Howell Calhoun 10 min read

Among colossal ruins on a barren Martian shore, where seas once rolled, the black gods still flash beneath sapphire torches, and a lurid shadow stands within the jeweled gates.

Howell Calhoun's 1936 Weird Tales prose-poem is a lush, atmospheric evocation of a dead Mars. Vivid, dreamlike, richly wrought. Read it for a shimmering fragment of weird fantasy, a haunting vision of the lost temples of Xantoos and the eerie splendor left behind on a vanished red planet.

In its time

Published in 1936, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

10 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).