According to editor Christofer Nigro’s introduction, the inspiration for this 2019 short story collection goes all the way back to 1965. That was the year Creepy #7 appeared on newsstands.

Nigro wasn’t around back then. But years later—as a kid obsessed with Warren comic mags (Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella)—he became aware of that particularly iconic issue. With its striking Frank Frazetta cover painting (see it here) and an interior story featuring a fight between a werewolf, a vampire and a ghoul, Creepy #7 hooked Nigro on the idea of dueling monsters.

As such, Duel of the Monsters, Vol. 1, is both a tribute and an homage to that memorable comic. Fifty-plus years later, the concept of monsters fighting monsters is still pretty cool. Who wins in a fight between Abbott and Costello and the Invisible Man? The 50-foot Woman and the Amazing Colossal Man? The Phantom of the Opera and the Phantom of the Paradise? Electric Frankenstein and Dr. Funkenstein? These are questions that all monster fans have pondered at one time or another.

Nigro’s anthology is a straightforward and bountiful collection featuring werewolves, vampires, zombies, ghosts, space aliens, serial killers, clowns, sea creatures, mythological beasts, dragons, cryptids and urban legends. They’re all here and they’re all ready to rumble.

The concept is strong, the stories are fun and the enthusiasm of the authors is real. Unfortunately, the execution is weak. Many of the writers come from the small press (or indie) community and their grasp of craft is clumsy and immature. Even a professional author such as Matthew Dennion stumbles with a wisp of an effort. Ultimately, Duel of the Monsters, Vol. 1, rises and falls depending on the reader’s forgiving nature.

But I want to keep things positive. The anthology is not without some merit. In particular I liked the slow burn of “House of Secrets” by Robert Galvin. “Gashadokuro Battles the Kee-wakw” by Zach Cole is a nice nod to Japanese mythology. And I really enjoyed Breyden Halverson’s kaiju-like story “Wrath of the Okanagan Lake God.”

I gather from the Nigro’s introduction that he plans to turn Duel of the Monsters into an on-going series. Even though Vol. 1 is deeply flawed; I look forward to follow-up editions. I would encourage Nigro to exercise more editorial control in the future, however. The monsters are counting on him.

[Duel of the Monsters, Vol. 1 / Edited by Christofer Nigro / First Printing: November 2019 / ISBN: 9781732365773]

Aftershock starts on the day Los Angeles is smacked by the biggest earthquake in recorded history. The initial tremor began “like a deeply released, contented sigh from a lover in warm slumber,” and quickly escalates to a 9.4 on the Richter magnitude scale.

After a few shaky moments, the earth moved 12 inches. Property damage was estimated to be more than 100 billion dollars and 75,000 people were now dead. Said author Robert W. Walker: “L.A. was like a fallen Humpty-Dumpty.” All the king’s men couldn’t put the City of Angels back together again.

To make matters worse, a team of scientists were sequestered in an underground L.A. laboratory at the time of the quake. Working on a super secret virus, their mission was to create a truly terrible weapon to add to the country’s chemical-biological arsenal.

When a 40-story building collapsed on the subterranean research facility, the experimental CBW was released prematurely into the environment. Feeding on the dead and taking control of first responders, the virus arose Phoenix-like to terrorize local citizens.

The virus, a recombinant DNA version of a rare New Guinea cannibalism disease, transformed its host into a hungry and vengeful monster (see the book’s cover illustration for a surprisingly accurate rendition). “Its limbs were large, thick branches, covered with layers of rotted, scorched and scaly skin. They moved fluidly as if bone had become latex. The head and eyes, a mass of lumpy flesh, carried two bulging, twisted orbs. The large nostrils formed a snout, recklessly pushed to one side. The torso was that of a hunchback. Skin was the color and consistency of creosote, found inside a well-used chimney. Claws dragged along the ground, too heavy for the weak frame. But they were tough, hard and metallic.”

The monster wasn’t just a heap of “rotted skin and lumpy flesh,” however. After munching on brains and offal all day, it carried the weight of existential grief on its shoulders. Like all living things, it had a primordial urge to reproduce. “The creature pondered this grim thought until it ached,” said the author.

But don’t shed a tear for the “Brain Snatcher.” By the end of the novel it was leaving a messy trail of headless corpses all over L.A. County. One way or another, the virus and the host had to be eradicated.

The creature was ultimately vanquished in a showdown at Dodger Stadium. “You’re no demon!” said Dr. Michael McCain. “You’re just a twisted lump of flesh, a life form that was never meant to be! I’m going to send you straight to hell!”

The Brain Snatcher paused, trying to interpret the words of the man standing before it. After a brief moment of reflection, its indecipherable screech of pain could be heard from the Santa Monica Pier to the hills of the San Fernando Valley. “Awaataa! Awaataa! Awaataaaaa!!”

[Aftershock / By Robert W. Walker / First Printing: November 1987 / ISBN: 9780312909062]

The Slave of Frankenstein takes place two years before the start of the U.S. Civil War. It’s 1859 and the focus of the entire nation is concentrated on Harpers Ferry and the forthcoming hanging of abolitionist John Brown. “Our universe is suspended somewhere between Heaven and Hell,” says a concerned patriot.

Not by coincidence, Frankenstein’s monster is lurking in the nearby Virginia woods. Along with a sizable band of renegades and ruffians, he’s got a mad plan to rescue old man Brown, kidnap Victor Frankenstein and ultimately end slavery.

That’s right. Author Robert J. Myers has reinvented Mary Shelley’s infamous monster as an American freedom-fighting abolitionist. If the monster’s plan is successful, says Myers, he might be able to stop the Civil War, keep the Union safe and become a political powerbroker in Virginia.

It’s too bad that Frankenstein’s creation is 200 percent batshit crazy. His proposed solution to America’s slavery problem is to create an entire race of zombie-like creatures using Baron von Frankenstein’s book of animation as an instruction manual. These walking corpses would be a new kind of slave, says Myers, both Constitutionally compliant and absent of freewill.

Frankenstein, Jr., is not interested in playing god, however. Unlike his father, he doesn’t want anything to do with making monsters. “I have sworn never to tempt God by allaying myself with such an unholy enterprise,” he tells the beast in a pique. “I will do no such experimentation. We both know the foul results of competing with the natural laws. Cease your unholy designs and sink back into the bog of your origin!”

The monster cannot abide by young Frankenstein’s holier-than-thou rebuke. After 41 years, he still holds a grudge against Baron von Frankenstein for the sin of creating him as a foul and ugly fiend and taking no responsibility for his brutish outcast life. If he can’t broker a zombie-slave revolution, he has no choice but to pursue and destroy his creator’s progeny. “I will settle our score either by your demise or by your involuntary servitude,” he says. “My fortune must rise as yours sink. Otherwise, there is no justice under Heaven.”

After a narrative filled with Civil War-Era politics (including a seven-page pro-slavery screed), sexual trysts (consensual and otherwise) and surprising cameos from John Wilkes Booth and George Washington’s great-grandnephew, the monster’s grand schemes are smashed to smithereens. Despite his machinations, he can’t overcome the brutal truth of his gloomy existence: A creature of Frankenstein will always remain a creature of Frankenstein and a slave of one era must remain a slave in the next. His fate was sealed the moment he opened his eyes on Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory slab.

[The Slave of Frankenstein / By Robert J. Myers / First Printing: August 1977 / ISBN: 9780722162989]

Back in 1961, President John F. Kennedy pulled the plug on a proposal to invade Cuba with a cast of giant crabs. It was Eisenhower’s crazy idea and JFK hated it. The newly elected president didn’t want anything to do with his predecessor’s cockamamie science fiction plan.

Kennedy wisely put the kibosh on a Cuban crab invasion. But what happened after that? Did the giant, bulletproof mutant monsters just disappear?

Nope. The genetically engineered super crabs were still hanging around. Dishonorably discharged from the CIA, they found a home near Fort Jefferson Dry Tortugas National Park.

Located 70 miles off the coast of Miami, Fort Jefferson was an abandoned pre-Civil War outpost. Even though it was officially part of the National Park Service, it was mostly uninhabitable—no Starbucks, no Netflix, no comic book stores, no nothing. “It was probably the quietest park in the whole system,” said Kathy West, the on-site park ranger. “Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened out here.”

Obviously Ranger West was unaware of the danger surrounding Fort Jefferson. The waters off the coast were clear and calm, marked only by a spiky coral reef. West had no idea what was going on because the crabs were busy doing nothing for over 50 years.

That all changed in a flash when a rogue Homeland Security agent shows up in tow with his crew of black ops musclemen. Their evil plan was to resurrect Eisenhower’s abandoned crab invasion (but with a dastardly twist).

Now it was up to West, an eccentric 80-year-old Navy veteran, a soggy torpedo and a self-described “history nerd” to stop an onslaught of giant crabs upon Miami Beach. “The odds weren’t good,” wrote the author.

Claws was more than a giant crab novel, however. Author Russell James had something else in mind the entire time. As it turned out, the crabs were just the “MacGuffin,” a literary device that fueled the plot. James was more interested in writing a lively mash-up of Men in Black, Challengers of the Unknown and (maybe) the Suicide Squad.

In the last chapter, Kathy West and her sidekick Nathan Toland were conscripted into a secret government assignment. In the future, wherever and whenever monsters attacked, they would be the first responders. It would be their job to keep the public safe from the creatures that haunted national parks, preserves, sanctuaries, archeological sites and historic structures. Their mission: to conserve and protect.

[Claws / By Russell James / First Printing: May 2019 / ISBN: 9781925840759]

Roger Sarac never explicitly gives a name to the shaggy humanoid beast at the heart of his novel. “It’s like a bear, and yet it ain’t,” he writes. “It’s sort of manlike, yet it ain’t. It’s just a thing without a proper name.”

Stories of apelike and bearlike creatures living in the Pacific Northwest have been popular for a long time. Readers may automatically assume the author is writing about Bigfoot or Sasquatch or something else born of “Indian and aboriginal stock.”

Sarac’s beast is something similar yet something altogether different. She exists as a link to both the past and the future—a baby beget by modern parents cursed with cellular structure culled from mankind’s forgotten stages of evolution.

To put it another way, it’s like a woman who wakes up in the morning to discover the world has slipped backward a million years. Or, perhaps, it’s like she’s been shot ahead into the future thousands of generations.

Forward or backward, says the author, it doesn’t matter. The timeslip is traumatic. “What is intended for thousands of people to experience gradually, comes all at once to one individual.”

The half-animal-half-human wretch is a repository of ancient human experience. She’s more advanced than most wild animals, but witless nonetheless. That’s her tragedy, says Sarac. Her intelligence and scale of awareness didn’t belong to any specific time period.

As a result, the she-beast is (mostly) sympathetic. She hunts and kills innocent people, but you understand her savage nature. Like all monsters, she’s trapped in a world she didn’t make.

The prehistoric throwback in Sarac’s novel is a genetic anomaly that provides a peek at the secret of life. She has no name, but she represents a serious threat to the future of mankind. According to the author, there’s a subhuman monster lurking in all of us—it’s just one gestation period away from being born.

[The Throwbacks / By Roger Sarac / First Printing: 1965]

Growing up, my friends and I were fiercely loyal to our favorite comics. One guy loved the old Marvel monster books. Another friend collected Swamp Thing. I was a big fan of House of Mystery. As I remember, we sort of liked Star-Spangled War Stories too.

But we all agreed: If we wanted to read the best comics on the newsstand, we always reached for Creepy and Eerie. These magazines, with artwork by Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta and Reed Crandall, were the gold standard for snobby comic readers like us.

Before Creepy and Eerie came along in 1964 and 1966, however, publisher James Warren hit pay dirt with Famous Monsters of Filmland (1957), a magazine that successfully capitalized on the burgeoning monster craze in America.

Famous Monsters was a magazine for 11-year-old kids, but ironically its genesis was inspired partly by a recently launched magazine for men. Says biographer Bill Schelly: “Warren was mesmerized by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, and he was aware of the magazine’s meteoric success. He saw how one man with a vision could make his mark in publishing.”

Warren’s vision turned out to be monsters and comics. Not a bad combo in my opinion. Famous Monsters of Filmland, edited by quipster Forrest J. Ackerman, soon paved the way for Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. Other magazines came and went (most notably Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! and Will Eisner’s The Spirit), but Warren’s empire of monsters ultimately became his legacy.

Unapologetically, Warren ruled his monster kingdom like a petty tyrant. Frazetta said he was full of crap, Archie Goodwin’s wife mocked him for being a Hugh Hefner wannabe and Gray Morrow said he was a flamboyant guy prone to attention-getting outbursts. “Warren was a feisty man with many contradictions,” confirms Schelly. “He had enormous charm, colossal arrogance, surprising kindness and explosive anger.”

Louise Simonson (then Louise Jones) became Warren’s go-to editor back in 1976. Like everyone before her, she discovered that Warren could be a prickly bastard. But somehow she survived. “He was a real character,” she says. “He could be the most charming man on Earth, or the most utter pain in the neck. He could be viciously cutting if he chose to be. He could be angry and raging or very kind and nice and gentle.” It was all part of the nature of a very complex individual, she says. “Heaven help me, I liked him.”

After driving his staff crazy for 25 years, Warren went a little crazy himself. He put out his last books in 1982, declared bankruptcy in 1983 and took a permanent vacation. “In running a publishing company I had to be more cunning than Satan and more generous than Jesus,” Warren confessed at the time. “I was not well-fitted for either role.”

Warren’s publications never seriously challenged larger companies such as Marvel and DC in sales, but they successfully created their own special niche in the marketplace and in comics history. Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and Famous Monsters of Filmland, still iconic after all these years, helped crystallize a fan zeitgeist that continues to influence pop culture today. Says Schelly: “Like Frank Sinatra, James Warren did it ‘his way.’ He successfully built an empire of monsters. And who doesn’t love monsters?”

[James Warren, Empire of Monsters: The Man Behind Creepy, Vampirella, and Famous Monsters / By Bill Schelly / First Printing: March 2019 / ISBN: 9781683961475]

When he was a little kid, Brian Kettering witnessed his father being murdered by the friendly neighborhood pizza delivery guy. Or maybe it was a fiend from the abyss? To be honest, he wasn’t 100 percent sure what he saw. He was only six years old at the time and his memory was a little bit unreliable.

Everyone has their own personal boogeyman, and Kettering was no exception. Thirty-seven years after witnessing the grisly murder, he was still being haunted by the specter of a monster he called “Doomstalker.” Kettering knew that one day he and his father’s killer would stand face to face—and only one of them would walk away alive.

As a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, Kettering was familiar with druggies, rapists and pedophiles. He was clueless, however, about pre-Christian ethnology, demonology and Pharaonic magic. They didn’t teach that kind of stuff at the police academy.

Now that the Doomstalker was scratching at his front door, Kettering needed help badly. There was a monster loose in L.A. and it was coming for him and his family. If only he could get his hands on a copy of The Necromancer’s Manual (or maybe a Death Note), then he might have a fighting chance.

Kettering knows he’s caught in an escalating situation but author Gary Brandner tells his story in the most roundabout manner possible. For example, the first third of the novel is mostly about Kettering’s failing marriage. After a while, you start to wonder if the author is using the Doomstalker as a metaphor for divorce. Spoiler alert: he’s not.

Eventually, with the help of his foxy new girlfriend, a police department psychiatrist and a community college professor, Kettering figures out everything. Once exposed, the demon has no choice but to reveal itself: “Its body grew and lengthened, its shoulders hunched into peaks. The legs grew thick and powerful, and the arms stretched down to its ankles. The curved talons clicked together as the fingers moved.” And the face, writes Brandner, “shifted and swelled and broke apart into a leathery devil’s mask.”

Doomstalker may be a solid horror novel featuring a monster older than recorded history, but it is nonetheless a product of its era. Published in 1989, it suffers wildly from outdated social signifiers. For example, Kettering’s son complains that his father isn’t cool like Bill Cosby (!!) and telephone answering machines are described as “high-tech gadgets.” There’s even a little bit of casual homophobia sprinkled about. I don’t think you could get away with that today.

And finally, it occurs to me that even the title of the book is somewhat dated. Doomstalker sounds like the name of an 80s-era thrash metal band, doesn’t it?

[Doomstalker / By Gary Brandner / First Printing: December 1989 / ISBN: 9780449145777]

The creatures featured in this “chrestomathy of monstery” are huge (with the strength of a thousand puny humans), tiny (small enough to fit into a bottle of tequila), hairy, scaly, slimy, lonely, horny, vengeful, perverse, benevolent and cosmic.

No matter what the species may be—bigfoot, yeti, swamp thing, man-bat, leviathan, duppy, amphibian, changeling, interdimensional alien, whatever—their strength and cunning are inevitably far greater than any man or woman. Creatures and monsters do exist, says editor Bill Pronzini, and we are all doomed.

The anthology is divided into three sections: Land Creatures, Sea Creatures and Other Creatures—all neatly sorted for readers and their proclivities (or genus). The roll call of authors is impressive and includes notable names such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Stephen Vincent Benét, Leslie Charteris (The Saint) and Robert Bloch.

Most of the stories are quite good, and some are pretty dang terrific. Surprisingly, the worst story of the bunch is by the beloved gentleman who gave us The Lost World and Sherlock Holmes. “The Terror of Blue John Gap” offers only a shadowy glimpse of a monster, a disappointing denouement and writing skillz no better than Snoopy. “The night was dark and cloudy,” writes Conan Doyle during the story’s endgame.

Once you get past this tepid contribution, however, the collection fulfills its chrestomathy promise. There are a lot of great stories worth mentioning, but my favorites are mostly stacked at the beginning of the book. “Creature of the Snows” captures a first-contact experience shared between man and yeti, “Waziah” is like a mad sasquatch version of The Searchers and “Barney’s Bigfoot Museum” ends with a ghastly twist reminiscent of a classic EC comic book. Robert Bloch’s contribution (“Terror in Cut-Throat Cove”) is a fine, if somewhat serviceable, homage to H.P. Lovecraft.

Perhaps the biggest surprise comes from Charteris, the author of more than a million Simon Templar stories. “The Convenient Monster” is a smart (and goofy) blend of detective and horror genres. The Saint is in Scotland investigating a curious livestock incident. He completely misreads the clues. But never mind, the Loch Ness monster “conveniently” solves the case for him.

And finally, I have to applaud Pronzini for his indefatigable editorial contributions. Not only does he pen a 17-page forward to this volume, but he also adds a two-page introduction to every story. And that’s not all. His bibliography contains dozens of recommended monster novels. This is pure gold. I’ll be cribbing from his list for years to come.

[Creature! A Chrestomathy of Monstery / Edited by Bill Pronzini / First Printing: 1981 / ISBN: 9780877953210]