Monster of the Day #1200

Updated on September 1, 2015 By Ken Begg 17 Comments

Man, that’s an itchy back if it’s his first priority in this situation.

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  • Flangepart

    “Drawn butter…get the drawn butter!”

  • CaptNemo

    A Terminex employee finally meets his match.

  • bgbear_rnh

    It looks like they are fitting him for a suit.

    which side do you dress on?

  • The home of the red whatsits is on the verge of annihilation. Their triple sun has gone out. Our hero Ham Burger is about to escape back to Earth via the Dimensional Translocater Replacer Machine when several whatsits come bursting. They’re desperate to escape too (just look at their faces).

    But will Ham allow their alien ways to taint the good old US of A? Of course not! He boldly beats them off with his sword, disgust twisting his features, until the DTRM whisks him away

    However, in a strange twist of fate, the DTRM reignites the triple sun. Thus the red whatsits are saved from a fate worse than death. This ensures that they speak Ham’s name kindly for generations to come, despite his unheroic behavior and general bad body odor.

    Meantime the DTRM deposits what remains of Ham on a table at a greasy spoon between two buns with a couple of slabs of cheese and fries on the side. In moments he’s devoured by a ravenous pulp science fiction writer, who, unaware of the cosmic horror that has just happened, suddenly has a great new idea for his next science classic.

    Or maybe I’m overthinking the story behind this cover.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Ham Burger should of never gave up being a District Attorney.

  • Give up? He should have never started! ;-)

  • Joliet Jake Blues

    and if anyone is wondering…I know I was…the Henry Kuttner story is “Red Gem of Mercury” which can be found in the Haffner Press collection Thunder in the Void.

  • Joliet Jake Blues

    If anyone wants to read the Tumithak tale, here it is:

  • Joliet Jake Blues

    link broken – just google the title.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Thanks! Poor Kuttner’s works seem all but forgotten in SF fandom.

  • One of the great things about the Kindle and devices like it is being able to find guys like Kuttner. I’ve been able to read wide ranges of Science Fiction writers that never seemed to pop up in my local Barnes and Nobles.

  • Marsden

    In Soviet Russia, Lobsters eat you!

  • Eric Hinkle

    Yeah, it can be relatively easy to get together ten or twelve Golden Age stories that probably wouldn’t sell well in print and still make a profit off of them via Kindle. I’ve also seen Fredric Brown on Kindle, and I think I read books with stories of his twice at the most.

  • Gamera977

    The more I stare at this the more I think it’s the most dangerous game of ‘Cootie’ ever…

  • Oh God, is Fredric Brown great. I rediscovered him through Kindle (I’d read his excellent Come and Go Mad in some anthology or another years ago.) The man wrote some killer short shorts. Any anthology that says it has the best Horror stories ever and doesn’t have his Geezenstacks has missed the mark.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I love some of his climaxes. Oh how he could write!

    “Is there a God?”

    “There is now!”

    And:

    “Thank God for that — for I am the Abominable Snow-WOMAN!”

  • Glorious stuff. Just glorious. What’s really great about your first example is that it comes from a short short. The man often proved you didn’t need the verbiage to tell a killer story.