The best horror anthology returns this week with Epitaphs From the Abyss #9. Three tales of frights, a horror host, and social commentary add up to a winning formula, but not every issue has had three winning tales. This week, Brian Azzarello, Christopher Cantwell, and Michael Conrad write stories of baseball, deadbeat husbands, and zombies with art by David Lapham, Peter Krause, and Christopher Mitten.
Kicking things off is another great full-page splash by Dustin Weaver featuring The Grave-Digger, who introduced each of the tales. This page’s theme is hunting, and we see a bunch of hunters strung up on the wall like stuffed deer. It’s a disturbing sight.
The first tale is “Exterminator” by Azzarello, and Lapham is about a guy getting a new job. Most of the story is his job interview, which isn’t very thorough. The story is mostly entertaining due to a twist on what his job entails, involving his entrails. Frankly, it’s overly focused on the bad manager rather than the actual job.
It is nice to see The Grave-Digger show up to introduce the story, which hasn’t happened in past issues.
A variant cover for the issue.
Credit: Oni
The art by Lapham is cartoony but suits the comical angle of the story. When monsters and violence come into play, Lapham will make you gag—in a good way.
Next is “Heaven is a Rounded Diamond” by Cantwell and Krause. It opens with The Grave-Digger, prepping readers for a tale of baseball and murder. Cantwell cleverly loops the title into dialogue, which closes the story nicely. The story is about a boy who goes to jail for life, but it’s not so bad because he can play baseball in the prison yard. Set in the 1930s, it’s a nice historical fiction that plays into the beauty of the game unless Hell taints it.
“The Rats of Ash Street” is the final tale by Conrad and Mitten. It’s about a lazy husband who demands countless beers from his wife and not much else. All she does is clean; eventually, she’s murderously sick of it.
Mitten outdoes himself with the violence she enacts on her husband, but he truly shines in a double-page spread. Blood and rats are scattered throughout the page, but some funny cartoon rats liven things up. This adds a chaotic element, conveying the wife’s state of mind.
Epitaphs From the Abyss #9 continues the anthology’s tradition of strong horror storytelling, but the stories vary in impact, with some excelling in narrative and others feeling slightly off-balance. Still, the combination of sharp writing, gruesome twists, and stellar artwork makes this a must-read for horror fans.
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