Magazine of Horror

I can tell it's nearly Halloween; the hair on my neck is standing up. It's either Halloween or I need a haircut.

It's both!

I'm digging deeper into my stacks of old books and magazines, just to find these goodies for you. Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories were published in the 1960s, and ended their runs in the early '70s. They seemed to be a shoestring operation; published by a company called Health Knowledge, and edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes, a writer, editor and anthologist. The magazines were hard to find. I only knew one store in town that carried them, and they only came out every three months or so. The stories they reprinted were mainly stories from old pulp magazines. The stories themselves had copyrights expired so they were free for the using.

They did publish occasional new stories: Startling Mystery Stories published Stephen King's first short stories. Here's the cover featuring one of his early ones, "The Reaper's Image."I have three or four other reprints of the classic, "The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs, but it's such a great story I have probably read it every time I've encountered it.

These magazines aren't impossible to find, but I went to eBay and spot-checked. I found one, and the seller wanted $14.95. I'll hang on to the ones I have. Maybe on Halloween night, in between trick or treaters, I'll treat myself to "The Monkey's Paw":

"But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey's paw, and frantically breathed the third and last wish."

Boo!