Unmasking Allison V. Harding: The Forgotten “Queen” of Horror

Weird Tales was a popular pulp fiction magazine specializing in horror and dark fantasy stories from 1923 to 1954. Between the years 1943 and 1951, the magazine published 33 tales of terror by an unknown author named Allison V. Harding. Mysteriously, Ms. Harding disappeared from writing altogether after her last submission to the pulp. No more stories. No paperback original novels. It’s like she never existed.

In June 2020, an excellent reprint publisher called Armchair Fiction released a compilation of 16 stories from Weird Tales titled Allison V. Harding: The Forgotten Queen of Horror. The publisher claims that Harding was actually a woman named Jean Milligan who lived from 1919 to 2004, a fact backed up by business records from the offices of Weird Tales showing that Ms. Milligan was paid for the stories bearing Harding’s name.

So Jean Milligan was the talented horror author behind the Allison V. Harding name, right?

Interestingly, it’s not that simple.

A blog called Tellers of Weird Tales did some valuable legwork in 2011 calling the Milligan-Harding connection into question. The evidence is laid out below.

It turns out that Ms. Milligan was married to a mainstream author named Lamont Buchanan who wrote serious books about baseball and American history. Meanwhile, his bride was never known to write anything before or after the eruption of 33 stories using the Harding pseudonym.

Evidently, Mr. Buchanan also had a steady paycheck during the relevant window of time. What did he do? He was the Associate Editor of Weird Tales. If Mr. Buchanan wrote stories for his employer’s magazine, it would have been standard practice to utilize a pseudonym for those stories to not clog up the masthead with his own name. Moreover, he was an author of serious books who wouldn’t want his brand sullied by overtly writing for the pulps. Is it possible that Mr. Buchanan was actually Allison V. Harding and he submitted the stories as if they were coming from his non-author wife?

If these suspicions are valid, why would Mr. Buchanan use a woman’s name for his horror story pseudonym? I can only speculate, but during the key years, the Weird Tales Managing Editor (Mr. Buchanan’s boss) was Dorothy McIlwraith, a woman. This egalitarian editorial hierarchy might have been the perfect place to have a faux female contributor of stories for the consumption of the magazine’s mostly male readership.

It’s also possible that Mr. Buchanan was double-laundering his stories through both the Harding pseudonym and his wife’s name as the submitter. Maybe his boss, Ms. McIlwraith, didn’t even know that her subordinate was the man behind the stories. If so, that’s a fun little scam worthy of a pulp magazine story of its own.

The best way to put this conspiracy theory to a test is to have Paperback Warrior read a sample of the stories and determine if they were written by a man or woman.

Here are the capsule reviews of the three stories we DNA tested:

The Frightened Engineer

In this Lovecraft-inspired story, a turnpike construction project is derailed by Hill 96. Under normal circumstances, dynamite and earth-moving equipment would be used to grade the hill for the highway. In this case, it’s almost as if Hill 96 does not want to be disturbed - as if it were alive. This was a very fun story - like a good Twilight Zone episode - but not particularly terrifying.

The Underbody

The anthology’s cover art is the illustration that originally accompanied this story in Weird Tales. It’s about a boy who finds a man stuck in the soil of a shallow hole behind his house. When the boy brings his father out to see the man in the hole, he’s disappeared. The boy takes to calling the reappearing dirt-man, Mr. Mole. This story was legitimately unsettling and scary - exactly what I seek in pulp horror.

The Damp Man

This was the author’s most popular story spawning two sequels appearing in Weird Tales. A female swimming champion turns to a male reporter for help because she is being stalked by a frightening large man in a dark suit. The stalker is absolutely vile, moist, and menacing. Great horror story.

DNA Test Results:

There is no way hell that these stories were written by a woman of 1940s America. The first two stories have no female characters at all, and the even the third story is told through a male’s eyes. Furthermore, “The Frightened Engineer” has many technical details about turnpike road construction, a stereotypically manly pursuit in the 1940s.

Another large factor supporting this conclusion is that these stories are really good, even excellent. Without question, a female author was capable of excellence. However, I’m not buying for a second that the talented author of these stories threw her typewriter out the window without authoring another published word for the next 53 years of her life.

Regardless of the true authorship, pulp horror fans will enjoy the Armchair Fiction collection of Allison V. Harding stories. Whether or not the author is the “Queen” of horror is up for debate, but the quality of these stories is not. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE

13 French Street

Gil Brewer’s 1951 paperback, 13 French Street, was also his most popular book. The paperback sold over a million copies and sustained multiple printings from Fawcett Gold Medal in the U.S. and foreign publishers abroad. The short novel’s reputation as a sex-drenched story of lust and betrayal made me crack it open for a sample and the pages just kept turning.

Our narrator is Alex Bland, and he’s on vacation visiting his old war-buddy Verne. Upon arriving at Vern’s house at 13 French Street in a fictional southern town, he is greeted at the door by Verne’s impossibly sexy and flirtatious wife Petra, a dame who just oozes promiscuity. Although Alex has never met Petra before, they know each other from letters (aka: paper emails) they’ve exchanged over the past five years. You see, Verne isn’t much of a letter writer, so he had his sexy wife write the letters to keep in touch with his best pal. (Note to dudes with sexy wives: Bad idea.)

Things are awkward for Alex from the moment he arrives. Verne has aged poorly and does a bad job feigning enthusiasm regarding Alex’s visit. Petra can’t help but make bedroom eyes at Alex every time their gazes lock. Finally, a pretty chamber maid confides in Alex that he’d be well-served to keep his bedroom door locked at night.

Thing escalate exponentially when Verne needs to go out of town on business leaving Alex to his “vacation” at the house with Petra. Verne’s elderly witch of a mother lives in the house, and she keeps a close eye on Petra while her son is gone. However, that doesn’t stop Petra from trying to seduce Alex every time the old lady’s back is turned. If you enjoy your vintage paperbacks filled with sexual tension, this one is definitely for you.

Eventually, the old lady’s chaperoning becomes more and more troublesome, and you can imagine where that goes. It takes about halfway through the paperback before 13 French Street becomes a full-fledged crime noir novel in which bad ideas beget further moral slippage. It’s also compelling as hell, and the pages keep flying by - making it abundantly clear why this book was such a sensation nearly 70 years ago.

To be sure, there is some retrograde treatment of women in this book that wouldn’t fly today, but 1951 was a very different world. While I still think that The Vengeful Virgin was Brewer’s masterpiece, 13 French Street isn’t far behind. It remains a lusty noir classic with a femme fatale you won’t forget. Recommended.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Bourbon Street

G.H. Otis was a pseudonym employed by Otis Hemmingway Gaylord Jr. (1924-1992), a Colorado native, advertising executive and World War 2 veteran. He used the Otis pen-name for two hardboiled crime novels originally published by Lion Books in 1953 titled Bourbon Street and Hot Cargo. Both of these paperbacks have been reprinted together in one volume by Stark House Books, so I’m starting with Bourbon Street.

Our narrator is Digger, a down-and-out bookmaker in New Orleans’ French Quarter occupying “an airless room in a crummy hotel.” However, the way Digger sees it, things are looking up. He’s devised a brilliant idea to make some money, and all he needs is an audience with the local mob boss to pitch his foolproof plan. The Big Man is a careful sort who has a lot of gatekeepers, including a particularly rough hood named Twigg. Navigating these obstacles comprises much of the paperback’s first quarter.

Otis draws a vivid picture of French Quarter life with snippets of real history and landmarks, and the humid atmosphere runs thick throughout the novel. Eventually, Digger is given an audience with The Big Man, and he’s able to pitch his scheme. The plan is basically a simpler means to smuggle opium and other contraband into Louisiana using a boat moored in the Gulf of Mexico. Digger has devised a ruse that will keep law enforcement blind to the shipments, and he wants to bring the local mob boss in on the deal to ensure he doesn’t wind up sleeping with the crawdads.

The problem is that Digger refuses to give up his many small-time side hustles - bookmaking, craps games, etc. His moonlighting causes problems with his mafia silent partner causing tensions and violence to reach a roiling boil. Will Digger need to betray his friends to climb up the New Orleans crime ladder?

I wanted to like Bourbon Street - I promise I did. Unfortunately, it was pretty sub-standard, and the plotting was off-track. Otis was a good writer, but it took way too long for Digger to implement his plan, and then the story fell into a maritime rut. The novel’s femme fatale arrives really late in the story, and she’s more trouble than she’s worth from the very beginning. Bourbon Street is a good first draft in need of an editor to guide the author through some structural plotting alterations. It wasn’t an awful read, but you deserve better.

Purchase a copy of this book HERE

Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 68

Episode 68 of the Paperback Warrior Podcast features an in-depth look into Don Smith’s “Secret Mission” spy series. Also: Shopping trips! Richard Stark! Jack Higgins! Scary Hillbilly Fiction! And much, much more! Listen on any podcast app, stream below or download directly HERE 

Listen to "Episode 68: Don Smith" on Spreaker.

Black Ice

Pat Graversen (1935-2000) began writing horror and suspenseful short-stories in the late 1970s. Her first novel, Invisible Fire, was published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1981. She later signed with Zebra Books and authored a number of “child in peril” horror novels including Dollies (1990), Stones (1991) and Sweet Blood (1992). I have owned her 1993 novel Black Ice for a number of years, and finally took the time to read it.

This horror story begins where most horror novels begin – the old Satanic ritual routine. In the prologue, three kids in 1928 climb into a dark dusty attic and perform the ritual inside of a scrawled out pentagram using chicken blood, an upside down crucifix and black candles. Afterwards, one of the kids is possessed into some sort of demon that makes him an invalid for the rest of his life.

In the opening chapters, single-mom Cassandra “Cassie” McCall and her eight-year old son Jess arrive in the sleepy town of Winter Falls, Connecticut. Throughout the book Cassie remembers growing up in the area and experiencing a harsh and physically abusive relationship from her father Colin (he was one of the creepy Satanic blood-slurping kids from the prologue). Colin's heath has deteriorated and now he's an invalid living at the local hospital. Cassie, in dire straits financially, uses this opportunity to return home for a fresh start.

Winter Falls is haunted by an old children's tale of three little girls who drowned in the town's lake. Through the years, their rotted corpses are seen sporadically by horny teens and delirious old men. While playing too close to the lake's center, Jess falls in and becomes trapped under the ice for 20-minutes. After he is resuscitated, both Jess and Cassie begin experiencing strange connections to the lake. Through Jess, readers learn that the three dead girls have awakened and they summon him to do bizarre things. Once the town's citizens begin drowning on dry land, Cassie realizes that her invalid father may have a connection to Winter Falls' ghostly tale.

This is my first experience with Pat Graversen and I find that her writing style is similar to Ruby Jean Jensen. In fact, both authors were similar in age and each of them authored “child in peril” horror novels for Zebra. Considering satanic rituals, drowned kids and a five-fingered body count, one would assume Black Ice is scary. It isn't. Instead, the book's strength is the portrayal of Cassie as a single-mom and her unwavering bond with Jess. The chapters became fairly predictable as Jess frequently disappears and both Cassie and her love interest search the woods and lake for him. There's a little mystery thrown in about a secret locked box but it wasn't the grand revelation the author probably intended.

Black Ice is a suitable 1990s horror offering from a publisher that seemingly perfected these types of genre novels consistently month after month. If you enjoy John Saul and the aforementioned Ruby Jean Jensen, you'll probably love this traditional ghost tale. At 255-pages, the narrative is a little slow but builds in enough atmosphere and engaging characters to keep the pages turning. It isn't a mandatory read, but a good way to waste the day.

Death Merchant #13 - The Mato Grosso Horror

Popular men's action-adventure publisher Pinnacle added Death Merchant to their publishing catalog in 1971. The series was penned by Joseph R. Rosenberger and stars a CIA agent named Richard Camellion who uses a variety of disguises and weapons to infiltrate and eliminate enemy forces. The series ran 70 installments through 1988 and I periodically reading a random installment every few months. As such, I grabbed the 13th installment from my shelf, The Mato Grosso Horror, published in 1975.

Rosenberger uses a tried-and-true staple of men's action-adventure as the basic plot. The concept, used quite frequently in pulps and magazines, is that Nazis escaped Germany at the end of WW2 and emerged years later in secluded, exotic locations. These Nazis still swear allegiance to Hitler and haven't abandoned their quest to enslave the human race. To further their cause, the Nazis have mutated villagers and natives into freakish super soldiers that they hope to use as the Fourth Reich's secret weapon. Taking all of this into consideration, the Death Merchant has been ordered to enter the steaming jungle of Brazil to eliminate the newest swarm of jungle Nazis.

The narrative has Israeli intelligence reporting the quest for Reich Glory stemming from the vast, mostly unexplored Brazilian interior of Mato Grosso. Richard Camellion partners with a squad of American Green Berets to enter the jungle and destroy the Nazi lab. In doing so, the author places the Death Merchant in precarious situations fighting a cannibal tribe for weeks. In fact, nearly every chapter of this installment features Camellion and his allies fighting tribal enemies – like wave after wave of tribal enemies. This is really fun for a few chapters, then becomes an endless game of Duck Hunt as Camellion mows down the baddies.

The Mato Grosso Horror is a fun, action-packed novel that features a weak enemy simply being assaulted and killed by the Death Merchant. If that's your thing, then by all means you'll absolutely love this early series installment. I'm complacent enough to enjoy a mass slaughter twice a year and this adventure surely delivers the blood 'n guts one would expect from a long-running kill 'em all series like this one. Death Merchant wins...again.

Trapped

Author Edmund Plante received a brief mention in Grady Hendrix's excellent Paperbacks from Hell book showcasing 1970s and 1980s horror paperbacks and their impact on pop-culture. Plante authored at least seven horror novels from 1979-1993, yet my first experience with the author is his novel Trapped. It was originally published in 1989 by BMI, a subsidiary of Dorchester Publishing/Leisure Fiction.

The novel begins with the Hunter family arriving at a secluded mountain cottage for a brief summer vacation. Husband Keith had an affair months ago and the marriage is on the rocks. Thankfully, his forgiving wife Maggie is using this valuable vacation time as marriage therapy in an effort to re-create a harmonious bond with him. Along with Keith and Maggie is their teen children Brice and Toni, Toni's friend Lisa and Maggie's elderly mother Vivian.

The family's first night at the cottage proves to be an eventful one. An ominous cylindrical craft lands on the property and by morning the family packs up and attempts to leave and notify the authorities. But the Hunters find themselves seemingly trapped by a clear dome-like structure surrounding the property. After attempting to smash through the dome with the car, the family realizes they now must contend with whatever is inside the craft. By nightfall, the Hunters are attacked by colorful, winged aliens that seemingly can control their minds and actions. It's this struggle between creature and man that is central to Plante's storytelling. Or, at least it should have been.

Trapped had the potential to be a fantastic survival-horror novel. Plante easily could have fallen into a George Romero scenario where the holed up family members have to board up the doors and windows while supplies begin to dwindle. The author even could have thrown a weather element in to heighten the atmosphere and isolation. Instead, he attempts to be clever and ruins what should have been an entertaining horror novel.

While there are plenty of attacks and many futile attempts to escape, the story just doesn't make any sense. These aliens apparently only come out at night, but there's no plausible explanation regarding why sunlight is their weakness. Due to this, the family just lives and breathes normally during the day – lying around and attempting to be happy during the day. I didn't really feel any sense of urgency from the characters. They don't board up any windows or doors aside from a front window that was broken by one of the creatures. They don't block the fireplace or use any real weapons other than a lamp and a fireplace poker. I hated these characters so much because of the sheer lunacy they all possessed. Just when I could celebrate one of their deaths at the hands of winged demons, the author resurrects the characters all over again.

Then there's Keith.

Due to the alien's control over Keith, they make him concentrate on sex. Because of Keith's dilemma, he immediately begins eyeing his daughter's best friend Lisa. I couldn't ascertain whether Lisa was being controlled or not, but she's begging for action, and Keith gives it to her twice – once while his daughter spies from the trees. Because of this (Keith's sex with a teen, not Toni's voyeurism), there's even more friction between Maggie and Keith. As a reader, I became so frustrated with their family drama.

Due to the author writing entire chapters from the perspective of the “mother alien”, there was no suspense or mystery to the attacks. The reader is just forced into a boring family drama with no real direction or urgency. At 344-pages, the sheer horror of this book is the likelihood that someone like me could be seduced by the intriguing, albeit terrible, cover. I was conned out of $2.95 for this pile of trash and I pray that this review serves as a warning to others: Judge a book by its cover. Trapped is terrible.

If you must own this, please buy it HERE