The Thrill Book
Contributors included Greye La Spina, Charles Fulton Oursler, J. H. Coryell, and Seabury Quinn.
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.
The last issue was dated October 15, 1919; the magazine was probably cancelled because of poor sales, although a printers' strike at that time may have been a factor.
In the late 19th century, popular magazines typically did not print fiction to the exclusion of other content; they would include non-fiction articles and poetry as well.
[13] The choice of format was probably a mistake, as it was associated in the minds of the buying public with low-quality fiction aimed at readers with very low standards.
Bleiler also suggests Hersey may have started the rumor that he was let go for buying too much of his own material, as this would have been less harmful to his reputation than a dismissal for failure.
At 160 pages, this offered readers much better value for money than the 48-page dime novel format of the first eight issues, even with a price increase from 10 to 15 cents.
A question and answer department, "Cross-Trails", was begun, in imitation of a similar feature in Adventure, the most successful pulp magazine of the day, and the format change may also have been done to increase the resemblance of the two magazines, along with a change to the appearance of The Thrill Book's contents page to resemble that of Adventure.
[6] 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.
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 ...
[22] 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.
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.
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.
[17] Stories such as "The Lost Days" by Trainor Lansing, which dealt with perceptions of time, and "The Ultimate Ingredient" by Greye La Spina, about invisibility, published in August and October respectively, were more evidence of this change in emphasis.
[13][28] In addition to increasing the science fiction content, Oliphant also brought in authors who were better known than those published under Hersey's editorship, including H. Bedford-Jones and William Wallace Cook.
[28] When The Thrill Book ceased publication, Street & Smith had numerous manuscripts in inventory that had been purchased for the magazine.
Greye La Spina bought back her manuscript to "The Dead Wagon" in 1927 and re-sold it to Weird Tales.
In the words of Will Murray, the view that The Thrill Book is the first such magazine is "erroneously held by many", and he adds that it was "merely a prologue to the Golden Era of periodical weird fiction".
