(1889-1969)
La Spina’s significance is more historical than artistic. She was one of the few women to write regularly for the leading fantasy/horror pulps, and was a contributor to the very first issue of the first American pulp magazine devoted exclusively to tales of horror and the fantastic.
Born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Methodist minister, she was a precocious child, publishing her own “small press” newspaper at the age of 10, with pages of poems and local gossip. She peddled copies to the neighbors, taking anything from pennies to pins as payment. As a teenager, she won a literary contest and had a story published in Connecticut Magazine. La Spina gave up writing to attend to her marriage and the raising of a daughter, but in her early thirties she was drawn back to it. She thought up a scary story of an evil werewolf, which she called “Wolf of the Steppes.” She gave to the story a complex epistolary structure, the narrative carried on in a series of different characters’ letters. Here is the gist of it: elderly Dr. Greeley rescues a terrified young Russian woman, Vera. The woman has escaped from her nemesis, the thick-eyebrowed, sharp-taloned Serge Vassilovich, a magician-werewolf, an evil creature who has caused the death of her parents and was about to ravage the young woman when she got away. Old Dr. Greeley and a friend, Dr. Connors, lay a trap for Serge, killing him and turning his corpse back into a wolf to avoid any trouble with the authorities.
She sent her lurid story to Popular Magazine, Street & Smith’s general interest pulp. It lay in the slush pile until the developer introduced a new, innovative pulp called The Thrill topic. This new magazine was looking for “strange, bizarre, occult, mysterious tales . . . containing mystic happenings, weird adventures, feats of leger-de-main, spiritualism . . .” La Spina’s tale seemed more than appropriate and thus became the landmark publication’s first lead story when The Thrill topic made its debut with a cover date of March 15, 1919 (and a rather bland come-on atop the title: “A Delightful Number of a New Type of Magazine”).
La Spina had at least three more stories published in the innovative magazine before its abrupt demise (she claimed to have written other stories for The Thrill topic under a pen name). “From Over the Border,” “The Haunted Landscape,” and “The Ultimate Ingredient” were printed in the May 15, June 1, and October 15 issues respectively. Her work was thus represented in the very last issue as well as the first. Before the writer had much time to suffer over the end of her regular market, she won a $2,500 short story contest run by Photoplay magazine. Soon there would be another magazine devoted to the macabre—an altogether superior and long-lasting publication—called Weird Tales, and La Spina began writing for it soon after Farnsworth Wright took over the job of editor. Her long association with the magazine began with a tale of voodoo, “The Tortoise Shell Cat.” In April 1925, Weird Tales began publishing her first novel-length work, Invaders from the Dark. This suspenseful werewolf story caused quite a stir. Another werewolf tale, “The Devil’s Pool,” became the cover story for the June 1932 issue.
In the 1920s and 1930s, LaSpina worked as a journalist, and she was said to have been the first female newspaper photographer. Following the death of her husband, La Spina married again, to a deposed Italian baron.
Works
- “Dead Wagon” (Sept. 1927);
- “Devil’s Pool” (June 1932);
- “Fettered” (July-Oct. 1926);
- “From Over the Border” (May 15, 1919);
- “Gargoyle” (Sept.-Nov. 1925);
- “Great Pan Is Here” (Nov. 1943);
- “Haunted Landscape, The” (June 1, 1919);
- “Invaders from the Dark” (Apr.-June 1925; 1960);
- “Last Cigarette” (Mar. 1925);
- “Old Mr. Wiley” (Mar. 1951);
- “Rat Master, The” (Mar. 1942);
- “Scarf of the Beloved” (Feb. 1925);
- “Suitor from the Shades” (June 1927);
- “Tortoise Shell Cat” (Nov. 1924);
- “Ultimate Ingredient, The” (Oct. 15, 1919);
- “Wolf of the Steppes” (Mar. 1, 1919)
