Harry Warner, Jr.
423 Summit Avenue
Hagerstown, Maryland, 21740

You could probably cause a lot of trouble for your friend, Mrs. Eddy, if you
felt resentful about your financial transaction.  I'm pretty sure that the Post
Office Department would consider this pretty close to use of the mails to
defraud.  Even if the dictionary doesn't say how many pages or words a
publication must contain to be described as a book, this particular item seems
safely beneath even the most liberal definition of the word.  If memory serves,
postal regulations set 24 pages as the lowest limit that anything can have to
be mailed under the book rate.  However, I imagine that action on your part
would call down on your head the wrath of some of the more extreme Lovecraft
fans who think that anything which adds one more item to the universe's total
of Lovecraftiana is justifiable, no matter what means are employed.

I hope The Last Farewell isn't really autobiographical.  If it's just a
description of a passing mood, I'll feel more comfortable, because it is
altogether too vivid and too exact a reproduction of a dangerous state of a
young person's mind.  I'd hate to see it become even more disturbing to the
reader, but it could get that way if the second page were reworked to describe
more fully and precisely what caused this decision to put on an ugly mask.

Pickering's articles are growing completely incomprehensible.  It used to be
that the last sentence of a paragraph would have no apparent connection with or
relevance to the beginning of that paragraph.  Now it's frequently impossible
to trace any way in which the final half of a sentence bears on the first half.
His increasing tendency to use words whose meaning he doesn't understand in
ridiculous ways is approaching illiteracy.  He is obviously bluffing in the
most outrageous manner whenever he tries to say something about fannish
history, because he's so demonstrably wrong in every specific reference to a
fan or fan publication which he cites by name.  And occasional references to
"we sociologists" or "my data and statistics" are evidence that the boy is in
grave danger of splitting completely off from reality.  If fandom affects him
this way, he'd better get out of it altogether and fast.

In The Unknown section, I thought the Gordon Charles story extremely well done
wherever it moved along by means of conversation, somewhat less expert when
straight narration filled the paragrpahs.  The opening scene, for instance, is
spoiled by taking much too long to describe action and by alternating between
snatches of action and tiny flashbacks.  But many of the paragraphs in direct
quotations are expert both for reprodicuing exactly the idiom and for filling
in the background of events and characterizing the speakers unobtrusively.  In
any event, I imagine that what appears to be a completely mundane western story
in a fanzine will produce another barrage of at least two dozen Pickering
articles

The End of Witch Liza is very uneven.  But there is originality in the
introduction of the furies converted from their mythological significance to
this modern two-dimensional fantasy form.  I suspect that this story was
written in improvised manner, without much idea in the author's mind of what
was going to happen next, and with no rewriting or revision after the first
draft was finished.  Putting it aside for six months and then reworking the
same general idea might produce a pretty good story.

I suspect that nobody else among your readers will even mention the little poem
on page 51 of the No-Eyed Monster half of the fanzine.  But I would rate it as
the best thing in the issue.  It could be inserted in a complete edition of
Emily Dickinson's poetry and I'll bet nobody would notice the difference except
the Emily Dickinson specialists.

I must say a lot of nice things about the front cover by Fred Phillips.  He has
achieved a real impression of bulk and weight for the spacesuit and weapon,
something that is not easy to do on a... dittoed page.  ...The tops of the
boots look both sloppy and dangerous in a vacuum or alien atmosphere.

Anyway, you're definitely improving fast, and by "you" I mean practically
everyone who writes for or edits your fanzine.

  [pp.43 - 46, "Your 5 Cents Worth," Letter 7, NO-EYED MONSTER #10, Winter 1966-
                                                                             67]

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