Now Available: Weird Menace Volume 2

The Shudder Pulps are back! In fact, it's like they never left in this second great collection of new stories inspired by the classic Weird Menace magazines such as DIME MYSTERY and TERROR TALES. Those pulps may have ended in the early 1940s, but some of today's top authors give us the same sort of pulse-pounding, spine-chilling tales they might have published if they had stayed around. 

World War II casts its looming shadow in Mel Odom's "The Spider-God of Nauru!" 

Hell comes to a tropical paradise in Keith Chapman's "Lust of the Cave Spirit". 

American GIs encounter a horror unlike any they ever expected in Michael Bracken's "Attack of the Nazi Snow Warriors". 

Weird Menace mixes with hardboiled detective thrills in Paul Dellinger's "Ghost Writer". 

The protagonist of John McCallum Swain's "The Hades Mechanism" confronts a legendary, undying evil. 

And Ray Lovato's popular character Doc Atlas returns to face a new challenge in "Howl of the Werewolf"! 

These action-packed stories are sure to entertain. Editor James Reasoner and Rough Edges Press are proud to present WEIRD MENACE VOLUME 2!

Forgotten Books: The Best of Spicy Mystery, Volume 2 - Alfred Jan, ed.

A while back I read a very good collection from Altus Press, THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY, edited by Alfred Jan. Now I've read THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY, VOLUME 2, also edited by Jan, and once again he's chosen some stories that actually have supernatural elements to them, instead of the usual Scooby-Doo endings, along with others that are more traditional Weird Menace yarns. Here are the contents and when they originally appeared in the pulp SPICY MYSTERY:

"Cats of Cassandra", Ellery Watson Calder (Robert Leslie Bellem), August 1935

"Castle Sinister", Ellery Watson Calder (Robert Leslie Bellem), October 1935

"She Who Was He!", Hugh Speer (Victor Rousseau), December 1935

"Labyrinth of Monsters", Robert Leslie Bellem, January 1936

"Taupoo Dance", Robert Leslie Bellem, April 1936

"Blind Flight", Clint Morgan (Edwin Truett Long), August 1936

"The Secret of Old Farm", Clive Trent (Victor Rousseau) September 1936

"I Must Have 5 Corpses", Jerome Severs Perry (Robert Leslie Bellem), November 1936

"False Face", Carl Moore (Edwin Truett Long), March 1937

"Red—For Murder", Cary Moran (Edwin Truett Long), August 1937

"Flesh of the Living", Clark Nelson (house-name), October 1939

All of these are good stories and I enjoyed them a great deal, but there are some stand-outs. Victor Rousseu's "She Who Was He!" is a pretty bizarre tale of involuntary transgenderism (!) and murder. "Taupoo Dance" by Robert Leslie Bellem has an unusual setting for a Weird Menace story: a tropical island in the South Seas. "Blind Flight" by Edwin Truett Long takes place for the most part on an airplane flying through dense fog, also not a typical Weird Menace setting, and Long's "Red—For Murder" is a pretty good crime yarn with several nifty twists packed into a few thousand words. I've never read much by Long, but those two stories impressed me. His other entry in this volume, "False Face", starts out well but kind of falls apart at the end. As for the more traditional Weird Menace stories, Bellem's "Labyrinth of Monsters" is my favorite; grisly and very action-packed. I don't know if there'll be a third volume in this series, but if there is, you can bet I'll read it.

Forgotten Books: The Best of Spicy Mystery, Volume 1 -- Alfred Jan, ed.

THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY is a great collection of stories from certainly the most risqué of the Weird Menace/Shudder Pulps.

I've written before about the Weird Menace genre, and while it could be extremely formulaic, the stories in this volume show that it didn't always have to be. For one thing, there's considerable variety in the settings, instead of just the creepy old house like you'd expect. "Fiend's Fiest" by Robert Leslie Bellem takes place entirely in a ritzy high-rise apartment. "Lorelei of Lynnwold Light" by Harley L. Court (also Robert Leslie Bellem) is a locked-room mystery set in an isolated lighthouse set six miles off the coast. One fairly large hole in the plot keeps it from really working as a locked-room mystery, but it's still an entertaining, very atmospheric story. John Bard's "The Second Mummy" takes place partially in the Mexican jungles.

Not that there aren't creepy old houses to be found in these stories, too. They figure prominently in "Murder From Nowhere" by Jerome Severs Perry (Bellem again) and "Mistress of Vengeance" by Justin Case (really Hugh Cave, who contributes a very well-written story as you'd expect).

A Weird Menace collection requires at least one mad doctor and some bizarre science, too, and we get that in "Bat Man" by Lew Merrill (really longtime pulpster Victor Rousseau), which has a twist ending that's predictable but also pretty creepy and effective. There's also a doctor in Robert Leslie Bellem's "Mirror Magic", but he's not crazy so much as desperate to find a cure for the mysterious malady that's killing him, no matter what the cost.

Of course, most of the authors who wrote Weird Menace stories wrote other things, too. Hugh Cave wrote every type of pulp story under the sun, and Robert Leslie Bellem was almost as versatile. Rex Norman, whose story "Dance of Damballa" closes out this volume, was really John A. Saxon, a prolific contributor to the Western pulps whose career goes back to the early Twenties. His voodoo yarn is a good one, too, proving that a top pulpster could write just about anything.

THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY, VOLUME 1 is a fairly recent book, having come out last year from Altus Press, but the Weird Menace genre itself is almost forgotten. I'm glad some of the stories are being reprinted, because I really enjoy them. In fact, I'm ready for Volume 2 in this series whenever it comes out.

Coming Soon: Weird Menace Volume 1

That cover sort of says it all, doesn't it? And this is only the first volume. Volume 2 will also be out later this month.

UPDATE: When I posted this earlier, there were a couple of things I wasn't sure of, but now I can add the table of contents:

"Bodies for the Brain Butcher", John C. Hocking
"A Night on Madhouse Mountain", Bill Crider
"The Curse of the Monster Makers!", Scott Dennis Parker
"Farmhouse of the Dead", Keith West
"The Hideous Blood Ray", Robert E. Vardeman
"Blood Treasure for Satan's Buccaneers", James Reasoner

Plus I'll write an intro for the book.

Coming Soon: Weird Menace Volume 2

Perfect reading for this Halloween season. Stories include:

"The Spider-God of Nauru!" by Mel Odom
"Lust of the Cave Spirit" by Keith Chapman
"Attack of the Nazi Snow Warriors" by Michael Bracken
"Ghost Writer" by Paul Dellinger
"The Hades Mechanism" by John McCallum Swain
"Howl of the Werewolf" by Ray Lovato

New This Week: Special Christmas Edition

These are the books I received as Christmas presents yesterday:

MEANWHILE . . .: A BIOGRAPHY OF MILTON CANIFF, Robert C. Harvey -- A massive (nearly 1000 pages) bio of one of the greatest comic strip creators ever and one of my all-time favorites.

MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY, Sean Howe -- Comics have been a big part of my reading life for more than half a century. I've heard many of the stories about the early days of Marvel, but I'm looking forward to finding out plenty of stuff I didn't know.

THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF SENORITA SCORPION, VOL. 2, Les Savage Jr. and Emmett McDowell -- I have the first volume of this series reprinting the pulp stories by Les Savage Jr., along with the one entry by Emmett McDowell.

THE BEST OF SPICY MYSTERY, VOL. 1 -- A collection of Weird Menace stories, with Robert Leslie Bellem represented at least three times, twice under his own name and once as Jerome Severs Perry. Some of those other by-lines may be Bellem, too.

I'm looking forward to reading all of these. I also got some Amazon and Half Price Books gift cards, so I'll be picking up some more things in the near future.