Description

Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants edited by Robert Deis & Wyatt Doyle

Hardcover – New Texture – 2023 – 310 pages

Men’s adventure magazines—those manly post-WWII periodicals known for “true” exotic adventure, crime and war stories, and yarns about flesh-ripping weasels and sadistic Nazis—were wild and weird in many ways. But few people know that you can find many stories in MAMs published in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that are even weirder than their usual fare. Stories about evil cults, vampires, aliens and robots, ghosts, plants with a taste for humans and other things that would have fit right in the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales.

So while it may at first blush seem unexpected to find Weird Tales-style tales in MAMs, it shouldn’t come as a total surprise. Weird tales were simply another option at the MAM buffet table. And like other kinds of fiction in MAMs (action, war, exotic adventure, crime, noir…) they came in numerous varieties and were presented in diverse styles, ranging from pitch-black and unsentimental to playful, even comic.

Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants is a curated collection of some of our favorite MAM horror and science fiction stories about vampires, aliens, robots, and—yes, indeed —a werewolf created by atomic radiation and giant man-eating plants, all lushly illustrated with the scans of the magazine covers they came from and the interior art and photos used to illustrate them.