Jeffrey Shanks’ Zombie from the Pulps is exactly what it says on the tin – a collection of twenty stories from the old pulps dealing with the walking dead.
Not, mind you, the shambling hordes of post-Romerian cinema, but the subtler, more personal and vaguely more anthropologically correct zombies of old fiction.
The selection includes at least two well-known pieces, H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West and Robert E. Howard’s Pigeons from Hell – most readers are likely to have read these before, and probably own multiple copies of both stories. I know I do.
The same goes, probably, for H.S. Whitehead’s Jumbee, another true classic, and for C.A. Smith’s Empire of the Necromancers, a true wonder of macabre humor and baroque imagination.
But it’s the rest of the collection that is a treasure-trove of surprises.
We find that often forgotten gem, Henry Kuttner’s The Graveyard Rats, and then a number of little-known stories of Haitian magic and walking corpses, by the likes of August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, E. Hoffmann Price and Seabury Quinn.
But there’s also a nice little number by our old friend H. De Vere Stacpoole, and a fine story by Garnett Weston, who penned the original story for White Zombie, and here hides under the alias of G.W. Hutter.
And more.
A nice little anthology, highly recommended to seekers of the macabre.
1 July 2018 at 00:03
Just found this online. It’s a Youtube link that shows an episode of Boris Karloff’s Thriller Theater. It’s an adaptation of Howard’s ‘Pigeons from Hell’. Thought you might want to check it out if you manage to get caught up with all (or most) of your current projects and deadlines.
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1 July 2018 at 00:44
Thank you!
I did not know about this adaptation.
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1 July 2018 at 19:44
I’ve actually had a copy on a VHS tape for a few years now. I picked it up on eBay. It was not a copy produced for retail sale. It was definitely taped off of a TV showing.
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1 July 2018 at 20:03
Heroic times before Youtube 😀
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