We stated last month that the Smith-Ackerman debate would end in this issue--and so it has. Many of our readers have started to get bored with it--and more than that, some ill-feeling has been aroused. We go further to state that there will be no more department known as "The Boiling Point." The name implies that everything contained therein should be boiling hot--and these boiling hot arguments, as we have found out, create an unpleasant atmosphere for many concerned. THE FANTASY FAN is attempting to bind the lovers of science and weird fiction tighter together with friendship, and not to separate them thru dislike of each others ideas. However, to take the place of "The Boiling Point" we are starting a new department next month entitled "Your Views." This will not contain any debates, but the opinions of you, the readers, on various subjects which we will nominate. So, write in us immediately answering the following questions: "What is there in the 'horror' story as associated with weird and fantastic fiction? Is there any virtue to them? How can they be defended when people will read them and say that they are distasteful to the well and normal mind? Why does a person wish to read a sinister tale of evil or monstrosities? Is it healthy reading? Is it not morbid?" Forrest J. Ackerman has suggested this subject. Let's see what you think about it. SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE Part Five by H. P. Lovecraft (Copyright 1927, by W. Paul Cook) Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously enough, are in prose; as the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome passages in Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the younger to Sura, and the odd compilation "On Wonderful Events" by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, "Philinnion and Machates," later related by Procius and in modern times forming the inspiration of Goethe's "Bride of Corinth" and Washington Irving's "German Student." But by the time the old Northern myths take literary form, and in that later time when the weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it mostly in metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst our own Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf" and the later Continental Nibelung tales are full of eldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and in Spencer's stately stanzas will be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and character. Prose literature gives us Malory's "Morte d'Arthur," in