You’ve got to hand it to those pulp writers – maybe because they were just pounding this stuff out it comes directly from the id with a power and compelling force the contemporary mold you’d find in a bookshop named, say, Shaman Drum would never have.
These passages are from 1938’s "Arms of the Flame Goddess" by Francis James as found in that great collection Selected Tales of Grim and Grue From the Horror Pulps edited by Sheldon Jaffery.
For the fire seemed to take on the shapes of girls dancing, linked hand in hand! Slim nude shapes that swayed in spectral minuet. And now they seemed to be beckoning to me, luring, taunting with an invitation of Circe-like wantonness.
Foul, unclean things were whispering, I felt their snakey crawling across my brain. For I was aware of an amazing emotion, a longing to go there to those girls!
Against the awful blackness of the night, a figure was visible. It was that of a young girl, utterly nude save for a gauzy scarf around her slim loins. She was of a witching, Circe-like beauty. Her gaze fastened on me and I couldn’t withdraw my eyes. Her look held a pagan allure, knowledge of age-old power of things beyond words, of the stark and primitive instincts that call from woman to man.
She stepped back from the window so that her whole figure was visible. Her arms rose over her head. Her slender body taut and standing on tip-toe, she seemed ready to draw down the tide of white light to her bosom. Like a naiad of ethereal and inhuman beauty she stood there, quivering, breasts hardened and throbbing – a thing not of this world, thrilling to something born of the night and the moon’s radiance.
Her arms dropped. Lascivious ripplings passed through her, writhings of a cat in throes of desire. She lifted her breasts in her cupped hands, holding them toward us.
Of course, as is so often the case in pulps, all this seemingly supernatural stuff has a mundane
, "rational" explanation that strains credibility.
"And the girl who led the men into the woods to their deaths?" I said at last.
"She wass my little Ella, my niece who keeps house for me," the big Dutchman groaned. "I did not know it, I had no suspicions. The Leadbetter woman got her to do that, she must haf given her money – and drugs. Many times I haf seen her acting not herself and I haf wondered what iss wrong."
Should have known drugs were involved!
A Leak In The Safe 