Nat Schachner - The Devil's Nightclub

[dem bones]

Nat Schachner - The Devil's Nightclub & other stories (Dancing Tuatara Press, 2011)

Gavin L. O'Keefe

John Pelan - Introduction: Nat Schachner - Mr. Terror Tales

The Devil’s Night Club
A Feast for Hell’s Angels
Monsters of the Pit
They Dare Not Die
Thirst of the Ancients
Creatures of the Dusk
Parade of the Tiny Killers
Factory for Death

Blurb:
John Pelan introduces this new collection of horror tales from the pulps by Nat Schachner, who quietly dominated the cast of authors who wrote for Terror Tales back in the 30s. Even today these stories have the power to fascinate and horrify.

This collection includes stories originally published in Terror Tales and Dime Mystery Magazine between 1934 and 1939

Amos Sewell

Thirst of the Ancients: (Terror Tales, Feb. 1935). On the eve of her twentieth birthday, newly-wed Elise Carson receives a telegram informing her that Uncle Philip is at death's door, and perhaps she'd like to return home this one last time? Husband John takes it philosophically - "That's too bad, honey. But don't take on so. After all, uncle's do die." Elise, however, insists on a mercy dash to the invalid's backwoods mansion in Satanstoe. Much to her horror, John insists on acting as chaperone.

From their arrival it's obvious that Elise is a local legend. Villagers cower, panicked horses bolt at sight of her. On finally reaching the Dewart place, the pair are welcomed by Lem, Uncle Philip's hulking idiot manservant, who drools, cackles and carries on something alarming at Miss Elise's return. Lem is no looker, but Uncle Philip is an absolute horror, a mad-eyed, wheelchair-bound living mummy, mouldering parchment skin shrivelled "like and empty sack." John Carson doesn't take to them at all. Making up the terrifying household, Nancy Tennant, the obligatory Terror Tales good girl, who seemingly acts as Philip Dewart's live-in carer.

As you may have guessed from the title (and from her penchant for biting John's neck during moments of passion), Elise is an ancient vampire, doomed to feast upon the blood of a victim once every twenty years, or perish. Uncle Phil, the sadistic bloodsucker who made her that way, is far the thirstier of the two top the point where he keeps a cauldron of acid in the cellar for the disposal of emptied human husks. Can John and Nancy somehow effect an escape from Satanstoe or will the vampires feed at midnight!

Have wanted to read this one ever since first setting eyes on the above illustration in Peter Haining's Terror! all those centuries back. Now I have and somehow it is ... just exactly what I expected from the extraordinary Mr. Sewell's artwork!

[andydecker]

I don't know how often I looked that one up in the past. But then I already had four others of the edition which I never read and for once said no. With those Terror Tales I often had the impression that the myth is better than the original thing. I sampled one of Zagat and Rogers and was quite underwhelmed.

So it is good to know that Schachner can deliver.

[humgoo]

May 6, 2021 18:44:37 GMT dem bones said:

Have wanted to read this one ever since first setting eyes on the above illustration in Peter Haining's Terror! all those centuries back. Now I have and somehow it is ... just exactly what I expected from the extraordinary Mr. Sewell's artwork!

I don't believe it I don't believe it! Now I just have to get the book in order to find out ... you fiend Dem!

[andydecker]

May 7, 2021 14:43:34 GMT humgoo said:

May 6, 2021 18:44:37 GMT dem bones said:

Have wanted to read this one ever since first setting eyes on the above illustration in Peter Haining's Terror! all those centuries back. Now I have and somehow it is ... just exactly what I expected from the extraordinary Mr. Sewell's artwork!

I don't believe it I don't believe it! Now I just have to get the book in order to find out ... you fiend Dem!

The story is also included in Terror Tales - Nat Schachner, Book 1, one of those Radio Archives Pulp Classics by Kindle. The imprint has done quite a few reprints of Terror Tales material.

[dem bones]

May 6, 2021 21:55:21 GMT andydecker said:

I don't know how often I looked that one up in the past. But then I already had four others of the edition which I never read and for once said no. With those Terror Tales I often had the impression that the myth is better than the original thing. I sampled one of Zagat and Rogers and was quite underwhelmed.

So it is good to know that Schachner can deliver.

In self's case the lurid covers, interiors and exuberant blurbs have always been the appeal, so it's to the authors great credit that, stripped of all three, several of the stories in Tales of Torment still retain entertainment value, though there's no way I'd want to attempt the book in one hit. As with a De Grandin story, I reckon the shudders are best enjoyed (if at all) as an occasional treat, because, God knows, even those John Pelan includes as departures from the formula, don't, for the most part, depart very far.

As to the Nat Schachner collection, Thirst of the Ancients is not quite up there with Fresh Fiance's ..., Revelry in Hell or The Mole Men Want Your Eyes, but ... it cheered me up. anyhow.

[andydecker]

May 7, 2021 20:02:19 GMT dem bones said:

As to the Nat Schachner collection, Thirst of the Ancients is not quite up there with Fresh Fiance's ..., Revelry in Hell or The Mole Men Want Your Eyes, but ... it cheered me up. anyhow.

So it did what it is supposed to do. :-)

You are right, this is read at best in small doses. Aside the 2 Gray's I bought Knox, Rogers and Zagat from Pelan. I couldn't get into them at the time. The very sameness of the stuff is sometimes a bit of an obstacle. I sometimes think going the sampler route like you did is the better way than starting with collections.

[dem bones]

Nat Schachner - Monsters of the Pit: (Terror Tales, Nov. 1934). No ordinary, boring, wild-sex-around-the-clock honeymoon for stockbroker Philip Rollins and his blushing bride, Kay. Phil has decided they'll begin married life with a canoe trip along Great Slave Lake in the great Northern wilderness. True, the old man at the trading post urged them to turn back, avoid the place from which none return, but then the Injun's always were a superstitious bunch! Washed up on the edge of the wood, the newly-weds are set upon by red-eyed, slobbering, tusked Neanderthals of prodigious strength. Kay is taken to the cave of torture where the man-apes, led by a bulging-skulled Priest, make sacrifice to the Pain God!

[dem bones]

"A stone idol that walks like a man; white boys that are changed by some dreadful process into obscene pigmies"

Parade of the Tiny Killers: (Terror Tales, Jan-Feb. 1939). Valentine Frazer was the town's laughingstock, then. But they didn't laugh a year later, when Valentine came back with an evil stone idol which seemed to come to terrible life - to crush the town's fairest girls to death in its basalt arms!

Some months previously, Frazer returned from Tanganyika's Devil-Devil Mountains, insisting he'd discovered a previously unreported cannibal pigmy race. Among the many to mock these preposterous claims, Peggy Whitman, ace reporter of the Daily Argus. A triumphant return sees a vindicated Frazer welcomed home to Centerville with the pigmies and a huge stone statue of their sacred idol, Nba, or, to put it less diplomatically, a leering "gargoyle of ugliness" in black basalt. Miss Whitman and her fiancé, Jerry Doane, lawyer, find the town's about face unnerving, not least because Frazer, having failed to find anything amusing in Peggy's satire, has sworn to "make her suffer" along with the rest of the fools.

Despite protestations from Dwight Ewing, Centerville other famous explorer and the curator of its museum, Frazer and Jimmy Rean, Circus proprietor, arrange a sell-out gala Meet the Savage's event under the big top. The pigmies have other ideas. Led by their mobile idol, they make off into the swamp with the most desirable of Centerville's young women and several children, intent on offering all in bloody torture-sacrifice to Nba. A lynch mob follow in pursuit. We're in for one Hell of a night!

Crushed infants, a heroine whose shapeliness of thigh and rounded curves would corrupt "the saintliest anchorite," a Scooby-Doo unmasking, and a dénouement so outrageous it brought on a near-fatal coughing fit. For those who love a shudder pulp, this one should see you right.

Amos Sewell

They Dare Not Die: (Terror Tales, Jan. 1935). Lured to the house of horror on the hill, the two lovers found themselves a prey to hideous ancients, who fought and clawed over them in their slobbering greed.

See Terror Tales, Jan. 1935.