Speaking of Weird Menace pulps, which I was a couple of days ago, here's one with a striking cover and a fine line-up of authors: Hugh B. Cave, Wyatt Blassingame, Carl Jacobi, and G.T. Fleming-Roberts. This issue must have caused a shudder or two among its readers . . . although I'm not sure how many of those readers, even in the Thirties, found these stories all that genuinely scary.
4 comments:
I used to have extensive runs of the weird menace pulps. The titles published by Popular Publications had the best writers: HORROR STORIES, TERROR TALES, and DIME MYSTERY. Some of the better written stories were scary with plenty of atmosphere. Unfortunately most of them had logical endings which explained away the supernatural events.
After many years of reading these crazy, bizarre plots, I finally got tired of them and didn't find them amusing anymore. However, lately I've been buying the Girosal reprints which reproduce the entire magazine without the pulp flakes and pulp smell, alas.
For me to start collecting these magazines again can only be a bad sign. They are funny as hell though...
I think the readers of the original pulps probably found Weird Menace stories scary enough.
Just not scary in a classic ghost story sense. No delicate frissons of eerie dread here, but instead the same kind of cringing horror we might get from today's more explict, physical horror tales. Some of the more extreme scenes in the shudder pulps still seem outrageous today, and must have really pushed the envelope back in the 30's.
John Hocking
This was the second issue of TERROR TALES. While at Corinth Publishing, Earl Kemp edited (as "Jon Hanlon") two collections from early issues of this magazine. DEATH'S LOVING ARMS AND OTHER TERROR TALES (Corinth, CR147, 1966) contained the Blassingame story above, as well as stories by Cave, Fleming-Roberts, Frederick Painton, and Frances B. Middleton. THE HOUSE OF LIVING DEATH AND OTHER TERROR TALES (Corinth, CR143, 1966)contained a novel by Arthur Leo Zagat and stories by Blassingame, Charles R. Wayne, and Henry T. Sperry. Girasol Collectables has reprinted facsimile editions of the first 33 issues of the magazine. Great fun!
Molemen want your e-readers.
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