February can be spooky-season; it's probably terrible out, right?

It's a 100-pager, odds are there should be something good in there, right?...right? From 1974, House of Mystery #228, featuring stories by Doug Moench, Robert Kanigher, Otto Binder, and others; and art by Sergio Aragonés, Frank Robbins, Bernie Wrighton, and more.

I kind of liked "The Wisdom of Many, the Wit of One," in which a schlubby businessman tries to protect his shrew wife from a vampire, unaware that she was seeing said vampire, his former business partner. The wife dresses like a vampire from the get-go, and the story is interspersed with assorted proverbs. "Stamps of Doom" is an old reprint, then "The Rebel," which features Alan Kupperberg and Neal Adams art in a short environmental fable that seemed like others I read as a kid: if you're aware of the problem, it's probably already too late...

In "The Wizard's Revenge" a reporter tries to debunk a small village's local legend, with mixed results. "The Man Who Murdered Himself" is three short pages from Bernie Wrightson; then "A Coffin for Bonnie and Clyde!" is an oddball from Robert Kanigher: an undertaker, fed up with shoddy materials and bad workmanship, has a proper coffin made for himself: solid iron, built like a battleship! Bonnie and Clyde want it, to store their ill-gotten loot, but the undertaker makes a break for it and is killed in a fiery wreck; possibly because he didn't properly strap down his ludicriously heavy coffin.

"The Dragon of Times Square" features a knight and a dragon, transported to and then from New York City; "Seven Steps to the Unknown" is revenge for a quiz show mishap; "Wheel of Fate" finds an archaeologist trapped by an artifact's predictions of doom--I hear 'Nostradamus' and check right out of these. Lastly, "The Fireworks Man" features an inventor whose new formula can make any picture, into a fireworks show. He is promptly killed by his business partner; an alarmingly common occurance in these stories; then has to revenge himself with his fellow ghosts killed in a bus crash by cut brakes. (Story by Michael Fleisher, art by Gerry Talaoc.)