The Shudderites Attack
"Well, what is it?" asked Zombos. He was cowering in back of Glenor Glenda, our usually highly strung maid.
"Wait a minute, my flashlight died again," I said, rapping it against the floor of the closet. It flickered into dull life. I was deep into Zombos' closet. Glenor had been doing her monthly dusting and tidying up when she came running to us, frightened out of her wits by what she discovered in his closet.
"It's a big one," I said, looking at the jagged four-foot hole in a rear wall of the closet. My flashlight failed again, leaving me crouching in the gloom. The closet lighting system was not working. Whatever caused the hole must have knocked it out also.
"Is anything missing?" asked Zombos, still cowering behind our trembling maid.
"Yes, I believe so. The shelves that were on this wall are gone," I said. "Let me think, what was in this corner? Oh, yes, the Troma Entertainment archives are gone."
"No great loss," said Zombos.
"And the Hammer archives."
"Damn!" said Zombos. "What about the Universal Studios archives?"
"Luck! I moved those last week. The Ed Wood shelf is missing, though." I added.
"Lord, no, not that!" cried Zombos. "What about Plan 9 From Outer Space?"
"Not here."
"Curses! The bastards!" yelled Zombos.
"Wait a minute: I found half of the Glen or Glenda DVD."
"What?" asked our maid.
"Not you, the DVD," I told her.
"Which half?" asked Zombos.
"Not sure," I replied.
"What ?" she asked again.
"Lord love a duck! Nothing! Never mind." I said. "It looks like it was chewed a bit, though." There was slimy, sticky residue on it.
"Chewed?" asked Zombos.
"Yes, chewed. By an amazingly large mouth judging by the size of these bite marks." I realized what I had just said and quickly retreated from the closet.
"I would suggest the exterminator be called in, " I told Zombos, dusting off my clothes.
He turned to Glenor. "Glenor, get Delbirt the exterminator over here right now." She hurried off.
While we waited for the exterminator, I grabbed a copy of Lullabies From Hell and went for the Claret.
Hideshi Hino's Lullabies From Hell is an essential tankōbon in any horrorhead's manga library. Hino is a queer duck, to be sure, and often incorporates much of his personal experience into his bizarre, often disturbing stories.
According to an interview he gave for The Comics Journal, it was after reading Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man that he felt the need to combine horror with a sense of fairy tale. This led him to mix monstrous birth defects, other-worldly transmogrifications, and hideous characters—inside and out—with Japanese folktales, producing uniquely creepy and culture-transcending stories of terror.
There's a whimsical grotesqueness in Hino's artwork: he fills his panels with people endowed with oversized, misshapen heads staring madly at the reader with bulging, blood-shot orbs filled with large, zigzagging veins. All is definitely not right in his world, as body parts, disgusting creatures, blood and corruption—both physical and psychological—splash amid normal scenes of home, work and play.
In the opening story, A Lullaby from Hell, he introduces himself as a mangaka (manga author), who is obsessed with those terrible, unmentioned things peeking from just below the surface of normalcy. He describes his fascination with horror came at an early age, nurtured by a demented mother who tormented him, a father he rarely saw who worked at the factory right behind his house, and his abusive "horrible Yakusa" brother.
Soon, as things, both living and dead bleed into one another in his mind, he begins to collect their parts in big glass jars so he can admire them for hours on end. In his admiration, he dreamed dreams of monsters and demons from hell that would, at his bidding, devour and torture people, especially those that abused him.
After being humiliated and abused once too often, he discovers he has a unique power: the ability to, with his drawings, kill people. And not just kill them, but mangle them, mash them, and do very nasty things to them. All because he could will it to be so. I bet you thought Stephen King was odd.
In the next story, Unusual Fetus- My Baby, once again our horror writer is dreaming that which should not be dreamed. He imagines his soon-to-be-born son as a "grotesque lizard" thing. Well, this is a horror story after all, and often we get what we wish for, don't we?
In this nasty tale of phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny gone haywire, his son is born a lizard-like thing with an unusual appetite that is not satisfied with baby formula. For a while, our horror writer uses this unfortunate event to his advantage, and successfully sells his impossible story. But fate always intervenes, and soon what is abnormal for him is normal for all.
Train of Terror begins with three children happily returning from a day trip to visit relatives. Soon their laughter turns to cries of terror as they meet the boogeyman (in this case, a demonic mountain goblin perhaps?) as their train enters a dark tunnel. Exiting the tunnel on the other side, only they remain unchanged. Their fellow passengers now have dark, mask-like expressions, and pupil-less eyes!
In the grand tradition of Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, our hapless children are alienated and hunted, with no one believing their strange accusations. One boy even suspects his parents of being different and wonders what is the thing in the large sack they are burying late one night? He is soon on the run, evading hordes of dark, pupil-less classmates, and adults that want to cause him serious bodily harm. In a unique twist, we are left with a happy ending, but not for long?
Now picture if you will, Morticia Addams sitting by a nice cozy fire, cups of hot and frothy, mashed eye-of-yak spiked cocoa steaming away, and Wednesday and Pugsley curled up around her like some lamenting felines as she reads the fairytale, Zoroku's Strange Disease. Never has a children's story conveyed such purulent corruption in it's narrative and textured artwork. How wonderful!
Zoroku, the titular hero of our story, yearns to draw colorful pictures, but the evil villagers make fun of him and his condition. It seems that a little rash has turned to a boil, and a boil to many, and many to something much, much worse.
Poor Zoroku becomes covered with a "colorful purulence," and the villagers and villagers' children drive him away to solitude, deep into the forest by a strange lake. Unfortunately for him, the purulence gives off an odor that would curl paint, and his boils ooze so badly, maggots infest them in the hundreds. My, what a quaint Brothers Grimm fairytale kind of picture, don't you think? But there is a happy ending.
Well, happy for a horror story kind of fairytale, that is.
