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.