Fri 29 Jul 2016
DAVID VINEYARD: Stories I’m Reading – ARTHUR LEO ZAGAT “Bride of the Winged Terror.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[3] Comments
ARTHUR LEO ZAGAT “Bride of the Winged Terror.” First published in Dime Mystery Magazine, November 1936, writing as Grendon Alzee. (In the same issue is “Terror Beneath the Streets,” by Arthur Leo Zagat.) Also available online and in ebook form.
“These hillbillies hate furriners worse’n poison …†ex-mountain man Fred Harris warns his private detective buddy Dick Mervale as their roadster tackles the dangerous winding roads of Buzzard Mountain where a picture in a circular has led the two to believe bank embezzler Gorham Carstairs has been hiding lo these many years.
Capturing Carstairs would not only me a big reward and much needed publicity for the low rent sleuths out of Louisville (presumably Kentucky, it is never made clear), but also the gratitude and business of the Bank Association, so they are willing to risk a great deal to capture Carstairs.
And it becomes clear how much when a bullet from a high powered rifle punches a hole in Fred’s head.
That doesn’t slow down Dick Mervale, who quickly covers up Fred’s body with rocks, spying a huge vulture as he does so, and makes his way up to the town of Winburg where he is met by armed citizens. They aren’t after Dick though. A child, a young girl has been murdered, horribly mangled by a “big black bird.â€
Dick manages to get out of Winburg and reach the top of Buzzard Mountain where he plans to wait until daylight, but he spies the giant black bird, and seconds later hears a woman’s cry. Racing to her rescue he encounters a leathery black winged monster with a “human face†attacking a young woman “… her gauzy frock … ripped in the struggle…†revealing “…white satiny skin seeming to glow from some inner light and the swelling firm curves of just budding womanhood.â€
And wouldn’t you know it, this is Elise Carstairs the mountain-raised daughter of the man he is after, who promptly shows up with a shotgun.
From that point on the action literally races to its conclusion, piling horror on horror until the naked Elise is in Dick’s protective arms and the mystery of the winged terror (she isn’t its bride, in fact there is no bride — she’s the monsters niece and no hint of incest appears) and why Carstairs embezzled the money in the first place is laid to rest along with Carstairs and his brother.
If you don’t recognize the basics of a typical Weird Menace story from what Robert Jonas labeled “The Shudder Pulps” in his excellent book on the subject then you likely don’t know you pulps. These were the ones with the gaudy covers of scantily clad women being tortured and murdered by looming madmen in the most suggestive way with a heroic male usually helplessly watching nearby.
A variety of pulp authors contributed to the genre, which was one step up from the Spicy genre where the sex was a bit more obvious and the nudity considerably so, including some notable names like Norvel Page, Cornell Woolrich, and Richard Sale, but the genre had its own stars, and one of them was the prolific Arthur Leo Zagat, best known for his fantasy horror Drink We Deep.
For all the nudity and strange psycho-sexual tortures out of de Sade by way of Kraft-Ebling featured on the covers and in the stories virtue prevailed as did virginity for both hero and heroine. In most cases, as here, a logical (if you can call it that) explanation was swiftly tacked on in the final paragraphs to assure the reader nothing supernatural had happened, though once in a while a whiff of sulfur and brimstone would linger.
The stories vary in quality as you might expect, from say a minor Universal Horror film to one of those independent productions with the likes of George Zucco, Lionel Atwill, or Bela Lugosi where the sets look like someone’s three bedroom house.
This one is absurd, even by the standard of the genre, but Zagat was a master of empurpled prose and swelling horrors (sounds like a bad diagnosis doesn’t it?) who could do better and did elsewhere, and this is actually quick fun to read with the caveat you don’t dare stop and think about it. If slavering mad monsters with foetid breath, reddened claws, and hideous eyes are your cuppa, this more than delivers.
They don’t write ’em like this anymore — well, they do, , but now they are themselves swollen monsters of 500 plus pages and with considerably less virtuous characters, and what logic there once was has gone the way of the pulps themselves. There is something almost innocent about the Weird Menace genre, in a slightly disturbing way, but I wouldn’t suggest you delve too deep.
Some things are better left alone.
July 29th, 2016 at 11:24 pm
I have to admit that I went through a period in the 1970’s where I managed to compile complete runs of the major weird menace titles like DIME MYSTERY, HORROR STORIES, TERROR TALES, and THRILLING MYSTERY. I found the stories to be crazy and bizarre comedies which I found to be hilarious and sick at the same time.
I became friends with Robert Jones and encouraged him to expand his essay which originally appeared in Fred Cook’s fanzine, BRONZE SHADOWS, in several parts. The resulting book, THE SHUDDER PULPS, is one of the best books ever written about the pulps.
We became close friends and carried on a correspondence about the pulps for many years. I still have many of his letters where we discussed the stories in ALL STORY magazine. At the time in the 1980’s I never imagined that one day I would complete my ALL STORY set but I recently did, all 444 issues, 1905-1920.
Bob Jones died an early death many years ago but he would have been impressed. We never thought that it would be possible because Edgar Rice Burroughs appeared so often in ALL STORY, making the set extremely difficult and expensive to complete.
July 30th, 2016 at 12:37 am
David,
I think this line of yours
“There is something almost innocent about the Weird Menace genre, in a slightly disturbing way, but I wouldn’t suggest you delve too deep.”
sums up the genre as well as anyone has ever done.
July 31st, 2016 at 11:14 am
I disagree with David Vineyard about the relative merits of the spicies versus the shudder pulps. But then I consider the sadism, cruelty and wallowing in horror and terror much worse than the generally oblique references to sex and nudity in the spicies.