Hugh B. Cave’s “Murgunstrumm” is easily one of the all-time best of the pulp-

Hugh B. Cave’s “Murgunstrumm” is easily one of the all-time best of the pulp-era vampire horror yarns. The reason Hugh B. Cave was so incredible was that his stories have the surreal ambience of a waking nightmare. His best story is either Murgunstrumm or the Cult of the White Ape. Unlike other horror writers of his milieu like Clark Ashton Smith (who was fascinated by unique settings and prehuman history) or C.L. Moore (who was more about transplanting horror to space) or Lovecraft (who had a view of the universe that only an internet posting agoraphobe shut in could come up with, which is why I suspect he’s still popular now), Hugh B. Cave was more about classic horror elements, like zombies, voodoo, vampires, wolfmen, mad scientists. He wrote about evil jungle islands and ghost ships. Hugh B. Cave was also one of the only pulp horror writers to have a notable sex drive, his stories always had shapely women. He’s also one of the only two pulp writers who’s life actually coincided with mine and I met before he passed on (the other was Jack Williamson). By the time of his death, he was a regional Caribbean and Florida Keys writer. Incidentally, I’ve often argued that was the trajectory for weird fiction writers: they transition into being regional authors. For instance, just before his death, Robert E. Howard ditched Conan and horror and was becoming mostly a Texas regional author. My one encounter with Hugh B. Cave, then in his 90s and super-alert, was so weird I hesitate to even share it. He was giving a lecture for aspiring writers and midway through discussing how to get an audience’s attention he went on a “weird uncle at Thanksgiving” jag about how psychology was entirely a con-game for suckers and wasn’t real science at all. I managed to actually sit down with Hugh B. Cave’s biographer a few years ago at a pulp gathering to ask what she made of all this - was he a scientologist? Why was he so hostile to psychology and to my shock, she was just as baffled as I was about that outburst and said that the only explanation she can think of was that he had some lingering scars from his divorce.  -- source link

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