Monday, April 27, 2015
Nightmare of Doom! + CONTEST
More doom for ya, this time from the January 1953 issue of Chamber of Chills #15-- and dear lord *choke!* it's also featured in HAUNTED HORROR #16 --in stores this Wednesday! Want a FREE copy of HH16 personally signed by Mr. Karswell himself? Just leave a comment about today's story below, and then tell us about your own personal nightmare of doom-- be sure to leave an email address too! I'll be drawing 3 names on Walpurgis Night (that's Thursday, April 30th at midnight, aka May 1st, for those of you not evil enough to know better!) So give it to me straight from the grave, doom lovers, be as detailed and deadly as you want, but the more nightmarish (and naughty) the better-- I'm only putting the really good ones into the fishbowl this time. Good luck to everyone that enters, and stay tombed for another HH16 preview this week as well!
The garish coloring, usually a determent, actually works well in this one. It desperately needed an editor, though, it seems to bounce around and is hard to follow, for what is a relatively simple story.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid, I always thought the blob was a super original movie, but there's so many similar stories in the pre-code horror comics!
As for a nightmare, nothing interesting. All my nightmares are stress dreams, where I suddenly found that I've bought 3 houses and no way to pay for them, or suddenly find I've been signed up for college courses plus work plus other things that I can't possible accomplish all at once. Not that exciting!
The scientist's "cowardly" partner or helper is such a great stock character in these kinds of stories. Usually he or she just gets lectured by the scientist, but in this story he's actually murdered.
ReplyDeleteI loved the art here. Great, strong work! Also I'm really happy that, when it comes to giant blobs of necrotizing bacteria, they are in every part visible. Otherwise, like in real life, once the city-wide fight between good and evil biotics had been decided, why, there'd be some worry that a particle of unhealthy remainder might be left in the air, in the water supply, on that watch. But here, nobody even has to wash their hands!
ReplyDeleteAs for a personal nightmare of doom, I assume you mean dreams I’ve had, not creatures I’ve manufactured and then unleashed on the unsuspecting world. But I'm not really very good at remembering dreams. There have only been a handful that I’ve ever recalled, and with most of those what I really remember, at this point, is telling other people about them at time. But okay, I do remember one in which I was in a steep river gorge, mostly red mud and mangled saplings, that looked like a landscape that has suffered a flood or a landslide. I was in these ravaged woods behind a large factory building with a tall, well lit fence, trying to avoid being seen by security guards. I think I was taking a shortcut back to a main road, surprised to stumble into this difficult landscape. I was being careful to grab onto roots and damaged trees, trying to keep from falling into the crashing rapids below.
At some point I realized I was being followed by a large, silent dog, making better time than I was in the dark, operating by a lower center of gravity and four-legs for balance. I had almost been overtaken by the dog when I stumbled on a medium sized fallen tree that extended from bank to bank over the river. It was very slick, caked with rotting leaves and studded with sharp, broken branches jutting here and there that I was able to use for handholds. As I inched backward along the fallen trunk, my attention was divided between the outlines of the dark rocks in the rapids below me and the pacing of the angry dog, its eyes reflecting the halogen security lights on the warehouse fence.
I was nearly to the other side when the dog changed tack and tore off along the riverbank to my right. He disappeared into the shadows, but I could hear crisp and muddy sounds as he made his way down the devastated bank, following some other trail. Finally on the far bank, I hoped I had a few minutes before that dog made his way back up on my side, undecided as to whether I should break for the fence or inch back out along the treacherous log.
But it didn't matter. I could hear the dog's progress as it barreled invisibly over the river and shot up the bank toward me. This was it. Running out of time I managed to rip one of the sharp broken limbs off of the fallen tree just as the dog shot out of the shadowed ditch nearly at my feet, ferocious, its short black fur slick as a seal's. I had the sharp club held low and was bringing it up when the dog leapt, catching it under the front legs and sending slightly off course to my right. As it spun, I brought the full weight of the wood down on its head. There was a flash of light and I fell to one knee in the soggy, sloping terrain. The dog was up and coming again, snapping, and I forced the branch between us with both hands, trying to fend it off. Only then did I get a clear look at the beast, as its teeth clamped tight on the wood between my hands. Then I saw that my blow had opened a crack in the angry muzzle, peeling back the pelt enough to see a sparking mechanism below. This dog was a robot! At this point all my fear left me, and as I struggled to my feet out of the mud, I kicked the machine away from me and staved its head in with two or three solid whacks with my club.
The last thing I remember before waking up is looking at the tall, brightly lit security fence and saying to myself, "I'm being tested."
Awesome. Now THATS what I'm talkin about!
ReplyDeleteI had a dream last night about poisonous snakes (and other kinds), but I'm so funny about reptiles, it wasn't really a nightmare!
ReplyDeleteOne of the earliest nightmares I can remember was about being terrorized by a clown in a drawn-out way. But the funny thing is, I've never been afraid of clowns, so the dream wasn't because of that, and it also didn't CAUSE me to be scared of them afterwards. Almost everyone nowadays calls clowns scary and disturbing, and yet they don't bother me, in spite of that very early nightmare about one!
Exactly - it's become such a bandwagon. And I think that means something coming from me, considering that nightmare.
ReplyDeleteI never got the scary clown thing either, but when I was a kid I was actually attracted to the wicked witch of the west, when all other kids seemed to be scared of her.
ReplyDeleteOther than her silly death (why keep the bucket of water around) she was the most powerful and awesome thing in all of Oz. To my young mind, she'd have made the perfect girlfriend :)
How that's for going off-topic?
My nightmares tend to be the miserable, prosaic anxiety-dream sort, but one notable bad dream ended with me being throttled by a man who looked like Robert DeNiro's monster in Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. What was so striking about it is that the dream ended with my neck being broken-- and as I startled awake, I must've been sleeping crooked because a vertebra in my neck made an audible POP!
ReplyDeleteI ended up lying there for a few minutes trying to be sure I wasn't dead...
Where did those two guys graduate from?
ReplyDeleteApokolips, maybe?
A nightmare I had just two days ago was about some excavations the municipal workers had to do in our small backyard (putting gas pipes or something) and thus disturbing the slumber of all the dead friends we buried there since the late Eighties (I'm referring to our cats). In the dream, my mother bursted into tears and I got very angry with the workers. I usually can connect my dreams to some daytime experience but this, I can't explain. Very unpleasant.
Some of mine are about committing murders or accidental killings (or mixtures of the two), but they're such "stories" that it's more like "playing" the killer than exactly being the killer. So on some level it can be entertaining, even while it's going on. Scary, but still entertaining.
ReplyDelete