Weird Tales Nov 1949: Demon Stalks the Graveyard — 'The Underbody'
A 1949 newsstand browser would have recoiled — then immediately reached for their dime — at the sight of this lurid, emaciated red demon crouching atop a cemetery tomb, its single cyclopean eye fixed hungrily on a half-risen corpse clawing from the earth below. Skulls litter the foreground, a blood-red snake coils between them, and a baleful full moon glows behind barren trees. This is Weird Tales at its most viscerally grotesque: pure graveyard horror rendered in slick, lurid gouache.
This belongs on a dorm room wall AND deserves a place in any serious survey of American pulp horror art — the cyclops demon, rising zombie, scattered skulls, and lurid palette represent Weird Tales cover art firing on all cylinders. Pure fever-dream horror illustration at its late-Golden-Age peak.
“A Jules de Grandin story by Seabury Quinn NOVEMBER Weird Tales 25¢ "THE UNDERBODY" by ALLISON V. HARDING IN MEMORY OF OUR VI[NE]”
