![]() Like Poe, Kafka and Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti is at home in the abyss, in “the dank, windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar,” as he writes here in “The Frolic.” And, no great shock, these are the very comic books that our enduring horror laureate, Stephen King, cut his sharp teeth on. Nicknamed Ghastly, he was a virtuoso of ooze, and his peers claimed that he was the master of the rotting corpse. For a few well-drawn pages by artists like Graham Ingels, Jack Davis and Johnny Craig, the reader can’t help quailing at ax-wielding corpses, bad dogs ( very bad dogs) and, oh, those toothy vampire girlfriends. This latest volume in the EC Archives, collecting The Haunt of Fear Nos. In story after story in comics like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, fever-dream drawings provided a scrim of relentless dread that forgave the primitive hack-slash prose. EC comics honed and refined a kind of dark Americana in the early 1950s, gruesome gross-outs that were a flip side to the too-sunny outlooks of Doris Day and Ozzie and Harriet. ![]()
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