Sucker Bait and Other Stories

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.