Image credit: Dead Sky Publishing
I have a bit of a weakness for horror anthologies, due to being influenced from a young age by the British weekly comic Scream (which was quite controversial in its day 40 years ago).
Short, sharp, twisty morality tales like Tales from the Crypt have always been to my taste.
So I was super excited to check out Permadeath, a “two-shot of horror” written by Jonathan Chance.
In the first story, “The Big Game,” a group of old men sneak around the house at night, dabbling in magic, until one of them decides to use it for a very dastardly purpose.
The second story, “Scattershot,” follows a video game player who, at the urging of a friend, tries to complete the game, but ends up going too far in the process.
Both stories are technically well-made, at least from a visual standpoint (The Big Game has art by Rafael Lanhellas, while Scattershot has art by Dell Barras).
In terms of how the storyline was handled, The Big Game felt like it ended on such an unpleasant note that it left me feeling a bit sick – surely that’s the point of a horror story, but it felt exploitative and unnecessarily nasty as the characters don’t try hard enough to resist their friend’s unpleasant intentions.
Scattershot seemed to lose steam and while the final scene was artistically stunning, it left me with the overwhelming impression of “Is that it?”
They’re both good stories, and both are good, but ultimately I can’t say I particularly enjoyed either story, they’re great ideas and I applaud the creators for trying something different, but these first two stories, assuming there will be more, just didn’t work for me.
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