Shaver Mystery Magazine, The.
Being dedicated to the further study of the hidden truths as presented in the fact-fiction stories by Richard S. Shaver, made famous in the past three years in Amazing Stories magazine.
1947--1949
Bimonthly
Chicago, then McHenry, IL.
Editor: Richard Sharpe Shaver, Chester S. Geir.
Publisher: Aldebaran Press.
Succeeded by: Shaverton Mystery Club Letterzine (contemporary companion); Shavertron (1979)
1/1, 1947.
Fifty cents, 32 pp. "Obtained only through membership in The Shaver Mystery Club."

The last issue is "an experimental issue": "You do not pay for it unless you wish to do so." Nine issues are said to have been published, with rumor of a tenth. Shaver (1907-1975) was a mental patient who in 1943 wrote to Ray Palmer, who was then the editor of Amazing Stories, with the beginnings of the tales of his personal experiences as a prisoner in the hidden cavern world under the earth and his encounters with the advanced prehistoric races who inhabited it, the Teros (noble, benevolent beings who aid mankind on the earth's surface) and the Deros (savage detrimental robots who still dwelt in the caverns and on advanced space ships (a presage of the UFOs to come in 1947, according to Palmer) and secretly controlled men and their history and tortured humans, especially women, with their mind ray machinery. Palmer publicized this "Shaver Mystery" as fiction but insisted until the end of his life that the underlying events were "fundamentally true," even though Amazing Stories, under pressure from the Deros, Palmer said, ceased publishing Shaver in 1948 and Palmer resigned. In this journal Shaver continued this ambiguity by saying that it was dedicated "to unearthing truth" and "to the further study of the hidden truths as presented in the fact-fiction stories" in Amazing Stories." The journal consisted of a series of introductions told by Shaver and "Nydia," a Tero denizen of the dark caverns whom Shaver had known there when she was a child, and the beginnings of a promised 200,000 word "Thought-Record Story," "Mandark," that would lay out the history of Jesus and of mankind in general: "The story of the Messiah as it is told in the caves." Both the text and the journal's covers and the illustrations (some by Shaver) are lurid (as were most of the science-fiction productions of the time) and filled with a surprising sadomasochistic sexuality (with elements of necrophilia) as the narrator tells of his experiences with the Deros' mechanical "stim pleasure rays" (which can case a "trance of sex" over its targets) and their opposite, the "pain rays."

"Lila walked always with her body radiant with a flood of stim rays from dozens of slaves appointed to her personal attendance in this way--and to look at her thus aflame with the terribly potent sexual synthetic nerve impulses was to be forever her slave . . . ."

"Too, afar off, a young dero of Lila's acquaintance, one who had known her from a child on, and who held a kind of twisted love for her beauty--sat and played always a detrimental ray upon the body of Yahveh unperceived by him . . . ." "Satantes Onderde, sitting on his golden chair within the great gloomy chamber called the ‘torture room,' gloated over the bound limbs of the great ebony figure of Yahveh the Terrible."

Issues after the first carried letters and discussions by readers which are themselves curious: "Would it be possible to have a meeting of the Shaver Fans in New York City some day and of course meet you and the Beautiful Blind Girl from the Caves, or is that too much to ask for. You must get this question very often. How can we help the people in the caves?" Many readers inquired about the pleasure rays: "Over so many centuries, ignorant use of extremely delicate and powerful apparatus which affects the whole body of course has caused variations in reproduction, as so much of it is used for sexual stimulation and rejuvenation effects."

The journal must have fallen on hard times because vol. 3, no. 2 featured an advertisement to rent out what has to be Shaver's house and was put out under a new imprint, typewritten and printed by hand, with the graphics done amateurishly. Under Palmer the club had 3,000 member subscribers but soon fell to half of that number and was transferred to Shaver. Shaver also published admittedly fiction stories ("Gods of Venus") patterned on Edgar Rice Burroughs) in Amazing Stories, March 1948. On Shaver, see the notes under Fate, Amazing Stories, Hidden World, and Shaverton. University of Texas, Austin.

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