Robert A W Lowndes - Weird Terror Tales

[dem bones]

Weird Terror Tales was a short-lived companion publication to Startling Mystery Stories and Magazine Of Horror which survived for just the three issues over 1969-1970 and, for once, I have a full run of something. The debut opens with the customary excellent editorial from Lowdnes - in this instance, he debates the difference between terror and horror - and there are the regular departments familiar from MOH and SMS. The stories themselves are a bizarre mix of the acknowledged classic, new fiction and out-and-out vintage pulp madness, much of it reprinted from Strange Tales. As with SMS and MOH, I'll try and knock out some plot outlines at some later date, although if anyone else wants to jump in, please feel free. In case you're wondering, Eddy C. Bertin's The Whispering Thing is the same story known to many of us as The Whispering Horror, perhaps the finest story in Pan Horror # 9:

Weird Terror Tales #1 (Health Knowledge Inc. Winter, 1969)

Cover - Virgil Finlay
The Editor's Page (On Terror vs. Horror)

Edmond Hamilton - Dead Legs
Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The House And The Brain
Edgar Allen Poe - MS Found In A Bottle
H. P. Lovecraft - He
Clark Ashton Smith - The Beast Of Averoigne
Eddy C. Bertin - The Whispering Thing
Nat Schachner & Arthur Zagat - The Dead-Alive

Weird Terror Tales #2 (Health Knowledge Inc. Summer, 1970)

Cover - Virgil Finlay
The Editor's Page (On "Forbidden Knowledge")

Sewell Peaselee Wright - The Dead Walk Softly
August Derleth - The Shadow On The Sky
Dick Donely - The Laundromat
Pearl Norton Swet - The Man Who Never Came Back
Seabury Quinn - The Web Of Living Death

Weird Terror Tales #3 (Health Knowledge Inc. Fall, 1970)

Cover - Richard Schmand
The Editor's Page (On Arkham House's Cthulhu Mythos Anthology)

Hugh B. Cave - Stragella
Joseph McCord - The Girdle
Henry S. Whitehead - The Trap
G. Appelby Terrill - The Church Stove At Raebrudafisk
Steffan B. Aletti - The Cellar Room
H. Warner Munn - The Wheel


G. Appelby Terrill - The Church Stove At Raebrudafisk: Deliciously nasty: Czergova, 1913. Sixteen year old Djira, the village belle, is waylaid by oily Orl Surl. When she rejects his passionate advances he slits her throat and leaves her for the wolves to dispose of. Unbeknown to him, a small boy witnessed the crime and the men-folk eventually capture him, tying him to a stout pipe in the church while they inform the police. Enter Djira's father, a blind man, whose job it is to fire the stove ...

Hugh B. Cave - Stragella: A corpse-festooned lifeboat is adrift in the Indian Ocean. Miggs and Yancy, the only survivors of the tramp ship Cardigan are dying of thirst. Salvation seems at hand when they cross a fog-bound ship, The Golconda, but it proves to be derelict save for the skeletons of the crew ... until nightfall, and the arrival of Stragella, a beautiful Serbian vampire, and her undead accomplices Papa Bocito and Serannis. Miggs is soon drained of his blood but Yancy survives thanks to his tattoo ...

H. Warner Munn - The Wheel: A companion piece to his Weird Tales/ Not At Night squirm-inducer The Chain. The American, Preece, is given a guided tour of Bohorquia's torture chamber, the centre piece of which is a customised treadmill suspended over a trough of bubbling pitch. Once you're on there, it's a case of keep walking, keep awake, as the guy operating the fiendish contraption has all these snazzy coloured levers he can pull to flick you over the side.

Mein host, who is clearly a loose cannon, relates the grim fate of three of his ancestors at the hands of the Inquisition and the campaign by generations of Bohorquia's to obliterate the families responsible from the face of the earth. Now there's only one person to be rid of and the revenge is complete. Rotten moment for Preece to realise who he's descended from ...

Munn capably handles the suspense and nihilistic ending is, to my mind at least, exactly spot on.

Joseph McCord - The Girdle: When Pelham puts on his belt he is transformed into a werewolf. He kills five German infantrymen by tearing out their throats. To be honest, this is a lesser Weird Tales/ Not At Night offering, not quite bonkers enough to be brilliant/ terrible.

[dem bones]

C. C. Senf:

Nat Shachner & Arthur Leo Zagat - The Dead-Alive; (Weird Tales, April-May, 1931). A shivery, goose-flesh story of violated graveyards and cadavers that walked in the night. No sooner has the father of high school "football" ace Hartley 'Buck' Saunders been laid to rest in Mountville Cemetery than his body seemingly claws its way out of the grave and vanishes! The nightwatchman on duty dies raving about "ghosts" and "dead men walking." Detective Sergeant Tim Riley confides in Buck that there have been hundreds of similar outrages in local burial grounds, and it is only a matter of time before the newsmen get hold of the story. Sure enough, two cases of "body-snatching" from the fashionable Kenesco cemetery in the same night - the one a famous financier, the other a proto It girl - make the following day's front pages. Who is stealing our dead people? What do they want with them? How can they be stopped?

Riley and Buck, who is now his assistant, stake out Hopeville cemetery after midnight — and suffer a terrible shock! Five goose-stepping dead men stop by a freshly dug grave and dig out the occupant with their cold hands. Bullets have no effect on these gray things. Riley slices the arm from one with his old military sabre. As it lopes back to await its advancing colleagues - they are quite athletic - Riley marvels, appalled, at the absence of blood!

The living men are fortunate to escape but the terrible experience sends the football star delirious. Recovering in hospital, he receives a visitor - Ruth Forsythe, his fiancee ("She was a sight to make any normal male's heart beat a bit faster.") We learn that Ruth chose Buck over Jim Carruthers, a brilliant biologist, and the latter is bitter about it.

No sooner has she been introduced than Miss Forsythe is abducted in the night. Luckily a mindless one drops a scrap of paper torn from a map with a ring around Birdkill, a village in the Catskills, where a stranger recently moved into the abandoned mill. A stranger bent on the mass manufacture of reanimated dead to hire out to farmers and factory owners as low-maintenance labourers!.

Dick Donley - The Laundromat: Lonesome Mr. Morgan is introduced to an exclusive dining establishment on Delany Avenue by the couple who run the laundromat. It's strange how everyone has come over all friendly toward him. It's strange how they're so keen to fatten him up.

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Apologies if this exists. I did a search and didn't spot it.
I do like the feel of these old magazines. I think I will start reading some.




CONTENTS

COVER Virgil Finlay
THE EDITORS PAGE (On Terror vs. Horror) 4
DEAD LEGS Edmund Hamilton 6
THE HOUSE AND THE BRAIN (novelet) Edward Bulwer-Lytton 24
MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE Edgar Allan Poe 45
HE H.P. Lovecraft 56
THE BEAST OF AVEROIGNE Clark Ashton Smith 66
THE WHISPERING THING Eddy C. Bertin 77
THE STAR CHAMBER (department) 85
THE DEAD-ALIVE (novelet) Nat Schachner & Arthur Zagat 86
READERS’ PREFERENCE PAGE (double-barrelled) 129/130

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

I give up haha.
I blame the search engine.
Delete it if you want.

[helrunar]

The cover is quite eye-catching!

cheers, Hel.

[dem bones]

The Lowndes digests remain a personal favourite. Pre-internet they were a treasure trove should your interest in 'golden age' weird & horror pulps extend beyond the names you'd been spoon-fed and told to like — Lovecraft, CAS, REH, Bloch, Bradbury, etc — as at last you'd get to read bizarre thrillers you only knew of by name or, if you'd seen Haining's Terror, their accompanying illustrations. Looking back, I think Lowndes made it his mission to revive the entire fictional content of Strange Tales. Plenty of de Grandin and Dr. Satan, too, plus overlooked greats from 20s/30s Weird Tales, with contemporary stories by up and comers like Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Joanna Russ, Eddy C. Bertin & F. Paul Wilson. Thoughtful editorials, chatty letters column, full page ads for blow up dolls — you got your money's worth (£2 used from Fantasy Centre in my case). Maybe Web Terror Tales was one magazine too many, as the whole range looks to have ended with #3. For me SMS and MOH are essentially the 'sixties' Weird Tales. From sample issues seen, I don't think any of the actual Weird Tales revivals came close.

[ramseycampbell]

Indeed! RAWL published my first non-Arkham House tale - indeed, it was the editorial in which he singled out my tale "The Cellars" for praise that emboldened me to submit "The Scar" to him. He would have used "The Sunshine Club" too, but the magazines folded.

[dem bones]

Feb 21, 2023 9:40:46 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Indeed! RAWL published my first non-Arkham House tale - indeed, it was the editorial in which he singled out my tale "The Cellars" for praise that emboldened me to submit "The Scar" to him. He would have used "The Sunshine Club" too, but the magazines folded.

The issue with The Scar was among those I bought from the Fantasy Centre. Think the only issues I never saw in the flesh, so to speak, were numbers 6 and 12, aka the pair containing Stephen King stories. I was delighted when you commemorated a visit to the shop in Ancient Images. The last time I saw Messrs Ball & Gibson was at a pulp & paperback fair after the shop had closed." I kind of dread asking, but are Ted and Dave still with us?



Startling Mystery Stories #13 (Health Knowledge Inc. Summer, 1969)

Richard Schmand

Everill Worrell - The Gray Killer
J. Ramsey Campbell - The Scar
Donna Gould Welk - Where There's Smoke
Seabury Quinn - Ancient Fires
Robert A. W. Lowndes - The Cases Of Jules de Grandin: Part 1 (article)
Ken Porter - The Hansom Cab
Eugend de Rezske - The Veil Of Tanit

[helrunar]

Cool cover! I'm curious about "The Veil of Tanit" by Eugene de Reszke. It was originally published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, March 1932. Never anthologized but the original 1932 mag has been reprinted twice according to ISFDB. The author only has 3 stories listed under his name there. 

Hel.

[dem bones]

Feb 21, 2023 14:12:18 GMT helrunar said:

Cool cover! I'm curious about "The Veil of Tanit" by Eugene de Reszke. It was originally published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, March 1932. Never anthologized but the original 1932 mag has been reprinted twice according to ISFDB. The author only has 3 stories listed under his name there. 

Hel.

The Wildside Press Strange Tales facsimiles are a joy. As mentioned, RAWL made it his crusade to recycle their entire fictional content across his various Health Knowledge publications - certainly looks that way, anyhow.

[andydecker]

Feb 21, 2023 14:12:18 GMT helrunar said:

Cool cover! I'm curious about "The Veil of Tanit" by Eugene de Reszke. It was originally published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, March 1932. Never anthologized but the original 1932 mag has been reprinted twice according to ISFDB. The author only has 3 stories listed under his name there. 

Hel.

It's on Archive org. It is a bit of a dramedy, as it is called by the cool kids. About the follies of religion. Reminded me of the plot of the movie Help! by the Beatles. Thought the ending not really convincing.

[helrunar]

Thanks for that info, Andreas. It's good to know that the story is so readily available.

Would be interested to learn more about Mr. Lowndes. He seems to have had a lot of energy and gotten some unjustly forgotten authors out of the back shelves of old bookshops and into readers' hands again through his efforts.

cheers, Hel.

[enoch]

Lowndes was a good writer of weird stories himself.  I very much admire his short story "Settler's Wall."

[helrunar]

Thanks, Enoch. I will have to look for that.

cheers, Hel.

[jamesdoig]

Feb 21, 2023 11:11:40 GMT dem bones said:

The issue with The Scar was among those I bought from the Fantasy Centre. Think the only issues I never saw in the flesh, so to speak, were numbers 6 and 12, aka the pair containing Stephen King stories.

Not surprisingly, those issues with the Stephen King stories are pretty desirable. I've only got three of them - hard to get down this way: