Yeah, yeah… I know for SOME of you every day is scary, but get up and out in the sunshine once in a while and you’ll see that people aren’t SO bad after all. Then again, Halloween most certainly seems like a more than good time to stay IN after a certain hour in some places, so you’ve hopefully stocked up on food and drink, have enough TP to last a while and maybe some nice and scary movies queued up on your favorite device. Yeah, I know you still use that Betamax, so I was purposefully being vague in that previous sentence…

Now, If you’re a reader and like your things with words a bit on the scary side, you may as well venture out before it gets too dark and boogie on over to your nearest comics emporium just to pick up these two finely illustrated fright-filled tomes from the fine folks at Dark Horse Comics. Tales From the Crypt: The EC Archives – Volume 4 is a chilling collection of classic 1950’s horror from some of the best in the business back then and despite their age, the pre-Comics Code tales of terror and that excellently detailed art will have your eyeballs dancing in their sockets as your brain tells them to calm down so it can process that scary stuff it’s trying to also see.

“Feh!” you say? Followed by “Aw, how can some old smelly comic that’s older than my granny be SCARY?” and a smug “They didn’t even HAVE horror back then!”. Well there, dear troll child… let me give you a taste of things to come…

Getting chilly in here all of a sudden, hmmmmmmm? I thought so. Yeah, I ALMOST cut off the last page of the story because I want you to believe in SUSPENSE, but I decided to put it back in just because I’m a nice guy. If I saved you a change of underwear you can thank me later. Or now if you prefer. Anyway, this one’s a hardcover, clocks in at 216 pages (collecting TFTC issues #35-40), and costs $44.99.

As for the other read, who doesn’t like a little Edgar Allan Poe for dessert? Or breakfast. Or lunch. Or a light snack? And by Edgar Allan Poe, I do MEAN Edgar Allan Poe, not some code word for boozing it up whenever you please.Ol’ Poe did a lot of that when he wasn’t tap-tap-tapping out scary stories for the ages and it didn’t do him much good in the end. But he did at least finish some great works (unlike you, who still need to clean out that hall closet and still can’t wash a dish to save your life. Get the BACK of the plates and utensils, man! Yeesh).

Ahem. Anywhooo, the great Richard Corben is back adapting more Poe tales and The Raven and the Red Death one-shot should make fine companions to his two issue The Fall of the House of Usher mini-series from this past May. As you’ll see below, Corben’s highly stylized work combines realism and exaggerated elements beautifully and his mastery of the comics medium is as solid as ever. Oh, NOW you don’t mind peeking at pages? Okay, Okay… but there’s a catch (as you’ll soon find out):

See? SEE?! You only get SIX pages on this one. SUSPENSE! Hey, don’t blame me for leaving you hanging, dear sir or madam. That’s Dark Horse wanting you to go spend a measly $3.99 for the rest of the book and they’ll thrown in Masque of the Red Death free of charge (OK, so it’s already part of the deal, but you know what I mean…)! Alrighty then – it looks as if we’re done here. I think you’ve got a pumpkin to carve or something. Use a good sharp knife if you do and make sure it’s dead before you try and stick your hand inside. I hear those pumpkins sometimes have VERY sharp teeth…