|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 3, 2023 11:46:23 GMT
Jeffrey Shanks [ed.] - Zombies from the Pulps! Twenty Classic Stories of the Walking Dead (Skelos Press, 2014) List of Illustrations
Publication History
Acknowledgements
Jeffrey Shanks - Introduction: Dawn of the Zombie Genre
H. P. Lovecraft - Herbert West — Reanimator
Henry S. Whitehead - Jumbee
Seabury Quinn - The Corpse-Master
H. De Vere Stacpoole - Dead Girl Finotte
G. W. Hutter - Salt is Not for Slaves
Ray Cummings - The Dead Who Walk
August Derleth & Mark Schorer - The House in the Magnolias
Clark Ashton Smith - The Empire of the Necromancers
Ben Judson - The Devil's Dowry
E. Hoffmann Price - The Walking Dead
Henry Kuttner - The Graveyard Rats
Jack D'Arcy - The Grave Gives Up
Carl Moore - Zombie
Arthur Leo Zagat - Revels for the Lusting Dead
Edith & Ejler Jacobson - Corpses on Parade
Robert E. Howard - Pigeons from Hell
Russell Gray - The Man Who Loved a Zombie
Thorp McCluskey - While Zombies Walked
Manly Wade Wellman - The Song of the Slaves
Jane Rice - The Forbidden Trail
Copyrights and Permissions
About the EditorBlurb: ZOMBIES! From The Walking Dead to World War Z to Plants vs. Zombies, they have become a multimedia pop culture sensation. But this isn’t the first zombie boom—in the 1920s and 30s, stories of voodoo zombie masters, mad scientists animating corpses, and evil sorcerers raising undead armies first began to appear in books, in movies, and in the pages of the pulp magazines. This volume collects twenty creepy tales from pulps like Weird Tales, Dime Mystery, and Terror Tales by writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, and E. Hoffmann Price. From genuine horror classics like “Herbert West — Reanimator” and “Pigeons from Hell” to rare and hard-to-find tales from the notorious shudder pulps, this anthology edited with an introduction by Jeffrey Shanks is one that no zombie fan should miss! Zombies in their traditional, reanimated by voodoo incarnation as opposed to the post-Romero ghouls. Particularly delighted to see the shudder pulps well represented, two Spicy Mystery Stories, too.  Amos Sewell: ( Dime Mystery, April 1938). From the doors of the exclusive Quadrangle Club they spewed forth — those living corpses whose very presence filled the streets of New York with the stench of the charnel house. But the fiend who created them was not yet satisfied ... An epidemic of rotting death among the patrons of New York's most exclusive upper crust hang-out. Freelance reporter Barry Amsterdam is particularly concerned for Bonny Carter, sister of the latest casualty. Encouraged by Duke Livingstone, editor of The Chronicle, Amsterdam infiltrates the Quadrangle Club. During initiation night, he is forced into a cage and tormented by Justice, master of retribution, blackmailer of those whose past crimes have gone unpunished. The newshound is given the choice; either he part with $100, 000 or he can watch the girl he loves putrefy before his eyes! Incredibly, when first I read this in Sheldon Jaffrey's Selected Tales of Grim & Grue, it didn't leave an impression(!), which is almost impossible.  Hugh Rankin: ( Weird Tales, Jan 1930). A story of the West Indies, of Zombies, of dead men risen from their graves to become mindless robots Inspired by William Seabrook's Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields. Saint-Pierre, Martinique. Within a week of Finotte's sudden death, her mother pays the grieving Baidaux a visit to inform him that his fiancée is out of her grave and working in the cocoa fields, a mindless drone. Baidaux walks the twenty miles to see for himself, and learns of a Plantation owner who has acquired the services of a herbalist, Mamam Fally, to provide doses of the zombie drug. TBC
|
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 4, 2023 19:24:31 GMT
 G. O. Olinick: ( Weird Tales, Sept 1926). A story of weird native beliefs in America's newest possessions, the Virgin Islands. Mr. Jaffrey Da Silva shares his first hand experience of the supernatural on Saint Croix. Includes a visit from friend Iverson shortly after he succumbed to a heart attack, and run in with the hanging jumbees — maiden, man-child, and shrew — culminating in a life or death struggle with a werehound outside the Moravian church. G. O. Olinick gallery C. C. Senf: ( Weird Tales, July 1929). An adventure of Jules de Grandin — a vivid tale of blood-freezing murders and corpses that walk in the night! Two gory, highly dubious "suicides" and the sadistic murder of an infant girl lead De Grandin and Trowbridge to investigate the Rangers Club, whose grievance committee comprised the two alleged self-murderers and the father of the butchered child. Five years ago, these three had expelled a portly fellow named Wallagin for an involvement with Haiti's infamous Culte des Morts. The banished explorer swore revenge. Wallagin has since bought a secluded mansion in Morrisdale where he lives with a Chinese cook, three attractive young women and, of late, a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Gyp Carson, "th' meanest killer th' force ever had to deal with," fried in the hot seat at Trenton last month. De Grandin's surveillance of this Wallagin's residence is rewarded when "a gross person who remind me most unpleasantly of a pig" manhandles the cook from the premises for the crime of adding salt to the gruel. De Grandin, an admirer of Seabrook's The Magic Island, bribes the replacement chef to spike tonight's dish with a lump of beef. With the replacement chef in their pay, De Grandin, Trowbridge and Costello slip inside the mansion unmolested to witness horrors unspeakable! On Wallagin's bidding, the three blank eyed glamour girls — each sporting an embalmer's "baseball stitches" beneath the armpit — perform a travesty of a shimmy to a drum beat provided by a likewise vacuous Gyp Carson. Even perma-incredulous Sam Trowbridge concedes the awful truth — the performers are dead. Suitably entertained, Wallagin has the new cook serve these artistes their gruel .... Can only assume CCT didn't receive the July 1929 issue, as The Corpse-master was tailor-made for the Not At Night's. The prohibition era de Grandin's are far my favourites! Curtis C. Senf gallery |
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Feb 4, 2023 21:21:23 GMT
Ooh! These are gorgeous.
Some day, some inventive artist or media person will bring back "old school Zombies" (one is tempted to call them proper Zombies tout court since the "zombies" of the present era seem to be a mash-up of ghouls and revenants).
cheers, Hel
|
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 5, 2023 11:40:49 GMT
 C. C. CenfCenf's gorgeous cover painting for The Corpse-Master. It's the prohibition-era de Grandin's do it for me and the zombie outing is a good example of for why. It's horrible!  Alex Schomburg The Dead Who Walk, Thrilling Mystery, March 1940. : ( Strange Tales of Mystery & Terror, Sept. 1931).
|
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 6, 2023 10:37:39 GMT
G. W. Hutter - Salt is Not for Slaves: ( Ghost Stories, Aug./Sept. 1931). Six dead men danced macabre through the burning streets of an ancient, sin-cursed Haiti — till they knew they were dead. Tresaint, the overseer, leads an uprising on the plantation, trashing the mansion house, looting the wine cellar. His fatal mistake is to break open a salt casket in defiance of the master's solemn warning that not a single grain must ever pass his lips. Narrated by Marie, the improbably long-lived housemaid, Tresaint's lover of all those years ago. " .... God, Monsieur, it was such a sight that would strike you dead. Six dead men racing and falling down the road, dragging along a woman more gripped by fear and horror than death itself holds. Heads like death; bodies stripped of clothes, the rags fluttering behind them; skeleton ribs showing the dust of the road through their gaunt gaps; the fleshless arms raised, threshing the air; and above all the shrill, deep unearthly yells that came from still throats. On down the road!" Also available in Peter Haining's Zombie: Tales of the Walking Dead, as are Jumbee, The House in the Magnolias and While Zombies Walked.  T. Wyatt Nelson: ( Weird Tales, Sept. 1932). An endless army of plague-eaten bodies, of tattered skeletons, poured in ghastly torrents through the city streets. Driven from Tinarath (!), the vile Mmatmour and Sodosma raise an entire city's dead as their slaves. "Those that were fairest, whom the plague and the worm had not ravaged overmuch, they took for their lemans and made to serve their necrophilic lust." Illeiro, the youngest of the resurrected Emperors, persuades an ancient sorcerer to release their people from undeath. But how to punish the necromancers?  Rafael DeSoto: ( Strange Tales, June 1932). ".... And the Curious Detail That the Graves Had Been Half Dug by Bare Fingers ....". New Orleans. More dead men working the plantation, this time under the control of a hideous mambo. Zombies yet to show slightest interest in feasting on brains, entrails, etc.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 7, 2023 12:02:13 GMT
 Joseph Szokoli: ( Spicy Mystery, Nov. 1935). Mississippi Delta. Walt Connell sets forth to find a slave, Plato Jones, who has failed to return from a trip to the wine store. A hot-blooded Cajun babe at the store says there's no hope for Plato, he is now a walking dead toiling day and night on Pierre Ducoin's plantation. A steamy romp in the store room and then Walt drives out to the orange fields. A genial Ducoin — boots, riding breeches, etc — denies any knowledge of this Plato, but should he wish, Connell is welcome to stay overnight, check for himself tomorrow. That night, Walt receives a scantily clad visitor to his room. Madeleine, the overseer's sensual niece, warns him he must leave now! Plato is indeed among the twelve men working the plantation, and he will be another if her evil uncle finds them together! As Connell and the girl get to know one another, 'Aunt Célie,' Ducoin's pet Haitian voodoo priestess, prepares a fresh batch of the zombie drug .... Pulp zombies still to discover cannibalism, although on this occasion they are allowed some quality score settling before returning to their graves.  Virgil Finlay: ( Weird Tales, Sept. 1939) A dark story of living dead men. Rev. Warren Barnes, seriously lapsed apostate priest, works doll magic to commandeer old man Barnes' cotton fields and raise a workforce of broken and rotting white zombies. Denied a woman all these years, the holy man plans on breaking his duck with Barnes' mandatory niece, Eileen. But first he'll need to be rid of the girl's sweetheart, Anthony Kent. |
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 9, 2023 11:22:06 GMT
Ben Judson - The Devil's Dowry: ( Terror Tales, Feb. 1935). A bent doctor and a voodoo high priest operate a lucrative zombie racket from a Dwight Street tenement. Peleg injects select patients with a Haitian death drug, Simone approaches the bereaved, offers to resurrect the dear departed for a paltry $500 fee. Any attractive young women are sold to white slavers on the Barbary coast. Our narrator, a reporter on the Evening Mercury, becomes suspicious after his fiancée drops dead following a visit to the surgery. A pre-sex & sadism Terror Tale before the whips and blow torches came into the equation. This next, however, is a shudder pulp masterpiece.  William Meilink: ( Terror Tales, July-Aug 1937). Linda Loray went to the quiet country town of Torburg to become a bride — but not the Bride of Lazarus, a mad fiend who conducted midnight orgies where naked, maniac girls clawed one another asunder in bestial fury — and the spectators were dead men lusting for the sight of blood. "You shall have your bride to warm your earthen bed for you — as have all your brothers in the League of Lazarus." Linda Loray arrives in Torburg village, New England on the eve of her wedding. Disappointed that her fiancée, Hort Carst, isn't there to meet her off the train, she takes a room at the inn by the graveyard. What a terrible mistake! The receptionist is creepy, the air reeks of funeral flowers, and two armed men stand guard over a coffin in the hall! That night, the dead crawl from their graves. Using a stone monument as a battering ram, they break down the door to the inn, slaughter the staff, and make off with a terrified Linda and the improbably lively corpse of the late Henry Fulton (he sits up in his coffin, all delighted). Linda awakens in the dead folk's Palace of Pain beneath the crypt. There, the vile hag Ninita, "the scrawny old panderer of temptation," tortures caged young women until they are ready to catfight to the death for the entertainment for of slobbering lechers in mortuary shroud fancy dress. Where is Hort? What can have happened to him! Who is that horrible man brandishing an evil whip? Lazarus, master of ceremonies, warns her that she is promised in wedlock to the new brother, Fulton, unless she prefers the alternative. So, "What is your choice, Linda Loray? Bridal bed or the lash?" Read it on Gutenberg
|
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Feb 9, 2023 13:32:43 GMT
Wonderful illustrations. Pity nobody collected them in a book.
To be honest, in the dim past interior illustrations were a thing I seldom had time for. In the 60s and 70s we had sometimes a few in the pulps. It was just part of the package. Nowadays I often ask myself why I didn't appreciate it more. Considering the plunge into the abyss 90% of contemporary commercial art for literature had done, it seems to have been short-sighted.
|
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Feb 9, 2023 15:49:59 GMT
Holy Hell! Revels for the Lusting Dead has to rate as Ground Zero Vault. Implacable! Out of the way, Mrs Pierce Nace!
cheers, Hel.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 10, 2023 15:50:55 GMT
Wonderful illustrations. Pity nobody collected them in a book. To be honest, in the dim past interior illustrations were a thing I seldom had time for. In the 60s and 70s we had sometimes a few in the pulps. It was just part of the package. Nowadays I often ask myself why I didn't appreciate it more. Considering the plunge into the abyss 90% of contemporary commercial art for literature had done, it seems to have been short-sighted.
As mentioned lots and lots, it was the illustrations first got me into the shudder pulps, via Peter Haining's indispensable Terror/Pictorial History of Horror Stories. Love at first sight!  Paul H. Stone: ( Spicy Mystery Stories, Nov. 1936). Three after he arrived in Haiti, Jim Herriott cables his sweetheart, Marie Terrill, to come marry him now he's made his fortune. Ti Poum, Herriott's local bit on the side all this time, is understandably put out at her unceremonious dismissal, and consults Mamam Celie, the voodoo priestess, to put the wanga-morts on him. Soon, Herriott's joyless marriage falls apart under the persecution of a walking corpse, but even then, Ti Poum is far from done with him. Pretty dark for a Spicy. |
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 11, 2023 17:54:00 GMT
 Amos Sewell: ( Terror Tales, May-June, 1939). From their graves they came — an army of horror to rule the world! Joey Cobb returns home to Redwell to find the community in the grip of a mystery death epidemic. One minute so-and-so is merrily going about their business, two hours later they're on the mortuary slab. With the coming of night, their corpse will rise up from beneath the soil to hoe the tomato fields on the late Mr & Mrs. Blagden's farm. Cobb reckons it's all some crazy hoax — until his gal, Holly Bolland, is killed in a motor "accident." With the walking dead now numbering twenty, the corpse master puts phase two of the master plan into operation. He arms them with automatic rifles! It transpires that a prominent Redwell citizen, recently returned from Port-au-Prince, has persuaded a Wall Street big shot to fund his zombie-raising programme with a view to seizing control of the town! It wasn't a difficult sell. Henry Yates, the moneybags in question, has always fancied himself a Great Dictator. "I shall be the greatest man in the history of mankind!.... Caesar and Napoleon had only mortal legions to lead. I shall have an invincible army!" Plenty of death/ "death" and violence — hero spends much of the story beating up the wrong people — but entirely bereft of flagellation and non-consentual body piercing interludes. Can't help but wonder if Man who Loved ... was written for a less disreputable weird pulp. It hardly reads like a Terror Tale at all.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 12, 2023 19:40:28 GMT
 Harry Ferman: : ( Weird Tales, March 1940). What weird chant sounded its blood-chilling message through the night? Charleston, South Carolina, 1853. The eerie chant loosely translates as; "Though you carry me away in chains, I am free when I die. Back will I come to bewitch and kill you," and when Gender, a sadistic plantation owner and slave trader, drowns forty-nine chained blacks at sea to escape prosecution, the murdered men make good on their threat. Also available in Phil Strong's The Other Worlds and Stephen Jones' Mammoth Book of Zombies Edd Cartier: ( Unknown, Apr. 1941). The native superstition said the trail was taboo, but the white explorers naturally knew better. Much better — when they returned. Khordon, Liberia. Government official Munchiman goes AWOL investigating some cock-and-bull story of an entire village of zombies near Bandigara. Colonel Mayhew persuades Tony and Meg Rutherford, commercial photographers and adventurers, to enquire of his whereabouts at Captain Langhorn's rubber plantation. Turns out there's more than a little horrible truth to the rumour. Langhorn is performing organ transplants on the newly dead to revive them as his workforce and private army, the luckless Munchiman and local Gueres cannibals providing the raw materials. |
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Feb 14, 2023 9:38:00 GMT
 Jayem Wilcov: : ( Thrilling Mystery, Aug. 1936). Two weeks after she was pronounced dead in a car accident, Janice Lancing phones her sweetheart. "Gordon! Come to me — I need You! I need you. I — " A blood-curdling scream and she is gone! Gordon traces the call to Gaunt Hill cemetery and rushes out into the night, stopping at the house of Dr. Ramos to tell him what's happened. Could it be that the physician was mistaken? Ramos assures him Janice is dead, that the call is the work of a sick hoaxes, and demands he keep away from the Gaunt Hill. Lane is not to be deterred. Arriving at the cemetery on the marsh, he hears a stirring within the Cervantes crypt. He slips inside to witness several corpses climbing from their coffins! No such luck in the Lancing vault. Janice's casket is empty! Gordon reports his findings to Cataran the caretaker, which is not the smartest move in the circumstances. Cataran moonlights as slave master to a six strong bogus zombie workforce provided by Ramos, a master mesmerist with a hatred of the Christian God. Ramos has his labourers digging night and day for the Indian treasure reputedly buried beneath the catacombs. As to Janice; "First he made violent love to me and I refused him. Second, I learned his awful secret." H. P. Lovecraft - Herbert West - Reanimator: ( Home Brew, Feb-July 1922: Weird Tales, March, July, Sept, Nov., 1942: Sept, Nov 1943). Can the dead be brought back to life? Read this tale and see. Have already given this one quite the seeing to on thread devoted to Karl E. Wagner's Intensive Scare, so here instead, the set of illo's which accompanied the stop-start Weird Tales serialization.  G. Roller: ( Weird Tales, March 1942)  G. Roller: ( Weird Tales, July 1942)  Correll: ( Weird Tales, Sept 1942)  Damon Knight: ( Weird Tales, Nov 1942)  Richard Bennett: ( Weird Tales, Sept 1943)  Richard Bennett: ( Weird Tales, Nov 1943) |
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Feb 14, 2023 10:14:38 GMT
H. P. Lovecraft - Herbert West - Reanimator: ( Home Brew, Feb-July 1922: Weird Tales, March, July, Sept, Nov., 1942: Sept, Nov 1943). Can the dead be brought back to life? Read this tale and see. Have already given this one quite the seeing to on thread devoted to Karl E. Wagner's Intensive Scare, so here instead, the set of illo's which accompanied the stop-start Weird Tales serialization. Considering how much the artists got paid for this and that they have been forgotten, one can't help but thinking that they were wasted for a magazine like WT. Especially Roller and Correll are way above throwaway commercial artwork.
|
|
