Horror Comic Review Robert E Howard And Scott Hampton Pigeons From Hell

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Spoiler alerts – 1988 Eclipse Books A 1932 horror story by Conan The Barbarian creator Robert E Howard, set to graphics with dark precision while retaining the bulk of the novella text of the original. Two men travelling in the American Mid-West stop off at an isolated seemingly abandoned house for the night and it comes as no surprise that the property is haunted. There are strange whistling noises and birds fly through the house – explained as capturing the souls of the damned, but in fact the pigeons have little to do beyond that reference. One of the men finds himself attacked by the other even though the attacker appears to be already dead. He seems to have an axe wound to his head. The other man escapes the house and runs in blind terror until he is found by a local sheriff who understandably thinks the panic stricken man might be the other man’s killer. He has doubts though as he knows stories of the strange Confederate women who ill-treated slaves at the property and who one of them claimed her three sisters died there in some secret room. The sheriff and the distressed man return to the house to recreate the events of the night before and only discover the secret room containing the rotted bodies of the three hanged women haunting the house after history almost repeats itself. Spooky use of dark shadows and well drawn looks of terror with only a few panels showing horrors only implied over much of the text. If this is ever filmed I hope the movie makers don’t go for buckets of gore over leaving much of the dread to the imagination as this perfect fusion of text and image achieves. Arthur Chappell