This is Horror Stories for December 1935, cover art by John Newton Howitt. The ISFDB entry for this issue is here. This small image of the cover — unfortunately the largest I could find anywhere — is the one preserved at Galactic Central.
Pulp Parade #58: Another “out-of-the-frying-pan” situation
Red, hooded cloaks were a theme on Terror Tales covers, with the occasional yellow cloak or white lab coat. (Statistical analysis, anyone?)
Looks like the theme for Horror Stories is a red dress. In the samples so far, all but two have a woman in a red dress. The two exceptions are a woman in a yellow dress, kneeling in a pool of red liquid so it would be stained red, and one presumably wearing nothing, but we can only see her head, hands and lower legs. Perhaps she’s wearing a red dress and we just can’t see it?
Whether it was artistic instinct or actual research I suspect the thought was that the color red would garner more attention on the rack than any other.
Gotta love the sort of stuff going on below floorboards in these magazines. Creepy cellars seem a recurring theme as well.
Do any of the exciting and enticing covers have any relationship to the stories in the magazines? They depict precise situations, but there doesn’t seem to be any relationship to any of the titles listed.
In my own experience (which is limited, because many of these old pulps or their contents are hard to find) the spectacular covers on these old magazines had at best a tangential relationship to the stories within, which were often disappointing.
I already commission writers to guest-write chapters of Tales of Gnosis College, and I’ve commissioned artists to recreate the covers only more explicitly. Perhaps I should commission writers to generate better stories that more closely match the original covers.
That would be excellent, especially if the story went with the more lurid version of the cover. 😉
When you run out of Horror Stories, there’s The Spider magazine covers.
Some of the Spider covers are pretty good and I think I shall be running them, though I’ve been thinking that next in line are the covers of Thrilling Mystery, some of which are fabulously mad science.