The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days! Let’s kick things off with one of the most indisputably weird storytellers of all time…

Somewhere, a parallel universe exists where FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924) survived his illness, agreed to have his stories translated into English, and became Weird Tales’s second superstar alongside H.P. Lovecraft. As it is, he has to settle for posthumous recognition as one of the greatest authors of all time. In his works, a man turns into a giant cockroach; another starves himself to death for the amusement of onlookers; a third is held in endless thrall to a mysterious castle’s bureaucracy; and a fourth, deemed a criminal, must have the judge’s “sentence” carved into his flesh by a fiendish justice machine. But they are all the same man, and that man is Kafka.