SPICY MYSTERY, February 1936

Pulp magazines now are enjoying their greatest flood of popularity since the rediscovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs kick-started the pulp boom of the 1960s. Falling between the pricey original magazines still in existence and the acceptably priced reprint editions are the exact replicas. These match the original mag’s dimensions and page count, and include everything that the first purchaser bought 55-85 years ago: all the ads, the letters to the editor, the not so-inspiring interior art and the hyperbole.

One of the leading producers of pulp replicas is Girasol Collectables, which puts out three replicas every month at a $25 or $35 per. Honestly, that’s a little steep for me, especially since other folks are doing it cheaper. Whining aside, I just finished reading Girasol’s replica of Feb. 1936 issue of Spicy Mystery. Look at the H.J. Ward cover painting of a terrified, gorgeous rehead in a sheer nightgown drawing away from a hanged corpse and tell me that you don’t want to read the stories that lurk behind that cover. It's supposed to illustrate a story called "Batman."  Go on, tell me – I dare you.

The cover story has nothing to do with any other Batmen with whom you may be familiar. In fact, the art has nothing to do with the story, but who the hell cares. The tale, from one of Spicy Mystery’s regular contributors, is about a man who thinks he’s a bat. Hey, you want your fiction to make sense, try something by Henry James.

This issue also contains stories by E. Hoffman Price and Robert Leslie Bellem. Price was a first rate pulp writer who continued publishing fantasy novels into the 1970s. Bellem’s story uses the theme of reincarnation. He is best remembered as the creator of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, from the pages of Spicy Detective magazine. Bellem also wrote for Spicy Western and Spicy Adventure. Perhaps you see a pattern.

Now, let’s approach that word “spicy.” The Spicys frequently were sold under the counter – one more glance at that cover art and you can see why – and went for the comparatively high sum of 25 cents. Every story contained several references to female breasts – the size, appearance and feel thereof – but it’s all PG-13 stuff that would make most kids today giggle. Spicy Mystery was a weird menace title and so its tales often would contain a blend of sex and violence that some readers might still feel is objectionable. But not you, you perv.  Weird menace is actually an inbred descendent of the English school of Gothicism

This issue contains no partial stories. Every tale is complete, and even the ones that don’t hold up too well are fun.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend some time ogling the hot blonde under attack by what looks like a gigantic grasshopper on the cover of the Feb. 1938 issue. It’s an assignment for my art appreciation class.

"Wolves of Darkness" by Jack Williamson (1932)

Most pulp fans agree that Weird Tales’ most significant rival in the realm of dark fantasy was the short-lived Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, which lasted only 10 issues from 1931 to 1933. Perhaps the strongest novelette published in Strange Tales was Jack Williamson’s always-fascinating “Wolves of Darkness” in the January 1932 issue.

Clovis McLauren has received a telegram from his father, Doc McLauren (one-time professor of astrophysics and currently an independent researcher), asking for help with an experiment. Clovis rushes to the small town of Hebron, Texas, and arrives on a snow-covered night and asks the station agent for help getting out to Dad’s ranch.

The agent does all he can to talk Clovis out of visiting the ranch, especially at night, but the younger man finally determines to find his own way. He hires farmer Sam Jenson to convey him to his father’s place. On the way, they are attacked by a pack of wolves. Jenson is killed and Clovis is horrified to see a beautiful young woman running with the pack. She is Stella Jetton, the daughter of his father’s assistant.

“Her head was bare,” Clovis tells us, “and her hair, seeming in the moonlight to be an odd, pale yellow, was short and tangled. Her smooth arms and small hands, her legs, and even her flashing feet, were bare. Her skin was white, with a cold, leprous, bloodless whiteness. Almost as white as the snow.

“And her eyes shone green.

“They were like the gray wolf’s eyes, blazing with a terrible emerald flame, with the fire of an alien, unearthly life. They were malevolent, merciless, hideous. They were cold as the cosmic wastes beyond the light of stars. They burned with an evil light, with a malicious intelligence, stronger and more fearful than that of any being on earth.

“Across her lips, and her cheeks of alabaster whiteness, was a darkly red and dripping smear, almost black by moonlight.”

Now, of course that’s overwritten in that grand, penny-a-word way of the pulps, but it also adds to the eerie suspense Williamson has been building from the beginning. Tod Browning’s film of Dracula had hit theaters about a year before this novelette was published, and the opening scenes reflect the movie quite closely: Innocent stranger arrives at country town and the locals tell him not to go to the castle — or, in this case, ranch. He goes anyway and is followed by wolves
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When he arrives, he is welcomed by Doc McLauren and Stella (think Dracula and his vampire bride) and given a meal in which they do not participate. And just as the film displays several telling details, Williamson give us this carefully placed observation: “Another fearful thing I noticed. My breath, as I said, condensed in white clouds of frozen crystals, in the frigid air. But no white mists came from Stella’s nostrils, or from my father’s.”

But you sense a shift from the supernatural to the science fictional as Clovis talks more and more of Doc and Stella acting and speaking like aliens. Williamson presents us with a grab bag of popular genres, from the supernatural and science fiction to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the physical grotesqueness and pain of weird menace:

“Her teeth caught my trousers, tore them from my leg from the middle of the right thigh ownward,” Clovis tells us about the torture his father demands that Stella institues when his son refuses to help him. “Then they closed into my flesh, and I could feel her teeth gnawing … gnawing….

“She did not make a deep wound, though blood, black in the terrible red light, trickled from it down my leg toward the shoe — blood which, from time to time, she ceased the gnawing to lick up appreciatively. Occasionally she stopped the unendurable gnawing, to lick her lips with a dreadful satisfaction.”

And later, when Clovis escapes, he is pursued by the wolves and what appear to be zombies:

“Judson, the man who had brought me out from Hebron, was among them. His livid flesh hung in ribbons. One eye was gone, and a green fire seemed to sear the empty socket. His chest was fearfully lacerated. And the man was — eviscerated! Yet his hideous body leaped beside the wolves.”

More and more, we sense that these are not just ordinary wolves. We assume they are werewolves, but as the adventure progresses we begin to question that explanation. Will the final answer come from the horror genre or from science fiction?

“Wolves of Darkness” is one of Williamson’s most popular early novelettes and it has been reprinted many times. You can read it for free online. Enjoy.

“The Empty House” (Algernon Blackwood, 1906)

Despite the fact that this tale was first published in 1906, it’s a wonderfully cinematic examination of a notoriously haunted house. Blackwood wastes no time, jumping in immediately with a paragraph that defines what a haunted house is and describes the effect it has on anyone brave, ignorant, or foolish enough to enter it.

“And, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent cause.”

That, to coin a phrase, says it all.

In the story, Jim Shorthouse receives what appears to be a semi-urgent request from his Aunt Julia that he come to visit her at once. She’s acquired the keys to an infamously haunted house on the other side of town and she wants Shorthouse to accompany her while she goes exploring. She makes him promise that he will not leave her side even for a minute because “persons who had spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die than enter them again.”

As the two ghosthunters enter the old house, Aunt Julia relates a brief history of the brutal crime that initiated the haunting.“’It has to do with a murder committed by a jealous stableman who had some affair with a servant in the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and when everyone was asleep, he crept upstairs to the servants' quarters, chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come to the rescue threw her bodily over the banisters into the hall below.’"

’And the stableman—?’

"’Was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder.’”

Blackwood then takes us on a regulated tour of the house, first downstairs and then up. He is an absolute master at describing everyday items in such a way that they assume personalities, and none too pleasant ones at that. He evokes that feeling that things change as soon as you look away from them—“There was the inevitable sense that operations which went on when the room was empty had been temporarily suspended till they were well out of the way again.”

The tension continues to build as Shorthouse and Julia are certain they hear a man sneeze next to them. Shadows are cast when there is nothing there to cast a shadow. Every time they turn a corner or move from one room to another, you wonder what they are about to encounter. Shorthouse “felt as if his spine had suddenly become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice.” The aptness of the simile is dazzling.

Then it happens, with a sudden jolt as powerful as the one that accompanies the first appearance of the old woman in “House on Haunted Hill,” a movie moment which may very well have been inspired by this story. “Facing them, directly in their way between the doorposts, stood the figure of a woman. She had dishevelled hair and wildly staring eyes, and her face was terrified and white as death.

“She stood there motionless for the space of a single second. Then the candle flickered and she was gone—gone utterly— and the door framed nothing but empty darkness.”

This is one of the most effective old school haunted house stories you will ever read. Take a look at it here -- http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/authors.html -- and you’ll know why Algernon Blackwood was one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite writers.