Punished: Navajo Witches - Jackson Lowry

Vincent Bayonne has gone from wealthy Louisiana plantation owner to penniless drunk in a very short time. But that’s not all. William Sherman, the ex-slave who put the torch to Bayonne’s beloved plantation, Dark Oaks, has done the unspeakable. Sherman, a voodoo priest, has placed a curse on Bayonne and made him one of the undead—living, but not truly alive. 

The elusive Dr. Glencannon is the only man who can stave off the sense-dulling effects of the curse with his elixir—but Bayonne is always one step behind him. A young Navajo boy tells Bayonne his uncle, Begay, can help—but for a price—killing the skinwalker that has been terrorizing the Navajo people. 

Though Bayonne resents having to hunt the supernatural shapeshifter, there is no choice for him. For Begay, true to his word, concocts a potion that holds the zombie traits at bay and allows Bayonne to do what he must do—including hunting the skinwalker.

As Bayonne stalks the skinwalker, he makes a surprising discovery. Will he be able to kill the beast? And can he make it back to New Orleans in time to meet the Queen of the Cape when William Sherman comes ashore?

I'm really enjoying this series. It's fast-paced, appropriately creepy, and Vincent Bayonne continues to be a compelling protagonist even though for the most part he's a very unsympathetic character. Jackson Lowry is doing some very skillful characterization in these books. I'm not a big fan of modern-day zombie stories, but I love the classic style tales and PUNISHED is a good one. Highly recommended.

Now Available: Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London - Stephen Mertz

Sherlock Holmes faces perhaps the greatest challenge yet in his long-running war with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty—the living dead walk, hungry for flesh and doing the bidding of the evil professor! 

From a dirigible carrying a deadly cargo high in the sky over London to a sinister castle lurking in the beautiful English countryside, the Great Detective and his friend Dr. Watson battle to thwart Moriarty's latest scheme to wreak havoc and loot one of the world's great cities. Thousands of lives hang in the balance, and it will take all of Holmes' incredible deductive skills to figure out just what a young writer named H.G. Wells and the German teenager Albert Einstein have to do with Moriarty's plans! 

Legendary thriller writer Stephen Mertz takes on some of the world's most iconic characters in this fast-paced tale that is part mystery novel, part horror yarn, and part steampunk inventiveness. It's a breathless adventure that's sure to entertain from first page to last!

Coming Soon: Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London - Stephen Mertz

Sherlock Holmes faces perhaps the greatest challenge yet in his long-running war with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty—the living dead walk, hungry for flesh and doing the bidding of the evil professor!

From a dirigible carrying a deadly cargo high in the sky over London to a sinister castle lurking in the beautiful English countryside, the Great Detective and his friend Dr. Watson battle to thwart Moriarty's latest scheme to wreak havoc and loot one of the world's great cities. Thousands of lives hang in the balance, and it will take all of Holmes' incredible deductive skills to figure out just what a young writer named H.G. Wells and the German teenager Albert Einstein have to do with Moriarty's plans!

Legendary thriller writer Stephen Mertz takes on some of the world's most iconic characters in this fast-paced tale that is part mystery novel, part horror yarn, and part steampunk inventiveness. It's a breathless adventure that's sure to entertain from first page to last!

(I'm going to be sending out a limited number of e-book review copies of this novel later this week. If you'd be interested in getting one, let me know in the comments or email me. It's a dandy.)

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Forbidden Trail - Jane Rice

ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS! comes to a close with "The Forbidden Trail" by Jane Rice, which appeared originally in the April 1941 issue of the legendary pulp UNKNOWN. I'm not sure I've read anything else by Jane Rice, but this is an excellent story and one of my favorites in the anthology.

Unlike any of the other stories that came before it, this tale of an explorer and his wife in Africa is told in a light, breezy, bantering style that seems more appropriate for one of the slicks, rather than a pulp. But then, when they're asked to look into the disappearance of a minor government official on an isolated rubber plantation, things wind up taking a turn that, if anything, is more creepy and gruesome than most of the other stories. Yet despite all the grotesque goings-on and the violent death, Rice still manages to spin her yarn in the same lightweight tone and somehow makes it work beautifully. I've got to seek out more stories by Jane Rice, who also wrote under the name Mary Austin.

This wraps up my survey of ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS! I've really enjoyed reading a story from it every week or so and might just tackle another anthology in the same manner. Jeffrey Shanks did a great job of editing this one. There's not a bad story in the bunch. All of them are entertaining and some are outstanding. I think this volume is sure to appear on my Top Ten list at the end of the year, and if you haven't picked it up yet, I give it my highest recommendation. I can't help but hope that sooner or later we'll see MORE ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Song of the Slaves - Manly Wade Wellman

After Howard, Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith, Manly Wade Wellman is one of the most respected authors who contributed to WEIRD TALES, and he wrote a zombie story, too: "The Song of the Slaves" in the March 1940 issue.

Unlike the other stories in this anthology, this one is a historical yarn, set in the 1850s. Instead of the Caribbean or the United States, it goes all the way back to Africa, the land where voodoo originated. An American plantation owner has journeyed there to cut out all the middle men and capture a group of slaves to put to work back home. He does so, but the return trip doesn't go exactly as planned. And once he's back in the States, things certainly don't work out the way the planter had intended, as the song sung by the slaves during the journey haunts him and becomes more and more sinister.

This is a short but really well-written story that turns some of the genre's conventions upside down, and as a result it's a little ahead of its time, reading more like a story that could have been published in the Fifties or Sixties. I haven't read Wellman's work extensively, but everything I've read by him has been excellent, and "The Song of the Slaves" is no exception.

Zombies From the Pulps!: While Zombies Walked - Thorp McCluskey

I don't know anything about Thorp McCluskey except that he wrote several stories for WEIRD TALES, some of which have been anthologized over the years. And here's another one, "While Zombies Walked", which was cover-featured on the September 1939 issue of the magazine. This one features a stalwart protagonist who wants to find out why his girlfriend wrote to him breaking up with him soon after she went to take care of her elderly uncle, who had suffered a stroke. When he arrives in the area he finds men working in the cotton fields in a sinister, dazed state. Some of them even appear to have suffered fatal injuries.

No surprise there, but McCluskey provides a nice twist by setting his story in the rural South and making these apparent walking dead poor white trash. In many ways, "While Zombies Walked" is as much a backwoods tale reminiscent of Erskine Caldwell as it is a horror yarn, although make no mistake, it winds up pretty horrific (in a good way). There's even an evil, bombastic preacher who's been tempted by dark forces and given in to them.

Like the Bruno Fischer story that precedes it in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, "While Zombies Walked" is well-written and a little more restrained in tone than some of the other stories in this anthology. But it's very entertaining and makes me think I ought to keep my eyes open for more stories by Thorp McCluskey.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Man Who Loved a Zombie - Russell Gray (Bruno Fischer)

Bruno Fischer was one of the top writers of mystery and suspense novels for the iconic paperback publisher Gold Medal in the 1950s. One of his early novels for Gold Medal, HOUSE OF FLESH, sold well over a million copies and was one of the first big success stories for paperback originals. He went on to have a well-regarded career as the author of hardback mystery novels.

But before all that, under the names Russell Gray and Harrison Storm, he was a prolific contributor to the Weird Menace pulps, including the story "The Man Who Loved a Zombie" in the May/June 1939 issue of TERROR TALES. It's a well-written, fast-moving yarn about a man who returns to his hometown to find that some of the inhabitants are dying from a mysterious disease and then being resurrected as zombies by a sinister unknown mastermind. Fischer introduces us to the suspects in rapid-fire fashion, compressing all the events of the story into a few hours one night, opening in a graveyard and ending with a military-style siege of a mansion with machine guns chattering and an army of zombies carrying rifles.

Despite the over-the-top nature of the plot, Fischer's prose is fairly restrained for the Weird Menace genre and not as wild-eyed as that of, say, Arthur Leo Zagat. It's a different approach, but it works. "The Man Who Loved a Zombie" is a very entertaining story and one more reason to pick up a copy of ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!

Zombies From the Pulps!: Pigeons From Hell - Robert E. Howard

Now we come to the best story in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, in my opinion, and a story I've read at least a dozen times. Because of that, I thought I could just skim it for this blog post. But no. Once I laid eyes on the first sentence, I had to read the whole thing again, and I enjoyed it just as much as I ever have. Of course, I'm talking about Robert E. Howard's "Pigeons From Hell", which originally appeared in the May 1938 issue of WEIRD TALES.

For those of you who haven't read it, it's the story of two young men from New England who taking a driving vacation through the South, and what they encounter when they decide to spend the night in an old, deserted mansion on an abandoned plantation. Not much chance of anything good coming out of that!

I won't say anything more about the details of the story. It's exceptionally well-plotted by Howard with a very effective twist ending he saves for the very last line. Mostly, though, it contains some of his most vivid, compelling writing. This is a classic of horror fiction, one of Howard's best stories, and one of the best horror stories by any author that I've ever read. If you've never read it before, that's one more excellent reason to buy this book!

Zombies From the Pulps!: Corpses on Parade - Edith and Ejler Jacobson

I'm aware of Edith and Ejler Jacobson mostly as editors (they edited several different science fiction digests at one time or another), but they also wrote stories for the pulps, including "Corpses on Parade", which appeared in the April 1938 issue of DIME MYSTERY. When I started reading this one, I thought it was going to be a more sane and sedate tale than Arthur Leo Zagat's "Revels of the Lusting Dead", the previous story in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS! Well, turns out it is, but only by a little bit. The Jacobsons knew how to go over the top as well.

The first person narrator is a wealthy young man in high society in New York, and as the story opens he's attending the funeral of a friend who died of a mysterious illness. This opening reads more like a mystery story than a Weird Menace tale, but then other members of society begin committing suicide or dying in mysterious fashion, and it's discovered that they're all victims of a disease that starts to rot the flesh from bones even before death. Before you know it we're up to our necks in a wild yarn involving kidnapping, a battle in a cemetery, prisoners locked in a dungeon, and a hooded mastermind.

This story is really interesting to me because if the plot had been handled differently it would have worked just as well for a novel featuring The Phantom Detective, The Black Bat, or any number of other pulp crimefighters. At heart it really is a crime yarn, but the Jacobsons make it plenty gruesome enough to fit in the pages of DIME MYSTERY in its Weird Menace phase. It's also a fast-paced, well-written story and makes me think I should read more by this husband-and-wife team. As far as I can recall, it's the only thing I've read by them, and it's another strong entry in this collection.

Zombies From the Pulps!: Revels for the Lusting Dead - Arthur Leo Zagat

This novelette from the July-August 1937 issue of TERROR TALES is a prime example of a pulp storytelling mantra I still follow myself: If you're going over the top anyway, you might as well go 'waaay over. "Revels for the Lusting Dead" is also reminiscent of 80s horror movies, with a heroine who's constantly being menaced and screaming as she runs away from one unholy threat after another. In addition to that, you've got your creepy old inn with a clerk whose description might as well be that of H.P. Lovecraft his own self, a cemetery right across the street (convenient for corpses to come out of yawning graves and lay siege to the place), naked girls in hanging cages in a crypt, a black-hooded guy with a whip...

This is almost a textbook example of a Weird Menace story, and it gallops along in a highly entertaining fashion. It's well-written, too, and Zagat provides a couple of plot twists that, while not exactly jaw-dropping, are still pretty nice. I just had a great time reading this one.

Zombies From the Pulps!: Zombie - Carl Moore (Edwin Truett Long)

From the November 1936 issue of SPICY MYSTERY comes "Zombie" by Carl Moore, who was really prolific pulpster Edwin Truett Long, as Jeff Shanks explains in his introduction. Long is best known for his mystery series featuring Doc Harker, a traveling snake oil salesman who also solves crimes. I know several people who are fans of the Doc Harker series, but I've never gotten around to reading any of them myself. In fact, "Zombie" may well be the first thing I've read by Long. I found some things to like in it, and some things more, well, problematical.

As for the good stuff, "Zombie" is pretty well written. Set on a plantation in Haiti, it's very atmospheric and the pace moves along quickly. It's a romance, in a way, about the triangle involving the plantation owner, the native girl with whom he's gotten involved, and his fiancée who's arriving from the States. The native girl takes offense to the fact that the plantation owner is planning to end their affair, and she turns to voodoo to have her revenge on him.

Not surprisingly, there's quite a bit of the casual racism of the times in this one, maybe more than in the others I've read so far. Normally this doesn't bother me much because I don't believe in holding fiction from the past to modern standards, but Long goes a little overboard even for the time period. I also didn't care for the way the story played out. I thought the author was headed one way with the plot but he wound up doing something else. Usually I don't quibble about that—hey, it's the author's story, he can do whatever he wants—but this time I think he missed some good opportunies for plot twists that he set up and then didn't do anything with. That bothers me a little.

All that said, "Zombie" is certainly a readable story and I liked more about it than I didn't. It's just not as good as most of the other stories I've read so far in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Grave Gives Up - Jack D'arcy (D.L. Champion)

Jack D'arcy was one of the pseudonyms of prolific pulpster D.L. Champion, who created the long-running pulp series The Phantom Detective, which took a lot of its elements from an earlier Champion story, "Alias Mr. Death" (if I'm remembering my pulp history correctly, which is never a sure thing these days). Champion wrote a bunch of the early Phantom Detective novels, and I've read a bunch of them and enjoyed them. I didn't know he'd written Weird Menace stories, although that doesn't surprise me. His novelette "The Grave Gives Up", from the August 1936 issue of THRILLING MYSTERY, is the first of that genre by him that I've read, and I liked it quite a bit.

The story opens with the protagonist, Gordon Lane, getting a phone call from his fiancée pleading for help. The catch here is that said fiancée was killed in a car crash two weeks earlier. Lane, who works for the county attorney's office, is able to get the call traced, and when he discovers that it came from the caretaker's house in the cemetery where his late fiancée is buried, we're off to the races as he tries to get to the bottom of this macabre mystery.

Nobody's going to be very surprised by the outcome of this story—the main villain might as well be wearing a sign—but it's certainly a lot of fun getting there. The pace never lets up, and there are plenty of creepy scenes described in breathless, semi-hysterical prose. Champion was very good at this sort of over-the-top pulp storytelling, which is also common in his Phantom Detective novels. This is another strong entry in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, and at the halfway point of the collection I can honestly say that there hasn't been a bad story in the bunch. I've enjoyed all of them and look forward to reading the rest.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Graveyard Rats - Henry Kuttner

Henry Kuttner's "The Graveyard Rats", from the March 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES, is one of the most famous stories in this anthology and one of the most collected horror stories of the 20^th Century, I would suspect. It's also notable for being Kuttner's first published story, a very polished debut in what turned out to be a stellar—if too short—career.

Mostly, though, this story of a corrupt cemetery caretaker's battle against the giant rats—and something else—that lurk inside and beneath the graves in his charge is just a great yarn, one of the purely creepiest stories you're ever likely to read. It's been years since I'd read it, and I had forgotten how scary it is and how the pace in it just gallops along. If you haven't read "The Graveyard Rats", you're in for a treat. This is another strong entry in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS.

Zombies from the Pulps!: The Walking Dead - E. Hoffmann Price

I really enjoy the Spicy pulps. Sure, they're formulaic, no matter what the genre: stalwart, square-jawed (and not always too bright) protagonist, plenty of over-the-top action, and beautiful, willing babes who have a habit of losing their clothes. Anything you get in the way of characterization or an actual plot is a bonus, but there's more of that in the Spicies than you might expect.

E. Hoffmann Price was a consummate pulpster, selling to magazines at or near the top of the line (ADVENTURE and ARGOSY), down to the Spicy titles and other pulps published by Trojan. Since he wrote every sort of story, it makes sense that he would turn his hand to zombie yarns, too. From the November 1935 issue of SPICY MYSTERY STORIES, "The Walking Dead" is set in the Mississippi Delta of southern Louisiana. The hero is searching for one of his servants who disappeared while running an errand for him, and that search leads him to a mysterious plantation where there's something wrong with the workers in the fields. Throw in a sinister plantation owner with a beautiful niece who wants to escape from the place and you've got the framework for a fast-moving action story and another one influenced by Seabrook's THE MAGIC ISLAND.

Price was such a good writer that he could take a formulaic plot like this and make it work, at least for the time it takes to read it. It isn't an example of Price's best work, but it is a lot of fun to read.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Devil's Dowry - Ben Judson

As you'd probably expect, the Weird Menace pulps featured quite a few zombie stories, too, and the first one in this collection from a "shudder pulp" is Ben Judson's "The Devil's Dowry" from the February 1935 issue of TERROR TALES.

The narrator of this yarn is a reporter whose fiancée has fallen ill and died suddenly. But there's a sinister Jamaican witch doctor who claims that he can bring her back to life—for a price, of course—and our grief-stricken hero is desperate enough to take him up on it. However, such things hardly ever work out just the way those left behind hope they do...

But this story is from a Weird Menace pulp, remember, so when all is said and done you can expect a logical explanation for all the strange goings-on. Judson doesn't disappoint in that respect. Authors who strayed far from the formula probably didn't sell very often in the pulps, no matter what the genre. His prose is fuctional but nothing special, but like most pulpsters he had the knack of moving a story along at a breakneck pace. That makes "The Devil's Dowry" an entertaining tale.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Empire of the Necromancers - Clark Ashton Smith

Of the Big Three authors from WEIRD TALES, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith, Howard is the only one whose work I've read extensively. So the next story in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, Smith's "The Empire of the Necromancers" (from the September 1932 issue of WEIRD TALES), was new to me. It's one of Smith's Zothique tales, set on a decadent, far future Earth where science has disappeared and magic has risen again. Two evil sorcerers are booted out of the city where they've been causing trouble, and while wandering in the desert they come upon the bones of a warrior and the man's horse. So what do they do? Raise both warrior and horse from the dead and press them into service as they travel on to a lost city that's been wiped out by plague, giving them many, many more bodies to reanimate. They set themselves up as emperors of this kingdom of the dead, but you know that sooner or later this is not going to end well.

This story shares several of the things that bother me about much of Lovecraft's work: long-windedness, a slow pace, and very little dialogue, which leads to a lot of telling and not much showing. But man, it's creepy and full of vividly grotesque imagery like one of the sorcerers riding that skeleton horse while the skeleton warrior shuffles along behind. Not to mention lurid plot elements such as necrophilia and murder. I'm a pretty tough sell when it comes to stories like this, but "The Empire of the Necromancers" won me over and I wound up liking it quite a bit, enough so that I'll probably read more of Smith's work one of these days.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The House in the Magnolias - August Derleth and Mark Schorer

"The House in the Magnolias" by August Derleth and Mark Schorer is another tale that first appeared in the pulp STRANGE STORIES, in the July 1932 issue. In this one, the narrator is a landscape painter, John Stuard, who comes across a picturesque old mansion just outside New Orleans surrounded by magnolias. Stuard wants to paint a picture of it, so he asks permission of a woman who lives there, the beautiful and mysterious Rosamunda Marsina, who reluctantly gives him permission to stay there while he's working. Stuard is attracted immediately to Rosamunda, but he's baffled by sinister noises he hears at night, and it won't come as a surprise to know that he decides to investigate and discovers more than he bargained for.

This is another story that seems to have been directly inspired by W.S. Seabrook's THE MAGIC ISLAND. There's even a line of dialogue referring to Haiti with that phrase. It's a good yarn, too, well written and no less compelling because we know where it's going. Derleth is more remembered as the founder of the publisher Arkham House than he is for his writing, but I've read a number of his stories and always enjoyed them. According to Jeffrey Shanks' introduction, Schorer was a long-time friend and occasional collaborator of Derleth's. Together they've written a very entertaining story in "The House in the Magnolias".

ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS! e-book and trade paperback on Amazon.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Dead Who Walk - Ray Cummings

Nobody could accuse Ray Cummings' "The Dead Who Walk", the next story in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, of being sedate. Just the opposite, in fact. This story from the first issue of STRANGE STORIES OF MYSTERY AND TERROR (usually referred to simply as STRANGE STORIES) in September 1931 is pure, straight-ahead, over-the-top, lurid pulp action. Needless to say, I really enjoyed it.

This tale opens with a young couple, newly engaged and enjoying a moonlit evening near a cemetery, witnessing a corpse breaking out of its grave and shambling around. With the animated corpse pursuing them, they flee to the caretaker's cottage and barricade themselves there. The walking dead man eventually wanders off.

This is the first of several such incidents in the valley where our young hero and heroine's wealthy families have resort homes. Terror grips the valley as the sheriff and his deputies seem powerless to find the walking corpses, let alone discover what strange power enables them to burst free of their graves.

I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that ultimately there's a somewhat reasonable explanation for all the grisly goings-on, in true Weird Menace fashion. It's not exactly a fair-play mystery, as Cummings' hero, the young man who saw the first corpse emerge from its grave, suddenly remembers things which have never been mentioned before that give him the answer to the mystery. But nobody reads a story like this for the puzzle. It's nearly all galloping action carried out in breathless, melodramatic prose. Cummings was there for the beginnings of science fiction, and his writing sometimes reads a little like a dime novel. He was a good storyteller, though, and knew how to keep the reader turning the pages. I had an excellent time with this one.

Zombies From the Pulps!: Salt is Not for Slaves - G.W. Hutter (Garnett Wilson)

G.W. Hutter's "Salt is Not for Slaves", which was published originally in the August/September 1931 issue of the pulp GHOST STORIES, also takes the form of one character spinning a yarn for another character, as several of the previous stories in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS! have done. In this case it's an old, old woman, a native of Haiti, who tells a tale of an ill-fated love affair doomed by voodoo and a slave rebellion. It moves right along at a brisk pace, with just enough lurid elements to make it an exciting story.

Hutter was really Garnett Wilson, who also wrote the early horror film WHITE ZOMBIE, which I've never seen. Judging by how much I enjoyed this story, I should probably check out the movie. 

Zombies from the Pulps!: Dead Girl Finotte - H. De Vere Stacpoole

H. De Vere Stacpoole is another author whose name was familiar to me from pulp covers and TOCs, but whose work I'd never read until now. His story "Dead Girl Finotte" appeared in the January 1930 issue of WEIRD TALES, and according to ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS! editor Jeffrey Shanks, it's the first story to mention THE MAGIC ISLAND, the non-fiction book about Haiti by W.B. Seabrook that established much of the zombie lore that has influenced countless stories, novels, and movies. Because of this, Stacpoole's "Dead Girl Finotte" has a definite air of authenticity about it.

Other than that it's a fairly tame tale about a doomed love affair and the revenge that a grieving lover takes on a sinister plantation owner. Like Henry S. Whitehead's "Jumbee", it takes the form of a story being told by one character to another. It's leisurely but well written, and the ending works quite well. I lean toward the wilder sort of story myself, and I'm sure there's much more of that to come in this anthology.

Stacpoole's best-known novel, by the way, is THE BLUE LAGOON, on which the Brooke Shields movie was based.