Magazine Review: Famous Fantastic Mysteries Fall 2016 edited by Matthew Moring
Every so often, someone tries to relaunch a once-popular magazine. Most of these efforts fold quickly. The subject of this review is one such, lasting a single issue. As you’ll recall from a previous review, Famous Fantastic Mysteries was primarily a reprint title, presenting classic science fiction and fantasy stories from the Munsey company back catalog, and in later years, stories that had not previously been in magazines. For this revival, the editor decided to focus on “weird menace” stories, with horrific trappings, but mostly having “natural” explanations.
After a brief editorial introduction that includes a bio of the one author whose story is not a reprint, we have eleven tales of terror.
“Kinsman’s Curse” by G.T. Fleming-Roberts starts us off with a young woman who is slated to inherit her uncle’s fortune–if she is still sane by dawn. Unfortunately, she has a houseful of hostile relatives to spend the night with, and a murderous ghost! The male lead is inserted into the story in a way that should make our heroine much more suspicious, but he turns out to be a genuine good guy. Content note: torture.
“Crawling Madness” by Arthur Leo Zagat has a young couple heading to the ghost town of Deadhope, as they have a plan for reopening the silver mine there. But there’s a crash, and the wife has to deal with the cruel mine foreman and a seeming army of crawling mad people in the deserted camp alone. This one does a good job of ratcheting up the feeling of desperation.
“Hands Beyond the Grave” by Henry Treat Sperry has a man whose hands seem to have a mind of their own, and want to strangle his beloved. Is this the curse of his ancestor, or is there a more immediate explanation?
“Shadow” by Kimberly B. Richardson is the one new story, and sticks out like a sore thumb. Fancy coffee shops just weren’t a pulp thing. This one’s a modern version of a folk tale; see if you can guess which one.
“White Moon of Madness” by Chandler H. Whipple takes us to the South Seas for a treasure hunt with a group of college students and their beloved professor. One by one the students succumb to madness and murder. This one combines a faked menace with what appears to be a very real one–certainly it’s never explained away.
“Daughter of the Snake” by Frederick C. Davis is a creepy tale of a family seemingly cursed by snakes, and the young woman who is trapped on their estate. Moral of the story: Never switch to a gluten-free diet without consulting with a real dietician.
“Daughter of the Plague” by Hugh B. Cave takes us to a small city with an abandoned library and a sewer system badly in need of updating. Which may or may not have anything to do with why workmen keep disappearing and turn up weeks later driven to madness.
“The Ice Maiden” by John H. Knox is set in an isolated house in the middle of a blizzard. The host is a polar explorer, who claims he has brought back a fabulous treasure, the problem being that it belonged to the hulda, a Norse ice demon. He now needs funding to return the treasure to its rightful place to escape the vengeance of that creature. An unlikely tale, but something is stalking the inhabitants of the house, leaving them shattered corpses. A bit of period racism, in that it’s claimed by the explorer that white women are more attractive than any other kind of women, and thus other races’ men and monsters are driven to possess them.
“Dead Man’s Bride” by Wyatt Blassingame has a family curse in which each owner of a particular estate loses his bride on the wedding night. Unlike most stories of this type, there is no rational explanation, and it ends in horror.
“Priestess of Pain” by Paul Ernst concerns a man who sees a green face whenever he is close to death. An evil woman’s face, yet one he is drawn to. Probably he’s hallucinating, but what if he isn’t? A bit too long for the premise to support.
And rounding out the issue is “The Devil’s Step-Daughters” by Wayne Rogers. Are the three sisters witches responsible for the mysterious abductions and mutilated corpses in their isolated village? Or are they the innocent victims of a frame job by a more sinister party? There’s a neat minor twist to this one, but it’s a huge spoiler. Content note: torture.
Overall, a fun collection of gruesome stories in an attractive oversize package. This would make an excellent present for your friend or relative who enjoys weird menace tales.
