Introduction
This section groups six British reprint editions of US weird menace titles,
as follows
- DMM1 - Dime Mystery Magazine (3 issues 1948-50, Thorpe & Porter)
- DMM2 - Mystery Magazine (1 issue ca. 1946, W C Merrett)
- HOR1 - Horror Stories (4 issues ca. 1948-52, Thorpe & Porter)
- SIN1 - Sinister Stories (1 issue uncertain date, Pembertons)
- SMM1 - Startling Mystery (1 issue uncertain date, Pembertons)
- TER1 - Terror Tales (4 issues ca. 1948-52, Torpe & Porter
"Weird Menace" is a description applied to a particularly bizarre
sub-genre of the horror pulps. The magazines, and especially their covers, are
characterised by grotesque, distorted figures and sadistic sexual violence of
a kind that leaves one torn between disgust and hilarity. The covers regularly
feature a shapely young woman wearing few or no clothes, about to be subjected
to some horrifying torture at the hands of misshapen, fiendishly-grinning men
often clad in hooded cloaks and occasionally what appears to be a red rubber
outfit. The themes include
- a girl drowning in a glass vat
- a girl being whipped by dwarfs
- a girl being thrown into a fiery furnace
- a girl about to be immersed in white-hot, molten metal
- a girl about to be cut in half or chopped up with rotating knives
- a girl about to be decapitated by an insane doctor with a scalpel
You begin to get the idea. Sadly, however, the more grotesque of these covers
were never reprinted on the British editions and you will have to look out the
US originals to see them. Very often, the cover will also feature a square-jawed
young man trying to rescue his girl from this terrible fate. From the very limited
selection of these stories I have actually had the stomach to read, I gather
that he usually succeeds, but not before a number of innocent bystanders have
been eviscerated, incinerated, foully ravaged or eaten alive. A sample of the
story titles may perhaps also help to convey some of the flavour:
- "The Mole Men Want Your Eyes"
- "Brides for the Swamp God"
- "Things that Once Were Girls"
- "Satan's Corpse Factory"
- "Revolt of the Circus Freaks" (my favourite)
- "Mistress of the Blood Drinkers"
- "The Tongueless Horror"
- "Brides for the Half-Men"
Some of the US originals of these title had quite long runs. "Dime Mystery
Magazine", for example, ran for 159 issues from 1932 to 1950, though it
developed into a conventional crime and detective pulp after 1941. "Horror
Stories" ran for 41 issues , "Terror Tales" for 51. There were
also strong echoes of the weird menace theme in some of the detective pulps
of the day, notably "Popular Detective". By 1941, however, the appetite
for this kind of fiction in the US seems to have evaporated.
These British reprints, though, are probably all post-war (though the dates
of some are far from certain). In the post-war years, the taste for stories
and images of torture, mutilation and dismemberment must have been distinctly
blunted by six years of the real thing. None of these magazines really took
root in the way that the science fiction and fantasy reprints did and, as far
as is known, none ran here for more than four issues.
DMM1 Dime Mystery Magazine
Thorpe & Porter published three issues of this title that are definitely
known of. It is difficult to be certain that these are all there are. For many
years, there were thought to be only three each of Horror Stories and Terror
Tales, but now four of each have been identified. The three DMM1 that are shown
here are neither numbered nor dated and the sequence and dating have been derived
from the advertising. The first of these has been seen with two alternative
prices on the cover, 1/6d and 1/-. It is likely that the higher price came first,
then was reduced to shift unsold stocks. The magazines reprint from US issues
of October 1948, December 1948 and December 1949 respectively and probably appeared
in the UK a couple of months after that. They come, therefore, from the later
period of DMM when it had largely departed from its weird menace roots.
The artists of the original US issues are not known and I am unable to say whether
the UK covers have been repainted or not, as is also the case for almost all of
the covers in this section.
DMM2 - Mystery Magazine
Despite the variation in title, this is another reprint from Dime Mystery Magazine,
just a single issue, this time from US July 1938. It was published by W C Merrett
- who also published a single issue of Weird Tales just after the war, see WTK2
- and it appeared in the UK about 1946. It was only 36 pages in length and contained
just one story, "Goddess of the Half-World Brood", though another
is advertised on the cover that was not in fact included.
It is worth noting here that there was another British reprint derived from
Dime Mystery. It was called "Mystery Stories" and was reprinted from
the last days of DMM when it had assumed the title "15 Mystery Stories".
I have not reproduced it here as it is more properly a detective and mystery
magazine.
HOR1 - Horror Stories
It is only in the last couple of years that the four issues shown here have
been identified and put into some sort of order by Alistair Durie and others
and the key to the dating was the codes on the Charles Atlas advertisement reply
coupons. These follow a monthly sequence that can be correlated with other magazines
that carry the same ads but are dated, which these are not. Confusingly, one
issue only is numbered as #3, but according to this latest research, it is the
last of the four. In the order they are given here, they reprint from the following
issues of the US magazine:
#1 April 1941; #2 October 1940; #3 December 1940; #4 August 1940
SIN1 - Sinister Stories
There were three US isues of Sinister Stories and this British edition is reprinted
from the first, February 1940. It is undated and SFFWF says that it ws "probably
from the late 40s", which I see no reason to doubt.
Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Dime Mystery were all sister titles published
by Popular Publications who therefore practically invented the weird menace
genre. Even in this limited selection of British reprints, the themes on the
covers and even the story titles are eerily similar. Sinister Stories and Startling
Mystery were published by Fictioneers, Inc, which I believe was a division of
Popular Publications. The close relationship is given away by the fact that
they sometimes borrowed covers from one another. All of the US Sinister Stories
used covers borrowed from Terror Tales, this one from Sept/Oct 1938.
SMM1 - Startling Mystery
The US Startling Mystery Magazine ran for only two issues and this British
edition reprints from the first of them, February 1940. Like SIN1, the SFFWF
Index dates it in the late 1940s. The cover on this Startling Mystery, and on
the US issue it is derived from, is itself reprinted from Horror Stories of
August-September 1937. It is a wonderful example of the villain in a red rubber
suit theme, whose significance I can only guess at unless it is to protect him
from some potent acid the poor girl is immersed in.
It is ironic that this, possibly one of the tackiest covers on this page, is
the only one for which I can find an artist credit. It - or at any rate, the
original - is by John Newton Howitt, who did most of the early covers for Terror
Tales and Horror Stories as well as many for The Spider and almost all of Operator
#5, two more Popular Publications titles.
TER1 - Terror Tales
The history of the British Terror Tales closely parallels that of Horror Stories
and it, also, has recently been re-sequenced and redated with the evidence of
the advertisement reply coupons while it, too, has a confusing #3 which is actually
#4. They were reprinted from the following US issues:
#1 March 1941; #2 January 1941; #3 November 1940; #4 September 1940.
Source of Images
Almost all of the images on this page were kindly provided by Alistair Durie.
