Donald Dale - Bodies Born For Slaughter (
Terror Tales, Sept. 1940):
"Why did the aged and infirm of Youth Springs find such ghoulish joy in beholding the bloodless, mutilated body of May Hobson? Did it mean that the incredible had actually come to pass - that age had won the final victory over youth?"Age versus Youth. The enfeebled, lusting gumsters who both drool over and despise the young their health, good looks and unsaggy flesh is one of THE big recurring themes of the weird menaces. Although
Bodies Born For Slaughter is among the least bloodthirsty examples of the form, it's also one of the most wildly entertaining shudder pulps I've read!
Wayne Wirt, recently qualified from medical school, returns home to Youth Springs, a charming, peaceful village, much favoured by the rich and worn-out. Wayne moves in with his mother and a senile uncle, Peter Bobbitt, ninety-two, a one-legged lech who saved old man Wirt's life back in the Civil War so you have to be nice to him. The old boy is as irritating as ever, and he's acting real strange. Rather than sneak a blatant perve at Wayne's fiance, Joyce Summers - "the loveliest girl that ever could come within his range of vision" - etc., the creepy old bastard seems more interested in Wayne's muscle-bound young body!
Uncle Peter isn't the only old goat who is taking a morbid interest in the local youth. Mrs. Wirt explains that a change has come over the elderly ever since Dr. Edouard Voss, a specialist in senescent ailments, came to practice among them. Also, a number of youngsters have mysteriously disappeared. There's talk that the local bogey, 'the Old Man of the Spring', is up to his old tricks, but, of course, Wayne isn't one to believe in superstitious mumbo jumbo, even when the devil's face appears in the night sky and the weirdly mutilated corpse of old May Hobson, "the silliest widow in the county" is discovered. Much to the feigned surprise of the senior citizens, May but recently willed her entire fortune to Bettina Starr who runs the local beauty parlour with her lover, Orin Nixola, the surrealist artist. But as the distraught Orin explains, Bettina has vanished!
Bettina returns, outwardly unharmed give or take a demon-shaped crest above her heart, but when she speaks it is in the demented cackle of May Hobson! Much to the obscene delight of the crumblies, the Old Man of the Spring has transferred the soul of the dead woman into a healthy young body! No wonder she was so generous to Bettina in her will!
More late night projections of the devil face over Youth Springs. More deaths among the elderly population. More missing youngsters including glamorous actress Lucille Lee and - horror upon horrors! - the celestial Joyce Summers!
Wayne, who suspects that this fancy foreign Doctor must have something to do with it, follows him on one of his clandestine creepy crawls to worship at the feet of a huge stone idol. The Old Man of the Spring!
And it walks! Before Wayne has time to think, the stone God lands him a vicious blow to the skull.
When Wayne regains consciousness, he's tied to a chair in an underground cavern along with all the missing youths and a bunch of eager decrepits. The Stone God and his assistant prepare to perform their nasty brand of 'surgery' ....
Well! The glorious denouement is too convoluted to go into - suffice to say an image painted in phosphorous on a red balloon, a minor talent for acting and a papier mache suit each play a part. The seemingly supernatural explanation evaporates before our eyes with the whole 'soul siphoning' scam exposed as a ruse to part the gullible gumsters from their loot, but for once we do not feel short-changed.
And something else.
True, toward the end Lucille Lee is fetchingly bound and gagged, but no gratuitous whipping scenes? no fixating over the size of Joyce's doubtless magnificent globes? That can only mean one thing. Gentlemen, we've been infiltrated!
Born of an impoverished Texan family and almost entirely self-taught,
Mary Dale Buckner made it to college where she attained both bachelors and masters degrees before quitting to write prolifically for the shudder pulps as
'Donald Dale'. According to Robert Kenneth Jones, Mary's specialist theme was "inescapable doom" to which i'd add a fine appreciation of arts and crafts (she had a fondness for deranged sculptors and evil artists). 'Donald Dale' was a relative latecomer to the field, but racked up over thirty Weird Menace sales from 1937, including something called
The Corpse Bride (it can't be the same!) and two stories featuring the fiendish face skinner, Prince Zagoul,
The Beautiful Dead and
Art Class In Hell, both of which sound absolute belters from Mr. Jones' commentary, but then he had a knack for making even the most mundane weird menace sound like the second coming of Monk Lewis! Commendably, unlike many of her male counterparts, Mary didn't always opt for the soppy, supposedly "happy" ending when a perfectly grim one would suffice, and both Zagoul tales end in tears, the hero rescuing his fiance only to realise she'd be better off dead than face a life of sustained torture.
"I hated her because she possessed him whom I desired above all men, and I hated, too, that unfinished tapestry because it pictured the happiness denied to me. So-God help me -I enlisted Satan's aid -and saw the tapestry grow again, depicting magically the awful fate that someday would be mine!"So runs the blurb for Mary/ 'Donald's
Tapestry of Terror (
Horror Stories, August, 1940), not yet got around to it but a Creole setting this time and, once again, not a flagellation festival in sight. Incidentally, this particular issue was as near as dammit to a women of weird menace special as it also featured Frances Bragg Middleton's
Dead Voice Calling ("Who can measure the ghastliness of a scorned woman's fury - if that fury were born in a breast now dead a hundred years!"). Frances Bragg Middleton's career in the weirds began three years before Mary's, and, although her titles err toward the normal, she would eventually contribute a respectable fifteen "stories of eerie menace" to the cause. Just to confuse matters, the issues lead novella,
Valley of Corpses is the work of another Frances, long-time horror hack Frances James, but this one was male.
