I have been a fan of Horror fiction for most of my life. Even before I was a strong reader I liked Horror comics and films. All of this is a way of saying: I’ve always liked Horror. Weird Menace or Shudder Pulp is a much more recent thing for me. I came to it through Hugh B. Cave and his book, Murgunstrumm and Others (1977). Some of the tales in that book are Horror while others are Weird Menace. Like many of the writers for Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Thrilling Mystery, Cave wrote both types. Others who did this include Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Arthur Leo Zagat, Henry Kuttner, Robert E. Howard, Paul Ernst and Jack Williamson. The contents pages of Weird Tales and Thrilling Mystery were often the same.
To really see the difference, I decided to read one Horror tale and one Shudder piece by a single author, relatively close in publication date. Any of these men would have sufficed but I chose Carl Jacobi, another of these dual writers. I selected his Strange Stories piece called “The Spawn of Blackness” (October 1939) for my Horror title and “Head in His Hands” from Thrilling Mystery, November 1937 for the other. There were many things that struck me as similar or even identical, and then some others that were in sheer opposition.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 2: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.