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Post by andydecker on Jul 6, 2020 11:06:30 GMT
Russell Gray – My Touch Brings Death and Other Stories (Dancing Tuatara Press, 2014, 283 p.) Introduction: Brutal Bruno—Godfather of Extreme Horror - John Pelan
She-Devil of the Sea (1938)
A Corpse Wields the Lash (1937)
White Flesh Must Rot (1940)
My Touch Brings Death (1938)
I Said Yes to Satan (1940)
The Singing Corpses (1937)
The House That Horror Built (1937)
Darlings of the Black Master (1937)
The Devil Is Our Landlord (1938)
Valley of the Red Death (1938)White Flesh Must Rot is included here. This is the second collection of Bruno Fischer's weird menace stories from Dancing Tuatara. A third never materialized, but there are a few E-books in circulation with one or two stories, either as Gray or Harrison Storm. The first story from 1938 is a good example how a lot of these stories worked. The narrator Thorne is a commercial diver on the search for gold in an old wreck which is supposed to be haunted. He and his bodies discovered a pair of well preserved corpses in a cabine, a man and a woman. Shortly after the first diver is dead. The other is babbling something about the walking dead. Back on board of the yacht of millionaire Howell who bankrolled the expedition there is also his hot daughter Judy who is engaged but really likes Throne. After some heated discussion about giving up the salvage the dead stalk the yacht and begin killing some people after ripping Judy's nightshirt, the corpse girl even kiss Thorne whose bullets cannot harm her. "It was horrible, feeling her wet dress and her skin as clammy as death against me. Revulsion numbed me. Then her lips were groping up for mine and – God help me! – I kissed her! Kissed a woman who was eighty years dead!" Played straight as a horror story the last act of course shows that everything is a deception. It is really like Scooby-Doo. One of the guys wants the gold for himself and planed everything, at first only wanting to scare all away so he can get the treasure. The "dead" are his accomplices, he changed the munition for blanks and killed the people with a hook, make it look like as if their throats have been ripped out. But Thorne has some live ammo in his pocket and saves the day. Of course this can't held a corpse-candle to White Flesh must Rot, which is indeed as good as Dem claims. It isn't even by far Fischer's best story, done absolutly by the numbers, but the adventure and horror elements work well at first, especially today when you think of those big deep-diver-suit the guys stumble about on the wreck discovering the real corpses of the drowned, which is vividly being told by the narrator. Something like that you certainly didn't see in the movies of the time. |
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Post by helrunar on Jul 6, 2020 14:45:59 GMT
Sounds like quite a page-turner, Andreas!
So the author's actual name was Bruno Fischer but he wrote under the pseudonym of Russell Gray? And presumably used other pseudonyms as well. Writers like this churned the stuff out under whatever name they thought would sell.
Kind of amazing that some of these were collected and reprinted decades later.
Steve
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Post by helrunar on Jul 6, 2020 14:47:21 GMT
One can't help thinking that phrases such as "The Devil is my Landlord" and "I said Yes to Satan" would make very appropriate song titles for any number of death metal bands.
H.
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Post by andydecker on Jul 6, 2020 17:47:45 GMT
Sounds like quite a page-turner, Andreas! So the author's actual name was Bruno Fischer but he wrote under the pseudonym of Russell Gray? And presumably used other pseudonyms as well. Writers like this churned the stuff out under whatever name they thought would sell. Kind of amazing that some of these were collected and reprinted decades later. Steve A few years ago I wrote an article about Fischer. Interesting guy. In a nutshell Fischer was born in 1908 in Germany, Berlin. The familiy emigrated 1013 in the USA, where the lad went to the Rand School, a socialist school, if I got this right. Fischer worked as sports reporter and was the editor of the paper Socialist Call in the 30s. 1938 he became candidate for the socialist party for the New York State Senate. But this didn't made him money. He earned 25 Dollars a week - if he earned them, he told in an interview. A friend suggested writing for the pulps. On the way home Fischer bought a few of the magazines, which he never read before, and made himself familiar with the content. He liked horror best. He wrote a short story and send it to Rogers Terrill, the editor of Dime Mystery, who bought it at once for 60 Dollars. If this all is true, who knows, but is is a good story.
Fischer wrote more then 300 short stories and later, after the pulps died, 25 novels, at first mostly for Gold Medal. His first novel under his real name House of Flesh sold allegedly 2 million times. It is a typical hard boiled crime novel in the vein of Macdonald or Thompson. Much more restrained than the Gray stuff. In the 60s he stopped writing and became an editor for Colliers Books. Unfortunatly his work sunk into obscurity, unlike James Cain or Thompson the critics didn't re-discovered him. Fischer wasn't a innovator, but his novels are still readable.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 6, 2020 18:13:59 GMT
Unfortunatly his work sunk into obscurity, unlike James Cain or Thompson the critics didn't re-discovered him. I was going to say he was reprinted by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, but it turns out I was confusing him with Peter Rabe. |
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Post by helrunar on Jul 6, 2020 18:16:41 GMT
Thank you Andreas! Those biographical details are fascinating. Sounds like one of the episodes in Flicker. I am enjoying the book, but it goes on, and on, and ON. I wonder if people who had not been familiar with French academic fads of the 70s and 80s would even be able to get through the chapter on "Neurosemiology." Parts of that were hilarious, especially when the crazed idealogue St Cyr informs the hapless protagonist that film critics will lead humanity to a new world order once human society has collapsed into ravening barbarism due to how commodity fetishism erodes the attention span (some of the bits about the disappearing attention span under late Capitalism were rather uncannily prophetic, or maybe the whole "sound byte" thing was more fully underway in the late 1980s than I had realized).
I can definitely see that Fischer would have been a big seller for the Fawcett Gold Medal series. Intriguing! Thank you for sharing your research.
Steve
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Post by dem bones on Jul 10, 2020 9:08:19 GMT
Hi Andy. Does My Touch Brings Death reproduce the original magazine illustrations?
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Post by andydecker on Jul 10, 2020 19:13:41 GMT
Hi Andy. Does My Touch Brings Death reproduce the original magazine illustrations? Unfortunatly not. None of the Ramble House reprints - at least those I bought - have included illustrations. Quite a shame. As I discovered these are PoD, so they are plain. |
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Post by dem bones on Jul 11, 2020 9:07:38 GMT
Hi Andy. Does My Touch Brings Death reproduce the original magazine illustrations? Unfortunatly not. None of the Ramble House reprints - at least those I bought - have included illustrations. Quite a shame. As I discovered these are PoD, so they are plain. Thanks, Andy. Such a shame that. The illo's definitely add to the experience. Would certainly pick up a copy if I ever found one on travels (if they ever resume). Think the only story I've read from Vol.2 is White Flesh Must Rot! |
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Post by andydecker on Jul 11, 2020 10:10:10 GMT
Think the only story I've read from Vol.2 is White Flesh Must Rot! As I discovered most of the stories in Vol.2 are also included in the Ebook Terror Tales Harrison Storm & Russell Gray. One of those Radio Archive Ebook Pulp Reprints. But I don't know if it is still avaiable, seems a few were taken out of circulation. |
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Post by pbsplatter on Jan 24, 2023 2:35:44 GMT
Seems as good a place as any to log the Russell Grays I've been tracking down on the Luminist's pulp mag archives. Lots of gaps, sadly, but still there's plenty.
House of the Mad Butcher (Horror Stories, March 1940): Weird proto-slasher that feels like The Ghastly Ones. Our narrator is John Wheatley, the last scion of a family with a cursed past of death and madness. Ever since his cousin Luke was committed for the murder of his girlfriend on the Cape Cod beach, John has vowed to let the family line die with him (lots of good Lovecraftian mutterings about degenerate bloodlines and self-loathing here). However, fate conspires to bring him, his girlfriend, and two other lovely young women to the family cottage, inhabited by two weird aunts, a weird uncle, and Ichabod, the truly vile cat. May, one of the two 'expendable' girls suffers the indignities of first being mauled in the bathtub by the oddly lecherous Ichabod, and then being stabbed right between the (bare) breasts that night. Everyone thinks John did it, including John, but what's up with that cat? Features a minor character named Colonel Saunders, which was an eminently reasonable name for someone in 1940 and so it's not Russell's fault that it's hilarious every time it comes up here.
Dem said somewhere that Laymon was one of the few writers who did stuff in the shudder pulp style, and I think that's spot on. Both are unevenly written, often feature risible dialogue, and have the most mindboggling motivations and plot turns that serve to max out the nudity, gore, and sexual menace. And, in both cases, this stuff is just too compelling to stop reading--the sheer force of the storytelling carries it on.
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Post by pbsplatter on Jan 24, 2023 12:20:52 GMT
Girls Who Lust for Death (Terror Tales Jan/Feb 1940): David is head lifeguard and “lord of the lake” at Black Birch Camp, which offers the finest amenities in a rural setting. Foremost among them—Georgie, the grotesque and imbecilic son of a swamp witch, who lives in the nearby bog and tells David that he has, through the “Lake God”, the ability to make women desire him.
David scoffs, but then he and girlfriend Bea intercept a comely nude woman swimming right towards Georgie! They intercept her and take her back to camp, but later that day she vanishes with no explanation while swimming. This reflects badly on David, but there’s just no way she could have swum away. Did the Lake God take her? The girl shows up that night, dead, with her breasts ripped to shreds and the rest of her in a similar state. Then, that night, another girl leaves her cabin to frolic with Georgie, and David sets upon a method to trap the Lake God…
The Scooby Doo ending here really feels like a cheat and there are too many characters to keep straight, but this is still a well paced and exciting tale with a huge amount of nudity and some nasty bloodshed.
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Post by pbsplatter on Jan 24, 2023 12:46:40 GMT
Venus of Laughing Death (Horror Stories Aug/Sept 1937): Epistolary story. Narrator is a playwright of no little acclaim, and is currently working on his next one (he’s a little behind). This means a retreat to an isolated cabin away from Broadway actress wife Celine. Skinny dipping in the creek one day, he encounters a beautiful maiden who had the same idea. Later on, he mentions it to a garrulous local reporter. Turns out the girl is a local legend—when her father refused to let her be with her lover, she drowned herself in the creek and now her naked specter pops around. Not only that—but the last inhabitant of the cabin was a poet of little significance who became obsessed with the ghost and wasted away.
Back at the cabin, narrator finds himself going to see the maiden again and again. Meanwhile, Celine gets suspicious when her letters get no reply, so she drives down herself to see what’s wrong.
The ending is obvious, especially when this issue’s ToC blurb gives it away, and this is a pretty slight story. Still it’s compelling enough for the length, and for once it we have a story that actually is thoroughly supernatural (there’s theoretically a mundane explanation, especially given the unreliable narrator, but it seems unlikely)
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