A while back one of our former Instagram followers announced his displeasure that we were posting art from Men’s Adventure Magazines. “There’s more to pulp fiction than manly man magazines” he said. He then listed horror pulps like, Weird Tales and Eerie Stories before unfollowing us and leaving our lives forever. If he only stuck around until October when we post so many horror pulp covers we alienate the people who seek Men’s Adventure content.
We’ve written in the past about what pulp fiction is, and that dude is totally right. There is way more to the pulp fiction ethos than Men’s Adventure magazines. And in honor of Halloween coming up we’re going to give the Horror Pulps their due.
Horror Pulp Fiction
Early on the pulp fiction magazines like Argosy would post all sorts of genre’s in one mixed bag, like the Black Mask issue above. Later they published only detective stories but in 1929 when The Maltese Falcon debuted they were still churning out Westerns and Adventure stories.
Horror fiction evolved from the Gothic writing of the previous century. Writers like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were re-printed in the Horror and Sci-Fi Pulps. Their work rubbed shoulders with up and coming writers of the time, most notably H.P. Lovecraft.
I’m not gonna go too deep into Lovecraftian Horror because that’s an article in itself but I will say the man was prolific. You can find a lot of his work at The Pulp Magazine Archive which has a ton of downloadable issues. He was also super influential for writers like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman.
Like the Hardboiled crime stories evolving into Film Noir; the horror pulps became Horror films and bad B-Movies. Halloween wouldn’t be quite the same without the horror pulps. Stay tuned for more articles about Universal Studios, Gothic Literature, and some H.P. Lovecraft.
