1971 / Ebook / 24 pages / USA****
I wonder if there's a stranger Sesame Street tie-in than this metafictional antibook that makes the reader culpable for lovable, furry old Grover's escalating distress, passionately evoked in the nightmarish art. It definitely shouldn't exist, but I'm glad I got around to it eventually, though only after mistaking Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone for being original.
John Rozum, Charles Adlard and Gordon Purcell, The X-Files: Internal Affairs1996 (collected 1997) / Ecomics / 128 pages / USA/UK
**
With fewer stories than average and quality below average, the comics cleverly foreshadowed the decline of the TV show. Titan Books' pun title summing up these domestic cases of madness and live organ transplant reimbursement is better than the contents.
Tim Greaves, Vampyres: A Tribute to the Ultimate in Erotic Horror Cinema – Revised Edition
1996 (updated 2003) / Ebook / 67 pages / UK**
This flimsy fan tribute shows that if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish modest goals unremarkably, apart from tracking people down before Google. Still, I enjoyed the contrast of his over-the-top adulation for the best British horror film ever made and the creators' cynicism about their exploitative low-budget money spinner.
2011 / Ebook / 130 pages / USA
****
I'd long been mildly curious about the serious Munsters/Addams, and this was a decent overview of which stolen plots worked, what's so bad it's good and the more significant legacy. I could probably still get sucked in if I allowed it, but I'll leave the remaining 1,220 episodes for the time being.
2013 / Ebook / 107 pages / UK
***
Hypothesises the smartness driving the paranoid sausagefest splatterfest. Interesting until he runs out of worthwhile topics and falls back on the history of monsters and stuff, but his brief summary of Alien as "essentially one long tracking shot through a dangerous birth canal" gets a round of applause.
