Three Witches - Expanded Edition: An El Tigre Azul Book

by Duane Spurlock

"The world is full of evil that's easy to reach out and grab. It's everywhere. Just like those bad men we pounded this week." El Tigre looked up. "Then there is another evil. Evil that is otherworldly. It infects this world."
In 1970s Mexico, El Tigre Azul (The Blue Tiger) is a luchador enmascarado -a Mexican masked wrestler who fights in the ring for a living. But outside the ring, he battles evil: human evil in the form of criminals and thugs; and supernatural evil in the form of monsters and unnatural creatures. From a giant fighting rooster and a 300-year-old dead-and-reanimated witch in love with a 400-year-old bridge, to a bomb-building anti-establishment cult and a strange elemental being that predates the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations, El Tigre battles strange and classic terrors with fortitude and brawn.
A warrior with no home, El Tigre travels across Mexico, to Paris, and back through time to battle evil wherever it throws its shadow! EL TIGRE AZUL will entertain luchador fans, cinephiles who love the 1960s and 1970s films of monster-fighting El Santo, and readers of weird fiction. Take a ringside seat for thrills and pulp-style action!

217 pages, Paperback

Published April 3, 2023

About the author

Duane Spurlock writes adventure and fantasy-oriented action tales. He has written both new stories featuring characters from the Golden Age of the pulp fiction era--the 1930s and 1940s--and novels and stories about new characters set in various eras, including the Wild West, the present day, and the decade of the 1950s in which history has followed an alternate course from the one we know today.

Spurlock has published stories both in print editions and as eBooks.

He also has worked as an illustrator for certain books, particularly those written by Brian Showers. One of those, The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories, won the Children of the Night Award from the Dracula Society.

Reviews

[Mark Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trio of luchador adventures set in the 1970s. El Tigre Azul fights for justice in between matches. The first adventure is the weakest, with our hero up against a witch who can turn a fighting cock into a kaiju. The style is a flat this-happened-and-then-this-happened delivery, almost like an Axe Cop episode. The second story is the best and has our hero in Paris at the behest of a film director. El Tigre ends up fighting against the vengeful spirit of an executed witch who is drowning people in the Seine. The style is much more polished with a well-researched period ambience. The third tale has El Tigre battling environmental bombers led by a millennia-old nature spirit. It's an odd story marred by an inconclusive ending.

Four stars might be a little too kind, but I have a fondness for homages to luchador films of the 1970s. Also, it has a fantastically lurid cover by Jeffrey Ray Hayes.