IBC135 The Spider

you have been warned yeah so let's take a look at the author first and then we'll get into the publication history hans heinz ewers was a german actor poet and writer born in düsseldorf in 1871 his first publication was the book of fables in 1901 and in that same year he formed a theater company that traveled around Central and Eastern Europe and even over to South America.

In fact, he ended up in New York.

Now, I'm going to do a full biography in the Halloween edition of Innsmouth News, which will be out later this month.

So we're just going to go over some other highlights here.

Quite an interesting life.

He was arrested in 1918 as a suspected German agent, and it's believed there's a possible connection to Pancho Villa.

He was encouraging Mexico to attack the US.

This, of course, was at the tail end of World War I.

He was never tried for that, but he was imprisoned and he wasn't released until 1921.

His best known work is probably 1911's Al Rauna, which was a reworking of the Frankenstein myth.

Interestingly enough, that also features a femme fatale, maybe a bit of a thread through some of his work.

Yes.

That story was filmed several times, the last one being in 1952 with the great Eric von Stroheim.

During his life, he also published several plays, poems, fairy tales and opera librettos.

And something I didn't know, he was a longtime friend and correspondent with Alistair Crowley.

That was a very interesting connection there.

Yeah, I found out that he basically, he considered himself a self-styled literary sorcerer.

Oh,

nice.

Yeah, I like that.

So what do you do? I'm a literary sorcerer,

don't you know?

I like that.

There's something very Tweedy about that.

I like it.