Terror Tales

As noted last week, when I took a brief look at an issue of Horror Stories, this horror pulp had a companion magazine: Terror Tales.  This magazine ran from 1934-1941 and, like Horror Stories, had a brief UK reprint edition, publishing four issues in 1940.  In common with its companion, Terror Tales featured very lurid covers, inevitably portraying young women in various states of undress being menaced by monsters, mad scientists and cultists.  Terror Tales, though, developed a definite emphasis upon bondage and S&M in its covers, far more obviously than Horror Stories.  The above cover, for Sept-Oct 1938, is perhaps the most bondage obsessed of all.  Certainly, it contains the most bound women of any cover I could find and they are all being threatened with violence of some kind.  The girls chained to the post in the background, being given a severe whipping is an image which became something of a motif in later issues, which frequently featured whip wielding mad monks and the like giving good thrashings to tied up women.

Of course, restrained women were a common theme across many genres of pulp magazine covers in the thirties and forties, but Terror Tales served them up with such relish.  The magazine shared its roster of authors with its companion and they cranked out an apparently endless streams of lurid stories.  Nowadays, the best remembered of those listed on this particular cover is Ray Cummings, who had had an illustrious career in the twenties writing for respectable pulps like All-Story and Argosy.  Indeed, he was considered one of the 'founding fathers' of science fiction, his stories both frequently reprinted in the science fiction pulps of the thirties and highly influential upon later writers.  By the late thirties, however, his glory days seemed to be behind him and he found himself writing for pulps like Terror Tales and Horror Stories.  By the forties, after these titles had succumbed to wartime paper shortages, he was, anonymously, contributing stories to comics, such as The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner and Captain America, (his daughter was also a writer for their publisher, Timely Comics).