On the crowded and fiercely competitive newsstands of the 1930s, it was the covers that helped magazines stand out from the crowd. While Popular Publications' three horror 'zines used the talents of such top-flight illustrators as Rudolph Zirm, Tom Lovell and Walter Baumhoffer, it was the work of ex-landscape painter John Newton Howitt that defined the look of the shudder pulps and enticed new readers to their unique pleasures. His mad masterpieces of cover art not only emblazoned scenes from authors' stories but were often fevered creations of his own imagination. A gentle soul by nature, Howitt was reportedly embarrassed by his own skill and ingenuity in devising such tableaus of torture and depravity. He later destroyed all his pulp paintings.

OPERATOR 5 (cover by John Newton Howitt)

HORROR STORIES (cover by John Newton Howitt)

TERROR TALES (cover by John Newton Howitt)

THE SPIDER (cover by John Newton Howitt)

For several years all black-and-white interiors for the big three horror pulps were handled by artist Amos Sewell. Like John Howitt, Sewell was a first-rate illustrator who was able to turn out work quickly for the demanding pulp market where speed and reliability were prime assets. The average issue of TERROR TALES sported half a dozen or more Sewell dry-brush illustrations, one for each story, portraying author-described scenes of horror, bloodshed and torture.

DIME DETECTIVE (cover by Tom Lovell)

DOC SAVAGE (cover by Walter Baumhoffer)

DIME DETECTIVE (cover by Walter Baumhoffer)

DIME DETECTIVE (cover by Walter Baumhoffer)

Even though cover artists were able to portray the most depraved scenes of torture and humiliation of women, full nudity was out. While they routinely portrayed buxom lasses in various degrees of undress, it was a case of titillation without nipples. In the world of newsstand magazines, nipples were verboten. A single display of fully-equipped breasts could get your magazine seized and the publisher charged. Curiously enough, interior illustrator Sewell was under no such handicap. He was particularly adept in the portrayal of attractive full-figure female nudes, even though a number of them appeared to be disappointingly deceased. A master of macabre art, Sewell abandoned the shudder pulps in the late 1930s to work for the prestigious SATURDAY EVENING POST, where he became famous for his family-friendly cover paintings featuring cute and cuddly children—with nary a whip or boiling cauldron in sight.

Just as important as interior illustrations were the blurbs that accompanied them—overheated testimonies to the lip-smacking horrors to follow. Many of the blurbs rivalled the stories themselves in fevered hyperbole. The following examples, all written by editor Rogers Terrill, give evidence of the singular pleasures of weird menace fiction:

It was the soul of Hell's Courtesan which spoke in that old bell—shrieking her midnight summons of lust and madness to the man and maidens of Westmoorland . . . Were all in the village condemned? . . . Would none escape the dreadful, compelling call? Curt Stannard prayed that the girl he loved would be spared—and then he saw upon her white arm the brand of the Mad Children of Satan!
–"The Coming of the Mad Ones" by Frederick C. Davis

Through the fog-choked greyness these horrors prowled. Their faces were pale as the fog itself and even knives could draw from them no blood. Yet it was blood they sought, blood that they sucked from their victim's headless corpses!
–"Men Without Blood" by John H. Knox (HORROR STORIES, January 1935)

What secret horror lay behind the whispered legend of midnight doom that stalked the tortuous road up Witch's Mountain? Was it some unknown demon of darkness that forced, one by one, the fear-frozen group of people to hurl themselves down into the storm-lashed maw of the canyon? Or was it the weird eyes of the gigantic film director, whose black whip writhed like a living serpent, waiting to feast on the living flesh of filmdom's great!
–"Corpses for Witch's Mountain" by Franklin H. Martin (TERROR TALES, January 1935)

HORROR STORIES (January 1935)

TERROR TALES (January 1935)

Emma Wayne's small hand shook a little as she fumbled her key into the grey door of the ancient Sprool house; and she was shivering inside her thin suit-coat. But it was not only the sharp chill of dusk that had set her quivering. The old dread lay like a leaden lump in her breast, the dread that, as far back as memory went, inevitably had come when the sun's last red rim vanished behind the jagged ridge of Big Tom and night began to fill the valley's bowl. As in the old days, the circumscribing mountains were tightening the ominous loom of their ring with the withdrawing light, were becoming formless, vast bulks of blue-grey menace; and, beneath the haze blurring their slopes, crawling, eerie things of the night stirred to unholy being—or so whispered the legends of the countryside. To Emma the very hills were endowed with uncanny, motionless life as they thrust gigantic shoulders against the darkling sky like quiescent monsters waiting in silent, age-long patience; waiting till at last their appointed time should come to crush, with one contemptuous gesture, the puny human lives scuttering in the valley.

In the copycat world of the pulps, nothing succeeded like excess. Believing that the public can never get too much of a bad thing, more newcomers tested the limits of sensationalism. There was ACE MYSTERY ("The Corpse Queen's Lovers"), EERIE MYSTERIES ("City of Stone Corpses" August 1938), EERIE STORIES ("The Pain-Master's Bride" August 1937), MYSTERY TALES ("The Monster Wants More Than a Mate!"), MYSTERY NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES ("Hall of Crawling Desire" December 1939) and UNCANNY TALES ("Blood-Brides of the Lusting Corpse" March 1940).

ACE MYSTERY (September 1936)	EERIE MYSTERIES (August 1938)	EERIE STORIES (August 1937)
MYSTERY TALES (February 1939)	MYSTERY NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES (December 1939)	UNCANNY TALES (March 1940)

Then there was SPICY MYSTERY published by Harry Donenfeld (later founder of DC Comics) and Frank Armer under the risible brand of Culture Publications. The "Spicy" line of pulps, SPICY DETECTIVE, SPICY ADVENTURE and (gasp!) SPICY WESTERN, featured short stories in a variety of traditional pulp genres, to which authors injected "hot bits" featuring rapt descriptions of the heroine's alabaster thighs and melon-heavy breasts. Said parts were in gorgeous display on Hugh Ward's sumptuous cover paintings, guaranteed to pop the eyes of every depression-era adolescent male. When SPICY MYSTERY was added to the line-up, stories with titles such as "The Club of Beheaded Men" (August 1936), "Graveyard Honeymoon" (February 1936) and "Bloodsucker's Feast" made it increasingly clear that the term "mystery", as used in the shudder pulps, had become a buzz-word for something more than routine stories of puzzle-solving detectives.

SPICY MYSTERY (December 1942)

SPICY DETECTIVE (June 1940)

SPICY ADVENTURE (November 1934)

SPICY WESTERN March 1942)

Publisher Martin Goodman, later to create the Marvel comics line, attempted to out-horror the competition with his grisly "Red Circle" pulps, UNCANNY TALES and MYSTERY TALES (sub-titled "10 Stories of Horror and Terror"). Writers were instructed to go for the throat and such shock effect treats as "Lovely Bodies for the Butcher," "The Claw Will Come to Caress Me," "Dead Mates for the Devil's Devotees" and "Yield, Lovely Maidens, to the Blood Master" brought fresh meaning to the term sadomasochism.

UNCANNY TALES (April 1939)

UNCANNY TALES (May 1940)

MYSTERY TALES: 10 Stories of Horror and Terror (June 1938)

MYSTERY TALES: 10 Stories of Horror and Terror (March 1938)

Even Popular Publications, the folks who had invented the weird menace formula as a kind of modern Gothic, decided to toughen up their act in the late 1930s. New writers blew up a wild storm with stronger, racier stories as Gothicism gave way to macho sadism. Donald Graham's "Revolt of the Circus Freaks" (HORROR STORIES, October-November 1938) made use of the weird menace mantra that physical

THE SHUDDER PULPS (1978)

ugliness was tantamount to evil. In it, a band of ungainly circus freaks, shunned by society, tempt a greedy airline pilot to help them kidnap beautiful women in order to deform and place the female victims on display. Countless mutilations are described in vivid detail—too vivid for the tastes of many.

As Robert Kenneth Jones explained in THE SHUDDER PULPS, his definitive history of the genre: "The covers provide a visual record of the newly emerging theme. Earlier, issues depicted the heroines fleeing staring-eyed, knife-wielding madmen. Their dresses often were not even disarrayed. There was little eroticism to the scenes. But in 1937, the nude look was in. Now the heroines were being tortured in a more sophisticated manner, if that's the term, by such contrivances as buzzsaws, boiling (and freezing) water, electric drills, and knife-edged corsets. The deranged look in the fiends' eyes had been replaced by one of depravity."

Like comic books in the 1950s, the pulps were overdue for hostile scrutiny. The heyday of the weird menace titles had coincided with the Golden Age of Hollywood's sound horror movies. Despite the popularity of such films, by the mid-1930s studios were besieged by the anti-horror sentiments of various civic groups. In Britain, which constituted over forty percent of the all-important foreign distribution market, vociferous indignation resulted in the British Board of Film Censors calling for an outright ban of the Hollywood horror product. After a few half-hearted releases in 1936, studios shut their doors to bogeymen in favour of family comedies, musicals and action programmers.

THE BLACK CAT (1934)

FREAKS (1932)

Having won the cinema wars, public do-gooders looked elsewhere for their moral outrage—and found it close to home. They discovered that the most condemned of the horror movies, Tod Browning's bizarre FREAKS and Edgar G. Ulmer's version of THE BLACK CAT, with its themes of necrophilia, sadism and Satanism, were but pale shadows of what could be found over (or under) the counters of their favourite magazine stores just down the street.

In the early 1940s there developed a public rejection of the permissiveness and thrill-seeking of the 1930s. When New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia threatened to rid his city of sex-and-sadism magazines, publishers retrenched in fear of losing newsstand sales as well as their U.S. postal mailing privileges. As shudder pulp stalwart Bruno Fischer described it: "Clean up organisations started throwing their weight around and gave editors jitters, and artists and writers were instructed to put panties and brassieres on the girls."

Unfortunately, in discarding key ingredients of their appeal, the magazines failed to develop new innovations, much less new readers. And, with the coming of World War II, the extent of human madness and misery could no longer be viewed—much less enjoyed—as mere fiction. In a more innocent time, it was thought that the brand of horror perpetrated by the fiends of the shudder pulps was purely imaginary. Now people knew that such things—and worse—were possible. DIME MYSTERY was retooled as a straight mystery magazine. SPICY MYSTERY soldiered on for awhile, but was then re-titled SPEED MYSTERY. TERROR TALES and HORROR STORIES were shut down in 1941. The editorial page in the final issue of HORROR STORIES (now a mere collection of creepy detective stories) made passing reference to the Grand Guignol Theatre of Paris, Henry Steeger's original inspiration for his new type of horror magazine. Pulp fiction's bloody reign of terror had ended, not with a bang but with a whimper.

SPEED MYSTERY (January 1943)

SPEED DETECTIVE (October 1945)

SPEED ADVENTURE (January 1946)

SPEED WESTERN (June 1943)

If the shudder pulps were just trash—and millions of people must have regarded them as such—today they are widely acknowledged as trash for connoisseurs of trash. Trash for people who realise just how wonderful trash can be. Call it nostalgia for a supposedly simpler time, or perhaps appreciation for a type of extravagant entertainment that was too exciting to be responsible and too much fun to be taken seriously, but collectors seek them out and pay large sums of money for them. A copy of TERROR TALES #1 in good condition can fetch from $600-$900 U.S. A stratospheric climb from the original dime or fifteen cents.

Pulp authority Robert Kenneth Jones expressed it best: "Weird menacism [sic] unfurled all the appurtenances of mystification: bizarre, seemingly unexplainable deaths, ghost-like creatures, and frightening fiends, in a Gothic setting of dreary houses, dark caves, dank forests, of devil cults and demonic evildoers, of heroines under dire threat, and heroes pitted against seemingly hopeless odds. There is nothing to equal their wild improbability today. Our present fiction may have smoothed some of the rough edges, but in doing so, has thrown out some of the excitement that once kept readers on the edge of their chairs."