Tales of Terror

This beautifully designed, oversize paperback teems with the decapitated heads, bug-eyed monsters, and stilleto-heeled femme fatales that filled the pages of EC Comics in the '50s -- well-known series like Shock SuspenStories and Two-Fisted Tales, as well as lesser-known but intricately campy comics such as A Moon, A Girl...Romance. There are interviews with the artists of these wild pulp fantasies, none very insightful; better are the authors' intermittent pieces about such topics as the Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring industry committee that resulted in the folding of many of these gleefully lurid creations.