E Hoffmann Price: "The Word of Santiago," "The Peacock's Shadow," and "The Apricots from Ispahan"

Incomprehensible forces, circumstances beyond your human conceptions of good and evil, have laid out for me a bizarre and unusual destiny, have set me on a unique quest--to read at least one story from every published issue of that seminal speculative fiction magazine, Weird Tales. Today we chip away at the 1920s, the first decade in which Weird Tales appeared on newsstands, by reading three stories published in 1926 by E. Hoffmann Price, a guy who, unlike so many of the weirdies, didn't just write about the mysterious East, but actually spent some time over there and made an effort to learn about such topics as the Arabic language, Persian rugs and the Buddhist religion. As a soldier, fencer and boxer, Price also knew more about actual violence than many of his fellow pulp writers. Whether all this knowledge and experience helped make him a better writer, I don't know, but maybe we'll get some clues today as we read these three stories in scans of Weird Tales you can find at the…