TM Gallery: Pulp

Weird Tales

The Shadow: Death Jewels

Reprints from AbeBooks

Thrilling Mystery, March 1936

The Twisted Men by Hugh B. Cave The virus of idiocy was in the vile potion clutched in a dead man's hand. Cold Arms of the Demon by Jackson Cole Black Moonlight by G.T. Fleming-Roberts While forests burn, frozen corpses are found-and fanatic predicts the end of the world. The Howling Head by Beatice Morton Vengeance of the Snake-God by James Duncan Spider's Lair by C.K.M. Scanlon Blood of Gold by Wayne Rogers The Man Who Died Twice by Bret Altsheler 

Reprint from Amazon

Horror Stories, v2n3 September 1935

Horror Stories vol 2 no 3
September, 1935

Death Calls from the Madhouse by Hugh B. Cave: Women are committing suicide after changing their beneficiaries to madhouse inmates.

The Devil's Gift by Raymond Whetstone:  Remember the Monkey's Paw?  Well this is completely different.  It's a magic ring.  And also all a dream.

City of the Scarlet Plague by Nat Schachner: A town is overrun by grey-hooded dead men.  Ear pincer torture.

Mother of Monsters by Roger Howard Norton: A woman visiting her uncle ends up in a very wrong house.  The creepiest premise yet in weird menace - a circus performer is angry that his horse-riding wife is pregnant, so he forces her to wear a steel corset keep her figure.  The baby is born deformed and he sells it as a freak.  He makes so much money he continues the practice, force his wife to be a mutant baby farmer.

The Living Flame by Robert Sidney Bowen: Mad scientists and a killer in the house

The Bath of Blood by H. M. Appel: Cult cattle ranchers

Satan's Lash by Arthur J. Burks: Creepy uncle promises his niece to his creepy friend.  When she hooks up with her true love, they are whipped and she is sent to an asylum run by a creepy doctor.  A rarity - written from a female first-person perspective, which got awkward when she was describing her own boobs.

Horror Stories by Francis James

Horror Stories by Francis James
Reprinted by Radioarchives

Music of the Damned
Seven fingered warriors with a triangle cut out over their lips guard an ancient Aztec treasure.  "A flood of crimson belched out of the ripped flesh."

Nursery of Horror
"Between the scrawny, withered breasts, the old crone had another mouth!"
This is the stuff right here.  With basically no set-up, deformed monsters attack a woman in her home.  Two heads, seven legs, all kinds of stuff.  No Scooby-Doo cop out here: a mad scientist creates a new race of humanity by interbreeding freaks created with prenatal x-ray exposure.  He kidnaps women and has them tortured with whips, the rack, and itching powder until they consent to marry the creatures and spawn their horrid offspring.

When Men Died Screaming
A mansion was built at the mouth of hell, raising the furor of legendary Rumptilkin.  A lengthy hillbilly-gang-rape-menacing scene takes up a big chunk of this one.

The Woman Who Killed For Satan
A ranting hobo inexplicably drives women to publicly strip naked for him, and the men who become aroused are engulfed in flame.  There's a War of the Worlds reference, as the hobo is able to take over the radio waves.

Valley of Corpses
We're getting past the prime of Weird Menace here in 1940.  Spooky ghosts and implied violence.

Scourge of the Faceless Man
Another 1940 tale.  The advantage of the Weird Menace pulps getting tamed down is that they also went off-formula.  A mutated form of leprosy takes over the town, and only magical mummy juice can grant immunity.

Terror Tales - James A. Goldthwaite

Terror Tales - James A. Goldthwaite
Radioarchives
James A Goldthwaite, sometimes writing as Francis James
The Laughing Corpse
A walking corpse attacks the crew of a steamliner, his victims die laughing with the faces ripped off their skulls.

The Unwelcomed Dead
A man takes his wife to a mad scientist in hopes of rousing her from her catatonic state.  The scientist can return life to the recently deceased, fugitives that he kills with his own gallows, but at the cost of their souls.  He ties the comatose woman's nude body in front of his legion of zombies as he whips them, hoping the stimulation of pain and fear will return their souls, while the husbands tries to kill his own wife before her soul is forfeit.

Monster's Death Song
Monster killings at an inn to cover up search for hidden treasure, Scooby Doo down to an Old Man Jenkins.

The City Ruled by Death
A convicted man raises the dead to wreak vengeance on the judge and jury.

Dance of the Bloodless Ones
Rich tenants of a Florida winter retreat have their faces ripped off after complaints of something crawling over them.

The Plague From Underground
Victims are singled out with a mark on the palm of their hands, before their body bloat up and sprout black flowers.  A mention of "addicts of the unspeakable Mexican peyote", before going a different direction.

Dance to Satan's Drums
An ancient rural cult menaces fancy city folk in town to survey a damn.

Where Goldthwaite would rip out throats in his Dime Mystery collection, for Terror Tales he ripped off faces.

"One side of his face seemed torn off by the roots, skin and flesh ripped down as one would shuck an ear of corn.  Behind the jets of spurting blood, the bones showed in grisly outline."

"Some one - something - had ribboned that face with stripping of giant claws, literally cleaned off the flesh as though raked by a monstrous currycomb."

Goldthwaite reused a lot of plot elements, the main one having victims being marked prior to their grisly deaths.  Old Man Jenkins aside, not too many Scooby Doo endings - the horrible thing that appeared to be happening actual happens, and the plot is often revealed early on.  One thing I noticed in this collection is that Goldthwaite seemed to be actually trying to be scary rather than just gory.  Early chapters regularly ended with the sound of someone trying to get in the house, or already creeping up the stairs.

Dime Mystery Magazine: James A Goldthwaite Book 1

Dime Mystery Magazine: James A Goldthwaite Book 1
Radioarchives
James A Goldthwaite, sometimes writing as Francis James

Some stock weird menace setups, but the execution felt a bit less formulaic than usual.  Lots of throats getting ripped out with bare hands - like snapping celery stalks!

Hands That Kill
A beastly strong womanizer was run out of a small Canadian town ten years ago.  His wife waits for him to return with the dog she's trained to kill him.  Now he's back, claiming to have learned mystical healing powers of the orient.  Someone with his immense strength is committing brutal crimes, starting with ripping the heads off rabbits and lining them up in teacups.  Now, the men that ran the mystic off ten years ago are dying one by one, their throats ripped out with bare hands, one left crucifed as a scarecrow, is face eaten away by birds.

The Devil's Highway
A lumbering, square headed brute is kidnapping people from a small town.  Weeks later they return, feeble minded and covered in whip lash scars.

Satan's Sisterhood
A series of suburban housewives start sleeping separately from their husbands before ending up dead in apparent suicides, their suicide notes forged by their husbands.  Is this connected to the fiend who tears apart neighborhood cats with his bare hands?

Mark of the Laughing Death
Hundreds of citizens find a brand tattooed on their chest before succumbing to Joker venom (four years before the Joker).

My Twin From Hell
A boy spends years in an asylum, driven mad by his father's brutal murder.  Now cured, he takes his girl to the worst resort possible.

Satan's Sin House by Wayne Rogers

Satan's Sin House
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.

Weird Menace

During the thirties and early forties, peaking from 1934-7, there was a glorious period in the pulps where the promises of the lurid pulp covers came true in the content of the stories.  Weird Menace, also called the Shudder Pulps, evolved out of the detective pulps and influenced by Grand Guignol theater.  The stories were formulaic in the extreme, and reading these tales in collections by author can get very repetitive.

They're told almost exclusively in first person by an average Joe.  He, usually accompanied by his fiance, visit some small town to cash in on an inheritance or such.  Some kind of supernatural menace threatens them, with a variation having the hero thinking he is responsible.  The hero is captured or knocked out, his girl is disrobed and faces a grisly end, before the villain is revealed to be mortal and after land/inheritance/the girl, in what is now known as the Scooby Doo ending.

There is a surprising amount of gore and violence for the time in these titles, which is what led to their inevitable downfall.  Some elements seeped into pulp hero titles like G-4 and the Spider.

The biggest Weird Menace titles were Dime Mystery, Terror Tales, Horror Tales, and Thrilling Mystery.  Other smaller titles include Strange Tales, Uncanny Tales, Mystery Novels, and Marvel Tales.  There was a brief revival in the 1960s with Web Terror Stories and Shock Mystery.

As with other pulps, the Weird Menace writers wrote in several genres under several different names.  For some reason, my favorite tales were written by writers better known for science fiction.  Authors include: Henry Kuttner, John H. Knox, Arthur Leo Zagat, Hugh Cave, Nat Schachner, Arthur J. Burks, Wyatt Blassingame, Novell Page, Emile Tepperman, Russell Gray, HM Appel and Robert E Howard

Author collections are available at Ramblehouse.  These are excellent collections, though it requires ordering via paypal.

Radioarchives.com also has several ebook collections, including single titles, available on their website and Amazon.com.  There are a few at Altus Press.

Other places to look include Pulpgen, Munseys, Mobileread, Gutenberg Australia, and Archive.org