Ed Hulse [ed.] - Satan Lives for My Love!

[humgoo]

Ed Hulse [ed.] - Satan Lives for My Love!: Sex and Sadism in Marvel's Horror Pulps, 1938-1940 (Murania Press, 2019)

J. W. Scott (Mystery Tales, May 1939)

Introduction by Ed Hulse
Donald Graham - Satan Lives for My Love!
Arthur J. Burks - Mates for the Morgue Master
Holden Sanford - The Monster Must Eat!
Donald Graham - Revelry in Hell
Brent North - Breath of the Lusting Ones
Russell Gray - The Gargoyles of Madness
Holden Sanford - Cult of the Lusting Carcass
John Wallace - Blood-Bait for Hungry Mermaids
Russell Gray - Fresh Fiancés for the Devil's Daughter
Donald Graham - Mates for Hell's Half-World Minions

Blurb:

Before launching what would become the Marvel Comics empire, Martin Goodman published low-rent pulp magazines issued by a dizzying array of shell companies designed to insulate him from creditors. In order to compete in an already-crowded marketplace, he allowed editor-in-chief Robert O. Erisman to distinguish these periodicals with lurid covers and sensational fiction. They eschewed explicit descriptions of sex acts but otherwise left nothing to the imagination, routinely trafficking in torture and paraphilia. Bearing Goodman’s "Red Circle" trademark, the horror pulps Mystery Tales, Uncanny Tales, Marvel Tales, and Real Mystery were transgressive in the extreme, shattering the boundaries of good taste and igniting a firestorm of outrage that eventually drove them off the newsstands. Although Goodman continued publishing pulps as well as comic books well into the 1950s, he deliberately allowed Mystery Tales and its sister magazines to lapse into obscurity, making no attempt to renew their copyrights or reprint their contents in other periodicals or paperback editions. This anthology collects the wildest, most offensive stories from those long-forgotten magazines, making it a veritable cornucopia of sexual violence and perversion!

From editor's introduction:

What still impresses about the Red Circle horror pulps is not the quality or inventiveness of their stories. Popular's weird-menace titles, on the whole, were better written and more influential. Harry Steeger's magazines were the first to promote sex and sadism; Martin Goodman, as always, had chosen to follow another's lead. But Mystery Tales, Uncanny Tales, and Real Mystery pushed the envelope to a nearly unimaginable degree. In truth, they couldn't have lasted beyond 1940. There was no way to top "Fresh Fiancés for the Devil's Daughter" and "Mates for Hell's Half-World Minions" without inviting prosecution.

[dem bones]

This looks lovely, Humgoo. Are the stories accompanied by the original illustrations? As to the editor's "they couldn't have lasted beyond 1940," I think that's what's great about the shudder/ sex & sadism pulps. No overstaying their welcome. Five, six years and they were done.

[jamesdoig]

Mar 7, 2023 20:11:05 GMT dem bones said:

This looks lovely, Humgoo.

Yeah, and it's impossible to choose my favourite story title. Maybe "Cult of the Lusting Carcass."

[humgoo]

Mar 7, 2023 20:11:05 GMT dem bones said:

Are the stories accompanied by the original illustrations?

No such luck! Probably need to wait for some Adventure House facsimile for that.

[dem bones]

Ah well, can't have everything, though no question the art is a big miss. I've a couple of these in Robert Weinberg's Pulp Classic #3: Revelry in Hell and Tom Mason had the good/ disgusting [delete as applicable] taste to include Fresh Fiancé's ..., Cult of the Lusting Carcass and Satan Lives for My Love! in Spicy Horror Stories, so that's most of the illo's accounted for.

[dem bones]

Ed Hulse [ed.] - Satan Lives for My Love!: Sex and Sadism in Marvel's Horror Pulps, 1938-1940 (Murania Press, 2019)

J. W. Scott

John Wallace - Blood-Bait for Hungry Mermaids: (Mystery Tales, Dec. 1939). My Pamela would be the most beautiful mermaid of them all, and that's what mattered - not that a fiend's fishhook would be torn from her lovely mouth, not that her lovely body would be split in two!

According to local folklore, three mermaids return to the rock every twenty years. Bob Barton, wife Pamela and her kid sister, nineteen-year-old Lucy, take a fishing boat out to the point for the anniversary, blithely unaware that one among their companions has devised a hideous charade involving nude bathers in elasticated fishtails which will ultimately see the girls gutted and Bob committed to the insane asylum for their murders! "She screamed — whether in pain or masochistic ecstasy, I couldn't determine ..." An abundance of breast-fixated torture and sewing shut of mouths with cheese wire. Story also benefits from lewd carrying's-on of obligatory lecherous imbecile.

Alex Schomburg

The same illustration accompanies Cult of the Lusting Carcass in the Tom Mason edited Spicy Horror Stories (Malibu Graphics, 1990)

Arthur J. Burks - Mates for the Morgue Master: (Mystery Tales, Dec. 1939). "Nothing can be done to this man, gentlemen, can punish him enough for this horror." Twenty-something hobo Joseph Morgan takes work as night attendant at Heller City morgue, whose creepy proprietor, clammy Simeon Lake, takes delight in informing the new boy that none of his predecessors have survived three shifts before going insane. The first night is certainly eventful; a corpse he has the hots for not only revives but comes onto him before escaping into the night! Joseph stalks the beautiful cadaver to a house in the worst part of the city where her fellow "dead" nightly gather for sado-torture orgies. The girl, improbably named Merry Tarn, has Joe lashed to an inverted cross for agonising molestation. It's a hell of a party until she spoils everything by wondering aloud if she should expose Simeon's racket to the press? Commendably downbeat and unrelentingly unpleasant. A shudder pulp classic.

[dem bones]

Holden Sanford - The Monster Must Eat!: (Real Mystery, July 1940). "Filthy, rotten extortion! You know damned well we'll pay anything we can to save the girls from the defiling putrescence of your touch — and worse!"

Driving through hillbilly country with fiancée, Ruth, and friends, Tom and Paula Anderson, Hank hits someone or something in the road. The "victim" — an enormous slobbering cretin known — survives suspiciously unharmed, but stout-hearted Tom Anderson insists on finding him a doctor. Better they'd left "Little Jeff" Coon to make his own way home, rather than meet the parents — a corrupt general practitioner and a debauched hag who wastes no time upsetting the girls.

"The doctor ain't had a decent body to work on in a long time! It's time the Blind Carter sent along another! Little Jeff, too, has been crying for another corpse to play with! Both of them will be pleased by tonight's work!" Oh, Hank, dear, what did she mean? Is she mad — or something worse?"

Just as Hank and friends make to leg it, two evil-faced, rifle-toting fellows usher them into the surgery. Far as they're concerned, the young city folk are spoils of the highway, theirs to do with as they please — the gals in particular! The Doctor states his terms. Either Hank and Tom each pay him a substantial amount of cash, or he lets loose his lust-crazed confederates on their women. And to prove it's no bluff, Little Jeff is gonna have some fun with poor Paula ....

Inexpiable torture porn, only slightly marred by an abrupt happy-for-some ending.

[andydecker]

Are the illustrations included in this? I am tempted, but without them I don't know.

[dem bones]

Apr 10, 2023 19:41:21 GMT andydecker said:

Are the illustrations included in this? I am tempted, but without them I don't know.

That was my first question, too. Sadly, they're not, but I'm still delighted with Satan Lives For My Love! — so much so that I picked up the companion volume, Mistress of Dread and Desire, a Mystery Tales special. The stories read like they are determined to live down to John Newton Howett and friends' nightmarish cover artwork for rivals Popular pulps' comparatively restrained (!) Terror Tales, Horror Stories, and the sex & sadism incarnation of Dime Mystery.

'Holden Sanford' [Donald Graham?] - Cult of the Lusting Carcass: (Uncanny Tales, May 1940). "She was being attacked, wantonly attacked, by one of the savage, lusting beasts who worked in this cesspool of human scum! A logging camp they called it! It was an outpost of hell, peopled by ignorant, sub-human brutes!"

Public health officer Dr. Dave McGowan is assigned to a small community in the California Sierras to contain a polio epidemic. Salter's Revelation takes its name from religious cultists whose present day descendents, still living in the original settlement, have entirely withdrawn from the rest of the world. "God alone knows what they're like — inbred. Superstition-ridden, primitive, disease-ravaged, and weak-minded. A modern Kallikak family." McGowan and fiancée, Laura, move in at the home surgery of Dr. James Huntley, and his nurse, Anne Dwyer. Hardly have they unpacked than Laura is molested by a lust-crazed logger. Dave shoots dead the rapist, Gonzalo Stiropulous by name, but Laura's blood loss is such that she requires a transfusion, and her assailant is the only match! Dr. Huntley drains dry the corpse, pumps the lecherous logger's blood into Laura — who is transformed into a cannibal sex monster! The cultists, outraged at Brother Gonzalo's "cold-blooded murder", demand Laura be surrendered them for "humiliation and sacrifice." When McGowan refuses, the Queen of the Idiots lets loose her morons on the surgery.

If this version of 'Holden Stanford' and the one wrote The Monster Must Eat! are the same being, he/ she(?) has a weakness for the perfunctory, abrupt ending. Not that anyone cares when the getting there is so horrible and disgusting.

[dem bones]

Donald Graham - Satan Lives for My Love!: (Uncanny Tales, May 1940). The madness was upon me then, and new girls grovelled before my lust, for I had been mastered by the Princess of Passion and Pain, and must from then on be a monster of love!

When William Cannon unexpectedly inherits Montcalm Lodge from misanthropic Uncle Godfrey, he at last agrees a wedding date with pure as driven snow fiancée, Jean Haviland, only to fall foul of a nude bather with sinful eyes! Somehow, Bill resists the very available charms of Naomi De La Convoitise, mistress of the house of lust, whereupon she pronounces her curse. From this day he will be Satan's monster of love, defiling innocent girls, destroying the love of his life, devoting every hour to the fulfilment of bestial desires! To help William on his way, the enchantress sends him three tiny flesh-like figurines of attractive young women he recognises from the hotel. As Cannon helplessly fondles the first of these lewd replicas, the living original, Catherine Williams, appears at his door as though in trance. Naomi's diabolical spell does its worst. Cannon abandons himself to an orgy of mindless lust! The second victim, a bashful teen in a white rubber swimsuit, is driven to take her own life. It's not as though Cannon can implore Naomi's forgiveness as his since learned that, twenty years ago, the locals strung her up as a witch and razed her château to the ground.

How can he break free before this insatiable lust for sexual torture leads him to murder his sweetheart?

[dem bones]

"It's been said that companies like Goodman's voluntarily ceased publication of weird-menace pulps rather than risk losing second-class mail privileges or see their products subjected to censorship by local or federal governments. And while this assertion has never been verified, there's very little reason to doubt it; By 1940 the stories in Red Circle's weird-menace line had progressed from merely tasteless to legally actionable."

— Ed Hulse, introduction to Mistress of Death & Desire: More Sex & Sadism from Marvel's Horror Pulps, 2022.

Donald Graham - Mates for Hell's Half-World Minions: (Real Mystery, July 1940). "God help the poor man who fell into the hands of a whole pack of these lusting, crazed virgins! The things they would do to him would make hell itself seem a refuge!"

Ted Calder, a journalist on his father's paper, The Sentinel, is among a packed out death chamber to witness the execution of Oriental-American sex fiend Anya Prami, proud butcher of several infants and young adults of either sex. Old Sparky holds no fears for Ms. Prami because; "You cannot kill me — I warn you not to try it. I tell you that I will come back. I tell you that I will destroy every young person in this city - destroy them in a madness and horror such as you never dreamed of! Before Siva, Eighth avatar of Vishnu, I swear it!" Ted watches her fry, but the ghastly spectacle somehow fails to reassure those present that the Mountain City Monster will not make good her boast. Sure enough, no sooner is her corpse laid on the slab than it goes missing from the morgue as though it simply got up and walked out — but not before busting open the attendant's skull and sewing together his lips with steal thread!

In the wake of the monster's resurrection, Mountain city witnesses a sharp increase in unusually brutal murders, all of them perpetrated by a mob of sadistic, sex-crazed alleged virgins, every one an Anya Prami lookalike — a particular repulsive episode sees them crucify a twelve year-old-girl then destroy her big sister with quicklime. As you'd expect, Calder's fiancée, Barbara 'Bobby' Manning, a columnist on The Globe has a tough time of it ("You shall see the face of the girl you love contorted with burning desire — as she mutilates a person she loves"), but then the same goes for everyone else, not least the reader. As ever, when Graham's through torturing the girls he loses interest and tacks on cynical upbeat ending. Our lovers emerge bloody, mutilated but otherwise unharmed and unsullied, from an abattoir that was once a print room.

Editor Mr. Hulse places Mates for Hell's Half-World Minions on a par with Russell Grey's infamous Fresh Fiancés .. as the most obscene of Marvel's torture orgies, and he's not wrong.

[dem bones]

Brent North - Breath of the Lusting Ones: (Mystery Tales, Dec. 1939). "Sex was my business .... my name had been signed to a series of articles dealing with sex crimes." Henry Hargrave, a reporter on the Greenwich Village press, investigates an epidemic of deadly nymphomania among lingerie models at Estelle Newmark's studio on Hudson Street, next door to the mysterious, curiously flagrant Shop of the Unusual. Hargrave has great personal interest in the lewd goings-on - his fiancée, Margaret Darian, is Estelle's star mannequin! When Margaret's best friend fatally overdoses on a super-charged aphrodisiac, Hargraves exposes an extortion racket. The drugged models are helpless victims of the Chemist of Eros and his bestial clients — the city's registered sex-abnormals — who nightly gather at the Shop to maul the girls, while a business-minded cohort surreptitiously films the orgies for blackmail purposes.

"Looking at the mannikins, at the corpse, the thought occurred to me that here was a scene of the most weird contrast — the sterile dead surrounded by the fecund living. And these maodels, what warm ripe creatures they were! They represented all that was succulent in femininity, all that was licentious and lascivious."

Hard to find fault with a story opening Chapter One: The Sex Mad. Despite early promise, this slick, pervy short is relatively tame when read off the back of Donald Graham's charmer, as indeed is everything every written.

[andydecker]

Here are a few more.  In The Secret History of Marvel Comics there is a chapter about Goodman's foray in this field. Not without merit, just the facts, but you can read the distase between every sentence.

[dem bones]

Apr 16, 2023 13:08:23 GMT andydecker said:

In The Secret History of Marvel Comics there is a chapter about Goodman's foray in this field. Not without merit, just the facts, but you can read the distase between every sentence.

This chap didn't think much of them either.

There is considerable torture carried on in the latter-day horror pulps and a great deal of fascination with pain. Deformities, maimings, disembowelings are all presented in explicit, often loving detail. You'll have to take my word for this, since this is one genre I am refraining from quoting. Various civic pressures, and the real horrors of the new World War put an end to most of the horror pulps by the early '40's. Fortunately, unlike what has happened in the case of the relatively literate Weird Tales, none of the material from any of the weird menace pulps has been preserved in books or elsewhere, and the gruesome stuff is now as defunct as a mad doctor at the end of a Dime Mystery novelet.

— Ron Goulart, An Informal History of the Pulps, 1972.

Goulart could be quite the prude when not accepting to commissions to novelise Vampirella strips.

It seems Goodman launched a horror pulp because Terror Tales, Horror Stories and Dime Mystery far outsold the perennially struggling Weird Tales; had the latter been the more profitable, he'd have jumped their bandwagon instead — an intriguing prospect. As it was, Goodman instructed the several established weird-menace authors he'd poached to up the Sex & sadism content way beyond anything you'd find in Horror Stories. Judged on the results, Bruno Fischer and Donald G. MacCormack ('Donald Graham') in particular were happy to oblige, though Hugh B. Cave and Paul Ernst never truly got the hang of it.

How did Weird Tales react to the weird menace menace? According To Robert Weinberg, it "continued to publish the same mix of fantasy, horror, and unusual stories as before. One or two attempts to present stories in the Gothic horror style failed to attract attention, so Farnsworth Wright followed the only possible path open to him. He ignored the horror pulps and hoped they would go away."

John Wallace Scott: Mystery Tales, March 1940, Real Mystery, July 1940.

[andydecker]

Goodman is a fascinating character. Both in the Marvel book by Sean Howe and in the Secret History He is of course featured heavily.

Ethics played not a big part in his business dealings. He wasn't interested in quality, just quantity. One tends to forget how old Stan Lee was when he created the Marvel universe. He thought he was working in a dying industry, he was pushing 40, which was not considered to be young any longer back then, while Goodman was doing this business for decades. He didn't care, what he sold, just that it sold. In a thing as fickle as publishing it is not the worst strategy. And

I can't stand Goulart as a writer, and he was wrong about many things. While some criticism about the Shudder Pulps is not wrong, a lot it the usual hypocritical nonsense. I think they are a fascinating oddity, like the Giallo, the Exploitation movie and so on.