Big Little Books Part 2

 

Aside from Moon Mission, the other Big Little Book I owned as a kid was The House of Horrors (1968), in which the Fantastic Four battles a shape-changing magician named Dr. Weird.

William Johnstone wr0te the story, which (like Moon Mission) is silly but fun. And the book is blessed with wonderful art work by Herbe Trimpe, who was emulating Jack Kirby's style for this assignment. (I am told that 2 or 3 panels may be Kirby--images taken directly from the comic book.)

I have reaquired this book as an adult and the illustrations are in black-and-white. I swear I remember them being in color when I read this as a kid. My current copy is softcover and I have learned from an old-school Marvel Comics group on Facebook that the original printing was in hardcover and were indeed in color. I'll have to keep an eye out for an inexpensive copy of that one.

Anyway, Dr. Weird wants to conquer the world and decides getting the F.F. out of the way is a good place to start. He lures them into his house at "the edge of town," where the heroes unwisely seperate to search different corridors.

Dr. Weird has set a trap for each of them. He appears as a fire breathing dragon when attacking Johnny, blasting him with flames hot enough to even potentially harm the Human Torch. But Johnny feeds his own flames with books from the surrounding shelves and forces the dragon to retreat. Before doing so, Dr. Weird transforms himself into a deluge of water, leaving Johnny unable to flame on and break out of the now-locked room.

Why Dr. Weird didn't start the battle as a deluge of water isn't discussed. In fact, Dr. Weird's main weakness as a villain is probably his distinct lack of tactical awareness. But I imagine the book's target audience of 8-year-olds probably didn't analyze his tactics in too much detail. The illustrations are simply too awesome.

Reed, soon after, is attacked by a hoarde of pythons, most of which turn out to be illusions and one of which is actually Dr. Weird. Like Johnny, Reed wins a pyrrhic victory, strangling most of the snakes while Dr. Weird gets away. Reed finds himself tangled in what the prose refers to as "one hundred knots," though Trimpe didn't take this literally in his accompanying illustration. 

Poor Ben Grimm has the most embarassing outing. He finds a basement full of old furniture. Assuming that one of the objects is Dr. Weird, he starts smashing everything. Dr. Weird finally appears in an avalanche of boulders pouring out of a closet door. When Ben starts clobbering the boulders, he breaks open a canister of sleep gas.

Why Dr. Weird didn't use poison gas is not discussed. The guy really was a lousy tactician.

Sue has the best outing, defeating Dr. Weird's attempt to shred her to pieces with her force field and foiling his attempt to use his magic wand to simply "disappear" her by disappearing first via her invisibility power.

Dr. Weird retreats yet again and Sue releases the others from the rooms they were trapped in. (I like the nice touch of Reed stretching his limbs down corridors to get the cramps out after the others help untangle him.) 

What follows is a fun chase scene through the house, with Dr. Weird constantly changing shape to either attack the F.F. or avoid their counter-attacks. Finally, the villain lures the heroes into a pit, but Reed soon has a plan for smashing out again:

They finally run Dr. Weird to ground in the house's garage, which has been turned into a maze of mirrors. Dr. Weird makes another tactical error--this time, a fatal one. A "disappearing" spell bounces off one of the mirrors and reflects back on the magician, bringing him to an ironic end.

Like Moon Mission, it's the illustrations that made The House of Horrors memorable enough for me to track down again as an adult. But in both cases, the writers put together a fun story designed to give the illustrators a lot of great images to draw. 

By the way, there's an excellent post about this book on THIS BLOG.