by the Basil Rathbone credit on the Dinosaurs! record.

Come back in a few days for our first story, which as it turns out was my first exposure to good ol' Aitch-Pee Ell (say it out loud).