Jack Cole's Deadly Horror: The Chilling Archives of Horror Volume 4
by: Cole, Jack

Hardcover. US, IDW Publishing, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover issued w/o a dust jacket. Jack Cole's often overlooked horror work finally gets the hardcover treatment. The stories hit many of the usual horror themes, and a few unique ones, with many based in the crime genre. Cole brings his own outlook to the idiom; casually violent and gruesome, with kinetic artwork and splash panels/pages that will knock your socks off.Offered chronologically, the earlier stories outshine most of the later ones. The best ones are "borrowed" from a couple of "Weird Tales" authors- "Custodian of the Dead" (Henry Kuttner's "Graveyard Rats") and "The Corpse That Wouldn't Die" (Clark Ashton Smith's "The Return of the Sorcerer"). Cole's own stories are pretty original, compared to the mostly ho-hum output of contemporaries like Stan Lee's ATLAS line, and he doesn't try to imitate the EC horror comics like 99% of the rest of the field did. Some of the stories are ludicrous and will make you roll your eyes ("Goddess of Murder" especially), but it's refreshing to see a different take on the comic book horror story.