MUSINGS ON THE ARCANE

"You will not remember what I show you now. And yet I shall awaken memories of love and crime
and death..."

-Boris Karloff in the role of Ardeth Bey/Im-Ho-Tep, The Mummy, 1932, Universal Pictures

Musings on the Arcane
by Tom Lynch

I bid you welcome to the Hermetic Order of Arcana and to the Corridors of Evil. What
started out as a weekly discussion while walking home from work has spawned two
adapted plays and now a website. RW Hessler and I wish to share our interest in the
weird world of dark fantasy, horror, and suspense in new and old radio plays, pulps,
comics, films, and history.


Through this site we will explore the themes that connect these genres, make
available our previous radio drama as well as our current adaptations of classic
works. We hope to thrill and entertain; we hope to shed light into forgotten corners
of literature and pop culture. We truly hope to scare you, just enough to make you
wonder what just went bump in the night. Perhaps it's your heart, or something
darker....


I don't doubt that I came along [just in, or] at the right time. In the sixties and early
seventies, amongst the upheavals, gains, and losses American society went through
[and probably in part because of them] there was born the nostalgia craze. College
kids discovered the rebellious comedy of the Marx Brothers and made Humphrey
Bogart out to be an existential noir hero. Parents bought vinyl lp reissues of the radio
programs they delighted in as children. Hollywood offered up large budget period
pictures set in the twenties, thirties, and forties with The Great Gatsby, Bonnie &
Clyde, and The Summer Of '42. The pulp heroes found themselves on the
newsstands reprinted in paperback form and almost as cheap as they were thirty
years before. The Late, Late Show, following the ten or eleven o'clock news report,
became for many the on air rep movie house where obscure B-movies went not to
die but to enthrall a new generation. Comic book heroes were still popular, and along
with the current neon colored exploits from the House of Marvel, DC comics blitzed
the stands with archival reprints of the first Superman and Batman sagas. Captain
Marvel was back in print after nearly twenty five years gone, so were the
adventures of Will Eisner's the Spirit.


This is where I come in. The spinning wire rack of comic books caught my eye early on.
These once ubiquitous squeaky obelisks of temptation sent my blood racing. All that
color, the smell of ink & paper, could cause me to reel and swoon. And the agonizing
over what titles to buy! And the hardest job of all-if I had no coin of my own, the
cajoling of dear old Dad to foot the bill. But over on the magazine stand, next to
Mad, Cracked, and Car-Toons, stood the ghastly Warren publications: Creepy, Eerie,
Vampirella, and Famous Monsters of Filmland! Encountering these weirdly menacing
tomes for the first time, it was their unabashedly garish, luridly illustrated glossy
covers that practically stared you down and beckoned you forth. Bordered in red and
black these 11 x 17 magazine covers were illustrated by the masters of the macabre
like Frank Frazetta and Basil Gogos. Recreating some of the silver screen's most
frightening images as well as the nearly nude [scantily-clad hardly covers the next
topic] haughty, Countess Vampirella, Warren publications was every PTA's waking
nightmare, a calculated affront to the healthy minds and souls of all good
children. Priced for a mere dollar, I knew it was useless to broach the topic with
Pops; these tawdry and terrifying magazines had to be purchased or perused with
extreme caution and stealth. Famous Monsters was filled with 4SJ Ackerman's
lifelong collection of movie stills and was a Horror and Science Fiction fan's greatest
joy to linger over every page, and I am forever in Uncle Forry's debt. The black and
white comics that comprised the interiors of Vampi, Creepy, and Eerie had the power
to shock and frighten, and were written and drawn by true legends: Russ Heath,
John Severin, Wally Wood, all alumnus of the fabled EC comics house, the fiends who
started it all!

As I breathlessly read through each mag, I'd come to the Captain Company catalog
of mail order goods and wares, located about five or six pages towards the back of
each issue, which offered a myriad of fascinating curios and books that, for myself,
helped as a road map to traverse the terrain of the mysterious. Sure, I wanted every
single back issue there was, along with the plastic model kits, rubber masks, fan club
pins and t-shirts, but there was no way my parents were going to cut a check to
these slimy hucksters. What torture and desire these back page ads could instill
["own all the classic monster films on super 8mm! Running time fifteen minutes..."] I
studied each item with obsession. The line of printed matter, I soon gladly
discovered, was mostly available to me at my own personal Mecca, the Little
Professor Book Shop, a little slice of heaven in the Campus Corner Shopping Plaza.
With a combination of a weekly allowance and earnings from my paper route, I was
adding paperback pulp reprints to my usual comic book intake. It seemed like the
right thing to do. Check out all that those back pages offered, reading wise--Sax
Rohmer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard; books on horror films; reprints of
the daily newspaper adventures of Prince Valiant, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and
the Phantom. After awhile, the lines began to blur for me. Arthur Conan Doyle and
Jules Verne were as loved by myself as was the works of Maxwell Grant and Kenneth
Robeson. Dick Tracy and Spider-Man both went after the bad guy, just in different
ways. The make-up artists who had worked on the Planet of the Apes couldn't have
gone on with out looking to the great Jack Pierce, the genius of all of Universal's
horror make up effects of the thirties and forties, this was clear to me. I found
myself in awe of the makers and their creations. I was lost in the realm of the
imagination.

I was bitten and bitten hard. I was in love with the past and imbued with a nostalgia
for a period of time that predated me by thirty-five years. Kids my age seemed like
they were ready for the career, wife and kids, at age twelve; they couldn't get why I
was hung up on all this "weird old stuff". I would have called it the Arcane, but that
just would have started some other kind of goof on me simply because they never
heard of the Arcane before. My grades hit the wall, I didn't care. Sports meant
nothing to me. Between reading and watching old movies on TV, I barely had time to
listen to the radio. This activity was best suited for Sunday night; from seven until
nine, the Golden Age of Radio was on the air. I was forced to knuckle down and do
my homework, but the rebroadcasts of the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet,
Suspense, and Gang Busters made the drudgery of scholastics elementary. The
script writing was snappy, the acting terse, all of the sound effects and musical
scores- it was spellbinding. The cheerless bell chimes and foghorn-like lower brass
section that began the Suspense program were amongst the most ominous sounds I
had ever heard; just writing about that score gives me the chills. The Music billowed
from my speakers, filled my bedroom with a dread cloud as the original host, a
solitary menacing voice calling himself the Man in Black, announced that for the next
hour the listener would be treated to a tale like no other, well calculated to keep you
in Suspense! My desk lamp seemed to turn into a meager candle, flickering weakly
as the story on air grew increasingly tense and suffocating until...!!! What a show.
Lights Out, the Inner Sanctum, and Mystery In The Air were also great for jolting
fright tales with legendary writers and stars. And no long car trip in the summer was
complete without tuning in to listen to the CBS Mystery Theatre, a good scare to
welcome you home.

I was rapidly becoming a basement dwelling creature of the night. But I could still
withstand day- light for special occasions. Old comic books and oddities of all kinds
could be found at garage sales, rummage sales, and flea markets. I began to haunt a
used paperback store and held an account there for a few years. Comic conventions
happened two or three times a year, and after pleading my case, Dad would relent
and haul me and some pals to some VFW hall twenty five miles away for an
afternoon of treasure hunting. Reading Tolkien led to the rather embarrassing
activity of taking part in playing fantasy-based table top role playing games with
fellows from school. These "Dungeon Meetings" would become more and more of an
excuse to meet someone's sister and her friends. Puberty was beginning to
win out over the realm of the imagination. Girls, rock 'n' roll, and rebellion took the
place of the Shadow, Fu Manchu, and Sherlock Holmes. The door into summer was
closing.

End of Part I.