Customer Reviews

The Dark Horse Book Of Witchcraft

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What are we to make of this odd little book? The comic stories range from great (Mignola's Hellboy short, "The Troll Witch,") to dull (Allie, Lee, Horton, Stewart and Madsen's "The Flower Girl") to having nothing to do with witches (Ricketts and Phillips's "Golden Calf Blues"). The most artistically exceptional piece is the reprint of a "rare" Clark Ashton Smith short story, "Mother of Toads," which is gross and well illustrated in black-and-white by Gary Gianni. Second best is Mignola's Hellboy story, which is refreshingly free of Hellboy's usual two-fisted antics. Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson produce a good beast fable with "The Unfamiliar," reminiscent of the Howes' Bunnicula books. Most of the other tales are forgettable.

Wedged in the middle of the collection is an interview with Phyllis Curott, Wiccan high priestess. All the other witches in the collection are, without exception, of the fairy tale variety. What kind of "witch" are we reading about? It would be better to keep the two kinds--the fantasy kind and the real thing--separate, as they are essentially unrelated.

As for the interview itself, Curott lucidly explains Wicca but misunderstands a few other religions. She says, for example, "The biblical model views God as transcendent, not present in the world" (p. 64), which misrepresents both Christian and Jewish perspectives. She also consistently misuses the word "indigenous" and mentions a few historical details that border on pseudo-history and conspiracy theory.

The Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft is entertaining but inconsistent and thematically confused. It has a few laughs, but no thrills.

The Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft features a leering, hideous old woman on the cover, in some kind of embrace with a goat. This is your first clue that these dark tales feature no young and curvaceous Charmed girls, no Sabrina the Teen-Aged Witch. The witches in this volume are the real thing, the original black magic practicioners who made convenants with the Devil and reveled in evil ways.

I enjoyed all of these original stories very much. They all provided horror chills. All but one are in comic format. The exception is an old tale about a horrible Toad Witch. This is text with a couple of black and white illustrations.

An interesting read, but one I hope no one takes seriously, is the editor's interview with a New York lawyer who is also the Wiccan High Priestess. This woman has serious delusions of self-grandeur. A lot of what she says is informative, but she engages in some ignorant Christian and Bible bashing. For a much truer version of Wicca and its origins, read The Forest House or The Mists of Avalon, both by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I've read all 4 of the "Dark Horse Book of ..." books. I actually won all four of them from a Dark Horse Halloween giveaway. (Thanks Dark Horse!) However after reading all four books I can easily say that I would have gladly bought them.

I think any fan of horror, Hellboy or Beasts of Burden will enjoy these collections. I really liked that each book had a classic short story in it with great illustrations by Gary Gianni. His style matches the stories perfectly. I even enjoyed the 3 interviews. I don't remember there being a bad story in the bunch. What the books lack in page count they make up for in content and design. Check em out.

This is an interesting collection. As well as the comic part it includes a story by Clark Ashton Smith, with illustrations, and an interview with a New York wiccan leader.

Best of all, and a very pleasant surprise, is a Hellboy tale.

There is also a pretty cute story of dogs and one stand up cat saving the world from a ritual to summon Sekhmet. Top marks to Evan Dorkin for that one.

This makes this eclectic collection well worth a look.

The Book of Witchcraft is another of the anthologies that Dark Horse released not too terrible long ago, and each one of them was surprisingly good considering how quietly they were received. I was happy to see Hellboy stories hitting the marketplace again after some absence from the shelves, and this particular book also has a story by the great Clark Ashton Smith that is worth re-adding to a collection. That has been one of the things I thought was great about each of the books Dark Horse released; since they were going with pulp stories they opted to reprint stories done by great writers, and their selections were some that I couldn't have been more pleased to look at. All the books are affordable and all are a nice distraction if you want to spend an hour or so reading/ admiring some of the pieces of comic art and, if you are into something that could be described as campy by people who aren't really fond of the word pulp, each of them makes good on their own specific byline.

The Book of Witchcraft includes the best of the three Hellboy stories in it in my opinion by far, with the engrossing short actually taking all of the Hellboy elements and delivering them in a surprisingly touching tale. I was taken with how well the story was written and, as always, how odd a tale can actually be and yet how much sense it can seem to make when Mignola sets down and delivers a pseudo-fairytales. Aside from the Troll-With there are 8 other tales in the book, the Clark Ashton Smith an actual story with art pieces done by the esteemed Gary Gianni and The Truth about Witchcraft taking an interview format, and each angles at witchcraft in its own particular way.
Included in the book are:
1. Macbeth. Adaptation by Tony Millionaire
2. The Troll With: A Hellboy Adventure. Mignola/writer
3. Mother of Toads. Clark Ashton Smith/writer
4. The Flower Girl. Allie/writer
5. The Gris-Gris. Keegan and Keegan/ writers
6. Golden Calf Blues. Ricketts/writers
7. The Truth about Witchcraft. Allie/ writer
8. Salem and Mary Sibley. Morse/ writer
9. Unfamiliar. Dorkin/writer

Again, this might be a selection for a specific audience and those in the forefront know who they are. Hellboy collectors aside, people who enjoy the feel of Lovecraftian days revisited will undoubtedly enjoy the reprinting of Clark Ashton Smith piece, and anyone with a love for Dark Horse's collections will like the way the book is made to look like a book of witchcraft.