The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings
P. Craig Russell, that Aubrey Beardsley of the comics, opens the book with the story of a voracious old house on the outskirts of a young boy's neighborhood. The German Uli Oesterle's piece about a tattoo artist's creeping revenge on the deadbeat customer who kills him is in the jagged, geometrical European manner of Jacques Tardi and his epigones, and Mike Mignola's Hellboy story "Dr. Carp's Experiment" looks like an Americanization of that style. There are two noncomics contributions: Allie's interview with a spiritualist medium and "Thurnley Abbey," a rattling good gothic short story by Perceval Landon (1869-1927), which Gary Gianni superbly illustrates by streamlining the manner offin de sieclemagazine art. Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson's haunted doghouse tale, with its painterly blue-gray backdrops, wraps things up with feeling.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved