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Shen Fu. Shen Fu was created by Frank Owen (John Steppling) and appeared in three stories in Weird Tales from 1942 to 1951, beginning with “For Tomorrow We Die” (Weird Tales, July 1942).

Dr. Shen Fu is a wealthy physician who lives in a houseboat in Hangchow, China. He is the owner of the Shen family store, “The Drug Shop of a Thousand Years,” which has been in the Shen family “since the golden days of the T’ang Dynasty.” Shen Fu is venerable and inscrutable, and takes a subtle vengeance on his enemies by telling them that they will die within a week. Since everyone knows that Shen Fu is wise, his prophecy drives his enemies to irrational acts and then suicide. Shen Fu might also be an alchemist who manufactured The Golden Pill of Immortality, and quite possibly be the scholar and magician Lu-yien who first visited the Shen shop a millennia ago.

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