* * * * * THE DEAD WORLD by Richard F. Searight I dreamed I stood atop a craggy verge And scanned long miles of dreary, jumbled waste That stretched, sharp-etched in airless, frozen surge Beneath the sable, star-strewn vault it faced. Black empty mouths of craters, grim and cold, Yawned bottomless, abysmal pits of slag Amid the desert stretching fold on fold To distant jagged peak and sharp-thrust crag. The desolation flooded through my soul-- No living thing relieved the dismal rifts Of long-past cataclysms; the bleak roll Of upflung ridge and tangled lava drifts. It was as if a Titan band had played With this dead world when it was young and fair, And tired of the sport when they had made A ruin and a wreckage past repair. The cold of outer voids lay like a blight Of cosmic hate across the planet's face; And from the riven features I took flight To seek relief in fairer realms of space. * * * * * A WEIRD BOOK by P. J. Searles "Lost Horizon" by Hilton. Weird stories are so often bloody and gruesome that it is a delight to find one written in an urbane and restrained style. "Lost Horizon" tells of the stealing of a plane and its four passengers (two British consular agents, an American absconding banker, and an American missionary) during a tribal outbreak north of India and their intentional removal to a remote valley in Tibet where they find a semi-Christian and semi-Buddhist monastery, inhabited by a group of serene men and women who have achieved an indefinitely prolonged life. The main portion of the story concerns life in the monastery and the attempt by its head to persuade the few prisoners to remain there, exchanging a hurried, confused, and short life in so-called civilization for calm, peace, and longevity in Tibet. Naturally, and inevitably, the denouement is a tragedy, indirect, but poignant. Mr. Hilton is an urbane satirist (if that is not a contradiction of terms) who has produced a beautiful story, weird and unusual, but without the so-frequent accompaniment of vampires, ghosts, or the like. He writes delicately in a style reminiscent of Owens' "The Wind that Tramps the World." "Lost Horizon" is not for the blood-and-thunder reader; it has no "crashing suns," no "supernatural," no "unseen presences," no incredible "brain surgeons," no "werewolves," but it does have an unusual plot, weird in a faint and beautiful manner. For the not-too-hardened it will be a pleasure. * * * * * TRILOGY OF DEATH by Robert Nelson Death is a wheel....