Hands Beyond the Grave

The AIRT Pulp Preservation Project

A NIGHT OF UNIMAGINABLE TERROR

Dare to read this chilling tale of legacy, love, and the shadows that linger in the moonlight.

Step into the ancestral halls of Robert Mercer, where a single October night shatters the boundary between the ordinary and the supernatural.

Haunted by a luminous, faceless apparition and a sudden, unexplainable change within himself, Mercer must confront an unknown terror that threatens his very soul.

from
September, 1934

Terror Tales was one of the flagship “weird menace” pulp magazines, first published in 1934 by Popular Publications. It quickly became infamous for its lurid blend of horror, crime, and sadistic thrills, setting the tone for the entire subgenre. The stories usually followed a formula in which seemingly supernatural horrors plagued the protagonists, only to be explained away by the end as the schemes of criminals or madmen. Despite these rational explanations, the magazine leaned heavily on graphic descriptions of torture, depravity, and bizarre cruelty, which made it both popular with thrill-seeking readers and controversial among critics and reformers.

The magazine was known as much for its sensational covers as for its content. Painted by artists like Rudolph Belarski and John Newton Howitt, the covers typically depicted terrified women in peril—chained, menaced by masked villains, or threatened with gruesome deaths. This imagery was designed to shock and entice newsstand buyers, and it played a major role in cementing the “weird menace” aesthetic. Terror Tales ran through the late 1930s and into the early 1940s before declining, as public pressure against violent and sexually charged pulp content grew stronger. While short-lived compared to other pulp genres, the magazine remains a notorious example of the extremes of pulp publishing, remembered today for its mix of horror, exploitation, and high-octane sensationalism.