Lately, horror books are polarized. They can be great like The Theater or abysmal like Severed. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror #4 contains two stories that parallel the current state of horror comics: one’s a blast and the other’s a turd. “The Dunwich Horror” follows four spell casters who venture out to contain the elder-god Yog-Sothoth. Yog’s a protean creature of darkness doing terrible things like munching the heads off bunnies. Joe Lansdale, the writer of this story and other great tales of the macabre, launches us right into the fight to get out the spell of containment.

The art effectively uses dark tones. The light and shadowing works to perfection in this tale, especially when we have the candlelights mixed with flashlight beams out in the countryside under a starry night.

There’s ample gore to please, and the depiction of Yog-Sothoth works as well as the South Park depiction of Cthulhu.

The spell casting doesn’t go well for the four. I won’t say anymore because I don’t want to spoil the story. If you are a fan of Ash from The Evil Dead series, you will get a kick out of this story.

Lovecraft would be proud of this one.

“The Hound” pissed me off. The art is great—dark and moody. Motion blur and watercolor type textures make for a gripping visual style.

The type, though, is illegible against the background. I gave up trying to read because of the thin white cursive on the black background makes the words indistinguishable. A shame.

Score: “The Dunwich Horror” 5/5; “The Hound” 2/5

Writers: Joe R. Lansdale, Robert Weinberg Artists: Peter Bergting, menton3 Publisher: IDW Publishing Price: $3.99 Release Date: 1/11/12