The Night Gawker
Occult detective spoofs date back to the 1940s with Bob Hope and Paullette Goddard in The Ghostbreakers (1940) and the Universal Abbott and Costello pictures Read More
Category: Occult Detectives
Pulp Writing: Opening With a Punch
I miss the Pulps. Not for the garish covers featuring aliens molesting sweet-young space maidens. Not for the variety that gave us the brash adventure Read More
The False Monster Tradition
This post begins: The notion that a monster should prove to be a fraud is a fairly recent idea. The warriors gathered around the scop Read More
Weird Wednesdays: Malcolm M. Ferguson (1919-2011)
I began this piece with one goal in mind, to find a latter day Lovecraftian tribute, preferably one that others had missed. That’s not what Read More
It’s Okay…I’m a Doctor!
The non-comic reading world got an introduction to mystical superheroes with Doctor Strange (2016) starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Now part of the Infinity War movies, little Read More
William Hope Hodgson: The Bottleneck
Horror writers use many techniques to heighten the terror in their work. One of my favorites is the bottleneck. As with traffic jams, the bottleneck Read More
The Case of the Coptic Priest
How do you create an Occult Detective in the last half of the 20th century? Edward D. Hoch found an old solution to a new Read More
The Ghostbreakers Mythos
Lovecraft’s circle shared mention of their separate creations in the pages of Weird Tales, name-dropping here and there a friend’s character or some other reference. Read More
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – Doc Savage Across the Genres
Doc Savage is hard to place in any one publisher’s pigeon-hole, which may be the reason Bantam Books reprinted the adventures with “Novel” on the Read More
Heralded by Blood and Other Tales
Jack Mackenzie’s collection of Dark Fantasy stories is now available from Rage Machine Books. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G8HHWC7 From the book’s introduction: If you ever feel that you Read More