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Post by dem bones on Oct 20, 2007 12:55:15 GMT
Robert Weinberg (ed.) - Pulp Classics#3 :: Uncanny Tales (Robert Weinberg, 1974) Russell Gray - The Gargoyles Of Madness (Aug. 1939)
Mindret Lord - Agony In Clay (Apr-May 1939)
Allan Echols - Honeymoon In Hell (1939)
Cyril Plunkett - Blood Is My Bride (1939)
Donald Graham - Revelry In Hell (Apr-May 1939) This is what I need to perk me up some: Innocent young women at the mercy of lust-crazed old-timers, perverted circus freaks and deformed hulks, their "large, gloating eyes, red tinged with idiocy", etc. Lets kick off with some of the small fry: Allan Echols - Honeymoon In Hell: Could the ghastly creature who'd crawled from the wreckage of our car have indeed been my own lovely Marcia? Was this at last our bloody sacrifice to the All-Seeing one? Marcia disappears after a car accident in which her husband, the narrator, is himself half crippled. Her old hag of an aunt, Miss Emma, directs him to the Temple Of The Eternal Truth where he is reunited with his wife - she being one of the three "virgins of the All-Seeing one", crucified and awaiting initiation by the 'Master' at the Black Mass prior to being torn to pieces by savage dogs! As is so often the case, the hood is a charlatan operating a cynical racket exploiting the lusts of the usual lovable octogenarian sex-maniacs. It doesn't do to trust a respectable bastard in these stories, I can tell you. Cyril Plunkett - Blood Is My Bride: Now this lovely creature whom I adored was dead, and I could humbly kiss her torn and bloody flesh. Jules Duvaise obsesses over Shirley Troy, a girl he's seen on the cover of various nudie books which he immediately purchases for his collection. One chance meeting later and they are head over heels in love. Unfortunately, Shirley chooses their wedding night to confess just how she's gotten by all these years, so Jules carves her face to pieces with a bottle. Overcome with remorse, he hands himself over to the police, but when they search his room there is no mutilated corpse, no blood on the bed - just a pair of wine glasses, one smeared with lipstick. Much gratuitous violence but by Uncanny Tales standards, an exercise in restraint and possibly the nearest thing to a gentle ghost story they ever published. Very disappointing, but never fear because Donald Graham will be up soon and he is pure Globeswatch gold .... Mindret Lord - Agony In Clay I am the master of pain, of agony and death, and the next time you feel an excruciating stab anywhere in your body - try to remember! Is there a photograph of you that I could have found? Short and not so sweet. The narrator is a sculptor, specializing in nude figurines of beautiful women. The trouble is, he's skint and his model Carlotta refuses to pose for him until he's paid her for the past two days work. Infuriated, he drives pins into the tits of the incomplete image of her. Carlotta winds up suffering and seriously ill in Hospital, the baffled doctors unable to find anything wrong with her. When our man removes the pins, she immediately revives and calls around again demanding her cash. This time he drives a pin through her heart. She doesn't recover from that! Now his collection includes statuettes of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini as well as every woman he's taken a shine to, including his ex, Astrid, "a beautiful, blonde Norwegian girl who had the most perfect pair of breasts that ever I saw on mortal woman." Mindret Lord appeared in many of the pulps and is probably best remembered for his minor classic Naked Lady ( Weird Tales, Sept. 1934) as revived by Michel Parry for Devils Kisses. His contributions to the shudder pulps are apparently atypically restrained as far as these things go, although I've read one absolute shocker, Beauty Born In Hell from the notorious Horror Stories which I'll try and get around to.  Alex Schomburg: Was it a madman's unutterable curse that doomed the defenceless students of that fashionable girls' school - doomed them to matriculate in Satan's own university, the Carnival of Passion and Pain!. Silvercrest Finishing School, "a fashionable college for wealthy girls of the high social bracket", is attractively located in the remote hills of New England. It is run by the founder, Prof. Frank Wayne, whose brother William, a doctor, presides over the only other building in close proximity - a nursing home for obscenely wealthy dirty old men. During the winter holiday, fifteen girls stay on at the college with just a couple of young female tutors to look after them. For young Natalie Porter ("slim shapely legs ... well-rounded hips ... firmly moulded buttocks", etc.) this is extremely bad news as one night a hideous, gas-masked monstrosity breaks into her room, slobbers, giggles and tears off her pyjama's as she lies paralysed on the bed. The next morning Nancy Henderson, one of the female instructors, is busy thinking about a date with dishy young Dr. Rand when she looks out of the window to see that someone has built a snowman - wait, that isn't any regular snowman. How comes everything under the head is composed of naked female flesh? Worse, much worse to follow ...
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Post by dem bones on Oct 20, 2007 12:56:22 GMT
II Meanwhile, back at Silvercrest, Nancy has called in Sheriff Howley, Dr. Wayne and nice Bill Rand to show them the novelty snow-woman. When Bill notices something that everyone has missed - namely, the girl has hideous manacle scars around her wrists and ankles - he realises that she isn't Natalie: the face has been mutilated to make them think so, but really this is some other broad and the rich girl is still in the clutches of the monster! While they've been copping an eyeful of the corpse, some creep has cut the phone line, so leaving the girls in the care of Howley, Dr. Wayne and his new assistant, Dr. Mullin, Bill drives away to notify the police. On his way back, he notices something strange. "At first, seeing only out of the corner of his eye, he hadn't paid much attention, not realizing. Then, just as he flashed past, the incredible significance flashed upon his consciousness. It was a girl, a naked girl, and she was crouching at the feet of a man who was beating her brutally with a vicious whip." Bill chases away the fiend, but he's too late. The lacerated girl coughs up a bubble of blood, splutters "The Carnival ... of passion and ... pain. Oh God! Oh ..." and dies. Bill is playing a blinder because driving on he spots something else he'd not seen before - a huge marquee with a load of Carney trucks around it. Investigating, he furtively approaches a huge cage .... which contains three dozen half-naked young women! Understandably distracted, he's unaware of the huge deformed thing creeping up behind him until it coshes him senseless ... When Bill comes to, he's been tied to a stake. He feels such a numb-skull! Obviously, that little cabaret with the girl was a deliberate ploy to lure him to the carnival and get him out of the way! Fortunately, the snow has loosened the pole and he eventually gets free. A good thing for him that it was one of the mindless idiots who found him as they left him just near his car. Now for a mercy dash back to the school. In Rands absence, however, the circus freaks have attacked Silvercrest mob-handed. In a truly bloody episode, the sheriff, Dr. Payne and even many of the girls are butchered by the "rabble of hideous monsters who exhibited every deformity that dementia could conjure. Some were pin-headed scarecrows that drooled and blubbered like idiots, others were bulbous louts with ghastly, bloated bodies, while still others were hunched and crooked freaks with vile, hair-covered bodies." By the time Rand gets there the massacre is done and his Nancy is among the captives taken by the victorious mutations. But why are they doing all this? When the slobbering hunchback who abducted Natalie Porter arrives back at the school to burn it down, Bill decides to follow him to find out where the girls are being held. Sure enough, the creature leads him back to the Old People's home where the big top has been erected for the Carnival of Pleasure and Pain! And you really don't want to know what goes down there ... As is the case with maybe 99% of the shudder pulps, behind all this apparently mindless violence is an evil mastermind who stands to make a mint from it. In Revely ...'s case, this sicko hides his face behind a rather disappointing cardboard skull mask. He's been pumping the geriatrics full of aphrodisiacs until they're salivating, sadistic sex-maniacs, and once these sleazebags have been wheeled into the arena we're in for a truly revolting chapter as girl after girl is tortured to death in increasingly gruesome fashion to hoots of insane merriment from the avid audience. Graham had a history of this stuff. I've just read Robert Kenneth Jones' review of his early Revolt Of The Circus Freaks in The Shudder Pulps (Fax, 1975) and it might just as well be the same story. Russell Gray's Fresh Fiances For The Devil's Daughter usually receives the plaudits as the sickest of the sex & sadism shockers, but Revelry In Hell pushes it close. |
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Post by dem bones on May 10, 2023 9:15:46 GMT
Torture! Torture! It .... pleasures me! Robert O. Erisman [ed.] - Uncanny Tales, April-May 1939 (Adventure House, 2007) Arthur J. Burks - Take Me, and Die!
Mindret Lord - Agony in Clay
Omar Gwinn - Horror Owns My Heart
Frederick C. Davis - Nameless Brides of Forbidden City
Donald Graham - Revelry in Hell
Donald Dale - Mortician for Satan's Other-World
George E. Clark - Stalked by Terror's Mate
Blackstone Gray - Keepsake from the Corpse Blurb: Pulp Magazines were popular culture for nearly seventy years. Their colorful covers beckoned the world-weary reader to step into a new vibrant world of action, romance and adventure fiction. Pulp magazines filled the entertainment void for as little as a dime for millions of readers each and every week. Printed on cheap high bulk pulp paper, "The Pulps," bridged the gap between juvenile nickel weeklies and the more expensive glossy magazines and hardbound editions. Stories and titles of magazines varied as much as their readers. Come along with us and drink deep the adventure and excitement of "The Pulps."Blackstone Gray - Keepsake from the Corpse: When sculptor Randy Carter took that grisly assignment to reconstruct the crushed bodies of those pitiful crash victims, he never dreamed how gruesome the task might be — until he found his facile fingers strangely fashioning the features of the girl he loved! The State Morticians Association convene in the Grotto room following a fatal tunnel collapse at Delroy Caves. Randolph 'Randy' Carter, a local sculptor, is tasked with reassembling the mangled bodies using a miracle corpse-wax developed by his once love rival, Henry Messick. Luckily his fiancée, Virginia Leigh, a tour guide, wasn't on duty that day. But wait — whose half-destroyed carcass is this? |
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Post by dem bones on May 11, 2023 9:53:10 GMT
 Alex Schomburg: A promising young artist, Barry Gordon, looked to a bright future — until his pictures of violence and degradation began to come true — until he depicted his own lovely wife, helpless victim in a monster's subterranean lair! After the honeymoon, Barry and Lora leave New York to live with her guardian, Uncle Tobey, former vaudeville performer, and family; Olwin the gardener, Martha Field, the sinister housekeeper, and her beautiful, idiot daughter, Iris. Hardly have the happy couple unpacked their cases than the hill behind the house crumples to rubble! Over the following days, Barry's paintings take a prophetic turn, the horrors he commits to canvas re-enacted in bloody reality within hours. Is he oracle of doom, or mad-axeman, whose right hand has no idea what his left is doing? Where have all the girls' heads gone? Who — or what — haunts "the hill of hate?" The late John Pelan compiled a volume of Mary Dale Buckner's weird menace stories as The Beautiful Dead & Other Stories (Dancing Tuatara Press, 2012), featuring such terrifically titled horror-packed eery terror novelettes as Bodies Born for Slaughter ( Terror Tales, Sept. 1940) and Art Class in Hell ( Horror Stories, June-July 1937). |
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Post by dem bones on May 12, 2023 4:52:27 GMT
George E. Clark - Stalked by Terror's Mate: I swore that no remotest power of hell could ever make me desert my beautiful Ellen — until my will became water before a girl whose body and soul belonged to Satan! When Bob Edwards rejects the advances of a comely schoolteacher, Marie Mauvais, alleged "She-devil "of Elkhorn District, he does so at his peril! It's whispered among the community that those who displease the terror tutor never live to cause further offence — Angus Grew, a foul-tempered old farmer, is all for burning her as a witch. Even so, the allegations against her are preposterous. Are we really to believe this attractive young woman can take possession of any animal and turn it against her enemies — and their loved ones?
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Post by dem bones on May 17, 2023 17:48:04 GMT
Omar Gwinn - Horror Owns My Heart: When our luxurious honeymoon yacht was driven to that lonely harbor, I couldn't guess that my young bride and I would be guests of a madman who'd offer me unspeakable death — and present my bride with a lusting scientific monster as her new groom! A wedding cruise turns to terror for newly-wed couples Grant and Marilee Mallory and Jim and Lenore Luxton when their hired yacht, The Back Bay, is boarded by sex-mad man-ape hybrids, Joe and Chimp. These lab-created missing links answer only to their masters, Prof. Baxter and Herr Doktor, "the greatest scientists of our age, a Dr. Moreau tribute act bent on breeding a new race of gorilla men and ape women. You already guess what's in store for the brides - plus sassy eighteen-year-old Julie - once the Cro-magnons and treacherous Captain Destinn ("Shut up, baby, or I'll teach you something dames your age are so curious about!") have satisfied their unnatural lusts. "You are going to be the first, Marilee Stuart,' the Professor said. "It was for you chiefly that I sent Destinn up to Boston to get the job piloting the yacht, that he might bring you to me. For it was your mother I once loved beyond all things, your mother who scorned my love and made me a misogynist — indeed, made of me a bitter recluse and a hater of all humankind. I was a small, colorless man, not romantic in her eyes, though I have, and had, one of the mightiest scientific brains in all history!," and so on, and so on.
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Post by dem bones on May 18, 2023 10:48:24 GMT
Arthur J. Burks -Take Me, and Die!: How could Prestley Crane know that he would fall into the power of an old hag — a sickeningly aged harridan with a young girl's voluptuous, pulsating body — who would force this awful decision: Take me as your mate, or see your sweetheart thrown to my slavering hired thugs! A young Californian lifeguard (that's him in the swimming trunks) is hired by Mrs. Ella Carnaham, an aged reclusive oil millionairess, to patrol her private beach, los Conejo's, a favoured suicide spot of attractive young women. Grim work for sure, and Crane's first attempted rescue almost results in his own death; the drowning girl - who, for some reason, hides her face behind a mask - seems bent on killing them both! Despite this initial misunderstanding, he falls madly in love with this Daryll, and she him — putting both their lives at terrible risk! Daryll, the widow Carnahan's niece, resolved to die rather than become another plaything of her sadistic Aunt's guard of strapping young men, who nightly molest several girl prisoners for their mistress's perverted entertainment! Now Prestley Crane at last stands face to gargoyle-face with the ancient Mrs. Carnaham who offers him a proposition. Either he submits to her desires, or she lets loose her super-virile vicious studs on his intended! An exciting, extremely bloody climax as, led by Daryll in warrior Amazonian mode, the slave-girls turn on their male tormentors with iron pokers and mash them to pulp. Still a wall of glass separates them from the horror crone. Can it be that after all, we've been through, Mr. Burks will allow the harridan to evade justice?
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Post by dem bones on May 20, 2023 10:00:49 GMT
 Alex Schomburg: Would that I could forget those nightmare hours spent in the Forbidden City! Banish the memory of that beautiful girl's body stretched on a mad cult's unholy shrine; never recall my own wild thoughts as I slowly approached her helpless, naked form, the sacrificial sword in my hand — for that pitiful victim was the mother of my son, my own adorable wife! Lhasa, Tibet. When Madge Macheny, the wife of an American pilot, gives birth to a son at the precise moment of the Grand Lama's death, local nonks declare him the reincarnation of their beloved, late master. That same night, the holy men snatch the Child Buddha and secure him in the Temple at the Potala Palace. While Jerry Macheny and loyal servant, Pun-Ring, launch a desperate rescue attempt, a second cult, Le Tomba, led by a lewd, fat faced murderer named Ram-Shar, abduct Madge for a decidedly impious purpose ... FCD's novella works better as Himalayan action thriller than weird menace; the token sex and sadism content reads like it was grafted on as an afterthought. |
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