I have been a fan of Horror fiction for most of my life. Even before I was a strong reader I liked Horror comics and films. All of this is a way of saying: I’ve always liked Horror. Weird Menace or Shudder Pulp is a much more recent thing for me. I came to it through Hugh B. Cave and his book, Murgunstrumm and Others (1977). Some of the tales in that book are Horror while others are Weird Menace. Like many of the writers for Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Thrilling Mystery, Cave wrote both types. Others who did this include Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Arthur Leo Zagat, Henry Kuttner, Robert E. Howard, Paul Ernst and Jack Williamson. The contents pages of Weird Tales and Thrilling Mystery were often the same.
To really see the difference, I decided to read one Horror tale and one Shudder piece by a single author, relatively close in publication date. Any of these men would have sufficed but I chose Carl Jacobi, another of these dual writers. I selected his Strange Stories piece called “The Spawn of Blackness” (October 1939) for my Horror title and “Head in His Hands” from Thrilling Mystery, November 1937 for the other. There were many things that struck me as similar or even identical, and then some others that were in sheer opposition.
The Spawn of Blackness
“The Spawn of Blackness” is a Horror tale, but as it happens, it is also a Science Fiction piece in the Hodgson/Lovecraft manner. Using a very familiar plot devise, the friend who comes to the help of a scientist, we get all the usual tropes including the beautiful daughter/niece. Dr. James Haxton is called to the house of his scientist friend, Stephen Fay. There he meets Fay’s gorgeous niece, Jane Barren, and his creepy assistant, the Italian, Corelli. Fay tells Haxton what has happened. After receiving a carving of a rat from a primitive jungle tribe, Fay is attacked by a rat the size of a Great Dane. Haxton has now arrived and bandages Fay’s injuries from the rat encounter.
We learn more about Fay’s work and his color-sound machine. More importantly, we hear of Corelli’s own theories on color, largely connecting good and evil with white and black. The two scientists don’t agree. There is a second rat attack and Haxon gets to see the monster for himself. Someone has been fooling around with the color-sound machine, inserting a black panel where a full spectrum one should be. The doctor begins to feel protective of Jane, and follows an unseen person in the hallway. The night walker has painted Jane’s doorway with fluorescent paint. Haxton follows him to the library. It is Corelli. The doctor doesn’t tell anyone but makes plans.
The next day, Haxton has Fay replace the black panel with the proper one and to make sure the machine is mobile for quick transportation. The rat attacks again but this time Haxton fires the color machine at it and hurts it. The thing attacks Corelli, ripping out his throat. The creature tries to escape down the hall but is finally destroyed, dissolving into ash then smoke. Haxton explains that Corelli created the rat because he wanted it to kill Fay. Corelli was in love with Jane but Fay had refused to consider him as a suitor. The glowing paint was to protect her from the rat. With Fay gone, he might achieve both his scientific and romantic objectives. Haxton finishes by declaring he will throw the rat sculpture in the river, and he does.
This is a fairly traditional Horror story, if you can look past the SF elements. The monster appears three time as the occult detective figures out what is going on. This could have been a Jules de Grandin story easily enough. The color-sound machine is right out of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki stories with its Electric Pentacle. Jacobi’s aim is to make terrifying situations with a resolution of defeating the monster. At no time does anyone suggest that the monster is not supernatural or super-scientific. There is no scene at the end where Corelli’s monster is revealed to be a robot or a trained Great Dane disguised as a rat.
Head in His Hands
Peter Jaffrey tells “Head in His Hands” like Haxton did his tale. Jaffrey is a news reporter on a South Sea voyage along with a host of others that Jacobi describes almost immediately. There is Durkee, the Australian curio-hunter, who explains the curse of the headless ghost. Beside him is Parker, a radio manufacturer from Chicago, Arthur Gage, the Cockney vaudeville performer bound for Sydney, Petrini, a mysterious Italian (another one!), and Janice Meren, school teacher and beauty. Durkee shows everyone a small carving with a headless black man holding his own head. He explains that the thing used to hold a fabulously rich jewel but that was stolen three weeks before Durkee found it. The possessor of the jewel is cursed to meet death at the hands of the headless spectre.
Not surprising, the thing makes an appearance on deck when Peter and Janice are strolling. Later, Gage is found dead, his head missing. The Dutch captain of the Macassar tells everyone they are under arrest until the culprit is found. Jaffrey hears a bodiless voice warning him of coming death. The Italian, Petrini, is the next to be found dead.
When next the thing attacks it goes for Janice. Peter attempts to fight it, shooting it once. During the struggle with the stinking thing, he feels a jab and then loses consciousness. He has been drugged with a hypodermic needle. He awakens in Janice’s arms, so not all is lost. The newspaper man has suspicions and sets a trap. He makes a very public display of giving the captain a metal box to be put in the ship’s safe. The captain is the next to be attacked. Peter is waiting. Again he struggles with the headless ghost but this time he wins. The attacker is a white man, wearing a mantle to appear headless. It is Durkee the Australian.
Peter gives Janice the full explanation. Durkee wanted the gem to go with the sculpture. He had heard rumors that someone on the Macassar had bought it. The murders were his attempts to find the possessor or frighten them into giving up the stone. In fact, the gem had been purchased by the purser, who sold it to another who sold it back to the locals who probably returned it to the temple it had been stolen from. There never was any real ghost, but now there is real romance between the reporter and the teacher….
Jacobi’s style in “Head in His Hands” is similar to the other story, with exciting descriptions during action sequences but over all feels just a little more heightened. This is typical of Shudder Pulps, which often feel like the narrator drinks way too much coffee. Jacobi doesn’t over do this style but it’s still there all the same.
Three Rules of Shudder Pulps
None of this should surprise me too much when I consider Dime Mystery‘s three story requirements. Dime Mystery was the first Shudder Pulp that set the mold for all that followed. The Pulp had started as a boring Mystery magazine then took an editorial 180 into Horror. These three things were its criteria: 1: Gothicism – plenty of old castles, ruins, laboratories, etc. in an Ann Radcliffe style. 2) Sadism – with plenty of women being threatened with mutilation or worse, especially on the covers. 3) Weird Menacism – a supernatural appearing threat that hovers over the main characters like Count Dracula did to the women in Jonathan Harker’s life. Ultimately, all supernatural elements are explained away in a manner that would make Radcliffe smile.
Starting with these requirements, the Shudder Pulp story needs to be organized (a least a little) like a Mystery rather than a Horror tale. At the story’s conclusion some bright light is going to explain everything away much in the manner that Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes reveals all. Because of this, I found Jacobi’s “Head in His Hands” had to pay more attention to who was in the story since one of the available cast was the villain trying to fool everyone. In Scooby-Doo terms, there had to be a Principal Dingwall among the gathered to have his mask ripped off and declare, “I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” Jacobi does this at the outset, describing each of the other passengers. He even tried to throw us off a little by having one of them be a radio manufacturer and another a vaudevillian who might have used radio or ventriloquism to throw evil voices? This does not prove to be the case in this story but the idea is at least as old as Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798).
Conclusion
In the end, which story works better is an opinion. I will always side with real supernatural over fake. It’s just how I am built. The few rare times that fake monsters did work for me was in the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle or the Dr. Gideon Fell tales of John Dickson Carr. I think both of these writers knew how to make the other elements of the tale as fascinating as the monster-fest. Shudder Pulps attempt to do this, but their sheer grandiosity ruins the effect. In that sense, Weird Menace is closer to Gothic novels or the Grand Guignol theater that Henry Steeger had in mind when he created the first Shudder Pulp. It’s a lot of work to create atmosphere, build the suspense, only to realize the truth is something far less intriguing. Sizzle, but no steak. Jacobi’s giant rat is not the scariest monster ever done, borrowed from H. G. Wells, but I liked it. Durkee in paint and costume, far less satisfying. (I could never quite figure out how a monster holding a head could grab at its victims?) Robert Kenneth Jones in The Shudder Pulps (1975) wishes Henry Kuttner’s brilliant monsters had proven to be supernatural. Think of all the great Horror tales we could have had instead…
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