If you were intrigued by the "Do You Dare Read Blood Thirsty?" blurb (see previous post) featured on the cover of the August 1954 issue of Mysterious Adventures #21, --well now's your chance to take that dreaded dare! Yep, it's time for one more terrorific tale from this gory great issue, and this time around it's Dick Beck's turn to switch off the lights and really get your blood a'pumpin'! AIEEEEEEE!
This one is totally unfair! It's the old vampire/ghoul switch, but on page 4 she going to drink the blood -- the caption even says so! I'm calling foul!
ReplyDeleteThis one is fun because I like the lovable Grandma who is kind of loveable throughout, even when talking to her victims or killing her granddaughter. Sure, she gets a little pissed at being called a vampire (which is always a feature of these stories, there must be some kind of long standing feud between the two creatures) but she is just so happy and kindly!
Very Norman Bates mom look, too, a couple years before the film!
If granny is a ghoul doesn't that mean the granddaughter would be one too?
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it run in the family similarly to a curse of lycanthropy ?
I can only wonder what keeps one ghoul from feeding on another ghoul when hungry enough.
For that matter, Karen is a sort of Marion Crane - except that instead of running from a crime, she's planning one, against "Mrs. Bates" herself.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny that even in word balloons while she's alone, Karen's planning to rob Granny but there's never a line about planning to kill her.
You'd think they'd include that just to take sympathy away from her, since that's such a tradition with criminals in these stories. But I think it's more original this way.
I think of Karen as being pretty sympathetic, actually. I guess she's talked herself into imagining her grandmother's hidden wealth will not be missed by anyone. Isn't it just uselessly walled-up in some hiding place? Who cares if she sneaks off with that? And if she can wedge some quality time in with Granny, well, that's a win-win.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the first two thirds of this. I found it really riveting. But I'm never sure how to feel about these stories where a dream takes over the whole second act. Sometimes that dream is inaccurate, setting the reader up to expect the wrong things--as in this story--and sometimes it's totally precognitive, forcing the characters into some kind of fatal endless loop. Either way it feels a bit dodgy.
In my version of today's story, Grandma would have just vamped Karen as an act of familial solidarity, and then they would have had to dispose of the man's body together. "Just dump all the useless old money out of that hole in the wall, Dear, and we can use that."
I like Mysterious Adventures' style of double-sized vertical splashes. I just realized we've seen that three times in a row now, and they've all been effective.
The part that amuses me the most in this story is how the vampire scenario turns out to all be a nightmare but then Karen suddenly realizes that Granny has tied her hands. Granny is so matter of fact of this situation too!🤣 That and the “Of course I’m going to kill you!” bit.
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