Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s

by Robert Kenneth Jones

The shudder pulps published some of the grisliest, goriest, most outrageous mystery-terror fiction ever sold on the American newsstand, during the golden age of the pulp magazines. This volumes chronicles the authors, artists, and publishers of those classic thrill-fests!

Genres: Nonfiction, History

253 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1975

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm an illustrator, and was lured into pulps by the rich artwork. I received this book for Christmas some years ago and just got around to reading it. I'm kicking myself for not reading it sooner. Jones did s superb job of tracking down all the writers and editors of the various publications and providing a brief history of all of them. Excerpts from their writings reinforce his summaries. The content and details he gives on the professional lives of the writers and editors is surprisingly good and kept me hooked. I only wished he'd cover a bit more on the artist and the print shops where the pulps were sent for production. But I think he accomplished his objective, the desire to share his keen enjoyment for this lost media-to the point where I'm thinking about hauling out me collection which I bought for the art and no go back and read some of the stories.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book about the authors of the "weird menace" sub-genre of the pulpiest of the pulp magazines, as well as the artists who provided the illustrations. The book is liberally illustrated with covers and interior illustrations, and examples of the purplest prose are included, too. There is a lot of offensive content (the racial "yellow menace" theme is prevalent, and the women are almost always only there to be objectified), but it's an interesting and factual portrayal of the popular entertainment of the era.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 2 out of 5]

(2.5 stars) I'm not exactly an expert on the pulp magazines but I have done some reading of them and about them, and this is a fairly weak history. The author tries to narrow his focus down from "the pulps" to a specific genre which he calls "weird menace," in which people (mostly women) are, well, menaced in weird ways--by torture or bloodletting or bondage or rape or other ghoulish activities. The covers of these magazines mostly feature almost naked women undergoing bodily harm. Jones wants to claim this is a genre of its own, and he focuses on a relatively small number of titles from the 1930's, such as Dime Mystery, Uncanny Tales, Horror Stories, and Strange Detective Mysteries. He mostly excludes science fiction, serial characters like The Shadow, or stories that involve the supernatural being real (as opposed to being faked), which puts more popular titles such as Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, or Spicy Detective Stories outside of his concern. But when he wants to, he does include stories that don't fit his template.

The topic of the pulps is a huge one so I can't fault Jones for wanting to limit his coverage. But rather than a traditional history format (strictly chronological, or by publisher or author), he uses story types as his framework. Unfortunately, these types tend to blend together or not really be unique types at all. For example, he has a chapter on Femme Fatales, but there seem to be femme fatales all through the book. There is one chapter on Purple Prose, but again, most of the writers published in these magazines engaged in purple prose. Jones jumps around between authors so much that I lost track of them. His 1-2 paragraph summaries of stories get numbing and repetitious fast (as he admits, these stories are not literature), and I'd say nearly half the book consists of these summaries. By the last 50 pages, I was largely skimming. It's obvious that Jones did a lot of research, at least in terms of reading the pulps and digging into the lives of a handful of authors, but the material needed a surer hand in terms of presentation and editing. (Also, the reproductions of covers and illustrations are small and murky, and because they are in black & white, very difficult to make out.)