The life-eater by Harold Ward
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"The life-eater by Harold Ward" is a pulp horror short story written in the early 20th century. Set in a Louisiana swamp village, it centers on a mysterious, vitality-sucking wraith and the occult struggle to banish it. In the village of La Foubelle, people die at night, their bodies shriveled as if drained of life. Doctor Hugo Lamontaine, a hard-drinking physician with deep occult knowledge, deduces that a malignant elemental has been
conjured into the world through a human medium. Suspicion falls on the sinister Aaron Kronk, whose hypnotic power and stealthy visits coincide with fresh deaths. To save schoolmaster Noel Pelletier’s beloved Evelyn, Lamontaine uses the ailing dominie as bait, wards the room with iron, and battles the wraith with an iron pentagon, dispersing it at last. Kronk attacks and flees into the swamp, and Lamontaine later uncovers his motive: to terrorize the townsfolk into abandoning their homes so he can profit from draining the swamp. With the entity dispersed and the plot exposed, Evelyn is spared and the plague ends. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Ward, Harold, 1879-1950 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Brundage, Margaret, 1900-1976 |
| Illustrator | Napoli, Vincent, 1907-1981 |
| Title | The life-eater |
| Original Publication | Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Co,, 1937. |
| Series Title | Produced from Weird Tales June 1937. |
| Credits | Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net |
| Reading Level | Reading ease score: 75.1 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read. |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Short stories |
| Subject | Horror tales |
| Subject | Louisiana -- Fiction |
| Subject | Swamps -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 76539 |
| Release Date | Jul 21, 2025 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 3990 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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