E. Hoffmann Price (1898–1988)

This Carcosa doorstop really isn't that good. The stories are terribly dated with lots of racial and gender stereotypes. They are mainly what would be called Eastern adventure weird menace stories, some WWII exotic adventure stuff. More than a few have the earmarks of having been tossed off in a hurry with a kind of make it up as you go feel based on some formulaic outline. Price's opinion of himself is way overrated, although interestingly he did manage to make a pretty good living unlike show more other, better pulp writers. Presented roughly chronologically the stories do improve as you go. The George Evans illustrations didn't do it for me either and are often funnily inaccurate as though he didn't actually read the stories.

Strictly for pulp nostalgia. Easily the weakest of the four Carcosa Press offerings. show less

Seems like even in 1980, and even with a beloved(?) pulp fantasy author with a late-in-life burst of creativity, someone should have said, "Uh, do we really want to use a racial slur that many times?"

A hard-boiled pulp story about a detective who has to cross the line and become a 'heel' with a woman in order to save his best friend from being murdered by gangsters.

Perhaps rarely in pulp fiction, Hoffmann Price, if superficially, explores a very real moral dilemma involving ends and means. Atmospheric in its way although clearly no masterpiece.

A fairly conventional 1934 pulp story from E. Hoffmann Price, perhaps only known today to most as a one-time collaborator on 'Through the Gates of the Silver Key' with Lovecraft, although his fantasy writing career took a another positive turn relatively late in life.

It is not remarkable but an example of its type and it reminds one of what would later come with Dennis Wheatley's stories of satanism, women in peril and brave and noble upper class heroes but with a stronger whiff of actual show more ancient evil and the potential reality of dark magic. show less