Saturday, December 1, 2018
The Terror of the Lively Corpse
After two full months of Atlas classics, it's time to delve back into the macabre mix of other precode 50's publishers. And since it's December already, I thought we'd kick off our first week of posts here with a FULL ISSUE presentation from Mysterious Adventures #9, published in August 1952 (all scans provided by diabolik deaddio, --THE Tommy Stanziola!) This is a totally batshit crazy issue as you will see, and the lead-off story is a good example of terrifying things yet to come! Good lord, how many times have we seen this disastrous ending happen here at THOIA over the years?!! I seriously will never get enough of that "Don't do it, you dummy!" plot...
Wowie Howie, whose narrating? Thank you Mr. K.. B.S. crazy is right for this one.
ReplyDeleteWow!...like Craig Yoe said,the LAST time we were lucky enough to get featured in your long-running THOIA blog, I am tickled "Intestines-Pink", to contribute whenever I can, Mr. Karswell!...I had as much fun uploading this KILLER book, as I did readin', n' droolin' thru these berserk "Off the Hizzoid" turbo-charged terror tales!! This made my day all the more INSANE in the MEMBRANE!!
ReplyDeleteYeah man, thanks again for these scans! I can’t wait to post the one about the lion, haha —that’s when things get seriously CATshit crazay!
ReplyDeleteThis story was written when a bunch of horror story authors had a car crash and all of them were sewn together by a mad scientist and nobody could agree on the plot so they did every plot at once!
ReplyDeleteThat theory might have some holes in it.
I enjoyed this one for the crazy, though it could have been made a lot better by some re-arrangement (for instance they could do away with some stuff and show the killer early and have his life parallel the boys, so the reveal makes a bit more sense.)
Being buried alive and dug up later, what could go wrong?
ReplyDeleteThe concept of faking ones death for the insurance money, being buried and dug up later, reminded me of the film "Vault of Horror" 1973.
One tradition in horror stories is that half the time cemetery caretakers are armed and even trigger-happy, so when they aren't being killed BY grave robbers, THEY'RE doing the killing. So it was clever of this story to go for something more ironic.
ReplyDeleteI love it. It's interesting to think back to a time when this sort of scheme might have been plausible. In the early days of the New Deal, when unemployed Americans rarely had federal IDs, birth certificates were in no way standardized, and records rarely moved over state lines until well after a crime had been committed, it was far more likely someone could fake a death and resettle elsewhere. As a man prone to spending large amounts of energy maintaining my own laziness, I can totally get where these kids are coming from, too.
ReplyDeleteAnd I like the art! It's a great splash, but I might have preferred that it not give the ending away. And speaking of the ending, only a New Yorker would imagine an outdoor, ground-level railway past a lonely country cemetery would have a third rail like an inner-city underground mass transit loop. Eye roll. And I frankly don't understand how anybody can imagine someone trying to jump a train accidentally contacting a rail the train is actually on at the time. I mean, it's certainly possible to fall underneath, I guess, but then the third rail is more likely to reanimate your dismembered corpse via Frankensteinian galvanic alchemy than to electrocute you.
Ooh, I wrote part two.
Haha, you better follow through with that part two, ASAP! Thanks for the great comments everyone, coming up with another crazy one— stay tombed!
ReplyDelete