Friday, March 17, 2017

The Other Side of the Macabre Mirror

A fellow horror fiend sent over some small, but still certainly scary scans to a very cool Lou Cameron (penciled) story from the May 1952 issue of The Beyond #11-- an issue from this series that has always eluded me! There are definitely not enough evil mirror stories archived here at THOIA!















8 comments:

  1. This one is a little interesting -- and not for the Vault Keeper sneaking out and moonlighting for another company -- because he's actually got an escape hatch from his torment. He will, eventually, and could be relatively soon, get out of the mirror by luring in another sucker.

    After that -- especially if it's decades later (the count didn't age) -- he can get a new identity, his wive's body will never be found, and while in the mirror he's NOT aging (unlike prison.)

    All in all, not the worse fate.

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  2. The first page of this story made me think of Algernon Blackwood's 'The Land of Green Ginger"

    The beginning is very similar but Blackwood's tale goes off in a different direction.

    Both tales even have the mirror warning the would be buyer of what lies ahead.



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  3. Okay, we get it: never collect anything!

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  4. Ooh, blown from the sand of pirate graves. Good detail! Thanks a lot, Fellow Horror Fiend (and Karswell)!

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  5. Clearly, Willis didn't reflect very well upon the consequences he would encounter upon entering the mirror.

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  6. I also like '..an hour of reckoning so macabre, so soul-searing and terror-fraught, that it passed the boundaries of human understanding!'.

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  7. I snuck in a couple more appropriate tags.

    Interestingly, some of the plot reminds me of R. Chetwynd-Hayes' "The Gatecrasher" (made into a segment of the movie From Beyond the Grave), although this predates that story by 20 years!

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  8. In a general way, it's also like the THRILLER episode "Prisoner In The Mirror."

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