One of the standard scenarios in Pulp horror magazines is the person stuck in a Gothic house, that either through tricks or merely atmosphere, seems haunted. As the plot grinds on we discover there is no supernatural agent but a mad man, usually a scientist behind it all. Seabury Quinn did this in his Jules de Grandin story “The House of Horror” (Weird Tales, July 1926) and Fritz Leiber borrowed this well-worn staple for “Spider Mansion” (Weird Tales, September 1942), which reads almost like a parody. An actual parody was “The Last Case of Jules de Granjerque” (Fantastic Adventures, April 1943) where Farnsworth Wright’s nephew poked fun at old Jules de Grandin and this same tiresome plot.
Which is a really long way to get to my point: I was surprised to find this same scene earlier in the work of Victorian author, Edith Nesbit. Nesbit is best-remembered as a children’s author, having written the delightful fantasies of the Psammead as well as the Bastable Children. She also produced a number of ghost stories that are often anthologized.
“The Haunted House” The Strand Magazine, December 1913) is a fake vampire story:
“…The black lid of the coffin opposite rose slowly — and then suddenly fell, clattering and echoing, and from the coffin rose a form, horribly white and shrouded, and fell on Prior and rolled him on the floor of the vault in a silent, whirling struggle. The last thing Desmond heard before he fainted in good earnest was the scream Prior uttered as he turned at the crash and saw the white-shrouded body leaping towards him.”
Sounds like more Dracula but here’s what really happens: Desmond is lured to stay in a haunted house, partly by mistaking the advertiser for an old friend, where he experiences a terrible shock when “the ghost” — or of a vampire– attacks him. Once recuperated he is lured once again into a vault where the “scientist” Prior plans to drain his blood because he believes the blood of someone who has all four races in him can give immortality. After tying Desmond up, a white-shrouded figure appears and attacks Prior. It is actually his assistant Verney, trying to find some way to rescue Desmond. The scientist is locked up as a mad man.
No real vampires but a nice dual role of “mad scientist” vampire versus “false vampire”. Nesbit keeps you guessing if there is a real one or not. This story appeared under the name E. Bland, which was Nesbit’s married name and so is often missed by anthologists.
The fake haunted house dates back to Ann Radcliffe and her Gothic novels of the 1790s. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) reveals all its secrets, but has no mad scientists in it. That had to wait for Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, which was the Gothic Explique in reverse, rather than teasing us with a Mystery then revealing its mundane truth, Shelley flipped it, showing the truth and going from there. Brian Aldiss says she created the first Science Fiction novel in the process. So horror writers have felt the license to make the villain a mad scientist in the end. Robert Louis Stevenson combined Doctor and Villain in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885). Even Jules Verne wrote one called Carpathian Castle (1892) where the seeming vamp turns out to be a scientist working on electricity.
So there is quite a history behind the “mad scientist” reveal though I thought of it as being particularly a Pulp thing, along with the idea that the mad scientist should always have a beautiful daughter. This cliché took us to The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Cassandra Rose (2013) but where did it start? Victor Frankenstein, though married, never spawns children. (It’s pretty hard to have any if your monster goes around killing your wife.) I suppose it was borrowed from that even earlier mad scientist-of-sorts, Prospero, in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) with Miranda acting as template.
Which brings us finally to the realization that Pulp clichés were often clichés before they were used in the Pulps. The Shudder Pulps would perfect this idea in the very titles with:
“Hospital of the Damned” by Nat Schachner
“Dr. Midnight—Surgeon From Hell” by Arthur Leo Zagat
“Satan’s Mad Surgeons” by Loring and Peggy Dowst
“Doctor Terror” by Evan Leigh
“The Deadly Arts of Doctor Girande” by Henry Treat Sperry
“Mad Surgeon of the Everglades” by Emile C. Tepperman
“Madman’s Surgery” by Thorp McClusky
And my favorite, which gave us the title of this rather rambling bit, “I Steal Your Blood!” The Shudder Pulps were the Grand Guignol theater on paper, another source of gruesomeness before the Pulps. (The Grand Guignol in Paris outlived the Pulps, closing in 1962.)
The Pulps certainly did not exist in isolation, but inherited plenty from the Gothics, the Victorians, the theater. So why do so many people call something “pulpy” as if the penny-a-worders of the Great Depression invented it all?
This might be a good place to thank all the doctors and nurses and all the front-line workers for the wonderful efforts they put in everyday during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thanks, and I hope you don’t take offense over this silly period in horror history.
