Weird Tales, Sept '43: R Bloch, A Derleth and R M Farley

It's time for another trip to the dark and dangerous world that is Weird Tales, the essential pulp magazine, edited, from 1940 to 1954, by Dorothy McIlwraith. Today, the September 1943 issue. We've looked into this issue already to admire "Fredric Brown's story "The Geezenstacks" and a Hannes Bok illustration. But it is stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Ralph Milne Farley that bring us to WT's pages today. Feel free to read along at the scan of the World War II-era magazine that I will be reading, which you can find at this link. "Black Barter" by Robert Bloch"Black Barter" is a sequel to November of 1942's "Nursemaid to Nightmares," a story I called "an absolute waste of time." I counted, and saw that "Black Barter" filled 20 pages of Ms. McIlwraith's magazine. Then I gritted my teeth and forged ahead. "Unto the breach once more, dear friends...."Our narrator, in the earlier story, was hired by an eccentric hobbyist to look after his collection of mythical and supernatural…