Edgar Allen Poe’s Haunt of Horror #2

The second of three installments in a limited series produced by Marvel’s Max line of mature comics, Edgar Allen Poe’s Haunt of Horror does pretty much what you’d expect; adapts Poe’s various poems and stories.  However, you’ve never seen any of his stories like this before.  This issue adapts 4 of his works; “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Spirits of the Dead”, “Eulalie” and “The Lake”.  The first story is a pretty straight-forward adaptation of the Tell-Tale Heart, and while the visuals are disturbingly gory, it’s nothing particularly special.  The second installment is a story set to the poem “The Spirits of the Dead”.  This one is a step I the proper direction, twisting the words of the poem into a narrative for a tale where the Ku Klux Klan attempts to lynch a black man only to be overwhelmed by a horde of Yankee zombies from the Civil War.  The best story in the issue is the adaptation of “Eulalie”.  I really don’t want to ruin the twist for you, I really don’t.  But the whole concept, the way they work around Poe’s words, is disturbingly brilliant and the whole concept is very nasty and uncomfortable.  The last one, The Lake, once again uses Poe’s poem as a narrative to tell a story of diabolical murder.  In this one, a man seduces a young woman into coming back with him to his lake house, where he murders her in her sleep and dumps her body in the lake among a watery grave of his other victims.  Anybody’s whose seen Creepshow or any episode of Tales from the Crypt can guess what comes next.  After each adaptation, the poem or story-itself is included for your reading pleasure.  I actually recommend you read the poem first, before reading the adaptation.  That way you can really appreciate the lengths the writers and artists went through to work a story around Poe’s words.