Month: July 2022

The Pulps: ‘The Dinner Cooked in Hell’

We have been moving our way a story at a time through The Pulps, an anthology published in 1970. The last few entries have been through a section of the book called “Exploiting the Girls,” which contains examples of the seamier side of pulp literature. The last of the stories in this section is also the best, “The Dinner Cooked in Hell” by Mindret Lord, a tale from Startling Mystery Magazine, originally published in 1940.

The story is told in first person by a man who, along with his life, is arriving home in anticipation of hosting a small dinner. When they arrive at their house, however, the couple find that their usual maid is absent, and an exotically beautiful stranger, Lucia, has taken her place. Lucia seems to know her way around the kitchen, but the dishes she serves to the couple and her guest are strange in appearance and taste—and the reader can easily guess that they contain human flesh and blood. After Lucia serves up this gruesome meal, her henchmen arrive to capture the couple and their guests and murder them in a bizarre sacrifice.

Although I think this is the best story in this section, the editor, Tony Goodstone, is of the opposite opinion: He refers to Startling Mystery as one of the “really sadistic Pulps” whose stories were “belabored,” “forced,” and “self-conscious.” By contrast, I would say that, while grotesque, “Dinner” at least avoids the titillating exploitation of sexual violence that mars the other tales in this section.

The story’s great failing is that its protagonist is merely a passive observer of some ugly happenings, with the result that the story has no real plot, though it still succeeds as a work of horror because of its unsettling details. There is a harrowing escape at the end, but it takes place only because of chance and not because of any decisive action on the part of the characters.

The Pulps: ‘Labyrinth of Monsters’

We now come to what is probably the second worst story in the collection, “Labyrinth of Monsters” by Robert Leslie Bellem, who had a previouly entry in the form of one of his infamous Dan Turner stories. “Labyrinth of Monsters” appeared in Spicy Mystery in 1937. Like the other magazines of the “spicy” line, this one featured a heavy dose of sexual content to go with the otherwise common genre themes.

In reviewing these stories, I have repeatedly used the word workmanlike. These are shorts by men who knew their craft, who could sit down at a typewriter and pound out, at the rate of at least one a week, a story with a well-designed plot and good prose. Their work was almost always of good quality even if it was only rarely that they produced a true gem. Some of the authors featured here would win accolades in other fields: Some are pulitzer winners, and some, like Ray Bradbury, wrote on such a level that they commanded respect despite their chosen medium.

Bellem, on the other hand, is purely an exploitation writer whose skill is outrageous metaphors and carefully described women’s torsos. Most of the stories in this collection are better edited than a typical mainstream novel today, but “Labyrinth of Monsters” has grammatical errors and malapropisms left and right.

The story features a he-man named Travis Brant, who for reasons I forget is renting half a duplex in an isolated town called Ghost Cove. Next door to him is a voluptuous woman, Anne Barnard, who screams in terror when she witnesses another woman having her throat torn out by a half-human, half-spider monstrosity. Travis kills the monster and rescues Anne, and then the two them, naturally, call the police. The policeman who arrives on the scene acts oddly, but Travis and Anne are curiously unsuspicious as he takes them up to an old mansion where a mad scientist, Dr. Zenarro, soon takes them prisoner. A Frankenstein of a particularly exploitative variety, Zenarro kidnaps women and forces them to breed with a mutant beast who sires monstrous offspring with multiple heads or limbs.

The story then proceeds much as expected with horrifying vistas, harrowing escapes, and bloody action scenes. Although morbid and poorly written, it’s reasonable effective as a horror story. Had it more dignity, it might have come from the pen of Lovecraft. What really mars it is Travis’s ridiculously inappropriate habit of trying to cop a feel from Anne at every opportunity: The poor woman has just witnessed murder by an arachnoid mutant, so she flies to Travis’s arms for safety, and his first instinct is to grab her breasts. As with the other examples of “spicy” stories here, the spiciness is a detriment.

The Pulps: ‘The Purple Heart of Erlik’

We will pass over in silence a few sketch pieces and poems that follow “Hot Rompers,” which we previously discussed, in this pulp anthology, and move on to “The Purple Heart of Erlik,” a tale by none other than Robert E. Howard, writing under the pen name of Sam Walser. It originally appeared in Spicy Adventure in 1936.

As the editor, Tony Goodstone, remarks, “Purple Heart” is “a sharp contrast to his more familiar work,” that work being primarily the stories of Conan the Cimmerian. Although the Conan stories are often racy (Conan is a lusty savage, and his heroines easily lose their filmy clothes), Howard nonetheless has a sense of restraint that in “Purple Heart” is not in evidence, probably because he was obliged to “spice things up” for Spicy Adventure. Partly for that reason, this is not his best work, but his considerable skill as an adventure writer is still evident, making this one of the better stories in the collection.

Set in the sordid back alleys of Shanghai, the story opens by introducing Arline, an adventuress who has recently been cornered by a treasure hunter who can frame her for murder. In exchange for his silence, he forces her to attempt to steal the titular Purple Heart, an enormous ruby in the possession of a ruthless Chinese gangster. Her attempt on the ruby fails, and the Chinese gangster elects to punish her with rape—and, shockingly, the rape actually happens. Were this a Conan story, Conan would have leapt into the room and slain Arline’s attacker before he had his trousers off. But alas, Conan is not here.

Arline does have a hero, however, by the name of Wild Bill Clanton, a sailor and smuggler who, out of infatuation, has been following her like a helpless puppy. Although Arline has rebuffed his decidedly rough advances, desperation finally sends her into his arms. With a combination of muscle and double-crossing, the two of them manage to avenge themselves and make it out alive.

This story displays something I noted repeatedly while reading through this collection: The “spicy” stories are competently written, but their risqué elements generally make them worse, not better. A reader can easily imagine how this might have been a better tale, and a less distasteful one, if Howard had not been obliged to try to titillate with a rape scene. There is still some good adventure here, but in the end, it’s all rather gross. The adventure pulps without “spicy” in their names showed more restraint when portraying Shanghai alleyways, and were better for it.

Handyman Update

As someone born right on the dividing line between so-called Generation X and the so-called Millennials, I find myself accomplishing things late in life that men of earlier generations would have accomplished by late childhood. Now that we have a house, I find myself thrust into the role of handyman and fixer-upper, a position with which I have no previous experience.

I’m easing into it, however. Last week, I successfully replaced the sacrificial anode in the water heater without even injuring myself. This week, I returned to the water heater closet to rodent-proof it.

We recently had what seems to be a mouse in the house, though it doesn’t appear to have made it out of the walls and into the living area. I traced its point of entry to the water heater, which is in a closent in the garage. The water heater is elevated eighteen inches, as its suppose to be, but the space underneath it offers rodents direct access to the walls of the house. Yesterday, I cut a spare piece of sheetrock and used it to cover the space, and then I coated every visible gap in the closet with foam insulation and left a present of rat poison. Then I went around the house to fill visible drill holes and spaces around electrical outlets with more insulation, which I’ll paint over later this week. After that, I’ll finally start in on re-grouting some of the tile.

I’ve never handled foam insulation before, so I made a mess of it. Fortunately, the stuff can be pared with a knife after it sets. I’m thinking about getting more cans to do the space between the brick and the foundation next, though I need to research whether that’s a good idea first. That should not only help prevent more mice but might cut down the brown recluse and hobo spiders: When we moved in, this place looked like something from a horror movie, and we’re only now getting the creepy-crawleys under control by diligently sweeping out corners, killing spiders on sight, laying glue traps, and using lots of insecticide to cut off their food supply. They have twice colonized the mailbox, but the last time, I nuked the box’s interior with spider spray and left it open to dry, and haven’t seen them since. The garage, however, still looks like the Arachnophobia wine cellar, and nothing I do seems to significantly reduce their numbers.