Stories from Dime Mystery Magazine

Dime Mystery Magazine pioneered the “weird menace” genre—pulp horror that blurred the line between the supernatural and the criminally insane. Arthur Leo Zagat was one of its star contributors, turning out novelette after novelette of mounting dread. These seventeen stories, published between 1934 and 1947, plunge readers into a world of corpse factories and midnight fangs, satanic rituals and broken dolls, where the real horror is never quite what it seems. Zagat’s heroes are ordinary men—engineers, reporters, doctors—dragged into nightmares they must solve or die in. The pace is relentless, the atmosphere thick with menace, and the final twists never fail to land. From “Midnight Fangs” (1934) to “Death Dance of the Broken Dolls” (1947), this collection captures the full arc of Zagat’s work for the magazine that defined an era of American horror fiction.