The Dark Horse Book Of Hauntings [Hardcover]

Mike Mignola (Author, Artist), P. Craig Russell (Author, Artist), Paul Chadwick (Author, Artist)

Book Description

Series: Dark Horse Book of | Publication Date: September 8, 2003

Dark Horse's horror line launches its new prestige format with this hardcover book filled with original short stories by some of the most respected names in comics. The longest story in The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings is also Mike Mignola's only new Hellboy adventure in 2003! Come along as Hellboy investigates a haunted house and discovers his own unexpected connection to the spirits within. P. Craig Russell (Sandman, Murder Mysteries) adapts Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson's story about a child who leads friends and family into an abandoned house, and Paul Chadwick and his longtime Concrete editor Randy Stradley team up for a creepy short about a haunted suit. In the strangest entry in the book, Jill Thompson (Scary Godmother) and Evan Dorkin (Hectic Planet) recount the legend of a haunted doghouse. With a Victorian ghost story illustrated by Gary Gianni, and an interview with real-life seance medium L.L. Dreller, plus a new Devil's Footprints story and outstanding contributions from international artists Uli Oesterle (Germany) and Lucas Maragnon (Mexico), this is the ultimate book for horror-comics enthusiasts and fans of fantastic artwork.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

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 of fin de siecle magazine art. Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson's haunted doghouse tale, with its painterly blue-gray backdrops, wraps things up with feeling. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Dark Horse (September 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569719586
• ISBN-13: 978-1569719589
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,156,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous artwork, spooky/poignant stories..., October 29, 2003

By 

GoryDetails "gorydetails" (Nashua, NH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dark Horse Book Of Hauntings (Hardcover)

You've got to love a book that's dedicated to "Hans Holzer, Edward Gorey, and the Fox Sisters"! This was a very enjoyable collection, overall. It was the lovely skeletal figure on the cover of this book that caught my eye, and when I found that "Thurnley Abbey" is one of the stories included, I had to pick it up. It turns out that "Thurnley Abbey," an old favorite of mine, is presented here in text form with a few handsome illustrations, while the rest of the stories are original works by several different graphic novelists, including a "Hellboy" adventure by Mike Mignola. The illustrated stories range from "exceedingly creepy" to "subtly disturbing" to "heart-warming" (not necessarily in that order). These are all ghost stories in the classic mold - very little gore or explicit gruesomeness, but lots of shadows and shudders. I've read stronger tales (and would have given a 4.5 rating if I could), but these were quite enjoyable, and the old classic "Thurnley Abbey" is just as chilling as I remember. This book would make a handsome addition to anyone's ghost-story collection.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wooooo!, May 24, 2010

By 

Sam Quixote - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dark Horse Book Of Hauntings (Hardcover)

The book is an anthology of short comics based on the theme of haunted houses. It's quite short at 92 pages especially given that most of the work included is comics and as such are quick to read. It's also just ok to read with about half the strips being interesting, the other half just dull, and a prose story that' sub par although Gary Gianni's artwork is amazing. There's also a 10 page interview with a psychic and if you're like me then you'll roll your eyes at that one. Anyone who claims to have powers of any kind and be in contact with the dead are scum in my book so I just skipped that section entirely.

The good stuff: Mike Richardson and P Craig Russell's "Gone" about an isolated, abandoned house that swallows up anyone who decides to break into it. Great story, even better artwork, a great start.

Mike Mignola writes and draws his contribution "Dr Carp's Experiment", a Hellboy adventure. As usual Mignola knocks it out of the park and as a big fan of Hellboy I was very pleased to see it's inclusion here. Great short comic.

"The House on the Corner" by Milton Freewater Jnr and Lucas Marangon is a nice spooky little real life story based on a haunted house in the southern states of America, it reminded me of the kind of half baked ghost books I read when I was a kid.

Uli Oesterle's "Forever" is excellent, it's about a man who gets a tattoo but runs off when it's done without paying the bill, running over the tattooist when he tries to stop him. The tattoo then begins to grow... Fantastic horror that doesn't fit into the haunted house theme but is awesome anyway.

It's a great little collection but goes by very quickly. Worth a look but only if you find it real cheap or at the library, I wouldn't pay £9 or so for it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Uneven Collection, Beautifully Illustrated, May 4, 2005

By 

Jesse Penitent "zekaille" (Somewhere, Out There) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dark Horse Book Of Hauntings (Hardcover)

Like the other reviewer, I picked this one up for "Thurnley Abbey" which is one of the scariest ghost tales going. While I was disappointed (at first) that it was the straight story with a few illustrations, I will say the illustrations were well done and I am glad to have the story permamently in my collection. The other stories varied wildly. My favorite was "Gone" which is subtly creepy: no gore, no blood and NO EXPLANATION. You are left to your own devices as to what happened and the story is the more bone chilling for it. On the other hand, that story in which a man tells a young boy a story about a haunted house was ho-hum while the Tattoo story was disturbing. (And, in a perverse way, quite amusing.)I'm not a fan of all the styles of artwork here--some of it was too dark and hard to look at. On the overall, though, if you like ghosts and the creepies, you'll want this in your collection.