MORE NEGLECTED MONSTERS FOR HALLOWEEN SEASON

Balladeer’s Blog’s recent look at Eight Neglected Monsters for Halloween Season was a big hit with readers, so here are more.

DEVIL-BUG

First Appearance: The Monks of Monk Hall (1844-1845)

Cryptid Category: Malformed Human

Lore: This deformed and depraved man-monster grew up in Monk Hall as the son of one of the Hall’s members and one of the prostitutes enslaved there. He was squat, incredibly strong and grotesquely ugly with one large gaping eye and one small, withered, empty eye socket on his face.

Devil-Bug – the only name he had ever known – worked as a combination doorman, bouncer and executioner in the vile mansion called Monk Hall in Philadelphia. He killed on command and secreted the corpses deep in the sub-basements of the sinister mansion.

The unwholesome figure slept in a chilly dank room with the body of one of his victims lying next to him. Devil-Bug even used coffins – both occupied and unoccupied – as furniture in his room.

FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE. 

BIONDETTA

First Appearance: Le Diable Amoureux (The Devil in Love) (1772) 

Cryptid Category: She-Devil

Lore: Biondetta was inadvertently conjured up from Hell at a ruined castle by a Spanish military officer serving in Naples. She pretended to be in love with the officer, all the while plotting to steal his soul by seducing him.

The beautiful blonde she-devil regularly sprouted wings from her back and flew herself and her target around at night. Biondetta partied and gambled with the man at decadent establishments, used her infernal powers to help him win at gambling and mired him in a murderous clash with his own brother.

This gothic horror story has been adapted in opera form as well.

FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE. 

EXPERIMENT 241

First Appearance: Blood and Iron (1917)

Cryptid Category: Undead Cyborg

Lore: By 1917, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, one of the Central Powers nations in World War One, had authorized experiments on dead and/or maimed soldiers. Those experiments were designed to reuse maimed and killed men by substituting their missing limbs and organs with diesel-punk replacements to make them walking, thinking weapons on the field of battle.

The first 240 such experiments failed for assorted reasons, but with the cyborg dubbed Experiment 241 success was at last achieved. All that was needed from there was final approval from the Kaiser pending an inspection.

We all know how these types of experiments always end up, and horrific bloodshed is in store for the reader in this underappreciated tale.

FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE.   

MELANY HORSEMANDEN

First Appearance: The Ghost Garden (1918)

Cryptid Category: Ghost

Lore: In life, Melany Horsemanden had been the beautiful, willful but wicked southern belle of a colonial-era Virginia plantation called Her Wish. The cruel sophisticate died young and her ghost had been haunting the dilapidated plantation ever since.

Many decades later, Evan Radford, a wealthy young man from the northern states, arrives to sketch the crumbling estate and Melany’s spirit considers him her long lost love reborn. Horsemanden begins using all her ghostly glamour and allure to tempt Evan away from his current girlfriend.

As Melany lures Evan Radford to move into the deserted plantation and seduces him ever closer to joining her in death, Evan’s living girlfriend starts practicing witchcraft to try defeating the ghostly belle. This is sort of a gender-flipped Twilight with one man fought over by two supernatural women.

FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE.  

HUGUES WULFRIC

First Appearance: Hugues the Wer-Wolf (1838)

Cryptid Category: Werewolf

Lore: Hugues Wulfric was the sole surviving member of the Wulfric family when his parents and siblings all succumbed to disease. On Halloween night the ghosts of several of his forebears drift from the estate’s cemetery to reveal his lycanthropic heritage to Hugues.

The ghosts lead him to a black magic wolf-cloak that has been in the family for generations. When Hugue dons the cloak like his father and his father before him, it transforms him literally into a large wolf-creature capable of speech.

Wulfric launches a reign of terror to avenge his family on the snobbish Brits who have been looking down on them for decades. He even imposes tribute on assorted families and thereby rebuilds the family finances. Complications arise when he falls in love with a woman from a family long at odds with the Wulfrics.  

FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE.

ANGELA THE STRANGER

First Appearance: Living Alone (1919)

Cryptid Category: Witch

Lore: During World War One, a witch known as the Stranger who often uses the admitted alias Angela, uses her boardinghouse to provide quarters for supernatural beings like warlocks, imps, faeries and even a dragon.

The boardinghouse is located on Mitten Island in the Thames and is called the House of Living Alone. The lone non-supernatural boarder is Sarah Brown, a young woman who works for the War Savings Committee.

Like a forerunner of the World War Two witch in Bed Knobs and Broomsticks, Angela wages war with witches from England’s German foes and even engages in broomstick dogfights with her Teutonic counterparts. All that plus Angela must deal with a mass reanimation of the dead in graveyards throughout England.

FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE.