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Post by dem bones on Jul 17, 2023 10:58:31 GMT
Harry Steeger [ed.] - Terror Tales: Jan. 1935 (Steeger Properties, 2023)  John Newton Howitt
Henry Treat Sperry - Souls Enslaved
Ben Judson - Honeymoon Coffin
Wyatt Blassingame - Dark Child of Doom
Franklin H. Martin - Corpses for Witch's Mountain
G. T. Fleming-Roberts - Blood on Black Knoll
Nat Schachner - They Dare Not Die
The Black Chapel: A Department  Amos Sewell: What fiendish, evil lust drove on those drooling ancients? Why had the two lovers been lured to the house of horror on the hill? What vital, hidden treasure lay in their youthful bodies that would bring those wrinkled bags and toothless men fighting and clawing over them in blind, slobbering greed? Lost in the Adirondacks, Lynn Hart and fiancé Jane Porter are directed to the private retreat of the brilliant surgeon, Dr. Meldon Hunt, by a pair of semi-mummified old timers, grotesquely dolled up in the latest Bond Street and Paris fashions. Dr. Hunt has not been seen since his experiments were branded "unethical" by the American Medical Association. Hunt claims the ability to restore youth to old age pensioners merely by transplanting fluids from the pituitary gland of the young and sprightly. Of course, this can not be done on the cheap, and volunteers are hard to come by ... On arrival at the Doctor's residence, Lynn and Jane are forced into a cage by a rifle-toting boss-eyed cretin to be drooled over by a hall full of millionaire geriatrics, get the "doddering old geezers" in the mood to spend big at auction. Sombart, the cadaverous Dr. Hunt's loathsome secretary, calls for an opening bid. "Their eyes glared; spittle and slime dripped unheeded down their slavering toothless jaws; every last vestige of humanity was stripped from them. They flung themselves forward; they screamed and yelled and prayed; they cursed and ranted; they clung to the bars of the cage, clawing vainly at the bodies they desired with such insane lust. "Hurry the auction," Fellowes screeched. "I can't wait; the doctors gave me a week to live. I have cancer. Hurry!" George Fellowes, the richest man in the room, secures Lynn for half a million dollars. Jane goes to "a gross fat woman, a bag of flabby putrescence" for a mere $150, 000. Now to the surgery to prepare the sweethearts for trepanning! A favourite Terror Tales scenario - young lovers waylaid in the middle of nowhere by a pack of drooling ancients. Schachner, realising he was on to a good thing, followed this early shudder pulp classic with the equally superb Thirst of the Ancients.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 18, 2023 9:01:56 GMT
 Amos Sewell: Above the headstones on Black Knoll a dark-winged horror lurked. Norman Blakely, hot shot reporter, investigates the murder of the famous lapidarist, Simon Vroon. His arrival in town coincides with an outbreak of corpse butchering in a churchyard reputedly haunted by a giant vampire bat. Blakely is inclined to laugh off such absurdity until Constable Billings is found impaled on the iron spikes of the church fence, the blood drained from his body via two gaping wounds to the throat!  Amos Sewell: Three bodies Barton Mowrey had — and the last of them knew only eternal agony.... A death struggle on the astral between catalepsy victim Dr. Barton Mowrey and murdering ectoplasm thief, Aubrey de Jonge. The winner claims the incomparably lovely Jeanne Fierbois for his bride. The loser is eternally damned to wander a bleak, barren waste of shrieking lost souls. |
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Post by dem bones on Jul 20, 2023 16:08:20 GMT
 Amos Sewell: On that lost isle of love, the wolf-man's curse set the mark of the beast on all Tom Mainor held dear! Washed up on an uncharted South Sea island, Tom Mainor of the Adventure Club begins a new life, even marrying a village girl, Teela, despite the threats of a love rival, Lezor, a powerful voodoo witchdoctor. After the wedding, Lezor informs the American that he has decided to let him live; "Through your child I shall get my revenge." Teela duly births an abomination. By the laws of the villager, Mainor, wife and bestial offspring have 14 days to leave the island or face death. Mainor leads wife and It into the mountains, only for both to maul him with fang and claw. He escapes to sea, but even back in New York, his life is one of perpetual, drink-addled fear as he recalls feral wife's solemn promise; "It will kill you if it must follow you back to your own country." No dipping into the dressing up box on this occasion. A bleak horror story, would have sat well in a Not at Night. |
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Post by dem bones on Jul 24, 2023 17:48:13 GMT
 Amos Sewell: Did the very fiends of hell possess young William Arnold's soul and body, that he should twine his clutching fingers about the throat of his own beloved bride? Miss Constance Defoe stands to gain the family fortune should her Aunt Mathilde Grull precede her to the grave. Independently rich and engaged to wed handsome, wealthy Bill Arnold, Constance couldn't care fiddlesticks for yet more money than she needs, but the same can't be said of an avaricious false friend of her fiancée. The classic weird menace Gothic set up. "Gloomy, castle-like" house on the hill with regulation Terror Tales hideous cowled spectre haunting the family crypt. Mesmerism, murder, young lovers in peril, fancy dress, a sinister doctor with hunchbacked valet, culminating in a ghoulish midnight wedding in a chapel of the dead. The Black Chapel: A Department: "Hence, we do not publish TERROR TALES for the dull ones, for the unimaginative clod who can see only what is before him. To such these stories would have no spark of life. TERROR TALES is for the hardy and imaginative, and for them alone!" |
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Post by dem bones on Aug 6, 2023 12:07:36 GMT
 Amos Sewell: What secret horror was it that forced that group of fear-frozen people to hurl themselves, one by one, into the storm-lashed maw of the canyon far below?A location shoot high on Witch Mountain during a storm provides opportunity for a psycho with a grudge to avenge a perceived slight. The mountain is reputedly cursed - walk too near the cliff edge and something will entice you over. This proves to be the case, as Marvin Cleek, leading man, his feisty off-screen sweetheart Sandra Boyden ("You great fat slug - you unspeakable baboon." "You big four-flusher!"), and Paul Dorsey, ace cameraman, fall to their deaths. Could it be that director, Braubeck, a mad genius and reputed dabbler in the black arts, is shooting a snuff movie? Terrified she'll be the next to die, rising star Doris Gladden leaps from the bus with veteran bit-player, Charley Wyeth, who knows these mountains better than any man alive. Charley is a contemporary of her father, James Gladden, the most famous director in Hollywood who mysteriously vanished in these parts two years ago. Charley leads Doris to a cave where she'll be safe ... safe, that is, to play his lust interest in a special one-off performance! But first, "come and watch me feed the dog — a very special dog." A weird menace film crew in peril, not the greatest Terror Tale by any stretch, but it will do for me. |
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Post by dem bones on Aug 8, 2023 18:47:22 GMT
"The boneless, formless Thing held her clamped in its foul embrace, investing her with its corruption, making her a part of its putrescence."  Amos Sewell: In the town below, gibbering madmen danced; in the dank parlor of that tragic house, lay a corpse that had come up from the grave itself.... And while Emma Wayne watched helpless from the dirt-smeared window, fleshless gray Things crept relentlessly upon the man she loved. On her gran's death, recently wed Emma Wayne, last of the family line, returns from New York to the Sprool Mansion, Ekwanok, to find the town under nightly attack from "grey things in the hills that ain't shaped like man nor beast," murdering folk and disinterring those they've already killed. Once indoors, Emma is confronted by a horrible smell; one of the things has dug up gran, coffin, maggots and all, and dumped her in her bedroom! Emma wishes dear Milton would hurry up and join her — until an old flame, Kurt Tradin, warns that the things lie in wait on the road from Old Tom mountain. Kurt, it seems, is the only man brave enough to take the battle to these amorphous blobs — "viscid doughy stuff that stunk to high heaven" — but then he's nothing to live for now Emma's gone and got herself hitched to some d**n City Slicker! Then again, if her husband were to come to grief in the hills .... Kurt can never forget the day grandpa Sprool laughed in his face when he made clear how he felt about Emma, disparaged him as a yokel, mad, just like his cretinous twin brother! We'll see about that! Zager shows our heroine little mercy; smothered, scorched, battered senseless and dragging a broken leg for twenty pages. If anything there's too much action, but it's worth sticking around for a dénouement outrageous even by shudder pulp standards. |
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