TY  - BOOK
AU  - Ward,Harold
AU  - Brundage,Margaret
AU  - Napoli,Vincent
TI  - The life-eater
T2  - Produced from Weird Tales June 1937
AV  - PS 
PY  - 2025///
CY  - Salt Lake City, UT
PB  - Project Gutenberg
KW  - Short stories
KW  - Horror tales
KW  - Louisiana -- Fiction
KW  - Swamps -- Fiction
N1  - Release date is 2025-07-21; Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net; Originally published; Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Co, 1937
N2  - "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.)
UR  - https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV29N06193706
UR  - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76539
ER  -