Hugh B. Cave – Master of Horror

There are many we think of when we think of great horror writers, but one perhaps less well known is Hugh Barnett Cave. He was born in England in 1910 but his family moved to the United States shortly after the outbreak of World War I.

Cave determined to be a writer early and really only held one short term job as a young man, working in a self-publishing (vanity) press company. After that he wrote.

And what stories he wrote! Cave was a master of the “out of the frying pan and into the fire” style of writing.

Murgunstrumm

One of the most engrossing of his stories is the novella Murgunstrumm from 1932. The first chapter suffocates you with fear and paranoia as the hero must somehow escape an insane asylum. His thoughts as he simultaneously creeps out of the facility and details his plans to do so are a horror story in miniature. Then he must face the real horror, an out of the way inn filled with vampires.

Stragella

Or how about the novelette Stragella also from 1932? Two sailors are afloat in a lifeboat in an ocean full of sharks and sea snakes. Their mates in the boat had all died, some going mad and diving overboard, some drinking sea water and suffering mightily until death finally takes them. But these two emaciated survivors happen upon what turns out to be a ghost ship. Not just an abandoned vessel, but a ship haunted by souls in agony.

World War II and After

During World War II, Cave traveled the Pacific Theater as a war correspondent. He drew from his wartime experiences to write Long Were The Nights, about the first PT boats at Guadalcanal. After the war he settled in the Caribbean and lived in Haiti for five years. While there he became so familiar with the rites and rituals of Voodoo that he published Haiti: High Road to Adventure, (1952) a nonfiction work acclaimed critically as the “best report on voodoo in English.”

In 1959, Cave wrote a best-selling novel, The Cross on the Drum, in which a white Christian missionary falls in love with the sister of a black Voodoo priest. In The New York Times Book Review, Seldon Rodman noted, it “treats both the country and its African religious cult with profound sympathy.“

After Haiti, Cave went to Jamaica where he rebuilt and managed a coffee plantation until the Jamaican government confiscated it in the early 1970s.

Hugh B. Cave died in Florida in 2004, but his stories will always live on.

About the author: Born a long time ago, I developed a love for Pulp Fiction as a young whipper-snapper. Whether it was riding rocket ships to Mars or tracking down the cruelest of killers, I always rooted for the hero to get the girl in the end. I found that a lot of my favorite pulp fiction stories, mysteries, sci-fi and adventure had gone out of print and also into the public domain, so like any bright young enterprising lover of cattle rustlers, robot armies and insidious villains, I decided to make the universe safe for my pulp fiction heroes of yore and republish them. I have since opened up the PulpFictionBook.Store to bring some of my old friends back to light.