The Dark Horse Book Of Hauntings

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.

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 OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

A graduate of the University of Cincinnati with a degree in painting, P. Craig Russell has run the gamut in comics. After establishing a name for himself at Marvel on Killraven and Dr. Strange, he went on to become one of the pioneers in opening new vistas for this underestimated field with, among other works, adaptations of operas by Mozart (The Magic Flute), Strauss (Salome), and Wagner (The Ring of Nibelung). Russell is also well known for his Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde series as well as his graphic novel adaptations of Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Dream Hunters and Coraline. The author lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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