June 1947 issue of Amazing StoriesĀ (P D-US via Wikimedia) Shaver or the Shaver Mystery appears in the caption. Dero statues look down on human who has driven into their cave while live deros at entrance ( bottom, right) fire at him. The "Deros," subhuman cave dweller, decorate cover of Amazing Stories' issue devoted to their evil doings. Life describes cover illustration, created by Robert Gibson Jones, in a caption: Thus Shaver benefited from the article because the Amazing Stories cover was the only cover of a science fiction magazine shown in the article and because many readers only skimmed the article. Most readers paged through the magazine, checked out the pictures, and skimmed an article or two. The cover story of the May 1951 issue promised a review of the latest in women's beachwear. Life wasn't always a special-issue magazine focused on one topic. I want to expand on my reasoning since many of my readers are unfamiliar with Life magazine in its old weekly incarnation. Readers looked at Life, but didn't read it. I expressed the opinion that Sargeant may have helped Shaver remain an influence in science fiction without intending to because Sargeant's article ran a cover of the June 1947 Amazing Stories issue that featured the Shaver Mystery. Shaver and the Shaver Mystery in a Life magazine article of May 1951. In my previous post I wrote about Winthrop Sargeant's discussion of the Richard S. Given our current knowledge of Shaver's life, "Return of the Demon" rings true because the story expresses so much anxiety about having a history of mental illness. We now know he spent some of that period in a mental hospital instead of visiting a secret underground civilization. Shaver created the mythology of the Shaver Mystery in part to conceal his own whereabouts during the 1930s. Indeed, we cannot know with certainty that Shaver wrote "The Return of a Demon," but we should not reject the possibility because it does not fit with the Shaver Mystery. Given that twelve other writers used this same pseudonym, how sure can we be that Shaver wrote this story?
The magazine credits the story to Alexander Blade, one of the house pseudonyms of its publisher Ziff-Davis Publications.
Fantastic Adventures published the story, a weird tale, in its May 1943 issue. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database () lists "Return of a Demon" as Richard S. In this story Shaver tells a strange tale of a man, a woman, a doctor and a demon. What, no degenerate evil-doers hiding below ground? No giantesses? No psy rays? What a shock to readers of "Return of a Demon," the first published story credited to writer and visionary Richard S.