Even 60 years after their original release, in an era
of explicit horror, EC Comics superstar Graham Ghastly
Ingels s grisly pages retain the power to shock. His
loving depictions of the endless corruption of flesh and
nature made him the go-to guy for stories involving
swamps, maniacs, and dismemberment and all three
combined to best effect in one of the standouts of this
collection of his stories: Horror We? How s Bayou?
considered the single most spectacularly drawn of all of
EC s horror stories, with a climax that would give
body-horror king David Cronenberg nightmares. Ingels
specialized in depicting the unimaginable. If you ever
wondered what the vengeful, decaying corpse of an
elephant stomping a woman to death would look like, it s
in here ( Squash...Anyone? ). Or living rats sewn into
the bodies of a tyrannical king and queen ( A Grim Fairy
Tale )... or the results of injecting a poison-pen
letter writer with literal poison and reducing him to,
in the words of Al Feldstein s script, a foul-smelling,
oozing pool of putrescence ( Notes to You! ). One of the
two Ray Bradbury adaptations in the book, There Was an
Old Woman (about a deceased crone who simply refuses to
stay dead) provides the closest thing to a note of
sweetness that you ll find here perhaps with the
exception of the genuinely romantic A Little Stranger!
and its loving marriage between a dead vampire and a
dead werewolf. Sucker Bait And Other Stories features 25
classic stories from Tales From the Crypt, Shock
Suspen-Stories, Vault of Horror, and Ingels and his Old
Witch character s special showcase Haunt of Fear plus
the usual fascinating historical, critical, and
biographical material.'' |
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