Wed 15 Aug 2012
Reviewed by Marv Lachman: SHELDON JAFFERY, Editor – Selected Tales of Grim and Grue from the Horror Pulps.
Posted by Steve under Editors & Anthologies , Pulp Fiction , Reviews[6] Comments
SHELDON JAFFERY, Editor – Selected Tales of Grim and Grue from the Horror Pulps. Bowling Green University Popular Press, hardcover/softcover, 1987.
A [recent] collection of stories, Selected Tales of Grim and Grue from the Horror Pulps, edited by Sheldon Jaffery, is wonderfully nostalgia-producing. Jaffery has collected eight novelets from magazines of the thirties like Terror Tales and Horror Stories. Some of the big names in the mystery field wrote for weird-menace pulps, including Cornell Woolrich, Frank Gruber, Bruno Fischer, and Steve Fisher.
Jaffery apparently couldn’t get them, but the writers he does include are probably more representative of the genre. Typical is Wyatt Blassingame’s “The Tongueless Horror” from Dime Mystery for April 1934. Don’t expect a great deal of subtlety, but they’re all readable, and the authors don’t rely on cop-outs. The seemingly impossible is explained rationally, even if the reader’s credulity is stretched a bit.
The book is loaded with wonderful cliches like the one in G. T. Fleming-Roberts’ “Moulder of Monsters” (Terror Tales, July-August 1937): “Then he turned into the room where horror dwelt.” From Wayne Rogers’ “Sleep with Me — and Death” (Horror Stories, April-May 1938) we read, “Then the shaggy-haired head lifted and I caught a glimpse of a scarred and battered face, hardly recognizable as human — a face in which the eyes of a madman gleamed triumphantly.”
All stories are reproduced from the original magazines, which means they include the wonderful pulp ads plus the interior illustrations of monsters slavering over scantily clad women. A bonus is a fine introduction and lengthy index by the late Robert Kenneth Jones, one of the real scholars in this aspect of the pulps.
Who can resist lists of the complete contents of the single issue, in 1937, of Eerie Stories and the five issues of Uncanny Tales published in 1939 and 1940? Certainly not I.
Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
August 15th, 2012 at 11:08 pm
Sheldon Jaffery and I were friends for many years. He unfortunately is gone now but I remember our long conversations and meals that we shared together at the Pulpcons. We were speaking recently about the reasons we attend PulpFest and Windy City. The books yes, but Sheldon was an example of the friends that you make at these conventions.
He edited several of these collections, most having to do with the weird menace pulps. The stories were insane and the covers stunning in their ability to show damsels in distress. I had just about a complete collection of HORROR, TERROR, DIME MYSTERY but I managed to sell them when I noticed I was in danger of trying to imitate the cover scenes! I guess I’m just a mad doctor at heart.
August 16th, 2012 at 9:41 am
Unfortunately, the weird menace pulps exemplify formulaic writing at its worse. The plots are the same:1) Hero and wife or fiance come to old house full of suspicious characters. 2)Hero gets knocked out at mid-plot. 3)Hero wakes up tied up, to see female companion about to be tortured. 4)Hero breaks free and overpowers and exposes villain to be Uncle Charlie in a monster suit with phosphorescent paint and demon mask.5) Couple leaves house happy in the bright light of day. These stories play readers for chumps (the corpse was really a wax dummy), and the only challenge is to guess the villain from the cast of people encountered earlier. The covers are good though.
August 16th, 2012 at 9:58 am
Alfred Jan gives a good description of the fiction in the weird menace pulps. That is why I said the plots were insane. For instance Zombies and creatures murder several people in town and threaten to torture and rape the beautiful girl. Turns out that the villain was some smuck who wanted to lower his property taxes.
These stories I read as bizarre black comedies full of crazy people. They can be fun but you have to read them as comedies with a distorted sense of humor.
August 16th, 2012 at 10:39 am
Alfred Jan is right. You couldn’t read too many of the so-called weird menace pulps without realizing how closely they stuck to the outline he suggests. But there were exceptions. They weren’t all Scooby-Doo stories with a superficial veneer of sex and sadism.
One notorious one is “The Mole-Men Want Your Eyes,” by Frederick C. Davis. It fits the formula, but it’s definitely why they also called them “shudder pulps.”
You can read the entire story online at http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/molemen/molemen.pdf
August 16th, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Steve mentions the story, “The Mole Men Want Your Eyes”. I knew a collector who attended the early Pulpcons, who used this line on girls he wanted to pickup. I actually saw him use it at the hotel registration desk and it worked.
He actually leered at the girl, said the line about Mole Men and she blushed and simpered. I of course was interested only in books and pulps.
August 17th, 2012 at 5:06 pm
Well, it’s a special kind of woman who responds to the Molemen line, and a special kind of man who uses it (and vice verse). (Though in my young and innocent days, a drunken dancer, a bit younger and vastly better looking than I, used a similar one on me [you might be surprised how striking blue eyes can be in some circumstances], and I cursed the fates that wouldn’t let me try my luck too hard with a drunken fellow teen.) Though high school memories also take me back to Charles Beaumont’s “The Bloody Pulps” and the rather less thin veneer of sadism he noted in some of the other shudder stories as well…and certainly I’ve read a few that were as disgusting as anything Wells coughed up before them (“The Cone”) or the lesser splatterpunks splashed after…leaving aside also the sadistic digest and bedsheet children of the shudder pulps, such as WEB TERROR and the quartet (iirc) of magazines the filmmaker Ed Wood hacked out for publication in ’72, as HORROR SEX TALES and such…