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Post by dem bones on Oct 20, 2007 13:06:21 GMT
Severance put us onto the wonderful pulpgen where you can download a number of free pdfs, including a fair number of Robert Leslie Bellem originals, many from the Spicy's. Black Mask Magazine As the title suggests, a homage to Black Mask magazine, but Horror Stories, Terror Tales & Co all get a look in. Plenty of nasty, mostly hard boiled 'tec stories to download and they also sell modern reprints of the sinister 'shudders.'
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Nov 13, 2007 20:06:04 GMT
The Shanghai jester actually does refer to her 'creamy thighs'. I wonder if that was a first?
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Post by jamesdoig on Oct 5, 2010 7:43:42 GMT
Not sure if Corinth has its own thread. In the '60s it published a series of reprints from American pulps from the 1930s. This is from Terror Tales, but they did lots of others like Phantom Detective and Dr Death: i686.photobucket.com/albums/vv221/jamesdoig/SAVE0685.jpgContents Jon Hanlon, Introduction Arthur Leo Zagat, The House of Living Death Charles R. Wayne, Blood Hunter Wyatt Blassingame, Dead Man's Bride Henry Treat Sperry, Hands Beyond the Grave There was an article about the series in an issue of Science Fiction Collector back in 1980: i686.photobucket.com/albums/vv221/jamesdoig/SAVE0686.jpg
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Post by dem bones on Oct 5, 2010 8:05:27 GMT
thanks for posting the above, James. we've not yet had a Corinth/ Regency thread - i doubt they've been mentioned too often before now, though Sev posted some stuff about their Phantom Detective reissues on Vault Mk. 1belated happy birthday to you!
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Post by jamesdoig on Nov 6, 2010 6:49:00 GMT
I had to give this story from the Corinth Terror Tales the full Vault treatment. Written by some cove with the unlikely name of Arthur Leo Zagat. Evidently he was a prolific writer of such guff for the American pulps.
The House of Living Death Hal Armour, tall and powerfully built heir to a fortune, has just returned to New York from a long stint in Puerto Rico having heard that his beloved dad has died suddenly. He receives a cable from one Irma Kahn to visit the lawyer, Avery Dunn, to settle the estate, and hoofs it to Dunn’s offices on Wall Street. Dunn, who has “faintly mongoloid features” (immediately setting the alarm bells ringing), tells him that Irma Kahn is his father’s long lost sister. Hearing a commotion from the next office, Hal bursts through the door to find two men locked in mortal combat; a knife whistles past his shoulder and kills one of the men. The knife was thrown by Dunn, who holds a second knife that Hal snatches away. Hal is then confronted by a towering, naked black man brandishing an automatic. Dunn thwacks Hal who is knocked unconscious. On waking, and still holding the knife, Hal is horrified to find that he is accused of the murder by Dunn, certified insane (evidently on the spot), and carted off to the nut house.
So far, so good.
Shackled to a cot in said nut house, Hal is introduced to Dr Ottakar Helming, the asylum shrink. Helming is one of those asylum shrinks who is just as crazy as the inmates, as revealed by his German-sounding name and inappropriate giggling. There’s also a chap named Rand who stands about cracking a whip, presumably to keep the nutters in line. By this time Hal is getting worried. That evening, glumly tucking into his dinner and contemplating life in the nut house, he hears a woman’s scream and the sound of running feet. A beautiful blond woman bursts into his cell, which was evidently left unlocked, closely pursued by the whip-brandishing Rand. Hal attacks him in an effort to protect the girl and Rand whips him within an inch of his life.
Regaining consciousness, Hal is taken on a tour of the asylum by Doc Ottakar. The highlight is a huge gallery full of gibbering freaks and lunatics: a guy without a forehead with bulging eyes, someone with an enormous head and skinny body who is always overbalancing, another banana whose head looks like a living skull and who can’t stop laughing maniacally. Then we are introduced to Shang, surely one of the great literary creations, up there with Goncharov’s Oblomov and Updike’s Rabbit. Shang is a giant with huge shoulders and a tiny, wizened doll’s head perched on it, who can only utter primordial growls, grunts and shrieks. When we meet him he has just ripped a guard to pieces. Rand, cracking his whip, forces him back into a room where the gorgeous blond lady, Nan Holmes, is also holed up. Hal escapes his captors and enters the room in an effort to save Nan. It’s pitch black inside and a game of cat-and-mouse ensues. Hal hears Nan’s moans and finds her strung up in chains in a torture chamber. He has time to admire her slender, semi-naked form before he frees her. Shang appears and attacks Hal who is only saved by the sound of a whistle – it seems he’s been trained to respond to it. Doc Ottakar returns Hal to his cell.
During the night Shang creeps into Hal’s cell with murderous intent. Just as Shang is strangling the life out of him, the whistle once again subdues him, and this time Hal sees a voluptuous dark-haired woman who berates Shang and sends him on his way. Hal hears the sound of strangely familiar shuffling feet in the corridor, but the escaped inmate is discovered by Rand who sends him back to his cell with a few cracks of the whip.
Next day the aged family lawyer, Humperdinck visits Hal and tells him about Irma Kahn, his father’s sister long thought dead. Irma and the lawyer, Avory Dunn, were on a cruise with his father, when dad disappears without trace, evidently lost overboard. Hal, razor sharp chap that he is, smells something fishy – with Hal incarcerated as a nut all funds will go to long lost aunty. Exit Humperdinck.
By a cunning ruse, Hal escapes from his cell and chances upon the dark-haired voluptuary with the whistle. Curiously, she is attired only in a black negligee and she introduces herself as…Hal’s long lost aunty, Irma Kahn. She clearly has the hots for Hal, but with astonishing perspicacity Hal detects “something wrong about her” and spurns her advances. However her feminine wiles are hard to resist and just when he is on the verge of surrendering, he hears Nan’s shriek of terror. Hal follows the shrieks down a stone staircase and finds himself in a dungeon, but his way is barred by a locked iron gate. He sees something through the bars, and I must quote at length:
“It was Shang! His diminutive head was outthrust from the awful spread of his tremendous shoulders, little lights were crawling in his beady eyes, spittle drooled from the corners of his thick-lipped, lascivious mouth. His hairy, simian chest heaved with crazed emotion, his bowed legs shambled through slime, and one swarthy arm hung loosely at his side, so long that its knuckles were inches from the scummy floor. The other arm – frantic protest shrieked soundlessly in my squeezed throat – was curled around the waste of a limp form, the form of a girl, of Nan!”
Hal tries to get Irma to call off Shang, but Shang leaps through the iron gate, now unaccountably unlocked, and goes after Irma, doubtless enraged by years of torment. Hal saves Nan, kills Rand with his own whip, and the two escape upstairs, pursued by a fire that has started in the dungeon. Upstairs the loonies have taken over the asylum, Irma has been mortally wounded by Shang, but, naked and bloody, she manages to extract a parting kiss from Hal with her last breath (Nan doesn’t seem to mind). They race up to the cells to escape the spreading fire. Hal discovers that the man who had escaped the night before, and who is still locked in his cell, is in fact his father (!). The three escape via the traditional method of tying sheets together and descending via the window. They evade the police, hijack a convenient taxi, and barrel off to the family mansion. There they find Dunn explaining to Humperdinck how he arranged the dummy murder to have Hal declared insane. Nan is another rich heir he has had locked up. Hal leaps out, Dunn and the lurking naked black man are killed, police are called, and all ends happily with romance in the air.
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Post by andydecker on Nov 7, 2010 17:16:33 GMT
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Post by dem bones on Nov 12, 2010 12:42:10 GMT
indeed they don't, more's the pity. Splendid stuff, James. Robert Kenneth Jones, in his indispensable (and very funny) The Shudder Pulps, dubs Zagat "the master of the tortured phrase" and, from what little i've read of his work ( The Corpse Factory - "Living derelicts, cast ruthlessly aside by the power that had maimed them, they formed in time an Army of the Damned!" - and his "novelette of weird, mysterious doom", Girl Of The Goat-God), he is not wrong. According to Jones, Zagat was a depression era great to rank alongside Hugh B. Cave, John H. Knox and Wyatt Blassingame. Despite a university education and a law degree, Zagat was at an all time low (homeless in NYC, $2.41 to his name) when his wife suggested he put his education to good use and try writing for the weird menace pulps! Talk about "behind every great man is a great woman ..."
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Post by doug on Nov 13, 2010 11:32:02 GMT
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Post by dem bones on Nov 13, 2010 13:20:27 GMT
i've not read any of the stories, but, on the strength of The Corpse Factory and further consultation of Robert Kenneth Jones's superb book, would have to say The Man From Hell is definitely worth a punt.
"Zagat ... out-Gothicized just about everyone else. You couldn't help but admire his colourful expressions, even if you did cringe at his idea anaemia. He spiced his stories liberally with such concoctions as 'choking fetor', 'spectral something', 'lambent gloom', 'virulent torchglow'. Most of these authors could turn Roget's Thesaurus upside down when it came to atmospheric embellishments. In Zaget's case he took it apart page by page. To Roger Howard Norton, a fellow author, Zaget was the 'magister trismegistus of macabre fiction.'"
i've no idea what a 'magister trismegistus' actually is, you understand, but it sounds very impressive.
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Post by jamesdoig on Nov 13, 2010 21:45:09 GMT
Zagat sounds like a one-off. And a lawyer no less - at least he had the good sense to drop that and pursue a glorious literary career. The Man From Hell looks good - I've also noticed on ebay somene is bringing out what look like facsimile editions of Terror Tales and other weird menace/shudder pulps.
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Post by andydecker on Nov 18, 2010 12:07:27 GMT
I've also noticed on ebay somene is bringing out what look like facsimile editions of Terror Tales and other weird menace/shudder pulps. I guess this must be those editions from american publisher Girasol. They do a lot ot this reprints, from The Spider to Spicy Mystery. I was tempted to order some, but at 25 to 35 USD (plus postage) per issue this is a bit on the expensive side.
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Post by jamesdoig on Nov 19, 2010 5:14:48 GMT
I noticed a bunch of nice-looking The Spider at Gaslight Books, the local crime and fantasy bookshop - large format paperbacks with a couple of novellas in each. Didn't check the publisher - they hadn't sold so they'd been marked down to second-hand prices. Didn't get those, but I bought Jeremy Scott (ed) The Mandrake Root: An Anthology of Fantastic Tales (Jerrolds, 1946) - an odd little collection:
Contents Introduction The Extravagant James Joyce, The Everlasting Fire Algernon Blackwood, The Man Who was Milligan Richard Hughes, The Stranger Dorothy K. Haynes, Changeling DH Laerence, The Last Laugh The Grotesque Thomas Ingoldsby, The Leech of Folkestone Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Haunter and the Haunted Fred Marnau, The Wrinkled Women of St Nepomuke Arthur Calder-Marshall, Pickle My Bones Alex Comfort, The Lemmings The Bizarre Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater Guy de Maupassant, The Horla Virginia Woolf, The Lady in the Looking-Glass William Sansom, The Peach-House-Potting-Shed Wrey Gardiner, The White House Olive Schreiner, Who Knocks at the Door The Fanciful Stella Benson, An Air-raid Seen From Above HH Munro, The Open Window Richard Garnett, The Bell of St Euschemon EM Forster, The Story of a Panic The Quaint MR James, "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come, My Lad" TF Powys, No Room Pamela Hansford Johnson, Altarwise by Owl-Light Walter de la Mare, Winter The Eerie J. Sheridan le Fanu, The Familiar James Laver, Mr Hopkins and Galatea John Atkins, The Diary of William Carpenter Sir Osbert Sitwell, The Greeting
Also got a book of essays ed by Clive Bloom called Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century.
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Post by doug on Nov 19, 2010 12:03:27 GMT
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 21, 2011 11:56:17 GMT
There is a long and unconvincing psychoanalytical essay about the shudder pulps here - jeangregorek.com/horror.htmlIt is by an academic called Jean Gregorek, and she says it "began life as a graduate seminar paper and an exercise in psychoanalytic criticism for a course in feminist popular culture". I am not recommending that anyone try to read it - I just scanned over it myself when I realized what it was - but I thought the paragraphs below were worth excising. Unfortunately, it's not clear who these stories were written by. <START QUOTE> Perhaps the most clear-cut example of the typical shudder-pulp formula is found in a tale called "Dance of the Bloodless Ones" (1937). In this first-person narrative, several young American couples are vacationing on a remote island inhabited only by Portugese fishermen. Their hoped-for idyll turns into a harrowing nightmare when they are menaced by a slimy and foul-smelling octopus monster. The creature first murders all of the American women, mutilating their faces horribly with its beak; later it steals the naked female corpses in order to bring them back to life and romp on the beach with them to the ostensible horror and shame of the American men. The once demure wives, now apparently transformed into sex-crazed zombies, are whipped into a lascivious frenzy by the octopus monster's tentacles. This part of the text is of course accompanied by illustrations. By the end of the story, the monster turns out to be the device of a young college-educated Portugese fisherman in a rubber octopus suit. Corrupted by a mixture of genetic deficiency and higher education (one wonders which did more) the evil Portugese youth had developed this elaborate plot in order to scare the Americans off the island so that he could begin to mine the valuable tungston ore with which the island turns out to be laden. He had actually kidnapped the wives, rather than killing them, and replaced their "bodies" with the corpses of Portugese village girls who had recently died--we are never told how--savagely and completely mutilating their faces so that the switch would not be noticed. Through the use of mysterious mind-altering drugs, he had managed to evoke "unnatural sex impulses" in the captive women and force them, through "the power of suggestion," to take part in lewd dances. When the drug wears off, they cannot remember any of this, and so cannot be held responsible for their shocking behavior. Ultimately, the sinister Portugese threat is destroyed and all American husbands and wives are happily reunited. This formulaic plot is enacted repeatedly in the pulps with local and supernatural variations. In "White Mother of Shadows" (1941), voodoo demons take the place of the octopus monster and Haitians substitute for Portugese. The secret villain turns out to be a white plantation foreman cleverly manipulating the natives, as persons of African descent are apparently beyond the realm of believability in the minds of pulp writers as the inventors of complicated evil plots. In "A Beast is Born" (1940), a similar scenario is played out in an asylum for "mental unfortunates," also described as "mewling cretins," who are being guided by a diabolical ward attendant in a hairy suit. An interesting plot twist occurs in "Mistress of the Blood Drinkers" (1940) in which a seemingly-fatherly family doctor, with the eager assistance of an "oriental temptress," uses marijuana to drug a loving husband into a murderous frenzy and attempts to induce him to kill his own wife and drink her blood; fortunately the wife escapes at the last minute and the hero vents his blood lust on the treacherous doctor and a "brutish" Mongolian servant instead. In all cases, the villain, once unmasked, turns out to have purely economic motives for his elaborate scheme of terror: money or power is his real object. <END QUOTE>
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Post by dem bones on Mar 21, 2011 12:36:40 GMT
Ah, have read Dance Of The Bloodless Ones in Sheldon Jaffery's The Weirds (Starmont, 1987) and it is indeed an excellent example of the form. Here's a detail from the illustration Jean Gregorek refers to - couldn't do the whole thing without ruining the book but this will give you some idea. George Vandegrift's White Mother of Shadows is reprinted in the same anthology though in spite of Jean's excellent synopsis it's not ringing any bells which can only mean i ain't read it as it's not the type of lunacy anyone is likely to forget.
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