Books by Grant Stockbridge

When the Underworld united in one compact army of crime, the Spider-his prestige gone-faced the most vicious collection of criminals and degenerate killers ever assembled under one dark banner of bloody social war! How can Richard Wentworth, robbed of Kirkpatrick and Nita, renew the Spider-fear which alone can bring him victory from a menace that is making casualty columns of our daily papers and filling our institutions with driveling victims of the new madness?

By what strange twist of Fate did the fearful menace which was to shadow every man and woman in New York City first rear its venomous head in the distant Caribbean? When terror suddenly boarded a little tramp steamer and left crimson havoc littering its narrow decks a spluttering wireless flashed the doom of every living thing aboard. Within a week, the same ghastly fate struck a gigantic new ocean liner, its luxurious cabins occupied by the elite and powerful of a dozen different nations! Death-swift and terrible-rode the ocean lanes. And the Spider-taken for once off guard-was supposedly dying in a hospital room on the very day when that terror from the seas first showed itself in all its terror above the city skyline. How can the Spider, fighting death himself, help the nation he loves in her hour of greatest need?

How fight a menace which strikes without warning-which disintegrates flesh and blood and stone to mere chemical atoms! Men fled in blind panic from the merest rumor of a new attack, and even the Spider-dodging the death blasts-can find at first no weapon with which to combat this new and devastating evil which obliterates its victims in the fraction of time between two heart-beats!

Hideous maniacal laughter shattered the dark silence of ghostly tenements. Sleepy-eyed men and women, stumbling through the dim halls of the building, found a sight that chilled their souls with terror. On a blank wall, spikes driven through her, hands and feet, blood coursing down her arms and breasts in tiny rivulets, a beautiful young woman was hanging, crucified, dying. Still another victim of the Torture Trust! And while panic spreads, while hundreds die victims of the Killers, the Spider is blinded, his faithful servants imprisoned, his friends dishonored! How can Richard Wentworth, desperate and alone, combat the powerful, well-organized Murder Syndicate whose gun hirelings hunt him down like a vicious mad dog?

The Flaming Shadows fell upon the city, shrouding whole neighborhoods in a fiery gloom-wherein walked screaming death and merciless destruction... Go with the Spider as he battles, single-handedly, the Flaming Shadows-to save the very people who pray for his destruction!

Thundering far beneath Manhattan's thronging streets came the Death Express-a crack New York Central train bearing a gruesome cargo of lifeless men, women and children-their bodies stripped of valuables, naked and mutilated! A grim warning of the terror-reign that threatened America-at the hands of Twentieth Century land-pirates, whose weapon was neither gun nor sword, but the stunning, body-shivering force which lies in electricity! Can the Spider, using mortal weapons, fight the numbing power of the thunderbolt-and survive?

Fear stalked the corridors and offices on Capitol Hill, for it was from the ranks of the mighty-the rulers and lawmakers of America-that the Silver Assassins sought their victims! Singly, in pairs and in numbered groups they died, laying down their lives for their country-while panic spread, and the Spider, alone aware of the terrific catastrophe which impended, fought through black, bodiless shadows to reach and destroy the menace which festered underground!

Never before had any criminal dared give open challenge to the Spider! Never before had Richard Wentworth faced a foe who welcomed personal combat with the grim avenger whom all others feared... And while they fought-the Spider and the Fly-a new and fearless criminal army was forming; men and women were dying by the scores; and the youth of a nation was flocking to the dark banner of that gentlemanly killer whose battle cry was "Kill the Spider-and the world is ours!"

America faces certain doom as its citizens fall in screaming thousands before the noxious death vapors loosed upon them by the Green Hand. How can the Spider, harried and threatened by a hundred new and deadly perils, check the rising power of the next Dictator-and lay bare the scheming, criminal mind which seeks to enslave the nation?

Never before in history had anything quite so horrible as the Mad Horde been loosed upon a terrified humanity! In rural towns and through the thronging streets of great cities the death-bringers stalked, spreading the slow madness of which they themselves must soon die! The Spider, dismayed and horrified as never before in his long career, is forced at last into risking the life of the girl he loves-so that a million others may live!

Like the consuming flames of a prairie fire the dread news spread: "The Spider has gone mad! He will massacre us all!" But Richard Wentworth, never more sane, was even then gambling life itself in one desperate effort to save the city which cursed his name-from the awful ravages of man-spread plague!