Weekly Dose of Weird!

House of Secrets #93 -- Oh no! Someone's murdered Brother Power! Still, Wrightson is Wrightson...

I. "Lonely In Death!" -- A young woman living in the house her mother left to her is convinced that her mom's ghost is trying to kill her, since she is lonely in the afterlife. Her brother at first tries to soothe her, then is sure she's gone loco. Imagine her surprise when her brother turns out to be the cause of her near-death experiences, until her spectral mom makes the save. Right? Or was she just so nuts that she made her brother lose it as well? Abel's not telling.

II. "Abel's Fables From The House of Secrets" -- Abel has some interesting pests in the House, and an interesting taste in decor.

III. "The Curse Of The Cat's Cradle" -- The new jefe on a banana plantation in Gutamala finds a giant stuck in a quicksand bog, and the man he is replacing trying to steal the giant's horde of treasure. A convenient cave-in causes the treasure, quicksand, and giant all to vanish, but there's no time for that now; people are waiting for their bananas.

IV. "Nightmare" -- Dirk falls into darkness, unable to pierce the inky shroud with his flashlight. Sadly, that doesn't stop the beasties from finding him... until he wakes up, all a dream. Needless to say, when he goes to work, faking accidents to delay the construction of a building, one wrong step leaves him falling back into a familiar darkness all over again.

V. "The House of Secrets Speaks!" -- Letters from readers wherein Abel claims such correspondence is a fire hazard, and then asks "What's an 'EC'?"

VI. "The Beast From The Box" -- A botanist finds a strange box, and opens it, then is turned to stone by the green creature inside. The creature escapes, builds a new box for itself, then grows bigger. Repeating this process a couple of times, destroying whatever gets in its way each time, the botanist and his lovely assistant figure out that it's like an alien caterpillar, making coccons for it's metamorphasis. So like any good American, they blow the thing up when it's vulnerable and defensless.

VII. "Abel's Fables" -- More hijinks ensue, including a poor guy who's lost his head.

VIII. "Never Kill A Witch's Son!" -- Randy and Andria, married amateur murders, shove Andria's Uncle Ken out of a window to collect the insurance money. Ken's mother, who knows they did it, is played off as a senile old coot, and locked in her room where she chants strangely. But when strange things start to occur -- like Andria seeing Ken outside her window leaving a trail of blood, or his pipe being still lit, or hearing from a friend that she ate breakfast with him -- it's too much, and the woman has a breakdown. Which works out for Randy, who is planning on faking her suicide to collect her half of the money. In the latest of a series of badly planned steps, though, he ends up getting shoved out the same window; Andria is carted away to the nuthatch, and Ken's mom can't help but be amused how her "black magic" brought these morons the justice they deserved.

Overall Weird Factor: 4.5 (out of 5).

I'll try to explain this one rationally. Okay, I can't do that. One issue after the introduction of Swamp Thing, we've got a banana farmer in Guatamala caught in a giant's cat's cradle over a pit of quicksand and from there figuring out that the cat's cradle is actually a trail map. How can I rationalize that? Plus, the presence of Abel is always a nice touch, a callback to the old GhouLunatics. There's no denying it: this is one weird comic book.