Christine Campbell Thomson - Terror by Night

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Christine Campbell Thomson (ed.) - Terror by Night - (Selwyn & Blount, Aug, 1934)

Many thanks to Robert Weinberg for kindly granting me permission to use his cover scans.

Joseph O. Kesselring - King Cobra
A. Barclay - The Chamber Of Death
Merle Prout - The House Of the Worm
F. Bonney - The Flying Head
J. W. Benjamin - The Man Who Saw Red
Hazel Heald - The Horror in the Museum
Oscar Cook - Dog Death
August Derleth - The Metronome
Mary E. Counselman - The Accursed Isle
Hugh B. Cave - The Watcher In The Green Room
Robert E. Howard - Rogues in the House
Harold Ward - The Closed Door
Michael Gwynn - The Death Plant
Flavia Richardson - Behind the Yellow Door
L. A. Lewis - The Author's Tale


Flavia Richardson - Behind The Yellow Door: Mrs. Merrill, the brilliant surgeon and pathologist, advertises for a secretary. Marcia Miles is told that her main duty will be to act as a companion to her daughter, Olivette. As it transpires, Merrill only wants some of Miss Miles to act as permanent companion to the girl, who is a horror from the waist down. Together with Dorcas the 'chambermaid', Mrs. Merrill overpowers Marcia and straps her down on the operating table: "Assuming that the operation is successful, as it must be, you will find Olivette's deformed legs grafted on to your body, while Olivette will at last be able to enjoy her life as a normal human being. She has waited nearly twenty years. You have had twenty years. It's your turn."

Mary E. Counselman - The Accursed Isle: When their boat goes down, seven Americans with little in common are washed up on a desert island. On their first night, the watch is savagely killed, someone or something tearing out his throat. As their number is whittled down, it becomes apparent that one of them is the killer although, as Dr. Kenshaw points out, it's likely that the man responsible is unaware of his actions. Eventually only two of the seven remain alive, the doctor and family man Landers, each of them tortured by the possibility that it is they who harbour cannibalistic urges. A ship approaches the island ...

L. A. Lewis- The Author's Tale: "He would kidnap the venomous swine of a woman and hold her captive in a secret place that he knew, flogging her daily until brute force brought her to absolute subjection."

He is 'Lester', usually an amiable enough fellow with a weakness for the ladies, and she is his third wife who has ruined him, while the remote spot is a deserted farmhouse where he has rigged up his apparatus, a frame with straps and pulleys attached easily capable of suspending his greedy ex until she sees the error of her ways. What he hadn't accounted for was the place being haunted - and by fiends of particularly sadistic bent who commandeer his torture device and use it to discipline one of their own with a savagery that has even the vengeful Lester. what he witnesses that night persuades him to make a significant amendment to his plans ...

Harold Ward - The Closed Door: Lucinda Marsh poisons her despised, bullying husband, Obie, then strangles him with a sheet, but not before he's delivered his chilling curse: "I'll come back from th' grave, you hussy!" He does.

Michael Gwynn - The Death Plant:Rheingelder is in search of an exotic plant of two flowers that grow from a single stalk by which each man is governed: the pretty flower is the life plant, the hideous, hairy thing is death. If he can find his own plant and destroy the death bloom then, reasons the German, "I shall be immortal!"

The narrator ferries him around the East Indies for the best part of a year until, at last, Rheingelder's faith is rewarded. Such a pity that his callous treatment of a Chinese hand along the way has alienated the captain to the point where he wants to kill him. Slowly.

Uncredited illustration, House Of The Worm, Weird Tales, Oct. 1933.

Merle Prout - The House Of The Worm: "I saw for a moment - his face! Purple, bloated, the crawling flesh nearly covered his staring eyes; white worms swarmed his puffed body, exuded squirming from his nostrils and fell upon his vivid lips. The foul stench grew stronger, so thick was it that my tortured lungs cried out for relief."

A black magic cult worship at a shrine in Sacrament Wood, unleashing a terrible plague across the US. Only the narrator, Art, and his fellow weird fiction enthusiast, Fred, know the truth behind the epidemic - but the authorities won't believe them!

Told in a hysterical spasm of (bad) journalese, but a must for fans of festering corpse fun.

August Derleth - The Metronome: Mrs. Farwell drowns her stepson Jimmy. After the funeral he comes back to see that she doesn't get away with it. The Coroner is mystified by all the wet footprints and the fact that Mrs. Farwell seems to have been suffocated with damp rags.

Hugh B. Cave - The Watcher In The Green Room: Anthony Kolitt has been on a five-day drunk since his wife left him. For some reason he's started talking to a large bureau in his room and neighbour Bellini, a psychic, warns him against his morbid obsession lest he thinks what he fears into reality. We already suspect that Kolitt knows more about his wife's disappearance than he's letting on but still nothing quite prepares us for the gruesome apparition and bloody, mindless carnage that ensues.

This one is more ideally suited to the soon come Sex & Sadism pulps than the relatively restrained Weird Tales.

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Not treated myself to a Not At Night interlude in ages, and this pair certainly reminded me of what I've been missing.

Joseph O. Kesselring - King Cobra: Peter Garr is sent to Java to investigate an alarming drop in productivity on a Surabaya Runner Plantation. He's met off the boat by a hideous spider of a man with a wicked blade in place of his amputated hand. This unnerving fellow introduces himself as Robert Wharton, plantation manager, but Garr soon has good reason to suspect that he's nobody of the sort. Neither is he fond of his host's "children", lethal cobras the native boys are paid a pittance to capture. And then there's George, the hired muscle, a giant Malay who can tear the flesh from a white man's bones in strips. When one of the youths, Moko, is bitten by a twelve foot King Cobra, 'Wharton' abandons him to his fate and sets out to trap the prize hooded beauty. Garr saves the boy's life and is rewarded with his confidence. Arachnid man is ruthless murderer Spider Horrosek who lost his hand to a Cobra bite which has given him an affinity with the deadly snakes. The real Robert Wharton is his prisoner. Horrosek has no intention of letting either man leave the plantation alive ....

Robert E. Howard - Rogues In The House: Conan conspires with a young aristocrat to murder the treacherous Nabonidus the Red Priest. They corner their prey in the booby-trapped, pitted dungeon beneath his house, but the trio are forced into uneasy alliance as Thak, the Red Priest's pet demented ape-man, has escaped to embark on a grisly killing spree. Nabonidus has hung the dungeon walls with multiple mirrors to perfect a crude but ingenuous forerunner of CCTV, by which means he, Conan and Murilo have ringside seats for the appalling doom that befalls a group of Nationalist conspirators who choose the wrong moment to attempt an assassination. Can the three rogues pull together to survive Thak, a virus of idiocy and the acid vats?

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J. Wilmer Benjamin - The Man Who Saw Red: (Weird Tales, Nov. 1933). A strange ghost-story of murder and an incriminating red necktie. Psychological horror. Barton strangles Locke, his business partner and love rival, and retrieves certain inconvenient documents from the dead man's safe. No prison for him! Now to charm the lovely Berenice!

Locke's ghost has other ideas.

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"Cast that most accursed spawn, that female toad into the river. And she who gave it birth, accursed and hated by the gods, drive forth from out my gates with ignomy. Burn on her forehead the brand of shame, for she sold herself for food and rainment, lived for a year in wealth and comfort, then failed to give her lord a man-child. Go!"

G. O. Olinick

Oscar Cook - Dog Death: (Weird Tales, Nov. 1926: as The Creature of Man) A Chinese tale about a cruel mandarin and the terrible deception that was practised by his majordomo

Governor Tey Bee Yong, despotic ruler of China's vastest province, is without son. Now Moi Kam Moi, his latest wife, is in labour, the people pray that this time the child be male that the famine be finally lifted on the land.

Moi Kam Moi dies giving birth to a daughter. Chow Lim, the majordomo, steals the new born of a starving peasant and presents it to the Governor as his son and heir.

Seventeen years later Yong Bee Tey, supposed son of the mandarin, and Ming Po Ming, peasant girl, are forbidden sweethearts. Yong Bee's father has affianced him to the pale faced, limping daughter of a far-off governor, and the opium addled, lust crazed old tyrant is not to be disobeyed! "There is no will in all the land save mine," he reminds the majordomo. Chow Lim grasses on the lovers and begs Tey Bee Yong's permission to curb their youthful passions. "I will cure the ill, restore the child to thee and wreak such vengeance on that besotted offspring of a foul and leprous birth as shall establish for all time the fame of thy omnipotence." The Governor consents, ordering that said offspring be taken to the temple, forced inside the mechanical Buddha and publicly crushed to death!

The majordomo, whose wife was slain several years ago on his ruler's whim, eagerly seizes upon this opportunity for grisly revenge!

A bit overlong, but prettily written with some great insults and mob chants. "Death to the foul polluter; death in the bowels and arms of the god!" Cook seems to have been obsessed with "Golden Lilies."

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This pair are ghoulish even by Not At Night standards.

Ernest Bonney - The Flying Head: White Gate Cottage, St David's Halt, Surrey. On his return from the Belgian Congo, Abbott was committed to a lunatic asylum, the anguish of witnessing his best friend staked out for decapitation having driven him insane. Considered well enough for release, he lives as a hermit until befriended by Enderly, who invites him to a family get-together. Unfortunately, Abbott takes instant aversion to Roger, Enderly's son-in-law, whose moustache reminds him of a dear lost one. He takes to sleep stalking. There's no cause for alarm, he’s just nervous among company. Things will work out fine, just so long as he's kept away from sharp blades and bamboo canes.

Roger and wife Patricia go missing. As does a knife and several sticks ....

Armiger Barclay [Marguerite Florence Laura Jarvis] - The Chamber of Death: "As though to convince me, but no doubt partly to show off his treasures, he lifted the lid of one of the bins. Involuntarily I retreated. It was half full of human limbs, fragments of the internal organs in pickle of chloroform - a nightmare of mortality that made my gorge rise."

Curtoys, paying a visit to a vivisectionist friend, is left alone in the mortuary with the corpse of a very beautiful and very murdered young woman, one arm crudely hacked from the shoulder, who stirs from her container to tell a story of espionage, torture and betrayal. Of course, on regaining consciousness it is easy to pass the episode off as a horrible nightmare, but the next day's newspaper carries a report on the branded and mutilated remains of a mystery girl recovered from the Thames the previous night. "The body lies at the Shadwell Mortuary awaiting identification."

The derelict nature reserve, formerly Shadwell Mortuary, Marion Bondage/ Vault photo archive, Nov, 2021

Thank you, Saskia and Scott.