SPIDER - Robot Titans of Gotham

 

THE SPIDER : Robot Titans of Gotham

By Norvell Page

Baen Books

358 pgs

 

The Spider – Master of Men was one of the most popular pulp heroes of the late 1930s. All his adventures were over-the-top thrillers written by Norvell Page, himself a remarkable character. Born in Richmond, Virginia on July 6, 1904, Page grew up to become a journalist and between 1924 and 1934 he worked for such papers as the Cincinnati Post, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, New York Times and others. By the 1930s he had begun selling short pulp stories for various publishers and soon became known as the author of the majority of the adventures of the ruthless vigilante, The Spider. He, and other writers, wrote under the house name of Grant Stockbridge. Molded in the tradition of the Shadow and other masked avengers, Page’s innovations to The Spider series included a hideous disguise for the protagonist, Richard Wentworth, and a succession of super-science menaces for him to combat. Dying of a heart attack on Aug 14, 1961, Page lived long enough to see many of his Spider tales reprinted in paperback ala this particular volume. 

In 2007 and 2008, Baen Books published two collection of some of the most outlandish Spider yarns. In this, the second volume, they reproduced three of them starting with

“Satan’s Murder Machines” copyrighted 1939. In a frantically paced adventure, The Spider and his team, to include Nita Van Sloan, Ram Singh and Ronald Jackson, must find a way to stop a squad of giant armored robots wreaking havoc throughout New York City and then disappearing beneath the waters of the East River after their attacks. It’s a typical Page nail-biter, hardly giving the reader a chance to catch his/her breath as the Spider must constantly elude devilish traps set to ensnare by the master mind behind the rampaging metal men. 

The second adventure is “Death Reign of the Vampire King,” and is dated 1935. Moving out of his normal New York haunts, the Spider battles a maniac who controls a horde of vampire bats able to poison and kill a victim with a single bite. Calling himself the Bat Man, he flies aloft with a glider-like suit directing his vicious winged beast in a story that goes from Philadelphia to Chicago and eventually climaxes in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Easily one of the wildest paced Spider tales of them all.  

The third and final story in this volume was our least favorite, as it is not another Spider adventure, but a story featuring a lesser known pulp character, the Skull Killer. Jeffrey Fairchild is a well-to-do man about town who has two alter egos. The first being the old and kindly Doctor Skull, the other the effective nemesis of crime, and master of disguises, the Skull Killer. In “The Octopus” dated 1938, an evil madman employs a special purple ultra-violet ray to turn ordinary people into horribly mutated monsters who much have human blood to survive. Soon a large part of New York’s population is infected and the story becomes one convoluted back and forth story with the protagonist jumping from one identity to the other while dealing with pathetically disfigured victims. It’s one of those stories was happy to finish.  With two out of three good yarns put forth, this is a decent collection and we give it thumbs up.