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:
Weird Daring Novelette
New Girls For Satan’s Blood-Ballet
by Russell Gray
What hellish madness was this upon me, that I could know again the ghastly tortures of the dread Inquisition, that my own Nancy could be chattel-goddess of Satan’s last bloody charnal!
Mistress Of Death And Desire — Weird Daring Novelette
by Arthur J. Burks
Lust-love, Pat Garrity worshiped at the shrine of the Vampire of the Everglades, for Pat Garrity had forgotten the men who’d gone before him, who in the end had raced stark mad and screaming into the black bog of passion’s purgatory!
Scourge Of The Corpse-Clan — Weird Daring Novelette
by Don Graham
The Plague of the Flaming Dead, we came to call it, for terror had not died with those slavering Things, and the holocaust that hallowed their mortal souls would hunger eternally for the young bodies of our daughters and our sweethearts!
Mate-feast Of The Flame-Monster — Startling Midnight-Thriller
by Ray King
How dared little Sonya wed the boy she truly adored, when her body and her soul would belong forever to the flame-lover of her dreams?
Black-Mass Bride — Startling Midnight-Thriller
by Mindret Lord
Was this the black chapel of my nightmare, and the voluptuous sin-crazed siren, or had I in reality become the notorious Archfiend from Hell, and would I now brand my newest Black Mass bride?
Blood For The Vampire Dead — Startling Midnight-Thriller
by Robert L. Bellem
No devil-magic philtre could have summoned this carnal seance, no undead corpse could have tricked Tim Croft into forfeiting the life-blood of his own lovely fiancée!
Horror’s Handmaidens — Startling Midnight-Thriller
by Brent North
The horrors came quickly to Hollywood, for that flesh-hungry fiend favored the bodies of the beautiful!
My Life Belongs To Lust — Startling Midnight-Thriller
by Allan K. Echols
I saw cold lust in the eyes of this man I loved, and then I saw his face go white with terror, for he, more than I, would know the torture of the blood-taint of my kin!
