Sucker Bait And Other Stories

If you ever wondered what the vengeful, decaying corpse of an elephant stomping a woman to death would look like, it’s in here (“Squash...Anyone?”).

Or living rats sewn into the bodies of a tyrannical king and queen (“A Grim Fairy Tale”)... or the results of injecting a “poison-pen” letter writer with literal poison and reducing him to, in the words of Al Feldstein’s script, a “foul-smelling, oozing pool of putrescence” (“Notes to You!”).

One of the two Ray Bradbury adaptations in the book, “There Was an Old Woman” (about a deceased crone who simply refuses to stay dead) provides the closest thing to a note of sweetness that you’ll find here — perhaps with the exception of the genuinely romantic “A Little Stranger!” and its loving marriage between a dead vampire and a dead werewolf.

Sucker Bait And Other Stories features 25 classic stories from Tales From the Crypt, Shock Suspen-Stories, Vault of Horror, and Ingels and his “Old Witch” character’s special showcase Haunt of Fear — plus the usual fascinating historical, critical, and biographical material.