|
|
Post by severance on Jan 29, 2011 13:49:12 GMT
Reunion in Hell : The Selected Stories of John H. Knox Vol. #1 Edited & with an introduction by John Pelan - Dancing Tuatara Press/Ramble House (2010) Cover blurb: One of the lost masters of the weird tale, John H. Knox produced an astonishing volume of horror and supernatural fiction for Popular Publications in the 1930s before switching to more straightforward mysteries. This is the first of several volumes collecting the best of his weird fiction. Contents: Men Without Blood - Horror Stories, Jan 1935 Children of the Black God - Dime Mystery, Aug 1936 The Sea of Fear - Thrilling Mystery, Sep 1937 The Thing that Dined on Death - Thrilling Mystery, Apr 1936 Reunion in Hell - Terror Tales, Mar 1936 Master of Monsters - Horror Stories, Dec 1935 Gallery of the Damned - Dime Mystery, Jan 1936.
|
|
|
|
Post by cw67q on Jan 30, 2011 11:41:52 GMT
Anyone know anything about John H Knox and his fiction?
- Chris
|
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Jan 30, 2011 14:44:38 GMT
Belated happy birthday for yesterday, Chris. i've only read (and, it must be said, absolutely adored) three of Knox's stories and know very little about him, but here's a neat snippet from the great shudder pulp authority Bob Jones to be getting on with. Jones writes of Knox in The Weird Menace (Jewel Of Opar, June 1972) The key word for pulp authors was versatility. To survive, they had to write mysteries, westerns, detectives... a trunkload of each. In the case of John H. Knox .... versatility took on a new dimension. For the unusual thing about his work for Popular Publications was that, within the confines of the weird menace formula, he proved adept at a variety of styles. Many of his fellow pulpsters were content to repeat themselves. Knox, however, could turn out a heart-touching diary by a little girl (Now I Lay Me Down - - To Die!, Dime Mystery, August 1937) on the one hand, and a psychological study of a hallucinatory aberration (Nightmare!, Dime Mystery, May 1934) on the other.
Man Out of Hell was his most ambitious for Popular. It is an unusual blend: detective, with science fiction overtones, a mystery, and overall, a cracking good piece of fiction. It appeared in Dime Mystery in March, 1934. Frozen Energy, from Dime Mystery, December 1933 is a brief but biting study of revenge that has lost none of its effectiveness. It seems he didn't go in for supernatural all that often, preferring for the most part to go with the Scooby Doo approach favoured by many of the shudder pulpsters, with the villain who stands to gain being unmasked once he's blow-torched the faces from a suitable number of victims, etc. The bulk of his work appeared in Dime Mystery but there were also number of appearances in Terror Tales and Horror Stories. i've no idea what became of him when these magazines went under shortly before WWII but maybe sev can fill us in. See also Sev's thread on The Cyclops' Eye |
|
|
|
Post by cw67q on Jan 30, 2011 15:03:59 GMT
Thanks on both counts Dem, I just took a look over at Ramble House and found that I'm behind in their recent releases of Mark Hansom and Walter S masterman. I'll probabaly pick up their recent reprints before looking further into Knox. With the recent big collection by Kuttner I think I have enough shudder pulp tales to do me for quite a while anyway  - Chris |
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Jan 30, 2011 16:58:48 GMT
Happy Birthday from Probert Towers, Chris! (Thanks to Sev's heads up on this and the fact that I need something much more pulpy after my adventures in 'respectable' horror fiction this one's now on order ) |
|
|
|
Post by cw67q on Feb 1, 2011 8:18:55 GMT
Thanks Lord P - Chris
|
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 16, 2011 9:01:40 GMT
Goodness me what a find!
Men Without Blood - Horror Stories, Jan 1935. We kick off with something that throws everything but the kitchen sink into 20 pages and makes about as much sense as an Italian horror film. A mad scientist is killing murderers and then bringing them back to life in his wax museum with his special synthetic blood but actually he isn't - it's some other secret invention of his and besides that wig and beard aren't real at all - he's actually someone else! Headless corpses spraying blood everywhere, sleazy characters, a young lady in fishnets strapped to a tilt table and too much wonderful wonderful dialogue to reproduce in entirety here (I see my wig and whiskers have fooled you!!! Science is my God but the government refuse to give me living men to experiment with!!) mean I've read this one twice already.
Children of the Black God - Dime Mystery, Aug 1936. This one's more like Scooby Doo but without the hippies and the van (as John Pelan alludes to in his intro). Stella comes to Mexico with her adopted baby Flo and her husband to attend a wedding but is plagued with images of a woman with a blood covered face who may be one of the ghsotly 'Haunted Mothers' of Mexico who steal adopted children. After she sees a Mexican woman throw a baby over a cliff she's even more worried (can't blame her, really). It all turns out to be a Scooby Doo plot about land inheritance and they would have got away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky plot contrivances. Best line in this one? Probably "Your baby wasn't dead at all! It was just drugged with chloroform and smeared in blood!"
|
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 17, 2011 11:14:32 GMT
The Sea of Fear - Thrilling Mystery, Sep 1937. We're in Arizona and the local mad millionaire is convinced he can see the remains of an underwater Atlantis from his study window, even though he lives on top of mesa. And why are research chemists turning up on the salt flats drowned in salt water and with no evidence of footprints around them? It's all Scooby Doo time again - this time the land is rich in Potash (I suppose that's a new thing to be fighting about) and through a combination of projecting old movies outside the window and using a scantily clad young lady in a copper-cupped bra that screams Pulp magazine cover image the villains are trying to convince the landowner to sell up for a song. It's ok but I hope we get some more supernatural goings-on soon.
|
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 17, 2011 22:39:43 GMT
The Thing that Dined on Death - Thrilling Mystery, Apr 1936. Who's slashing open sheep and pinching their livers? Could it be anything to do with the scoudrel who's bought the Big House On The Hill and is said to be conducting obscene rites there? Or could it be the "harmless" old bloke in the wheelchair, the one whose son died a few years ago but needs a diet of livers to sustain his mummified body?
Reunion in Hell - Terror Tales, Mar 1936. This one's so barking I can't even begin to summarise the plot, suffice to say that at one point in the narrative one character is being roasted on a spit over a fire while another is being dissected on an operating table while three women who have been bricked up in the wall of the torture chamber in which this is taking place are screaming for their lives. Strippers, deformed freaks, torture, burning alive before our very eyes, explosions and, of course, the 'it was all for the money' denouement. If this story were any more pulpy it would be a runny liquid
|
|
|
|
Post by jamesdoig on Feb 17, 2011 22:53:46 GMT
This sounds like a must-have book.  |
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 18, 2011 10:32:38 GMT
Ain't that the truth! if i was drooling before we reached the account of the title story, Reunion In Hell has now officially entered the realms of the indispensible. Here's the cover of the March 1936 issue (borrowed from the superb galactic central), and it is only a shame that Howitt wasn't let loose on Reunion In Hell as this offering for Paul Ernst's The Mummy Maker is almost staid by his standards. Something i love about the 'Russell Gray's, Wyatt Blassingame's, Frederick C. Davis and Knox's of the piece is that they were proud of their shudder pulp excesses whereas, despite contributing ten or so stories to Terror Tales, Paul Ernst's heart wasn't really in it ("When the heat was put on for sadism, I officially bowed out.") and i have my suspicions that a gratuitous whipping scene in his Models For Madness, ( Terror Tales, Jan-Feb 1937) was grafted on by the editor. Baynard Kendrick (speciality: blind detectives) was another reticent contributor. He told Robert Kenneth Jones. "One of my pulp stories that made quite a hit was one where they burned the panties off the girls with a blowtorch. they were hard to write. Hell, you don't think I'd put my own name to things like that? They changed the title. You lost everything when you sold a horror story" |
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 18, 2011 11:17:47 GMT
He told Robert Kenneth Jones. "One of my pulp stories that made quite a hit was one where they burned the panties off the girls with a blowtorch. they were hard to write. Hell, you don't think I'd put my own name to things like that? Goodness me, no. The very idea  |
|
|
|
Post by severance on Feb 18, 2011 12:31:06 GMT
Hope you're enjoying it John, I've yet to make a start on it yet, soon hopefully. If anyone wants a taster of Knox's work, then 'The Thing That Dined On Death' and 'Wake Not the Dead' can be dowloaded from Pulpgen - here's the link to their Thrilling Mystery page - some of the other stories there sound equally deranged! |
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 19, 2011 14:57:43 GMT
Hope you're enjoying it John, I've yet to make a start on it yet, soon hopefully. If anyone wants a taster of Knox's work, then 'The Thing That Dined On Death' and 'Wake Not the Dead' can be dowloaded from Pulpgen - here's the link to their Thrilling Mystery page - some of the other stories there sound equally deranged! Sev I'm seriously enjoying this one! iIt's the most fun I've had with a book in ages - thanks for bringing this to my / the vault's attention!
Master of Monsters - Horror Stories, Dec 1935. Another completely bonkers effort. Mad Professor Malcolmson is experimenting with the young girls he teaches in his high school by carting them off to his seculded shack-cum-torture chamber in the hills where he's trying to get them to connect with 'repressed primitive memories'. This gets them so scared they daren't sleep and there's only one way to stop them sleeping apparently - a good lashing! Oh deary me. Yet again there's a 'we made it all up' explanation but this one involves blackmail, a porn ring, a barefoot Rasputin type called Brutus who's on the side of the Lord and a leather bat suit so how can you not love it? Only one more story to go and I can feel myself missing this book already... |
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 19, 2011 18:37:50 GMT
And finally:
Gallery of the Damned - Dime Mystery, Jan 1936. Does anyone remember the episode of Garth Marenghi where at the end we cut to a picture of a cheeseplant for an inordinary length of time to allow overdubbed voices to attempt a desperate last-minute attempt at an explanation of the plot? I was reminded of that by the time I got to the end of this one, a story where it's best to abandon any attempt at understanding what's going on and just revel in this glorious pulp cavalcade of atrocities. Someone is causing people to think they're famous villains reborn - Judas Iscariot, Gilles de Rais, Jack the Ripper, etc who then go out and murder in the style of said infamous folks (Judas crucifies someone with the intials JC on the back of an office door in case you're wondering). There's an underground torture chamber with the usual black cloaked and cowled torturers and false beards and wigs galore in this absolutely riotous finale to a book that has really cheered me up this week. I can't wait for volume 2.
|
|
