4 out of 5

So again: Marvel in the 70s was a crazy freakin’ place.  The niche magazines, Howard the Duck – I’m not saying this stuff can’t exist nowadays, but the cultural self-awareness that affects most attempts aside (see Dark Horse’s ‘Eerie’ and ‘Creepy’ reboots), there’s just this sense of creative enthusiasm and impulsiveness behind these things, resulting in stories and ideas that aren’t always perfect, but feel inspired nonetheless.  And a horror mag wasn’t anything new at this point, but ‘Haunt’ – at least the first three issues, which I bought for Gerber’s part in them – is the kind of horror mag I want to read, where the stories don’t end in winky gags and there are occasional forays into psychological horror, veering away from the zombie / werewolf / vampire mash-up.  This probably is due to the magazine’s previous incarnation, a prose collection that lasted only two issues until it was recast as comics and text in the Marvel Magazine format.  Having that as a precedent, ‘Haunt’ burbles with a slightly more literary vibe, these issues boasting half of their page count dedicated to straight text.

While the content leans heavily on exorcisms due to the then-recently-released Exorcist (a fascinatingly dated roundtable regarding the film with Marvel writers and wives takes up the text portion of issues 2 and 3), it’s still quality stuff, Dough Moench’s ‘Gabriel, Devil Hunter’ entertainingly gloomy and over-stated and Conway’s ‘Satana’ entries odd erotica-lite that, again, wouldn’t appear as blatantly in a modern Marvel rag.  Issue 1 stands out as a unique work of art, a quiet editorial voice standing back to allow full room to the features, which includes a strange tale by George Alec Effinger; I suspect the last paragraphs were laid out on the page out of order, but it thankfully doesn’t tarnish the effect upon the brain of this complex 20-page tale.  Issues 2 and 3 seem a little more distracted without such a centerpiece, and obviously since I’m limiting to the Gerber issues I can’t weigh in on whether or not that was a trend that continued, however, that more adult impression remains, even though the editors get a bit more of a voice thanks to a letters page (as well as that roundtable pretty clearly breaking the 4th wall illusion).

Pages will crumble and the ink will stain – it was the 70s – but the stock of horror artists from that area are all god damned amazing, and the covers still look great.

So despite such classics as ‘Creepy’ and years of EC comics to which to refer, from what I’ve read over the years, I’d actually point to ‘Haunt of Horror’ as my go-to horror book – leaning more on ‘book’ than comic, the collection stands out by removing the ‘gotcha’ wink that a lot of the genre anthologies fall back on.  And, y’know, it’s fun to read.