One sub-genre that enjoyed popularity during the height of the pulp magazine era was the "weird menace", or "shudder", pulp.  The stories in these pulps followed a fairly predictable format:  something horrifying appears on the scene and menaces someone, usually a beautiful girl who manages to lose her clothing during the course of the story and the menace is finally vanquished by the stalwart hero.  What made this formula different from the straight horror pulps (such as Weird Tales) is that the menace in the shudder pulps was never supernatural, but was shown, by the end of the story, to be the result of a very human madman doing his best to get revenge on a world that didn't recognize his genius (in the same style as the "old dark house" films of the 30s, or, to make a more contemporary analogy, the cartoon show, Scooby Doo.).  Twists on the formula involved multiple beautiful girls who lose their clothes and multiple madmen.  What makes The Molemen Want Your Eyes stand out from the other stories of the period, aside from the catchy title, is the sheer brutality and sexual imagery that Frederick Davis brings to the story.
     Davis was no stranger to the pulps. During his career, he wrote numerous hard-boiled detective stories and is best remembered for the series of stories featuring his super-heroish creation, The Moon Man, who wore a frosted bubble over his head when fighting crime. Always a competent writer, Davis rarely strayed from the detective pulps and was never seen in the slick magazines.
     Yet Davis' work on Molemen is a bit to the extreme.  There is a savagery in this story that is not seen in his other writings, or very often in the pulps.  Without giving away any of the plot, there are events in this story that are very graphic and can easily make one queasy and unsettled.  Unlike many of the weird menace stories, however, the end of the story doesn't tie up all the loose ends.  The "why" of some of the events is never fully explained.
     Possibly, that is why The Molemen Want Your Eyes has enjoyed a life far beyond the pulps that spawned it.  While most of the pulp stories of this genre leave the reader with a happy ending, there is an undercurrent of horror in Molemen that goes beyond the "shudder" that made the weird menace pulps famous.

Editor's note:  The Molemen Want Your Eyes was originally published in the April/May issue of Horror Stories in 1938. There is no record of copyright renewal and we used the 1976 Shroud edition for the text.  We have tried to mimic a pulp layout for this edition and have included the original title page art, which was, again, obtained from the Shroud edition.

The Molemen Want Your Eyes
by Frederick C. Davis

This version of the story is © 2002 by The Nostalgia League
Introduction is © 2002 by Bob Gay