Book Review: Monster Massacre

Monsters are an odd phenomenon in the human psyche.  When we’re little, the thing under the bed or hiding in the closet seems entirely too real.  But once those fears have been conquered, kids with vivid imaginations often embrace the creatures of their nightmares, and suddenly the razor-sharp fangs and slimy exteriors become endearing, instead of frightening.  For those kids, Titan Books has just released Monster Massacre, a compendium of comics, short stories, and artwork of those things that go bump in the night.  The book features a wide variety of creepy crawlies, from Lovecraftian cephalopods to mutant insects to demi-gods to good old fashioned dinosaurs.  Essentially, if you like monsters, there’s something here for everyone.  Unfortunately, the quality of the work presented is as varied as the creatures lurking within.

As a fan of the old horror anthologies like EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Fear, my favorite parts of Monster Massacre are the self-contained stories.  Stories like Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s Angel of Death, about a mysterious illness that’s striking the people of a small village, are great.  We learn about the setting, the major players, we watch the plot play out, and then there’s a resolution.  I wasn’t a big fan of the resolution to this particular plot, though, which is disappointing coming from legends like Simon and Kirby.  But then there are fun little stories like Andy Kuhn’s Ira Gershwin: Monster Puncher, which tells the hidden history of the Broadway lyricist who, along with his more famous brother George, wrote some of the most endearing and enduring show tunes in the early part of the 20th Century.  It’s a well-constructed romp through 1920s rural Mississippi, with a few fun twists and turns along the way.  Another highlight is Seasons, written and drawn by Mark Nelson.  The artwork, depicting an epic battle of the personification of the elements, is incredibly detailed and almost ethereal with the use of gray ink for lines and highlights.  However, the writing is so dense with its own mythology that it eventually becomes irrelevant and the artwork winds up doing all the heavy lifting instead.  There are a handful of other good examples of tight, contained storytelling that helps give the collection that EC Comics feel.

What doesn’t work as well are the stories that appear to have been cut from a larger work and are only included because they feature a monster of some kind at this particular junction.  For example, Deep Six by Jerry Paris, Dave Elliott, and Arthur Suydam drops us in the middle of an underwater operation where a crew of divers is trying to stop a leaking oil rig.  That would be fine except there’s so much banter and names being tossed around that there’s clearly a history between these characters that we’re not privy to.  It becomes even more confusing when government agents fly out to the rig in the middle of a hurricane to see if someone is on board, only to find he’s not even there.  Then they leave as soon as the monster that’s causing the leak starts to attack the surface.  They don’t serve any purpose here whatsoever, but they clearly have a more important role in whatever the larger story is that this chapter has been cribbed from.  When entire pages are dedicated to character arcs that don’t go anywhere or have no bearing on the plot of this story, it gives the book the appearance of being thrown together without a lot of forethought.  There are a few more examples of this type of unrelated story in the book, and almost all seem to be in part the work of the book’s editor, Dave Elliott.  I appreciate his interest in wanting to bring a collection of monster stories to fruition, but the inclusion of these non-sequitur pieces hurts the overall cohesion of the book and leaves the reader confused and annoyed rather than wanting to delve deeper into the source material.

In between the stories are creator bios, which are informative, and brilliantly give you the person’s online contact info so you can find them on Twitter, DeviantArt, or anywhere else they have their work on the web.  I love that idea and I hope more art books follow suit.  In addition there are quite a few individual pieces of monster “pin-up” art scattered throughout the book, and these are almost all great.  However, it’s also one of those features that you won’t really come back to very often, either.

There’ s one more aspect of the book that I’m really not crazy about, and that’s the cover.  Don’t get me wrong – I can appreciate a beautiful, big-breasted woman in tattered clothes squatting down for no particular reason as much as the next hetero guy, but…that’s the image you chose for a book called Monster Massacre?  Really?  Not, you know, a monster?  Oh, she’s a demon or a shaman or something?  Riiiiiight…

In the end, I can’t say I’ll be picking up Monster Massacre again anytime soon.  The handful of good stories are fun, but the bad ones are so glaringly out of place that they overshadow the rest.  The Amazon page for the book claims this is Volume 1, so here’s hoping a little more effort is put into Volume 2 and beyond.

Monster Massacre is now available from Amazon and other fine book retailers.