For anyone who misses the creepy/hokey aesthetic of Tales from the Crypt and/or Are You Afraid of the Dark?, I have a proposition for you: pick up an issue of Eerie. It’s all the mind-bending horror you could desire in a neat little anthology. Plus, the artwork is pretty upstanding. It’s pulpy, it’s dark, and it has this overall sense of being mutated. I’m pretty smitten.
Eerie issue #4 brings you the visual talents of Kelley Jones and Norm Breyfogle and the spooky writing of Al Ewing. This particular anthology tells three unsettling tales: Shadowplay, Invulnerable, and The Alien Plague, which branch through elements of mad science (or, in this case, I suppose “mad therapy”), witchcraft, and vampiric alien tomfoolery.The stories are short, but they manage to pack in their point without much difficulty. Honestly, the only thing that I can spot as a problem is an issue that the horror genre tends to have in general: predictability. Yet, in a way, Eerie is very prepared to own up to its foreseeable endings, what with the prologue jokes and all.
In the end, I say do it to it. Give Eerie #4 a look-see and experience that uncomfortable prickle in the back of your skull that makes you wonder, “What if?” Let your imagination unlock the door. The door that leads to another dimension. A dimension of sound, sight, and mind. A dimension that seems an awful lot like…The Twilight Zone.
Score: B+
Get Eerie #4 digitally here at Dark Horse Comics.
[Disclaimer: A review copy was provided for me to review this comic.]