page_title: The Thrill Book
section_title: Contents and reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Thrill Book / Contents and reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of the 15 October 1919 issue of The Thrill Book. The cover art is by James Reynolds.
context_page_description: The Thrill Book was a U.S. pulp magazine published by Street & Smith in 1919. It was intended to carry "different" stories: this meant stories that were unusual or unclassifiable, which in practice often meant the stories were fantasy or science fiction. The first eight issues, edited by Harold Hersey, were a mixture of adventure and weird stories. Contributors included Greye La Spina, Charles Fulton Oursler, J. H. Coryell, and Seabury Quinn. Hersey was replaced by Ronald Oliphant with the July 1 issue, probably because Street & Smith were unhappy with his performance.
  Oliphant printed more science fiction and fantasy than Hersey had done, though this included two stories by Murray Leinster which Hersey had purchased before being replaced. The most famous story from The Thrill Book is The Heads of Cerberus, a very early example of a novel about alternative time tracks, by Francis Stevens. Oliphant was given a larger budget than Hersey, and was able to acquire material by popular writers such as H. Bedford-Jones, but he was able to produce only eight more issues before the end came.
context_section_description: Hersey began by making himself familiar with the work of writers already in the market who were capable of producing the kind of material Ralston wanted. He soon concluded that the new magazine would have to include some reprinted stories alongside the original material. The budget did not permit Hersey to pay rates that would attract top-quality writers, nor even to reprint the best-known stories of the kind he was looking for, and he was forced to use relatively unknown authors such as Perley Poore Sheehan and Robert W. Sneddon. Hersey distributed a "Notice to Writers" that described what he was looking for: "strange, bizarre, occult, mysterious tales ... mystic happenings, weird adventures, feats of leger-de-main, spiritualism, et cetera ... If you have an idea which you have considered too bizarre to write, too weird or strange, let us see it." This did not restrict the submissions to fantasy or science fiction, and as a result, Hersey received (and printed) all kinds of fiction, including mysteries, adventures, and love stories, though it may be that he simply did not receive enough good quality science fiction and fantasy to fill the magazine. Hersey later recalled that the notice did not bring in many usable manuscripts: "As a result of the notices in the writers' magazines, I received a thousand manuscripts but was able to buy only ten!"
  The first issue included "Wolf of the Steppes", a werewolf story by Greye La Spina. This had been submitted to The Popular Magazine but purchased by Clancy for The Thrill Book in 1918, when Street & Smith began making plans for the new magazine. The story was the first by La Spina, whose real name was Fanny Greye Bragg; she would go on to publish several more stories in The Thrill Book, and later became a regular contributor to Weird Tales. Another first story was "The Thing That Wept", by Charles Fulton Oursler, who later went on to edit Liberty and to write novels under the name Anthony Abbot. Two serials were begun in the first issue: "The Jeweled Ibis" by J.C. Kofoed, and "In the Shadows of Race", by J. Hampton Bishop. Both contained enough fantastic or science-fictional elements to fit the original plans for the magazine: "The Jeweled Ibis" was about worshippers of the ancient Egyptian gods, and Bishop's story was about a lost race in Africa, and included intelligent apes. The cover for the first issue was by Sidney H. Riesenberg; Bleiler describes it as "shabby and second-rate" by comparison to cover art in successful magazines of the day such as Adventure and Detective Story Magazine. The May 1 issue included an early short story by Seabury Quinn, "The Stone Image", which features a character named Dr. Towbridge, who would later appear (renamed Dr. Trowbridge) in Quinn's popular occult detective stories about Jules de Grandin, though Quinn had not yet invented de Grandin. Tod Robbins, a well-regarded writer of fantasy, supplied several short pieces, all "shallow mood sketches" without much substance, in the opinion of science fiction historian Mike Ashley. The contributors included Sophie Louise Wenzel, who later published stories in Weird Tales under the name Sophie Wenzel Ellis, but most of the writers from Hersey's editorship, such as George C. Jenks and John R. Coryell—both authors of dime novels—are no longer well-known names.
  When Oliphant took over the editorship, he placed notices in writers' magazines looking for more submissions. Much of the material published under Oliphant's editorship would have been bought by Hersey, making it hard to judge Oliphant's impact. However, it is clear that Oliphant bought more science fiction and fantasy stories than Hersey had done: in particular, Hersey had published almost no stories that were straightforward science fiction, though two he did purchase, Murray Leinster's "A Thousand Degrees Below Zero" and "The Silver Menace", appeared in the first few issues of Oliphant's editorship. Stories such as "The Lost Days" by Trainor Lansing, which dealt with perceptions of time, and "The Ultimate Ingredient" by Greye La Spina, about 
caption: Cover of the last issue; artwork by James Reynolds
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