Nightshade Diary

At the turn of the century, the brave Legionnaires manned forts throughout Morocco, sometimes finding death suddenly, but no peace.

Host - M.P. Pellicer
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"Terror Over Hollywood" is a short story by Robert Bloch that serves as a satirical critique of Hollywood’s obsession with youth and fame. Originally published in Fantastic Universe, the narrative follows an ambitious actress named Carla Hayes who discovers a secret society of ageless elite actors and pays a horrific price to join their ranks.
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The story was adapted into a segment of the 1967 Amicus anthology film Torture Garden, with a screenplay written by Bloch himself. In the film adaptation, the segment is framed by a carnival horror show and retains the core plot of Carla’s rise and monstrous transformation.

Host - M.P. Pellicer
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"​To learn of her husband's hidden life, Jean Kirkwood dug so deep into the past that she suddenly hit her own future. It was anything but a pretty one, with a heap of corpses at her feet, and the clear, cold knowledge that she'd never again come home!"

Cyril Plunkett (1905-1966) used the pseudonym Jerome Kinnear. Terror on the Twelfth was published in November 1946 in Dime Mystery Magazine. Beyond being a prolific author of detective pulp fiction (300-400 stories), he was president of Continental Fremont Inc., a steel-processing firm he founded in 1946. He was a member of the Fremont Yacht Club, the Fremont Country Club, Catawba Cliff Club, St. Ann's Catholic Church, and the Mystery Writers Guild of America.

He was friends with Fred Danny, one of the two authors of the Ellery Queen Series

He died at the age of 61 from cancer.

​Host - M.P. Pellicer
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I Hope They're Worried by Don James

It gave John Marshal a chill, creepy feeling to sit by and watch, play by play, his own murder develop. Particularly since he knew that this was the second time that he'd be dead.

Don James was an author in the pulp noir fiction tradition. He was a newsman, editor, radio and TV writer, and a copy chief for advertising agencies. By the late 1950s, he had written several hundred fiction stories and articles which appeared in more than 34 national magazines such as American and Collier's.


I'll Be Seeing You by Day Keene

His grapefruit was iced and laced with sherry. A morning paper was folded on the tray. Life, O'Hara thought, was a pretty fine affair if a man had sense enough to take from it what he wanted... Today he must send a spray of flowers to District Attorney Martin's funeral... And if O'Hara had been more far-sighted, he would have ordered some more for his own!

Day Keene was the pseudonym of Gunnar Hjerstedt. Other pseudonyms include Lewis Dixon, Alvin F. Hunter, William Richards, Clark Nelson, Daniel White, John Corbett & Donald King (1904-1969). Keene targeted the crime and detective pulps, and soon proved he could handle the sex stuff and tough stuff as well as anyone. But his wry wit and sly humour– not to mention his talent for creating three-dimensional and often flawed male characters –made him stand out in a field dominated by one-dimensional slabs of beef. 

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After twenty years of it, Eloise got tired of her coffin and returned, unannounced, to get her garnet ring. When she took her departure, she had a strange farewell party, and two new companions for the long, lonely journey home.

Dorothy Dunn (1913-1952) was a St. Louis schoolteacher who published over sixty short stories in such hardboiled pulps as Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and Thrilling Detective in the forties and fifties, with such juicy titles as “Senora Satan,” “Dead-End Darling” and “Morphine Alley.”Her writing’s marked by “strong characterization, offbeat situations, and evocative and distinctively gritty prose,\

Host - M.P. Pellicer
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Like many short pieces from Shock and similar "weird menace" pulp fiction magazines of the late 1940s, "Undertaker's Delight" is a suspenseful crime thriller by John Bender designed to shock the reader with a swift, dark narrative. he story centers around a classic noir/hardboiled premise involving crime, a morbid angle involving death or the mortuary business, and a fast-paced conflict that culminates in a sudden twist ending—a signature style of the magazine. 

John Bender was a classic mid-century pulp writer active from the 1940s through the 1950s. He briefly served as an editor for the famous Dime Mystery Magazine in 1942 before focusing on his own writing. His work regularly appeared across popular detective, horror, and mystery publications of the era. 

Till Death Do Us Join is a short story by Theodore Sturgeon, first published in the July 1948 issue of Shock magazine. It appears in The Perfect Host: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 5, which covers his work from 1947 to 1949.
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The narrative centers on a young woman who falls in love with two men, Paul and Golly, who appear to be twin brothers but possess entirely different personalities. Paul is gentle and kind, while Golly is bad-tempered and destructive. The story explores the complex dynamics of this unusual romantic entanglement.

Theodore Sturgeon (born Edward Hamilton Waldo, 1918-1985) was an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the Golden Age of science fiction. He is best known for his prose style, emotional depth, and treatment of themes like love, loneliness, and what it means to be human. 

Host - M.P. Pellicer
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​You Know What I Did? by Charles Beckman appeared in Manhunt May 1954. This is a gritty story that plays out in only two hours. Your kid's missing, and at first it's nothing to worry about. Then time passes, and your kid doesn't come home.


Charles Boeckman Jr. (1920 - 2015), who wrote under the pen name Charles Beckman Jr., was a prolific American pulp magazine author known for his work in suspense, mystery, and western genres. He broke into the pulps in 1945 with a story published in Detective Tales and continued writing for major publications like Star Western and Fifteen Western Tales until the format’s decline in the late 1950s. 

Beyond his pulp career, Boeckman was a professional jazz musician (clarinetist and saxophonist) who toured with bands for decades and authored the non-fiction book Cool, Hot and Blue. Several of his short stories were adapted for television, including an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and he remained active as an author well into his 90s, publishing new works and anthologies of his vintage stories.

The Woman on the Bus is a short story written by R. Van Taylor, originally published in the May 1954 issue of the pulp crime fiction digest Manhunt.

Mack didn't know why he was worried. The woman only wanted to stay until the next bus. Then she took out a gun...

This story was famously adapted into a television episode for the anthology series The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse. The episode aired in 1954, directed by Charles S. Gould and starring Polly Bergen, Chick Chandler, and Ross Elliott.

Host - M.P. Pellicer
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The Mummy's Soul is an anonymous short story first published in The Knickerbocker, or New York Monthly Magazine in May 1862.  Scholarly analysis identifies it as one of the earliest American curse fiction tales, predating Louisa May Alcott’s Lost in a Pyramid (1869) and Jane G. Austin’s After Three Thousand Years (1868). 

The plot follows a narrator who desecrates an Egyptian tomb and removes a stone scarabaeus inscribed with the prophecy, "three thousand years hence a new life." Upon returning to America, the narrator's wife begins to physically and spiritually wither, eventually dying.  The narrator later discovers a supernatural fly in his home, which he burns, but he is haunted by the reanimated mummy from the tomb, which seeks magical revenge for the desecration. This narrative established a template for the "mummy curse" genre, linking tomb disturbance with supernatural retribution. 

​Host - M.P. Pellicer
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Date in the City Room is a punchy, short story published in Weird Tales, January, 1938 by Talbot Johns. It blends a classic supernatural twist with a gritty, fast-paced journalism setting. The story takes place late at night in a frantic metropolitan newspaper office— the "city room." Two reporters meet up in the press room, waiting to see a massive headline hit the morning papers. As they talk and watch the printing presses roll, it is revealed that the breaking news story they are waiting on details a horrific crime and its immediate aftermath: the execution of a killer.

Talbot Johns (1909 -1969) was an American author and advertising executive. While he only published a handful of fiction pieces, his professional life was deeply rooted in the golden age of American advertising.

Betelgeuse Bridge is a satirical science fiction short story by William Tenn, first published in the April 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It serves as a sharp, humorous commentary on interstellar diplomacy, economics, and cosmic "racketeering". The story is told from the perspective of a public relations executive hired by the government. A race of highly intelligent, slimy, snail-like aliens arrives on Earth from the Betelgeuse star system. Rather than invading Earth with weapons, the polite and unassuming aliens engage in trade. Only too late do humans realize what they really wanted.

William Tenn was the celebrated pen name of Philip Klass (1920-2010), a British-born American author and academic widely recognized as one of science fiction’s greatest and sharpest satirists. He began publishing immediately after his military discharge, debuting with Alexander the Bait in 1946. Under the pseudonym William Tenn, he became a dominant voice in the 1950s golden age of science fiction, particularly in Galaxy Science Fiction.

Host - M.P. Pellicer
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A powerful and compelling tale of brooding horror that deepens and broadens to the final catastrophe—an unusual and engrossing novellete by the author of "The Curse of Yig".

Medusa's Coil" by Zealia B. Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft is a short story first published in January 1939. A traveler seeking shelter at a decaying plantation hears a tale of forbidden love and supernatural horror. When Denis de Russy brings his mysterious Parisian bride, Marceline, home, dark secrets emerge through a painter's portrait, revealing monstrous truths about the woman's true nature and her serpentine hair that possesses its own sinister life. The story blends Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos with Greek mythology. 

Zealia Bishop (1897 - 1968) was an American writer primarily known for her collaborations with H. P. Lovecraft, who extensively revised her work to the point of ghostwriting three major horror stories: "The Curse of Yig" (1929), "Medusa's Coil" (1939), and "The Mound" (1940). 

Host - M.P. Pellicer
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