Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants

The pulp-fiction and men's action-adventure connoisseurs Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle are back at it again with a brand new volume for their Men's Adventure Library series (published by New Texture). The book is aptly titled Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants and it is a beautiful collection of vintage men's adventure magazine stories about ghosts, aliens, robots, vampires, werewolves, and creepy rats. Like many of their prior offerings, this book is available in an expanded hardcover edition as well as paperback.  

The collection begins with “A Century of Weird Tales”, written by PulpFest organizer Mike Chomko. This is an informative history on Weird Tales magazine's history, including full color cover panels by the likes of Virgil Finlay, Matt Fox, and Margaret Brundage. Chomko illustrates how Weird Tales really found its identity in 1924 when Farnsworth Wright assumed the editorial role. At that point, the magazine began a prosperous creative flow populated by some of the best writers of the 20th century – Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Hugh B. Cave, and Manly Wade Wellman, as well as artists like Hannes Bok, Jack Williamson, and Margaret Brundage. 

In “Weasels Ripped Their Flesh”, horror editor, critic, and author Stefan Dziemianowicz examines the influx of early, weird pulp-fiction stories that appeared in the mid to later 20th century Men's Action-Adventure Magazines (MAMs for short). Dziemianowicz points out that these MAM editors would often browse back issues of old pulp magazines to find riveting stories they could feature in their own publications. Titles like Cavalier, Fury, Men, and Peril featured stories previously authored by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon. The article also includes artwork by John Leone and James Bingham.

Both Deis and Doyle offer their own experienced insight on “A Turn for the Weird:, a massive 27-page essay that not only explores the richness of weird pulp-fiction stories in the pages of MAMs, but also serves as an informative introduction on the many stories that saturate this impressive short-story collection. The duo also use this medium to explore the idea of MAMs historically featuring brawny, barrel-chested heroes that were impervious to harm. They show a stark contrast between the usual flavor of MAM writing to the more harrowing horror and terror tales that were sprinkled in. In these stories, readers welcomed the change and grew to accept that these heroes were prone to “fear, panic, mutilation, and fatalism.” The text also examines how the violence and savagery of these MAM stories served as an unexpected coping tool for military veterans that predominately bought and read these publications.

The stories culled from the MAMs and presented here offer a variety of creatures, traditional horror, science-fiction, and just plain 'ole weird writing. The authors featured include Gardner F. Fox, H.P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, Rick Rubin, and Theodore Sturgeon. For eye candy, glorious artwork from John Leone, Basil Gogos, Mark Schneider, Vic Prezio, Clarence Doore, Dwight Howe, Fernando Fernandez, John Duillo, Norm Eastman, George Cross, and Mort Kunstler to name a few.

Needless to say, if you love horror, science-fiction, pulp-fiction, MAMs, or collectively the amazing body of work created by both Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, then this book is a mandatory addition to your library. With a title like Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants, why wouldn't it be? 

Buy a copy of this book HERE.

Voodoo! A Chrestomathy of Necromancy

Bill Pronzini (b. 1943) saw his first novel, The Stalker, published in 1971. His writing career has flourished with over 50 stand-alone novels as well as numerous novels in his series titles like Carpenter and Quincannon and Nameless Detective. Aside from being a prolific author, Pronzini's career is often celebrated for his anthology editing. He has collaborated with the likes of Martin Greenberg, Barry Malzberg, and Carol-Lynn Waugh for nearly 100 short-story collections in genres like crime-fiction, horror, and western. One of the first Pronzini anthologies I read was Voodoo! A Chrestomathy of Necromancy. It was published as a hardcover by Arbor House in 1980.

This collection is presented in three parts. Part 1: Traditional Voodoo features stories by Cornell Woolrich, W.B. Seabrook, Robert Bloch, Carl Jacobi, and Henry S. Whitehead. Part II is Voodoo Elsewhere and Otherwise, consisting of stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, John Russell, Edward Hoch, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Bryce Walton, and Morris West. The final part is The “Ultimate” Voodoo, which is simply one tale by Henry Slesar. 

The stories in this volume are culled from numerous pulps like Weird Tales, Dime Mystery, Rogue, and Adventure. One original story appears here, “Exu”, by Edward D. Hoch. 

In sampling the collection, I began with Robert Bloch's story “Mother of Serpents”. Pronzini's introduction states that the story was first appeared in Weird Tales in 1936. Bloch was only nineteen years of age when the story was published, two years after the author's first professional sale to Weird Tales in 1934. “Mother of Serpents” is a fictional tale based on factual events (presumably the leadership of Fabre Geffrard). It tells the story of a new, unnamed president arriving to power in Haiti. This new leader wants to remove the “old world” from the country. The narrative takes readers through the president's life as a boy, his mother's mastery of the dark arts, and the horrific event that mires his presidency in the very thing he wants to eliminate – voodoo. It's a great story that accomplishes a great deal despite the short length. Of note is the strained, bizarre relationship between the president and his mother, an element that Bloch will successfully use later in his smash hit Psycho. 

Bryce Walton was a staff correspondent for Leatherneck Magazine, and after WWII transitioned into writing for the mystery, detective, western, and sci-fi pulps. Walton's contribution to Voodoo! is his short “The Devi Doll”, which originally appeared in Dime Mystery in 1947. In the story, New York artist Earl breaks up with his girlfriend Crita, a French woman who has a hobby of voodoo. But, Crita knows that Earl really broke up with her because the new girl, Jean, is extremely wealthy. When Earl makes his case that he no longer loves Crita, she curses him. Later, Earl finds that a small, miniature version of Crita is “growing” out of his shoulder. Crita whispers terrifying things to Earl, which eventually leads to terrible things happening to Jean. Walton's writing is terrific with a smooth prose that serves as a sort of countdown to Earl's demise.   

Used copies of Voodoo! A Chrestomathy of Necromancy are out there. You can also get a real bargain by searching for the giant Arbor House Necropolis hardcover. It was published in 1981 and not only features the entirety of Voodoo!, but also collects two other Pronzini-edited anthologies about mummies and ghouls. Spooky, and darn-near mandatory for vintage-fiction readers. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE.

Snake-Bite and Other Mystery Tales of the Sahara

Robert Smythe Hichens (1864-1959) was a journalist, music critic, playwright, lyricist and novelist. He saw his first novel published in 1886 when he was just 17 years of age. His most popular works include An Imaginative Man (1895), Flames (1897), and The Slave (1899). Many of his novels were adapted into film or plays, including The Paradine Case, which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1947. Stark House Press has published a collection of the author's short-stories that include mystery and intrigue set in North Africa. The book is called Snake-Bite and Other Mystery Tales of the Sahara and features an introduction by literary critic S.T. Joshi.

In the story “Desert Air”, an astute worldly traveler recounts his trip to Beni-Kouidar, a windswept city in the Sahara Desert. It is here that the narrator and his companion stumble upon a young exotic dancer that has ties to a powerful Sheik. After being warned to stay away from the young woman, and to leave town, the two overstay their welcome and misfortune falls on the companion. 

“The Desert Drum” is a first-person account of a traveler riding through the tiny hovels called Sidi-Massarli in the Sahara. His reason for explaining his travels is the examination of the “desert drum”, a local superstition that these mysterious drum sounds beckon death. In town, the narrator finds a lawman who has a prisoner tied to his saddle. The lawman explains that the prisoner murdered someone, served prison time, and is now being returned to his hometown to go free. Later that night, the trio of men hear the ominous sounds of the “desert drum”, a sign that one of these men will surely be murdered.

In Joshi's introduction, he points out that Hichens was fascinated by the “eternal feminine”, highlighting the voided space both physically and emotionally between man and woman. The stories in this collection share a location setting – the Sahara Desert – but also a general theme of man lusting for woman. Often, these are performers that have a resound effect on the travelers and businessmen they entertain. In “The Charmer of Snakes”, the stage actress Claire enters the life of Renfrew, creating a life disruption. The same can be said for “The Desert Drum”, where the young prisoner commits murder just to return to prison to see the dancer he's smitten with. 

These stories are entertaining, and showcase Hichens storytelling talents as both a mystery and adventure writer. His writing borders on the cusp of dark fiction, like several of his contemporaries like Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith. If you are new to Robert Hichens, this collection may be a great place to discover his work. Stark House Press have also released more Hichens collections, including The Black Spaniel & Other Strange Stories and How Love Came to Professor Guildea and Other Uncanny Tales. 

Buy a copy of the book HERE.

The Kill

New York native Alan Ryan (1943-2011) graduated from Regis High School in Manhattan and from Fordham University in The Bronx. He was an English teacher, book reviewer, and later an editor. In his writing career, he produced at least five horror novels and three short-story collections. My first experience with his literary work is the novel The Kill, which was originally published in paperback by Tor in 1982. 

The book begins with a nine year old girl running away from home during a storm. Readers learn that she is on the outskirts of the small town of Deacon's Kill. Something grabs and jerks her head, creating instant death. Then, whoever or whatever killed the girl moves back into the forest. End scene. But, unfortunately the book continues. 

A couple named Megan and Jack work and live in Manhattan and are tiring of their hectic schedules. They are invited by a friend to visit a farm in Deacon's Kill, a sort of all-night party involving another 30 or 40 city yuppies. At the farm, a woman is murdered by this same unknown person or thing when she ventures too far into the forest to urinate. The murder (and urination) is caught on tape by a voyeur/party participant and presented to the local sheriff. The odd thing is that who, or whatever this thing is, was completely invisible. Like the book's plot. 

Megan and Jack, in their infinite wisdom, decide that this farm – which just hosted a murder by an invisible monster in the forest – is an ideal place for them to move to. WTF! They both quit their jobs and move into this ordinary run-of-the-mill farm house in the middle of nowhere. They befriend the sheriff and everything seems fantastic (read that as mundane and lifeless) for the next 250 pages of this horrific 294 page paperback. The couple make love, establish new businesses, have dinner with the sheriff and his wife, make friends with the town doctor, and engage in mindless, completely dull antics for a painful amount of pages. Just when my knuckles were white from anger, something finally happens. 

Apparently, the former owner of the farm dug up some old bones that resembled a prehistoric man. How the man is now alive, invisible, and is able to track all over the forest without anyone noticing isn't relevant, so no real explanation is offered (or I slept through it). Instead, you have the girl at the beginning of the book and the chick at the party as the only main victims while the sheriff watches endless loops of the VHS tape that captured the one piss/murder. The rest of the novel is just a complete waste of time and I wish I could erase it from the annals of time. 

If I'm locked in a room by a maniac and forced to watch endless Medicare commercials or read this book...brother pass the popcorn and crank the tube up. I'd do just about anything to avoid the literary nightmare of Alan Ryan's The Kill. So should you.

Buy a copy of this book HERE.

Suburban Gothic

Bryan Smith has authored more than thirty horror and crime novels. His novel 68 Kill was adapted to film and his 2009 novel Depraved became an instant cult classic, leading to three sequels. Brian Keene earned the 2014 World Horror Grandmaster Award, two Bram Stoker awards, and the Imadjinn Award for best fantasy novel in 2016. It was just a matter of time before the two friends collaborated on a novel. 

In 2009, Brian Keene authored a paperback for Leisure called Urban Gothic. The premise had a group of kids breaking into an old row house in Philadelphia that they thought was abandoned. Unfortunately for them, a family of inbred cannibals lived in the basement. The book was an obvious ode to “grindhouse” theater flicks like Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I enjoyed the book years ago, so I was intrigued to learn of the book's sequel, Suburban Gothic, published in 2020. But, the backstory on the novel doesn't stop there. 

It turns out that Suburban Gothic actually connects (retcons?) Keene's Urban Gothic with Bryan Smith's horror novel The Freakshow, which was originally published by Leisure in 2007. I also read that novel, and reviewed it HERE. In The Freakshow, cosmic entities are controlling humans from a netherworld. These entities combine mayhem, torture, cannibalism, rape, etc. into a sort of game which comes to a small town in Tennessee through a traveling carnival. The book was slightly above average and written in a perverse way that I typically find distasteful. I'm not a fan of Bryan Smith.

Suburban Gothic, which is authored by both Smith and Keene, has an early explanation that the inbred cannibals from Urban Gothic are forced to move to an abandoned mall located in a sketchy crime-ridden part of Philadelphia. At the same time, Smith's crazy supernaturally-controlled entities also move into the mall. One side is occupied by these mutant freaks (humans with arachnid-like appendages, multiple heads, etc.) while the other side is the weirdo cannibals. 

Like Urban Gothic, various people enter this abandoned mall for different reasons. These disposable characters include a group of urban explorers shooting YouTube footage, a real-estate agent, and your common everyday headbanging stoners. This is a problem for the book and it's readers. None of these characters are remotely interesting, and all of them are flawed and unlikable. So, when Smith writes nasty, violent deaths for each character (I'm sure he was tasked with their violent endings), I found myself simply skipping to the next death set-up. 

Brian Keene typically isn't an extreme splatter-horror guy, but Smith's participation drags this book into uncomfortable depravity. Characters are raped sodomized, eaten, beaten, forced into various amputations, dragged across multiple hard surfaces, shot, stabbed, and, in some cases, involuntarily placed into barbaric medical experiments. At a time in my life when I can turn on any social media news platform and see brutality and death, reading the intricate details of a fishing hook ripping an anus isn't really what I find enjoyable. 

If you love shock and awe, then by all means have a great time with Suburban Gothic. For me personally, this book is just an absolute mess mired in useless death, excess violence, and horrific gore. Take a hard pass on this kind of thing. Maybe it will eventually just go away. 

Pin

Andrew Niederman (b. 1940) is the author of over 125 novels under his own name and others. He ghostwrote a handful of novels as V.C. Andrews after the real lady died and his book The Devil’s Advocate was adapted into a movie starring Keanu Reeves. Pin was his fourth novel, originally published in 1981.

Pin is told as a first-person flashback by Leon looking back on his odd adolescent years with his sister, Ursula. As adolescents, they share an imaginary (?) friend named Pin who was always there with them. Pin is an elaborate, adult-size, anatomical medical dummy come to life. It’s clear that Pin has a lot in common with their dead father with the big differences being Pin’s translucent flesh where every vein, organ and capillary can be seen.

Leon and Ursula are orphans. Their wealthy parents die in a car accident and leave a considerable fortune to the teens who continue living in the same creaky mansion in New York’s Catskills Mountains with Pin, the chatty, erudite medical mannequin who may or may not be real. The threesome are rather isolated up in the mountains living off the dead parents’ inheritance.

We are treated to flashbacks of their dysfunctional upbringing and the siblings' unconventional attitudes towards sex and desire. The sexual exploration gets rather explicit, so consider yourself warned. If you know about the incestuous work of V.C. Andrews, the novel often reads like the author was auditioning for the ghost-writing job he landed later in his career. A plot begins to develop when Ursula finds a boyfriend, and Leon is not pleased. Neither is Pin.

This paperback is so weird but also so readable. Neiderman keeps the pages turning because the reader is dying to know if we are reading a supernatural horror book or a Vietnam-era gothic about siblings experiencing a shared delusion. There’s plenty of graphic sex along the way, and the compelling weirdness doesn’t lighten up until the novels striking conclusion.

Overall, Pin is an easy recommendation if you’re looking for something completely different. It’s not particularly scary, but you won’t be able to look away. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE.

The Switch House

Tim Meyer is a hotshot young horror author from the New Jersey Shore who has been appearing on a lot of “best-of” lists over the past few years. My first exposure to his work is his 2018 short novel, Switch House.

Angela and Terry are cast on a reality show called Let’s Switch Houses!, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Interestingly, the novel takes place when the couple returns to their own New Jersey house, which as been occupied for the past eight weeks by an unknown stranger. They only learn what was happening in their house in their absence when they sit together and watch the show along with the rest of America.

Even before the episodes broadcast, it’s clear to Angela that something is off in their own house. The place wasn’t frat-party trashed, but nothing feels right. Angela explains she feels like a stranger in a familiar house. The novel is mostly told through Angela‘s third-person perspective, and the author does some interesting tricks to showcase the fact that her perceptions are very different than her husband.

The bottom line is that a witchy lady was doing witchy stuff in their house while they were gone, and now this nice couple has to live in a haunted house. Meanwhile, their lives and family tragedies are being laid bare on reality television for the world to see.

Switch House is a combination of a haunted house story and a woman slipping into madness story. There are some cool plot twists I didn’t see coming, and some genuinely unnerving moments. Fans of paranoid, female-protagonist horror, along the lines of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, and whiplash-inducing plot twists will really enjoy this short novel. Consider it a must-read for fans of contemporary horror fiction. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE.