(1905-1983)
Born in New Mexico, Knox grew up in Abilene, Texas, where his father was the Reverend Dr. T. S. Knox, the pastor at the First Presbyterian Church. His father read Shakespeare to him as a boy and he grew up with a love of poetry and great topics. In his late teens, under the spell of popular writer Jim Tully and other chroniclers of the hobo life, Knox left home to ride the rails and see the country from a “side-door Pullman.” He spent two years on the road, taking every sort of odd job, including a term as an assistant cameraman at a Hollywood movie studio. Returned to Texas, Knox attended McMurry College, worked on a student publication there, and wrote his first poems and stories. His first professional sale was a poem to Brief Stories magazine. After completing a term at Mc-Murry he took a job as a shoe salesman and, in his room behind his father’s church house, he devoted his nights to writing. Although Knox was obsessed with modern and recent writers of serious literature, and especially the weighty Europeans Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Knut Hamsun, he aimed his own fiction at the frivolous pulp magazines that had entered their golden and gaudiest age at the dawn of the 1930s.
A tall, big-shouldered man who crouched over an old portable typewriter, hunting and pecking for each letter, Knox began producing pulp stories, and the pulp developers in New York City began buying them. He wrote stories in various genres, and when an editor of a certain pulp sent encouragement—or paid promptly—he would for a time direct particular attention to the needs of that magazine. This was made clear when Popular Publications introduced a new style of terror fiction magazines—often called “weird menace”—in Dime Mystery magazine in 1933. These were horror stories that (with few exceptions) excluded the supernatural, and featured elaborate scenes of sadistic and bizarre torture. Beginning with his contribution of the story “Frozen Energy” to the December 1933 issue, Knox published a story nearly every month in either Dime Mystery or Pop-ular’s two follow-up weird-menace titles, Horror Stories and Terror Tales, right up until the genre was effectively shut down under pressure from moral watchdogs and politicians in the early 1940s.
Knox, who held his attendance at a lecture once given by novelist Thomas Wolfe as one of the great moments in his life, was probably not artistically fulfilled by the writing of stories with titles like “Dance of the Beast People” or “Brides for Satan’s Pupils,” but he did not let this get in the way of his delivering what readers of Horror Stories and the others were expecting, as in these savory sentences from “The Buyer of Souls”:
“Brand him with the sign of the unutterable and secret name of Satan!” the guttural voice of the witch intoned out of the smoke. . . . Then the iron struck, sizzling. The smell of burning flesh was in my nostrils, choking me, and a blinding flash of pain struck my skull like a lightning bolt. . . . There was an awful burning above my ribs; stinking smoke still rose from the blackened ridges of flesh. The girl was laughing, her lips quivering insanely as she wallowed in the spectacle of my pain.”
In Abilene in the ’30s, Knox was at the center of a small literary/intellectual community of writers and would-be writers including Edward anderson (future author of Thieves Like Us), the historian William Curry Holden, and Files Bledsoe (future Daily Worker writer and coauthor of the choreographer Ruth St. Denis’s autobiography). In this high-minded atmosphere Knox would seldom feel comfortable talking about his latest horror or detective story sale. By the end of the decade his first marriage had ended. He married again in 1941 and had children with his second wife, at which point he moved in search of steady, good-paying work, ending up at a steelworks in California. He moved back to Texas after World War II, buying a farm near the small town of Devine, and he tried to revive his dormant pulp fiction career, selling crime stories to Black Mask and Dime Detective, among other magazines. But the pulps were dying, and his attempts to find new markets were not very successful. A novel he had spent a long time completing was lost in a fire that burned down his farm. He relocated to Alabama, and started a new life as a newspaper writer and local history author, earning part of his income as a real estate developer. By the time of his death Knox had long ceased to think about his days as a busy pulpster, although he had written more than 1 million words for the old magazines, and many—particularly the weird-menace titles for which he had produced 39 stories under his own name and perhaps many more under pseudonyms—were now hotly collected items selling for hundreds of times their cover price.
Works
- “Blood Moon” (1935);
- “Brides for Satan’s Pupils” (1937);
- “Bright Rose of Death” (1934);
- “Buyer of Souls, The” (1936);
- “Children of the Black God” (1936);
- “Coffin for the Living” (1936);
- “Corpse Queen’s Lovers, The” (1936);
- “Court of the Grave Creatures” (1935);
- “Dance of the Beast People” (1940);
- “Dead Demand Tribute, The” (1935);
- “Dead Man’s Shadow” (1934);
- “Flame Maiden, The” (1936);
- “Frozen Energy” (1933);
- “Gallery of the Damned” (1936);
- “Girl into Mummy” (1935);
- “Girls for the Gods of Fire” (1938);
- “His Bodiless Twins” (1935);
- “Ice Maiden, The” (1935);
- “Kiss Me and Die” (1937);
- “Little Beasts of Death” (1934);
- “Master of Monsters” (1935);
- “Mates for the Murder Girls” (1937);
- “Men Without Blood” (1935);
- “Music from Hell” (1935);
- “Nightmare” (1934);
- “Now I Lay Me Down to Die” (1937);
- “Pain People, The” (1937);
- “Playground of the Tiny Killers” (1940);
- “Reunion in Hell” (1936);
- “Soul Eaters, The” (1934);
- “Tenement of the Damned” (1937);
- “Those Who Dwell in Coffins”
- (1934); “Village Cursed by God, The” (1937);
- “When the Blood-God Ruled” (1935);
- “Witch’s Handmaiden” (1935)
