The House of Mystery - Book #1

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, when I was first getting into comic books, I was buying pretty much everything off the rack (DC and Marvel - never really fancied Archie comics). That included a number of horror anthology titles by DC, including books like Ghosts, Unexpected, Secrets of Haunted House, and, of course, House of Mystery.  As my tastes in comics evolved, I eventually stopped reading the horror anthologies, and apparently I wasn't the only one, as they all seemed to disappear by the mid-'80s or so.  Thus, I never really gave them another thought...

Flash-forward 30 plus years, and this year, while at a comic convention, I was looking through a box of comic-related items and came across this novel of The House of Mystery, written by Jack Olsek and illustrated by the mega-talented Berni Wrightson!  I assumed it was a paperback novel-sized comic in book form, but no! When I opened it up, it was an anthology of eight prose tales of horror and suspense!  Obviously, I wasn't going to pass it up - I mean, a throwback to be sure, published back in 1973, and now that I've read it, it certainly brought back a lot of memories of those horror comics and their chilling tales of irony and the unexpected.

The book gets off to a great start with probably the most recognizable horror staple - the vampire!  In "Chamber of Horrors," a young man who seems to never have any luck happens to meet the perfect girl who - surprise surprise! - is actually interested in him. But when he drops her off that night at her house, he sees two people carrying what appears to be a coffin into the house.  No one will believe him, so he investigates on his own, only to discover that the girl and her parents are vampires! But, are they?  The police investigate, but find nothing out of the ordinary. The girl has a logical explanation for everything. Is he simply going mad, or do vampires really exist...?

"Nightmare" is one of those tales where the protagonist is someone you can't wait to see get what's coming to him. Kelso (what a name!) is a bitter man who is not happy about anything - certainly not about the trip to England that his wife forced upon him, nor about their excursion to see Stonehenge. He is belligerent to the tour guide and other people on the tour, he is downright nasty to his wife, and when he storms away from Stonehenge in the heat of the day to find some shade, he finally gets the peace and quiet he's been looking for. But what if those stories the tour guide was saying are true? What is Stonehenge is the place of ritual sacrifices? Kelso is about to find out...!

The third story, "Collector's Item," shows the lengths a man will go to when shown the ultimate collector's item - but at what cost?  "Born Loser," is yet another tale of a married man in an unhappy marriage. When he finds romance with a woman at work, he decides to summon a demon to get rid of his wife - but with witchcraft, there is always a price to pay! Then, in the fifth story, "Tomorrow, the World," a man in the psych ward is accused of killing a woman, but he insists he is innocent, that she was the victim of a satanic cult.  A new psychiatrist is hoping to help the man - but is the man's story a figment of his imagination, or is there something to his conspiracy theory?

"The Haunting" is a nice little twist on the haunted house tale, very much in the vein of The Sixth Sense.  The next story after that, "You Only Die Once," is another unhappy marriage tale (there seem to be a lot of those, don't there?) where a greedy husband is tired of waiting for his wife to die, so he sets a plan in motion to get rid of her before she can give away her fortune, leaving him penniless.  Of course, she's not going down without a fight!

The eighth and final story, "Act of Grace," is the perfect tale to end this one - it is one of irony, of sadness, of hopelessness, and of facing reality.  A young boy is sent to an orphanage - but he doesn't mind, as he has his Happy Place that he can go to any time he wants. No one believes it exists, until the other boys at the orphanage who have been bullying him watch him disappear into a stone wall! A successful psychiatrist is brought in to help him - but what will happen when they severe the boy's connection with his Happy Place?  Tragedy, in no simple terms....

Each story is introduced by a beautiful pen and ink drawing by the master of horror himself, Berni Wrightson.  And the stories are beautifully told so that it is very easy to imagine each one on the comic page - my mind vividly displayed each story, panel by panel, as I read the pages, leaving me to wonder if these were ever adapted into the comic book series published by DC Comics.  Regardless, the horror fan in me thoroughly enjoyed the read, and I am going to have to track down the second book that was published by Warner Brothers.

RATING:  10 mushroom filled boxes in the basement out of 10 for living up to the tagline on the back of the book:  "For the Connoisseur of Terror"!