Tom Mason - Spicy Horror Stories

[dem bones]

Tom Mason (ed.) - Spicy Horror Stories: Classic Tales Of Inhuman Terror (Malibu, 1990)

Rob Davis

John Wolley - Introduction: Scare-Devils Of The Red Circle

Russel Gray - Fresh Fiances For The Devil's Daughter (Marvel Tales, May 1940)
Donald Graham - Satan Lives For My Love (Uncanny Tales, May 1940)
Holden Sanford - Cult Of The Lusting Carcass (Uncanny Tales, May 1940)
Brent North - The Claw Will Come To Caress Me! (Uncanny Tales, May 1940)
Ray King - Fresh Blood For My Bride! (Uncanny Tales, May 1940)
John Wallace - Terror Is Cupid's Mate (Mystery Tales, May 1939)
Donald Graham - Chorines For Death's Ballet (Mystery Tales, May 1939)
Russell Gray - House Where Terror Lived (Uncanny Tales, May 1940)

Thought I'd get in training for Captive Of Gor by revisiting just about the ghastliest guilty pleasure - if you can even call it a pleasure - of them all.

Russell Gray - Fresh Fiances For The Devil's Daughter: The four huge creatures were on the floor, each with one of our wives. In order to whet their bestial appetites they were toying with them, slobbering over their quivering bodies."

All heads turned to the door through which the giant Clops was coming. Before him he wheeled a brazier in which irons glowed white hot in burning coals.

The beautiful Tala Mag is a budding authoress of some talent but her manuscript is so vile and perverted that no-one in the industry will touch it. Tala isn't a woman to be crossed: when our narrator, literary agent Lester Marlin, refuses to sleep with her she has him chained up for a taste of the lash but that's as nothing to what she'll do to his wife, Helen. The five publishers and authors Mag holds responsible for failing to launch her career are lured to a secluded estate along with their partners. After downing the customary glass of drugged wine, the men are led into the stone chamber which Tala and her monstrous goon squad have prepared for the night's entertainment. With the husbands secured, one woman is hung in chains and slowly tortured to death with a red hot poker ("the acrid stench of burning flesh clogged our nostrils"). Tala warns that each of the women will suffer the same fate unless the men agree to participate in a macabre game of paintball wherein they hunt each others' wives. The woman who is hit by the most pellets will suffer the same slow burning to death as the first victim ....

Robert Kenneth Jones, writing in his excellent The Shudder Pulps (Fax, 1975) wistfully describes Fresh Fiances ... as "an extreme case. Very few stories reached this level of repugnancy .... it is extremely depraved, and certainly not for the squeamish" - can't argue with that. Gray makes all the right references to "slobbering" over the "magnificent breasts" of all concerned, but you know he's only doing that because he understands that wobbling bosoms are mandatory in spicy fiction. Give him the torture of same to describe and he really comes into his own.

Alex Schomburg

Peggy and Vivian, innocent chorus girls are subjected to the madman's "mindless lusts".

Donald Graham - Chorines For Death's Ballet. Broadway's Gaiety Theater is anything but for Peggy Andrews and the scantily clad cast of musical comedy Holiday. A masked madman has struck three times this week leaving three chorus girls dead (a hanging, a beating and the old 'acid in the cold cream' fail-safe). The prime suspect has just been dragged out of the ocean and its clear the cops were after the wrong man. Can Peggy's fiancee Tom Foster, Private Eye, get to the killer before the killer gets to her?

[dem bones]

John Wallace - Terror Is Cupid's Mate: James Walton inherits the Élan boutique from a doting aunt whose life he once saved, along with her long-time employees, "mincing" and "effeminate" Pierre and Jacques. Élan specialises in Paris fashions, notably silky gowns and "intimate lingerie for fastidious ladies" and runs at a tidy profit. Local rival Franklin Hassett at Modiste, inc has recently attempted a buy out but Walton won't hear of it. He's fallen in love with his model Loretta Dunne, and he'll not give up the store for fear of losing her. So it's no great surprise when, one night while locking up, James is spiked in the spine by an unseen assailant who announces himself as the Sultan of Satyrs! Walton is forced at lash-point to drink "nectar" which not only enslaves him to the Sultan but transforms him into the 'Envoy of Cupid', a sadist who wants nothing more than to harm Loretta and her friend Anne Lee. After an indoor torture session, both drugged girls are turned out into the freezing snow in their novelty undies for Walton to re-enact The Most Dangerous Game, firing feather-tipped darts at them as they ski downhill ...


This stuff never dates. It was terrible misogynistic rubbish when it was written, it remains so today - even the Scooby Doo ending is more ridiculous than usual - but that doesn't prevent Terror Is Cupid's Mate making for another wonderful guilty pleasure. "Pierre, like many others in his profession, was hardly a man save in the technical physical sense. He hated women, was a dress designer primarily because it gave him pleasure to design silly styles that women might look like fools ...." Incredibly, a number of the advertisements run in the Red Circle magazines were aimed at a women's audience they surely never had?

[Craig Herbertson]

Never underestimate the fair sex, Dem.

These must have been such fun to write. I remember going into Bobbies book shop in the 1960's and it was quite funny to see the extremely soft porn (no pubic hair) carefully hidden next to people being blithely slaughtered wholesale, cut into pieces, murdered and raped in war comics, magazines and wonderful little books like these.

[dem bones]

I remember a radio interview with Maxim Jakubowski when he was the proprietor of the much missed Murder One in the Charing Cross Road. The shop had just added a Romance section, and he was perplexed at all these young, respectfully dressed women who'd walk straight past it in the rush to get at the extremely gory true crime porn. Even so, it's hard to imagine Horror Stories, Terror Tales & Co., having much of a female readership. In fact, it's hard to imagine them having any kind of readership at all.

yet another cover borrowed from Galactic Central

Russell Gray - House Where Terror Lived: Sandra Hume is driving over to her friend Brenda's place late at night but - typical silly woman! - she forgot to top up on petrol before she left and now she's stranded in the middle of nowhere! There's a ruined old house up ahead, but Sandra's reluctant to call as she remembers Brenda writing her that a man slaughtered his wife there, and it's been haunted ever since. No sooner has the thought struck her mind than a thing with no flesh or bones rears up before her. Fortunately, handsome Tax-inspector Ben Clark is on hand to save her before she's overcome by the "clammy effluvium", as the clawed corpse of an old cop spread out on the lawn indicates what the phantom is capable of. Once they've entered the house, the spectre overpowers them (in Ben's case, with the help of a blackjack) and Sandra and Tom find themselves lashed to concrete pillars in the basement at the mercy of three sadistic counterfeiters who have a passionate hatred of G-men. George, Monk and Slippery explain how they manufactured their "ghost", duff up Ben some, and then turn their lustful attentions to Sandra. George tears her dress down and just when you think things are about to take a much-needed turn for the Fresh Fiancés For The Devil's Daughter, Gray gives in to the temptation to go the boring traditional route and lets granite-chinned Ben play the hero!

For a truly surreal reading experience, try this sandwiched in between two of Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected!

[andydecker]

Jan 24, 2011 18:42:56 GMT dem bones said:

Even so, it's hard to imagine Horror Stories, Terror Tales & Co. ... having any kind of readership at all.

I would have bought them No, really ;D

And the genre isn´t dead. Just watch any of those serial killer crime show on tv. They are not that much removed from a good Russel Grey yarn.

And those Mason´s? They have become really expensive.

[dem bones]

oh yeah, if I'd been around in the late 'thirties, early forties, Horror Stories, Terror Tales & Co. would've been up top of my shopping list - the John Newton Howitt cover paintings would have seen to that without any help from the writers. Truth be told, several of the 'horror novelettes of gruesome and eerie terror!" were likely a bit weedy even at the time, but the extreme cases are glorious. As Robert Kenneth Jones points out in The Shudder Pulps, several of the authors come into their own when pitting hideously deformed circus freaks and/ or gangs of senile lechers versus an innocent honeymooning couple. We so need more of this magnificent fare from our contemporary authors!

The Tom Mason over-sized paperbacks are not the best bound. I notice that several pages have come adrift from the spines of my copies and, while not the most careful handler, it's not like I read 'em in the shower or use a cheeseburger as a bookmark, etc.

[dem bones]

Another diabolical download. Really, the Spicy pulps are beyond parody, so to lampoon them is a pretty pointless exercise, but that didn't stop the wonderfully named Thorp Feesh from trying his hand in this three-pager for Real Spicy Horror Tales and Sweetheart Detective Secrets (i.e., student rag The Yale Record (April 21st, 1937)

Found, need you ask, on the indispensable Pulpgen

I MARRIED A TORSO.pdf (72.92 KB)

[Craig Herbertson]

'I married a torso'. It must be some congential condition but I can't look at a title like that without absolutely having to read it. There is no choice. It was wonderful

[dem bones]

Not in the book, not even from the Spicies, but will include on this thread because, while it might not be quite as puke provoking, what we have here is a micro Fresh Fiancés For The Devil's Daughter.

Mindret Lord - The Dinner Cooked In Hell: (Startling Mystery Magazine #2, April 1940). "I could see that these men were mad. Degeneracy was written upon their lantern-jawed faces and in their piggish, cunning eyes. And I, with my arms roped behind me, was completely helpless to defend either my wife or myself."

George and Dora are entertaining their attractive young neighbours, Mike and Mary Royce. Martha the maid hasn't turned up, but maybe that's to be expected as it's a stormy night and she is terrified of thunder.

A stunning young Italian, spilling out of her too tight uniform, arrives on the doorstep. Lucia explains that she is standing in for Martha. The hosts aren't best pleased, but needs must in a crisis. Lucia gets busy in the kitchen. Unlike poor, timid Martha, she finds thunder sensual.

The meal is far from a success. The tomato juice tastes funny and the meat dish is all wrong. Dora specifically ordered roast beef, not pork ...

Mike Royce falls into a stupor. The lights go out. George steps down into the basement for candles and - abject horror! - feels up the mutilated corpse of a girl. Even as the appalling truth registers a cackling idiot smashes him over the head.
Once George regains consciousness, he's dragged to the bedroom to witness the fun and games. Mary, Dora and Mike have been stripped naked and suspended from the stout ceiling beam. Lucia, armed with a whip and a red hot poker, has an announcement to make.

"I am the Thunder God's bride - and I want your lives for him - tonight!"

Yes, Lucia and her pals have escaped from a lunatic asylum! Robert can only watch in horror as the terror trio set to work ...

[dem bones]

This stuff is more addictive than ... addictive things!

Rexton Archer - The Pain Master's Bride: (Eerie Stories, Aug. 1937). First appeared as Murder Masterpiece by G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Secret Agent X, Sept. 1934).

Edmund Neymores felt chill horror at sight of Fulton Xavier’s sensational statue of a man in pain. But Neymores did not know real horror until he saw the ghastly torment of a helpless girl as she posed for a newer masterpiece.

Mad sculptors and artists! Where would the shudder pulps and spicies have been without them? Neymores of The Record visits the local gallery. His initial reaction to the latest Fulton Xavier bronze, 'Man in pain' is to recoil in disgust. "It's not a statue - it's a tormented soul captured in metal." 'Man in pain' is indeed a rare achievement for a deformed cripple who lost his legs in a railway accident! But Xavier is only the public face of the operation. The real genius - hired by the amputee - is a reclusive mystery man who conceals his features behind an unconvincing Old Father Time beard. Leonardo Da Vinci MK II has hit upon a fail-safe formula for artistic triumph. The sado-sculptor lures street beggars to his studio and subjects them to an agonizing graphite and electrode treatment (pat pending). Would that Xavier had recognised his co-conspirator as Jasper Felps, an old associate who blames him for a failed business deal that ruined him and killed his father. Now it is time for Felps to begin work on his final piece, 'Judgement' - with Xavier's daughter performing modelling duties!

[dem bones]

"The lash curled out. It plucked at the front of my dress as though it had been the fingers of a fiend. The dress came away with the lash. I looked down at the ravages the whip had caused. My breast had been bared. The face of Luke Carns was a picture of desire. He licked his lips as a famished dog licks its chops."

Ralph Carlson

Arthur J. Burks - Satan's Lash: (Horror Stories, Sept. 1935). The crazed self-torturers were preparing a blasphemous rite for their beautiful new victim, who waited, trembling, to share their unspeakable punishment!

This one doesn't mess about. Total de Sade Gothic from start to finish.

Marie, eighteen, loves Jack Deed, but her uncle-guardian, Obed Crisman, RELIGIOUS MANIAC, has promised her to PSEUDO-RELIGIOUS MANIAC and fellow landowner Luke Carns, a man twice her age, twice married, with two dead wives on his scorecard. Marie and Jack continue to meet in secret, their rendezvous, a cabin on High Island. But now Crisman and Carns have discovered the love nest there is Hell to pay. The twisted pair beat Jack unconscious and set the shack ablaze, leaving loves young dream to perish in the flames. Poor Jack, "burned like a roasted pig" as Marie indelicately puts it, but then it is not like her own situation is a bed of roses.

The evil hypocrites row back across the lake with their prisoner. Back home, Marie is bound to a chair, cruelly whipped and ordered to "confess." Would that she had surrendered her virginity to Jack, because it is obscenely apparent that Carns is bent on having her one way or another. The monsters adopts a new policy. Rather than shred Marie's tender young flesh to ribbons, they will place her in the care of their old crony (and fellow slobbering lecher), Dr. Stator, at the local lunatic asylum. Perhaps a spell in Stator's "place of atonement" will make her a little more amenable to our sanctimonious hypocrites design!

[dem bones]

Don King - White Meat: Spicy Adventure Stories, April 1935). Begins with a harrowing account of the last moments of a British soldier, burnt at the stake and feasted upon by the hundred-strong Monbuttus cannibals. He is the fourth Tommy to have met with this appalling fate in recent months and, back at the fort, Major Cyril Whittey is sorely displeased, likewise Kane Bedford, attaché to the American Consul at Zanzibar, who is investigating a white slavery racket. Brits are one thing but “As I told you, Major, if American girls are being sold up from Cape Town to the Berber tribes and then in turn to these cannibals, we must stop the traffic in flesh.”

As is only to be expected, the Major has brought his a beautiful young daughter, Margot, to this desert Hell-hole. Margot is blessed with all the right attributes for a spicy - I'm sure you know what they are by now - and if Kane plays his cards right, he'll be getting his hands on them any paragraph now.

First, though, to business. Kane, Margot and six dispensable Nubian braves set off on camel after the suspected white slavers. Major Whittey is against this reckless escapade from the off but can never say 'no' to his headstrong daughter. Pull yourself together man! Margot is a big girl now, and, after all, what's the worse that can happen?

Read it at Pulpgen

[ripper]

I read 'White Meat' a couple of days ago. I thought it was quite good and liked the African setting. I think Major Wittey's parental skills have to be questioned in letting his buxom daughter go off with the square-jawed, two-fisted hero of a pulp story, not to mention tracking down white slavers, who would happily add her to their collection given half a chance.

[dem bones]

Wildside Press have compiled a 25 story, eBook only Spicy Adventure Megapack with the vast majority, if not all, of the stories seemingly recycled from Pulpgen. You might think that the excellent Larry Estep & John Locke would therefore warrant a credit for their hard graft, and you would be right. Perhaps I'm not looking hard enough but have yet to spot one.

Charles R. Allen - The House Of Weird Sleep: Spicy-Adventure Stories, Jan. 1935). Former marine Nick Carson confronts a Panama City white slavery outfit who specialise in abducting rich girls. Fists fly, whips crack, bullets hit home, Nick exposes Mr. Big, earns reward, lands coveted job on police force, gets the breasts girl, etc, in uninspired Spicy-by-numbers.

Read on Pulpgen

[dem bones]

Spicy Detective Stories? Check. Spicy-Adventure Stories, Spicy Mystery Stories, Spicy WesternStories? Check check check.
From 1934 through to the beginning of the next decade, Kenneth W. Hutchinson edited all of the above titles for New York's Culture Publications . Tom Mason's delicious anthology to the contrary, there never actually was a Spicy Horror Stories, no Spicy Sci-Fi Stories either. So, in December 1939, Chicago-based Western Fiction thought to fill the void out with Marvel Tales.

Robert Wentworth - World Without Sex: (Robert O. Erisman [ed.], Marvel Tales, May 1940).

Uncredited, but those big eyes suggest Max Plaisted more likely Alex Schomberg. Lingerie by Jean Paul Gaultier.

It is four-thousand years into THE FUTURE. The last twelve men on Earth stand before an all-female jury accused of rebellion against the Ruling Council. Artificial insemination has made the sex act long redundant, and males surplus to requirements. The birth laboratories stopped producing them years ago. It would be better - reason the women - that they do the decent thing and die out altogether.

Angry young hot-head Rann Haddan is not one to accept the death penalty lying down. He and his fellow prisoners overcome the armed guard and escape in a torpedo-shaped flyer to the hills beyond the uninhabited plain, taking with them four captives with whom they intend to make babies - male babies - the old-fashioned way. In decades to come, there will be enough of them to take the battle to their oppressors. Rann's five fellow survivors of the prison-break don't much like the idea. "Mate with females as they did in the old days? Faugh! It would be beastly!" "It's too atavistic, animal ..."

Initially, Ala and her sisters, are very understandably, resentful of their treatment and scream bloody murder. But after a difficult acclimatization period ....

Giving the premise - and bearing in mind Marvel Tales ran Russell Gray's notorious Fresh Fiancés for the Devil's Daughter in the same issue, Mr. Wentworth's treatment of his subject matter is relatively restrained.

Strange magazine, Marvel Tales, and no mistake.