Allison V. Harding


Allison V. Harding was the pen name of an author of science fiction and horror stories that appeared in Weird Tales magazine between 1943 and 1951. It may have been a house pseudonym; however, the byline has generally been associated with Jean Milligan and Lamont Buchanan since 2011.

Jean Milligan and Lamont Buchanan

Jean Milligan was born in Cleveland, Ohio and raised in New Canaan, Connecticut, the daughter of John Raymond Milligan and Beatrice Isabel Humphrey Milligan. Her father was a banker, and her mother was a Smith College alumna active in clubwork. Her stepmother, Carina Eaglesfield Mortimer, was an architect and mapmaker. Milligan and her sisters were students at the Low-Heywood School in Stamford. She attended Connecticut College for Women in 1936 and 1937.
Milligan married Charles Lamont Buchanan Jr. in 1952. Buchanan, who wrote at least a dozen pictorial history books on steamships, railroads, aviation, the Confederacy, the Kentucky Derby, and baseball, was an associate editor of Weird Tales magazine during the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith. Some have proposed that Buchanan wrote or collaborated with Milligan on the stories published under Harding's name; however, payments for the stories were made to Milligan. Milligan died in a New York City nursing home in 2004, at the age of 85. Buchanan died in 2015, leaving a significant fortune.

Works

Harding was "amongst the most prolific of all the contributors to Weird Tales". All of the following works originally appeared in Weird Tales or its sister publication, Short Stories between 1943 and 1951, and many were later included in anthologies of science fiction and horror.
  • "The Unfriendly World"
  • "Night Must Not Come"
  • "Death Went That Way
  • "House of Hate"
  • "The Marmot"
  • "The Day the World Stood Still"
  • "Guard in the Dark"
  • "The Seven Seas are One"
  • "Night Without Darkness"
  • "Death Whistles Twice"
  • "Ride the El to Doom"
  • "Revolt of the Trees"
  • "Fog Country"
  • "Night of the Impossible Shadows"
  • "The Murderous Steam Shovel"
  • "Tunnel Terror"
  • "The Wings"
  • "The Machine"
  • "Shipmate"
  • "The House Beyond Midnight"
  • "Ticket to Doom"
  • "The Immortal Lancer"
  • "The Place with Many Windows"
  • "The Damp Man"
  • "The Damp Man Returns"
  • "The Inn by Doomsday Falls"
  • "The Frightened Engineer"
  • "The Coming of M. Alkerhaus"
  • "The Double Feature Murders"
  • "City of Lost People"
  • "Isle of Women"
  • "The Follower"
  • "The House on Forest Street"
  • "Crime of a Thousand Clues"
  • "Four from Jehlam"
  • "The Holiday
  • "The Damp Man Again"
  • "The Deep Drowse"
  • "The Underbody"
  • "Corpse on Vacation"
  • "Take the Z Train"
  • "Scope"

    Legacy

In 2011, blogger Terence E. Hanley connected Harding's works to Milligan and Buchanan; investigations by others confirmed this connection. Sixteen of her stories were collected and published as Allison V. Harding: The Forgotten Queen of Horror Fiction and more than a dozen have been recorded for the HorrorBabble audio series. "It seems that we're in the middle of an Allison V. Harding mini-Renaissance," wrote reviewer Cora Buhlert in 2020.