It's tough to top the original, but the Dark Horse Book of the Dead, the third in Dark Horse's horror hardcover series, might just edge out Book of Hauntings as the best of the three. The usual suspects are here, including a third offering from Dorkin and Thompson's charming dog and cat tales, a new Hellboy story from Mike Mignola and prose illustrated by Gary Gianni, but there are some new contributors as well, including Kelley Jones, Eric Powell, Guy Davis, Jamie Rich and even Robert E. Howard. Many of the contributors used the "dead" theme to write a zombie tale of sorts, and there are several good ones in here, but I also liked the ones that were a little off the beaten path, like Bob Fingerman and Roger Langridge's humor piece, the haunting horror/love story by Rich and Davis and the story of immortality from Howard and Gianni.
There have been three continuing features throughout the Dark Horse hardcover horror series. Of course, one of the big selling points of the first one was that it was the only original Hellboy story being done by Mike Mignola that year. This year, Mignola also produced The Island, but he has an original Hellboy tale here too, one that pits Hellboy against a flesh-eating ghoul in a graveyard. The story itself is kind of strange, with Hellboy providing the salt of the earth dialogue as always but the ghoul waxing eloquent with poems, seeming weirdly discordant with its monstrous appearance. Truthfully, it's one of the weaker stories in the book, but it still features Mignola's art colored by Dave Stewart and a few memorable Hellboy lines, at the very least.
The other continuing features fare a little better, at least in my eyes. Allie, Lee and Horton serve up a father-son chat from their Devil's Footprints series that is more effective if you've read and remember previous Devil's Footprints tales but which works even if you haven't. The frustration that Brandon feels, and the academic approach that the undead father takes to his son, is very effective, and the personality of the father comes through despite his inexpressive skeleton form, especially in the emphatic gesture made at the end of the story. Probably one of my favorite tales in the book, though, is the third continuing feature, a story of dogs and cats by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson. Dorkin and Thompson would be hard-pressed to top "Stray," the first story in the series, but "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie" comes close, taking the tropes of the zombie flick and applying it to the scrappy dogs and cats from the "Stray" series for a perfect blend of horror and comedy. Thompson's artwork is stunning as always, and creepily effective in depicting the zombie dogs. Dorkin and Thompson scare (the dogs at the gate is a truly frightening moment if you're empathizing with the characters), poke the reader for laughs (mostly through dialogue), do a shocking and effective action climax (don't want to spoil it) and leave the story with a touching bit of sadness.
"Let Sleeping Dogs Lie" is probably the best of the stories in this volume, but it's not the funniest. That honor goes to the collaboration between Bob Fingerman and Roger Langridge on "Death Boy." The notion of a guy who kills with a touch (and who really doesn't want to) is not unlike one of the gags that drove the recent Death Jr. series, but the punchline about how he got the power, as well as the execution of the main story, is completely different and quite funny. Also making use of a great twist ending is "The Hungry Ghosts" by Kelley Jones, which sets the reader up for a standard zombie tale and then has a nice reversal at the end.
There's actually quite a variance in tone amongst these stories, which is a welcome thing. Pat McEown's "The Queen of Darkness" is a post-apocalyptic zombie epic that has more in common with a fantasy story, dealing in prophecy and sword-swinging heroes of legend, while "Kago No Tori" by Jamie Rich and Guy Davis feels like a Japanese horror story, all mood and ironic, self-inflicted horror aimed more at creeping the reader out than providing shocking scares. Davis's ability to draw waterlogged, horrid ghosts comes in handy in Rich's story, but I also love his Japanese painting style that opens and closes the story, and appreciate the change in color palette for those styles that Dave Stewart uses.
Robert E. Howard's tale, meanwhile, is pure pulp, to no one's surprise, and it also isn't too much of a surprise that Eric Powell also chooses a pulp style for his tale. Powell's tale of an Arctic expedition that runs afoul of a twisted tree is very Lovecraftian in its approach, and Powell does an especially good job of showing the horrific, twisted look of the undead as well as conveying the sinister, almost sentient evil that creeps forth from an inanimate object like a tree. David Crouse, meanwhile, teams with artist Todd Herman on a tale that reads more like the modern pulp/horror of Joe R. Lansdale, a haunting and evocative tale of roadkill that will have the reader casting a wary glance at the next dead thing they pass on a busy highway, wondering if its extending any sort of mental influence over them.
So there you have it... nine horror tales, most of them completely different in approach but all good to great reading. Great care has been taken to give these books a nice looking graphic design, with evocative covers by Gary Gianni and a beautiful hardcover design, but it's clear that editor Scott Allie has also gone the extra mile in making sure that the interiors are as special as the exteriors.
