In the late 1930s, weird menace magazines gained surprising popularity. Mystery Tales was one of several in the genre from "Red Circle" magazines, aka Western Fiction Publishing Co. Mystery Tales began with its March 1938 issue. Other magazines in the Red Circle line were Star Detective, Uncanny Tales, Marvel Stories, and a huge catalogue of western, mystery, detective, sports and romance pulps. The horror and terror tales were famous for their lurid covers... at least by 1930s standards, that is. By 1940, the interest in the shudder pulps was lessening, and Mystery Tales closed its nineth and final issue in May 1940. Mystery Tales returns in these vintage pulp tales, reissued for today’s readers in electronic format.
Table of Contents:
Eerie Spine-Tingling Novel
School For Beasts
by Gabriel Wilson
Their modesty, their terror, hid the thing, nurtured its ghastly sanctuary while it plucked unseen at the girls, while it metamorphosed high-hat Marlette Hall into an exclusive seminary for Satan’s ape-mates!
Breath Of The Lusting Ones — Weird Daring Novelette
by Brent North
Sex was my business, but this went far beyond — this had to do with blood and flesh, with madness born of the Devil’s own laboratory, with the death-lure of the lust-lost!
Mates For The Morgue-Master — Weird Daring Novelette
by Arthur J. Burks
A strange, a ghastly place to find love, you say? But then you do not know that I saw the corpse of Merry Tarn through the eyes of my immortal soul, and that I could marry her only in the morgue!
Horror’s Hallowed Handmaid — Weird Daring Novelette
by Allan K. Echols
Yes, I’d pried into the secrets of the Sisters of Desire, I’d learned that the girl I loved was Goddess of the lust-crazy cult — yet all I knew was that I too longed to be lashed with the thorn-thongs those blood-hungry harpies brandished!
I Share My Bride With Satan — Startling Midnight-Thriller
by Ray Cummings
Into the midst of the sodden, passion-drenched souls like his own, the dead Satan would drag my still-living beautiful bride!
Blood-Bait For Hungry Mermaids — Startling Midnight-Thriller
by John Wallace
What matter that a fiend’s fish-hook be torn from her lovely mouth, what matter that her lovely body be split in two — would not my Pamela be the most beautiful mermaid in the world?
I Married A Monster — Startling Midnight-Thriller
by Elliott Corning
Will a creaking wheelchair keep me forever on the borderline between madness and sanity? Can I never again be done with paying blood-ransom for that fateful night’s voluptuous orgy?
