Leonora E-Book

Everil Worrell

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 24

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Leonora, a 16-year-old girl, likes to walk in the moonlight...until she meets a fascinating stranger who invites her to ride in his automobile. A classic dark fantasy from Weird Tales magazine, originally published in 1927.

Leseprobe

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Edited and revised version copyright © 2022 by Wildside Press LLC.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

LEONORA, by Everil Worrell

INTRODUCTION

Everil Worrell (1893–1969) was a popular Weird Tales author who published 19 stories in magazine. The most famous of these is probably the often-anthologized “The Canal,” though “Leonora” is also up there.

She was born in Nebraska, but moved to the Washington, D.C. area, where she worked for the Treasury Department. Fiction was not her main focus; she dabbled in it, and published mostly in Weird Tales—her last story appearing there in 1954.

Several years ago, the pulp magazine and paperback show Pulpcon announced that her estate had donated her manuscripts for their annual auction. This piqued my interest, as I had read a number of her stories and enjoyed them, though I had little background information on her or her work. It seemed her daughter had passed away, leaving her own estate to a Washington, D.C. church, and I contacted them and purchased not only her copyrights, but the rights to publish her unpublished works—of which a number appeared in the auction!

Mike Chomko, who runs Pulpcon, copied the manuscripts for me before the sale, and Wildside Press released a number of “new” Everill Worrell stories as a result.

This version of “Leonora” has been edited by me and also contains a number of revisions not in other versions of the story. I believe it is the best version of the story available today.

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Cabin John, Maryland

LEONORA,by Everil Worrell

I am writing this because I shall not long be able to write it. Why does one long for the understanding and sympathy of his fellow beings—long to have that, even after the worst has befallen and he has gone from this life to that which awaits him? How many bottles laden with last messages float on lonely, unknown ocean surges, or sink to the bottom of the sea?

It will be so with this, my last message. That is, it will go uncredited, unbelieved, uncomprehended, although it will doubtless be read. But I have told my story many times and heard them say that I am mad. I know they will say that, after I am gone—gone from behind these bars into the horrors of the fate that will overtake my spirit somewhere out in the open spaces and the blackness of night into which it will go. He will be there, one of the shadows that lurk in old cemeteries and sweep across lonely roads where the winds moan and wander homeless and hopeless across the waste spaces of the Earth from dusk till dawn. Dawn!

But I will tell my story for the last time.