Has anyone read some of the old "shudder pulps" (also called weird menace)? These stories were influenced by Grand Guignol theater and feature lots of sadistic villains.
RadioArchives is reprinting many titles from Dime Mystery and Terror Tales. You can buy their titles from their site (DRM-free), and from Amazon. They have audiobooks, too!
The stories were controversial in their day for sexing up the stories. Now they're controversial for violence (particularly against women) and non-PC language. And how about those covers?
They have single author collections for $2.99 a volume, including well-known pulp authors such as Hugh B. Cave and Wyatt Blassingame. They also have individual stories for 99 cents, with titles like
Blind Date with the Devil. It's hard to resist.
But for now, I'm resisting some of them because while some of the authors are still loved today, some of the short stories have gotten bad reviews. But there aren't many reviews of these titles, and I don't like trusting a bad review from someone who thought he was getting an entire issue instead of a short story.
Has anyone else read these? I've bought a couple of short stories and a Hugh B. Cave collection, but I don't want to wander through a minefield of mediocre stories. Especially as some of the 99 cent stories seem quite short. (Then again, sometimes shorter is better. Some of those pulp writers remembered they were getting paid by the wordy and ran off at the typewriter.
)
(Here is an Amazon link to their
Terror Tales titles. And here are the
Dime Mystery titles.)