Sucker Bait And Other Stories

Even 60 years after their original release, in an era of explicit horror, EC Comics superstar Graham â€Å"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 â€" and all three combined to best effect in one of the standouts of this collection of his stories: â€Å"Horror We? How’s Bayou?” â€" 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 (â€Å"Squash...Anyone?”). Or living rats sewn into the bodies of a tyrannical king and queen (â€Å"A Grim Fairy Tale”)... or the results of injecting a â€Å"poison-pen” letter writer with literal poison and reducing him to, in the words of Al Feldstein’s script, a â€Å"foul-smelling, oozing pool of putrescence” (â€Å"Notes to You!”). One of the two Ray Bradbury adaptations in the book, â€Å"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 â€" perhaps with the exception of the genuinely romantic â€Å"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 â€Å"Old Witch” character’s special showcase Haunt of Fear â€" plus the usual fascinating historical, critical, and biographical material.