"Weird Tales" Experiments Continue

Following a new look and logo last year, "Weird Tales" magazine (via jazzy website) continues to offer challenges and events in an effort to market their publication, and to push celebration of the weird further into reality. 2008 is also the 85th anniversary of the journal responsible for titans of weird fiction and horror like H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Thomas Ligotti. They took contest entries until the end of 2007 to determine the 85 weirdest authors of all time, a prestigious list that should be appearing shortly.

Even more impressive, however, is the involvement from "Weird Tales" in helping popularize several odd festivities. The first Miss Zombie Pageant this year will see winners taking all sorts of excellent prizes: a year's subscription and the new anthology, Weird Tales: The 21st Century (Volume 1). The ultimate victor will also get a special "Zombie Love" book, with appropriately ragged, unsettling style. The magazine will also reportedly have a contigent at the quirky "Wicked Winter Renaissance Pirate Ninja Lovecraftian Faire III" on February 8th and 9th, 2008. And for a publication that did so much to build the very historical foundations upon which a gathering of Lovecraftiana, dark humor, and bizarreness like this can exist, there really couldn't be a better place for "Weird Tales" to make a big splash than here.

Bravo, "Weird Tales." This is the kind of involvement that tears away from merely printing fine fiction, and leaps into actively forwarding the real world cause of the weird. Despite grumblings by traditionalists over the new format (particularly the logo), the good will and innovation of "Weird Tales" cannot be denied. Let's hope it continues!

-Grim Blogger