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The Underbody

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28 pages, Unknown Binding

Published November 1, 1949

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Allison V. Harding

38 books5 followers

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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Profile Image for Lee Foust.
Author 11 books238 followers
May 12, 2025
Great pulp! Wonderfully weird and creepy.
Profile Image for David Sarkies.
1,978 reviews391 followers
June 17, 2026
Children Disappearing Underground
6 June 2026

A lot of horror seems to involve mysterious beings taking children, and this isn’t necessarily something new, this has been going on for a very long time. No doubt back when people mostly lived in villages, if children wandered off they might get nabbed by bandits or pirates, or even slavers, and pressed into service. Thus, children being told not to wander off into the forest because the faeries, or monsters, will get them, was probably a way to keep them safe. Then again, these days, or at least when I was growing up, it was Stranger Danger – don’t go with strangers, don’t get into strange cars.

Well, in this story, the child discovers a mole man, a man that seems to be living in a hole. His father, the town doctor, goes to investigate and determines that it is just a corpse. However, when he goes back the man, and the hole, is gone. Then his child disappears, well before that we are told that even though this man appears dead, he isn’t really dead, he just appears to be, and it seems that he lures children into the ground and suffocates them.

You could say that this is a clash of the scientific and the mystical, and that is also in a sense the difference between the children and the adults. Children are open to the magical, while the adults only see the scientific, so when confronted with the magical it can rock their world. In fact it appears that the protagonist in this piece is shattered through the experience, especially since it seems impossible to stop the mole man, or to even kill it. Even when they go out to hunt for it, they cannot seem to find it, and when they do, they simply are not prepared.
Yes, it is quite a harrowing tale.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews