Terror Tales - John H. Knox

Art by John Howitt

This is kind of a familiar story. A young man with literary ambitions in a central Texas town, the son of a well-respected professional man, is friends with all the locals who also have literary ambitions. He decides to become a pulp writer and pounds out stories in a small room that becomes his sanctum, while also working at various odd jobs. When he breaks in and makes his first sale, he becomes even more prolific, with his work appearing in several of the top pulp magazines of the era and even frequently featured on the covers.

Robert E. Howard, you say? Nope. This is John H. Knox we’re talking about, the son of a minister and probably the most successful pulp writer to come out of Abilene, Texas. Certainly the most successful author of Weird Menace yarns from Abilene, which is less than an hour’s drive from Cross Plains, the home of Robert E. Howard. It kind of boggles the mind to think that these two young men lived so close to each other and toiled in the same business at the same time, yet, as far as I know, they never met or even knew of each other.

Radio Archives compiled several collections of Knox’s Weird Menace stories, including this one where all the stories are taken from the pulp TERROR TALES. I decided to sample his work, and this seemed like a good place to start.

The first story in this collection is “Dead Man’s Shadow”, from the December 1934 issue of TERROR TALES. It makes use of a standard mystery plot: a creepy old house full of sinister, eccentric characters, relatives of a rich old man who are waiting for him to die so they can fight over his fortune. The protagonist is a private detective hired by one of the potential heirs who fears someone is going to try to murder him. Knox’s Texas connection comes through in this one because the private eye works for the Lone Star Detective Agency in San Antonio, and although it’s never stated, it’s easy to assume that the creepy old house is located on the Texas Gulf Coast. While there’s nothing groundbreaking in the plot, and the main villain is pretty easy to spot, Knox keeps the action moving along very well, and his prose is both evocative and fast-moving, two important qualities for a Weird Menace writer.

Art by John Howitt

“The Ice Maiden” was published in the June 1935 issue of TERROR TALES, and man, does it move! The narrator is a reporter who has journeyed to an isolated lodge somewhere in the North Woods to interview a famous Arctic explorer, along with two of the man’s colleagues. The beautiful young wife of one of the other men is there, too. After the discussion strays into the subject of mythological monsters found in the icy climes, the explorer says that he has something in the basement that he wants the others to see. Well, we all know that in a Weird Menace story, nothing stashed away mysteriously in a basement is going to be good, and sure enough, that’s the case here. Gruesome murders right and left, baffling disappearances, love at first sight . . . Knox really piles it on, and the characters barely get to take a breath before some other horror threatens them. The ones who survive, that is. I got so caught up in enjoying this story that I completely missed the clues to the big twist, which made it even more fun. This is just a great Weird Menace yarn.

Art by John Howitt

“His Bodiless Twin”, from the November 1935 issue of TERROR TALES, is a much different sort of story. It starts off philosophical, with discussions among the characters about mankind’s dual nature, the presence of good and evil in every man, and what a boon it would be if, say, a man’s evil nature could be separated from his good side through some combination of science and the occult, and then destroyed. Why, what could possibly go wrong with something like that? Of course, once the narrator agrees to go through with the experiment devised by his beautiful young wife’s cousin, who happens to be a movie star/scientist/metaphysicist, things do indeed go wrong. I’ll give Knox credit for writing some nicely atmospheric scenes in this one, but it’s talky in stretches and the big twist stretches disbelief pretty close to the breaking point.

Art by John Howitt

Dave Powell, the protagonist of “Reunion in Hell” (TERROR TALES, March 1936), is the sort of down-on-his-luck guy you’d expect to encounter in a Fifties noir novel by David Goodis or Gil Brewer. He and two other men were partners in a successful gold mine, until an explosion killed one of them and caused a scandal that ruined Dave and his other partner. Because he’s broke and desperate, Dave’s beautiful, wholesome young wife is tempted by an offer from a sleazy producer to join his burlesque show. Then, an unexpected visitor offers Dave a chance to fix everything. All he has to do is pretend to be somebody else and attend a family reunion held in a spooky old house. Again . . . what could possibly go wrong? This yarn rockets right along with a lot of well-done action and over the top horror. Knox really piles the trouble on his hero, and watching Dave battle through it is pretty entertaining. But as in “His Bodiless Twin”, the explanation for all the crazy goings-on really stretches credulity past the breaking point. I realize it’s kind of silly to be complaining about believable plots in Weird Menace stories, but Knox seems to be trying to outdo himself with every story.

Art by John Drew

If Knox faltered—a little—in the previous two stories, he more than redeems himself with “Kiss Me—and Die!”, a great yarn from the March/April 1937 issue of TERROR TALES. The plot is still packed full of stuff. Let me see if I can remember all of it. First of all, the story takes place in and around an isolated Arizona settlement that’s mostly a ghost town called Angel’s Grave. The setting gives it an almost Western feel at times. The place is called Angel’s Grave because local legend has it that two hundred years earlier, a Spanish soldier murdered his mistress and concealed her body in a cave. But ever since then, her ghost, known as “Sister Death”, has been appearing and luring men to their deaths with a siren-like scream. A mad scientist from Germany who claims to have mastered the process of alchemy has showed up in the area and built a laboratory in a cave that may or may not be the final resting place of Sister Death. Then there’s a millionaire toy manufacturer who wants to buy the process from the mad scientist, assuming, of course, that it turns out to be real, and the toy manufacturer has a beautiful daughter who the narrator, an undercover newspaper reporter, falls in love with at first sight. The mad scientist has deaf-mute assistants and a mysterious Hindu servant. And, oh, yeah, a blind violinist and a drunken artist are hanging around Angel’s Grave, too. Whew. As crazy as all that sounds, Knox actually makes the plot work, while providing several gruesome murders and plenty of breakneck action. I had a great time reading this one.

Artist Unknown

Compared to the inspired lunacy of “Kiss Me—and Die!”, the set-up for “Tenement of the Damned” (TERROR TALES, November/December 1937) is fairly simple. It also makes use of Knox’s Texas background in the setting, an unnamed city along the Texas/Mexico border that I think is probably supposed to be El Paso. It seems that a Mexican drug smuggler named El Vibora—The Viper—has been shot and killed by the Border Patrol, but the poor people who live in the slums near the Rio Grande believe that he has come back to life in the form of a snake that draws women and children to their deaths. It’s up to two-fisted real estate agent Jim Francis to figure out what’s really going on, and he has a personal reason to do so because his beautiful young wife, whose father owns the property where the slum sits, has a mysterious serpentine mark on her arm that shows she’s a target of El Vibora! At times, this story reads like Knox was trying to write a straightforward hardboiled detective yarn, but it never strays very far from Weird Menace territory. It’s a good story and moves along quite well.

It also wraps up this collection, which is no longer available. But if you already have it on your Kindle and are a Weird Menace fan, I give it a pretty high recommendation. Knox can be a little inconsistent, certainly, but all the stories are enjoyable and a couple of them are exceptional. I think he’s an interesting writer, and I intend to read more by him. There are three print collections of his Weird Menace stories available from Ramble House, and I've already ordered them even though there’s some duplication between them and the ebook volumes I have.

And I still think it’s a shame Knox and Bob Howard never ran into each other. I think they would have gotten along just fine.