Ed Hulse [ed] - Mistress of Death and Desire

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Ed Hulse [ed] - Mistress of Death and Desire: More Sex & Sadism from Marvel's Horror Pulps (Murania Press, April 2022)

J. W. Scott

Ed Hulse - Introduction
Ed Hulse -Unholy Jitters

Arthur J. Burks - Mistress of Death and Desire
Mindret Lord - Black Mass Bride
Robert Leslie Bellem - Blood for the Vampire Dead
Russell Gray - New Girls for Satan's Blood Ballet
Ray King - Mate of the Flame Monster
Brent North - Horror's Handmaidens
Gabriel Wilson - School of the Beast Girls
Hal K. Wells - Black Pool for Hell Maidens
Ray Cummings - I Share My Bride with Satan
Allan K. Echols - Horror’s Hallowed Handmaidens
Don Graham - Scourge of the Corpse-Clan

Bibliography of Red Circle's Weird-Menace Magazines

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. Bearing his "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 horror pulps off the newsstands. This anthology, like its predecessor Satan Lives for My Love!, gathers together a sickening slew of stories memorable for their frank, in-your-face depiction of sex and sadism — stories so unabashedly and unapologetically perverse that they would have given Marquis De Sade himself the heebie-jeebies!

All stories from Mystery Tales, including seven of the eight that comprise the March 1940 issue. A reminder that the book does not reproduce the original line drawings.

Unsigned and unacredited, but I believe many, if not all of the illustrations to follow on this thread are the work of Alex Schomberg of Captain America, The Green Hornet, etc., repute.

Mindret Lord - Black Mass Bride: (Mystery Tales, March 1940). Was this the black chapel of my nightmare, and the voluptuous sin-crazed siren, or had I in reality become the notorious Archfiend from Hell, and would I now brand my newest Black Mass bride?

Narrator Jay Arnold is tormented by the most terrifying, vivid nightmare of a goat-man destroying a young woman in a black chapel. The following mornings, Arnold's fiancée, Victoria Starr, wakes to discover a cloven hoof branded on the breast! Meanwhile, across town, the police launch an investigation into the murder of Miss Lorna Dane, a wealthy heiress and close friend of Vickie. She, too, has been burnt - and worse. "It was as if some sick satanic dance had been performed on the girl's delicate torso — she had literally been stamped to death." When another rich girl is branded and slain in identical fashion, Arnold, the chief suspect, is forced into hiding. Is he a sex maniac devil worshipper, or are persons near at hand out to settle a score?

Robert Leslie Bellem - Blood for the Vampire Dead: (Mystery Tales, March 1940). No devil-magic philtre could have summoned this carnal séance, no undead corpse could have tricked Tim Croft into forfeiting the life-blood of his own lovely fiancée! Tim Croft, a doctor newly arrived in Haunted Hollow, a tiny, superstition-ridden Ozark Mountain community, falls foul of local hostility. Lige Ludlow leads a mob bent on driving a stake through Old Jeb Starko's wife. According to Ludlow, Eula Starko is the "vampire-witch" been stringing up young women and draining them dry of their life blood. Improbably touching for a Bellem story in that the killer, however misguided he/ she might be, is motivated by love not material gain.

Brent North - Horror's Handmaidens: (Mystery Tales, March 1940). The horrors came quickly to Hollywood, for that flesh-hungry fiend favored the bodies of the beautiful!
Told via impersonal journal entries. A sadistic maniac at large in Hollywood, flaying alive young women and/ or gouging out their eyeballs. Contemporaneous with the murders, Henri Graven, "one of the greatest painters of his generation," opens a new studio. On wife Linda's insistence - it was her identified what was left of one girl by a scar above her hip - Gray Lawson, international detective turned motion-picture executive, returns to police work to hunt down the maniac (you guessed). Routine nasty.

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Jack Binder (?)

Russell Gray - New Girls for Satan's Blood Ballet: (Mystery Tales, March 1940). What hellish madness was this upon me, that I could know again the ghastly tortures of the dread Inquisition, that my own Nancy could be chattel-goddess of Satan's last bloody charnal!

A secluded maximum security theatre along the Long Island shoreline screens ghoulish torture epics, depicting man's inhumanity to man — e.g., Spanish Inquisition versus "witches", Nero versus Christians, conquering Turks versus Armenian women, etc. When Lucian Jarrett, famed author of ethereal love poems, recognises one of the starlets as his missing fiancée, Vera Robinson, he alerts her brother, our narrator. Philip Robinson shares Jarrett's concerns that that sick footage is too horribly convincing to be fake ... And now Phil's girl, Nancy the aspiring screen goddess, has gone AWOL while supposedly visiting Vera ... Stands to reason that Mr. Gray would write at least one snuff-themed horror.

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Ray King (Ray Cummings) - Mate of the Flame Monster: (Mystery Tales, March 1940: as Mate-feast of the Flame Monster). How dared little Sonja wed the boy she truly adored, when her body and her soul would belong forever to the flame-lover of her dreams? At the age of ten, Sonja Blake watched her mother die in apparent ecstasy, launching herself into the flesh-searing arms of her secret lover, the flame-monster from the local volcano! Having already lost her father in suspicious circumstances — he was cremated in a house fire — Sonja, now seventeen, has been raised by her legal guardian, Thomas Balt, the family lawyer, and Miss Jenks, a joyless spinster governess.

Of late Sonja, "her body rounding into voluptuous maturity," has taken to fantasising about the fire-master once she's drank the bedtime beverage prepared her by Miss Jenks. She's also fallen in love with a young man from the village, George Harding, but how can she accept his proposal when she's promised to the monster! "The bed was rumpled with Sonja's naked body as she writhed in it - fighting the unnatural sensation within her," when what should appear salivating outside her bedroom window but the fiery fiend of her fantasies. He's been keeping an eye on her for quite a time now, seven years to be precise ...

New Girls for Satan's Blood Ballet is horrible. This one is much more fun (not to mention outrageous).

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Hal K. Wells - Black Pool for Hell Maidens: (Mystery Tales, June 1938). Deep in that dismal swamp there dwelt an abysmal Thing, a monstrous being of the ooze, gloating in its perfume of cadavers .... Kent's horrified eyes must watch the girl he loves run stark naked to greet that grisly creature from hell!

Much-travelled adventurer Larry Kent is taken prisoner by a bogus Mad Scientist while investigating the disappearance of fiancée, Dorothy Lane, and her amputee brother in the Alabama swampland. We've a black pool for sure, also a congenital idiot with the head of a giant trout, a crayfish-derived serum which, claims Dr. Enlow Carlin, regenerates limbs, a clawed monster in a tank of slime, and a particularly cruel extortion racket, but, perhaps unique to the Marvel horror pulps, not a 'Hell maiden' to be had, the "mad pack of the maimed" being exclusively male (although Dorothy tries her hardest to buck the trend).

Gabriel Wilson - School of the Beast Girls: (Mystery Tales, Dec. 1939, as School for Beasts). Dr. Cedric Holmes, sixtysomething advocate of natural health remedies, cultivates a serum whereby the pupils of an exclusive seminary for young ladies regress to fanged and hairy Cro-Magnon women. In keeping with weird-menace tradition, the leading member of staff you least suspect of skulduggery is not slow to exploit the situation for his own greedy ends. Standing in his way, Dr. Thomas Meade, 38, the school's resident physician, a widower whose 16-year-old daughter, Dot, first alerts him to the improper behaviour of an art instructor. How can such things be at Marlette Hall? "Don't forget we're a respectable, exclusive establishment, in a highly civilised, law-abiding community!" The worst of the atrocities are committed in an attic gymnasium, so a borderline sport is horror for we wretched ones (i.e., me) who appreciate such things.

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"It was fantastic, unbelievable, utterly depraved!"

Don Graham - Scourge of the Corpse-Clan: (Mystery Tales, March 1940). The Plague of the Flaming Dead, we came to call it, for terror had not died with those slavering Things, and the holocaust that hallowed their mortal souls would hunger eternally for the young bodies of our daughters and our sweethearts!

"The first girl leapt upon her victim with a wild scream, slashing with her knife, disembowelling the helpless virgin - ripping out her entrails alive."

Following the mutilation-murders of two young women in Chesterton, local mill workers storm the new Blair Sanitarium on the order of Paul Bancroft, the bank owner, town elder and richest resident. The mob duly burn down the asylum, cremating six guards and all twenty psychopathic inmates in the process, the last to die swearing vengeance on the workers' wives, sweethearts and daughters for this night's work. He is good as his dying word. Soon the village is under siege from a plague of flaming corpses, hacking down men, making away with young women for torture sessions at their hideaway. As newcomers to town, Dr. Bill King and nurse Janet Beardsley face increasing hostility from the locals until the deputy sheriff advises they hit the road. But would dead-people-on-fire carry out bank robberies? Do they still retain an inclination to indulge their most depraved sexual perversions? Bill shares his suspicions with the wrong person. The couple are manhandled to an operating theatre beneath the asylum ruins to participate in tonight's "entertainment."

It's Graham, so you can be sure this will involve nude girls suspended upside down, plus skinning alive, electrocution via metal brassieres, and much else to arouse an audience of sadists to "nauseating sounds of unnatural enjoyment."

Ray Cummings - I Share My Bride with Satan: (Mystery Tales, Dec. 1939). " ... but suddenly from the pit voluptuous bodies had leapt up and were upon him, engulfing him. He felt hot arms around him - voluptuous breasts sensuously, lewdly pressing him - eager sensuous lips fighting for him ... "

On securing a position at Jamesville Hospital, newly qualified Dr. Alan Peters pops the question to fiancée Babs Stewart, who joyfully accepts. Cue gaiety, bans, bridal dress, trousseau, etc., - and a deranged stalker, Ivan Dimitroff, who'll not relinquish pursuit of Babs until she comes to her senses, realises she's absolutely besotted with him. When Dimitroff next calls at home, an exasperated Babs not only informs him of her impending marriage, but lets slip that she finds him repulsive, and why can't he just leave her alone? Ivan's furious response is to force the girl down on the bed and shred her dress (mauve for a change) until she knocks him comatose with the telephone. Terrified that she's killed him, Babs jumps in her car and drives off too fast, meeting an approaching vehicle in a head-on collision ....

The story cuts to a three-way grapple on the astral as Alan battles a Satanic Dimitroff to prevent his hurling Babs into the fiery pit, there to join her writhing, lust-sodden sisters ....

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Arthur J. Burks - Mistress of Death and Desire: (Mystery Tales, March 1940). Lust-love, Pat Garrity worshipped at the shrine of the Vampire of the Everglades, for Pat Garrity had forgotten the men who'd gone before him, who in the end had raced stark mad and screaming into the black bog of passion's purgatory!

After a one-night stand with his best-friend's fiancée, Pat Garrity quits town for the Everglades to shoot swamp footage for a film project. After a few nights' solitude, Garrity's need for a sexual partner is driving him crazy — so it is just as well when a very beautiful, stark naked woman arrives outside his tent pursued by a black mass of hungry alligators. Cienega, mistress of the swamp, gives herself to Garrity on the understanding that he understands it is death to love her, that she is every woman he ever used and cast aside once he'd had his fun. No sooner is their love-making done than Cienega returns back into the ooze with her saurian army.

Garrity receives a second visitor the following morning. Eileen Doret, his fling back home, has deserted her husband-of-ten-minutes to indulge a fantasy. She wants to have two men fight over her in a winner-takes-all death match. Garrity informs Eileen she's had a wasted journey. Yesterday morning he'd have leapt all over her, but after Cienaga, she holds no appeal for him whatsoever.

"No man ever refused me, shamed me like this, and got away with it! I won't have it! I'll stay here until Radcliffe comes, if I have to sleep in the swamp like an alligator, or like your friend of the jungles. And I hope he kills you! But if he doesn't, let me tell you this: one day you'll want me again, and I'll laugh at you until you are shamed as I have been shamed ...."

And with that, she storms off, sworn to kill this damned swamp floozie he's so besotted with....

As is case with Mates for the Morgue Master in the previous volume, Mistress of Death and Desire is something of an anomaly, in that it is more sombre Spicy Mystery Story than sex-sadism carve-'em-up.

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Allan K. Echols - Hell’s Hallowed Handmaidens: (Mystery Tales, Dec. 1939; as Horror's Hallowed Handmaidens). "It was strange, but I was beginning to have confidence in this strange kind of detective. He talked as though he were in the gutter, but the brain behind his slang was working overtime, and I knew it. I had a feeling that his tough, cop-like front was half a pose, that underneath it there was a cool, analytical mind, and not probably the mind of a shrewd psychologist. In short, he was a cop who thought it best for business reasons to impersonate a cop."

An executive board meeting at Marvel Perfumers, New York, is gatecrashed by a nude stenographer. Rose Lane, body lacerated and bloody, launches herself into President Brainard's lap to snog him senseless. "Sylvester, it is death we want, the ecstasy of love and death. Are you joining me?" Without waiting for a reply, Rose leaps through the glass window ....

Hardly have they scraped Miss Lane from the pavement than Brainard is found dead at his desk, face torn and bleeding. Who has got it in for the Marvel top brass?

Detective Hanlan and our narrator, the company's sales manager (didn't catch his name), unearth a secret love cult involving the most attractive office girls who nightly gather in the basement to strip naked and flagellate one another with long-stemmed, thorny roses! But who is the masked demon in black gauze dress presiding over these participate in mad horrible orgies of masochistic delight (and their sequel, involving toga-clad lechers in the cellar next door)? Can it be that the narrator's gal, Lola Jamison, is Queen of the Sisters of the Flesh?
"You Messalina — the whole bunch of you have fallen mighty low if you ask me."
"Give him to us! Strip him naked, and let him feel the thorns!"

A sombre warning of the evils of Marijuana, the so-called loved drug, and

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}dressing up in women's clothes.

While it makes sense to end the two volumes on Graham's disgusting and gruesome Scourge of the Corpse Clan, still I'm glad to have overlooked this ridiculously thrilling romp till last. After all they'd been put through over eight years, seems only fair the girls got a turn with the whips (the narrator can't wait for them to get to him).