by Wayne Rogers (Archibald Bittner)
Ramblehouse 2011
A collection of Weird Menace tales from Dime Mystery, Terror Tales, and Thrilling Mystery, written by Archibald Bittner under the names Wayne Rogers and HM Appel.
Satan's Sin House - Women who occupy a cursed house become wanton seductresses, while cows and people are impaled on broken saplings.
The Little Gods of Doom - Oriental andirons with strange metallurgic properties.
I Am A Frankenstein - A doctor is drugged and hypnotized, forced to do experiments to raise the dead and create a new rice a people
Maniac's Masterpiece - Is a starlet's kidnapping a publicity stunt, and how is it connected to a mannequin factory?
Substitute corpses - A town's dead come back to life and are delivered bottles of blood to their door like milk.
The Man who painted pain - A sadistic artist tortures models.
Hell's Brew - Decapitated heads and a Loup Garout. Does that have anything to do with a private clubhouse built over an oil deposit?
Fresh Blood for Satan - Missing girls from a campgrounds, a creepy hillbilly, and a tourist attraction crystal cave made over to look like hell,
Temple of Torment - A hasheesh crazed Hindu thrill kill cult connected to dead playboys and a Coney Island dark ride
Harvest of Hate - A farmland feud, blood sacrifice, severed heads, and hate letters mowed into crops.
A few of these stories match the brutality promised by the covers, with The Man Who Painted Pain being just straight out torture porn with almost no plot. The Scooby Doo endings are particularly absurd here, involving actors, drugs, and hypnosis.
Great stuff, and with a wider variety of subjects than other Weird Menace collections, although I still recommend spacing out reading the stories to avoid monotony.
Available in ebook format from Ramblehouse, or in paperback below.
Many years ago, I picked up the complete run of THE SPIDER and tried to read them one after the other, in order. A bad mistake. New York destroyed in every novel, millions of people killed by ravaging creatures and murderous criminals and Oriental masterminds. The Spider wounded, Nita Van Loan ravaged, no one can be trusted. Good grief, you would go nuts reading them one after the other. I finally got through them, evenly spaced between THE SHADOW, DOC SAVAGE, PHANTOM DETECTIVE, SECRET AGENT X, et al. The pulps were a lot of fun, you just had to limit what you read moderately.
ReplyDeleteGood idea - I've got a similar rotation. Figure I should finish with them in about 50 years.
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