Out of the shadows of nocturnal Manhattan came the Master of Darkness whose Underworld rule was bloody and absolute. For when this butcher unleashed his Hounds of Hell, defenseless citizens were blown, one by one, into extinction!
By 1939, Richard Wentworth had been operating as the Spider for nearly six harrowing years. He’s been through everything a good pulp hero could expect to face. Malevolent master villains. Sinister Asian world conquerors. Mad scientists more diabolical than anything conceived before that point. And of course since the Spider was a wanted criminal, endless police officials, uniformed cops, homicide detectives and other officers of the law had been pursuing him with single-minded fervor.
The problem for his poor writer, Norvell W. Page, was that there are only so many plot variations for a hero who fought crime in his dual identities. So as the year 1939 dawned, Page’s editors must have put their heads together and asked themselves, “What can we do that we’ve never done before?”
Evidently, they decided to subject Dick Wentworth, his fiancee Nita van Sloan, and the other stalwart Spider crew to a monthly series of challenges designed to make the readers clutch at their hearts.
As a result of a horrific events in the previous Spider novel, Rule of the Monster Men, Richard Wentworth’s beautiful fiancee, Nita van Sloan, is a crippled shadow of her former self, a victim of the Wreck.
As if that isn’t trial enough, suddenly the power of the law and that of a new underworld ruler, the Butcher, have combined to shatter Richard Wentworth’s life even further. Forced to go underground, a wanted fugitive, Wentworth now tastes what life is like for the Spider...alone.
Not for long. For out of this debacle emerges a new force for justice––the Black Widow!
Nick Santa Maria breathes life into the Spider in this series-shattering exploit taken from the July, 1939 issue of The Spider magazine.
