“Murgunstrumm” (1933)

Hugh B. Cave’s ginormous action-packed whomper of a tale—it’s longer than Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, and faster!—delivers pulp juice by the barrel. It starts with a nighttime breakout from a mental institution and proceeds to the Gray Toad Inn way out in approximately the New Jersey sticks. It has hypnotic shape-shifting vampires, a battlin’ chauffeur, blazing firearms, an abattoir down in the cellar, and a cannibalistic homunculus named Murgunstrumm. He’s not really the focus of the story but he has such a cool name, may as well make it the title—that’s how they do it in Strange Tales in 1933. Also, he’s Serbian. Our main guy and his girlfriend Ruth have been locked up as crazies in separate mental institutions after some strange incidents at the GTI seven months earlier. At the Gray Toad Inn, the whole thing has a “cabin in the woods” vibe, as properly signaled by the name of the joint. It’s way out there ... and the things that are going on. Murgunstrumm runs the place and serves the vampires, dining on the remains of their victims. Oh, brrrr! The vampires dress for society, which is where they seem to be finding their victims, as they are invariably decked out with furs and diamonds and such. In human form, the vampires have European accents and names: Costillan, Maronaine, etc. There is even someone named Von Heller who appears to be a vampire hunter, if you can imagine that. Cave doesn’t shy from making the vampires less than appealing. They also appear as wolves, bats, and purplish clouds with green glowing eyes. But he saves the most repulsive details for Murgunstrumm. A lot of things happen in this story as our guy works with his chauffeur to solve the mystery of the GTI, restore his reputation and Ruth’s, and get Ruth sprung from the bughouse. Except for the vampires and some extremes around Murgunstrumm, it feels more like zippy mystery story with noir touches—convincingly seedy, depraved, and lurid. But all’s well that ends well, as they say. Cave kind of got lost in the pulps shuffle, if I understand where he’s coming from. He always wrote a lot, even into the ‘80s and beyond, but focused on horror more in the prewar years, then went more for light romance in slick-page magazines like Good Housekeeping. Not sure I have all this straight, but something led me to the Murgunstrumm collection, which was first published in 1977 and I got as a kindle product published in 2011. This long one is a blast—curious to see how the rest go.

Hugh B. Cave, Murgunstrumm and Others
Story not available online.