Haunt of Fear #5 (1992)

John and Becky are lovers but they're married to other people. The puritanical townsmen would never tolerate such behavior, so they keep their affair a secret until John's wife, Priscilla, finds out. To silence her, John kills her and throws her body in the lake. Then, Becky's husband discovers John and Becky embracing and Becky accuses John of attempted rape. The townsmen sentence him to a repeated dunking in the lake as punishment, but every time he goes underwater, John sees Priscilla's corpse drawing nearer. Finally, the dunking seat comes up empty. Priscilla has John all to herself, now.

The King is grief-stricken when his little princess dies after falling from a tower. If only somebody had heard her cries for help over the court's revelry. The unhinged King orders all noise in the kingdom to cease, with severe punishment for any who disobey. Finally, the people can't take anymore and they exile the king to a quiet shack, where he must remain absolutely still or be tormented by the maddening sound of a metronome. When fear of a spider makes him jump and causes more ticking, the King throws himself off a cliff to escape it.

Released from prison just two days earlier, ex-con Weldon made his way to Fairview Cemetery to inspect the grave of a deceased ex-partner in crime with him ten years earlier, Paul Kleeg. When he dug up the coffin and opened it, Kleeg's skeleton was there.....grinning at Weldon. Before he died, Weldon told the Police that when he leaned over the skeleton of Kleeg, a hand reached out, grabbed him......and stabbed him.

An escaped convict beats in a woman's skull with a club in order to steal her food out in a shack set in the swamp. The convict looks up from his meal, only to see a huge hulking brute of a man looking at him. He flees in terror only to have the brute follow him clutching the club. He faces several dangers of the swamp, yet still the brute pursues with the club. Finally, he can go no further, and begs for mercy. The brute ignores his pleas and hands him back the club telling him he forgot it at his house and leaving him mentally unhinged from the stress.

A farmer's wife and the hired hand are having an affair, so the farmer kills the hand one evening and buries him along with some flower seeds he had purchased that day in the field. When the farmer's wife leaves for the city to inquire as to Cliff's whereabouts, the farmer corners his wife in an alley and threatens her with violence. She clouts him with a lead pipe and stuffs him into a garbage can which the sanitation workers load into the compactor truck. When the wife returns to the farm through the field she comes across the newly sprouted flowers and realizes what must have happened.

Stanley and Ned run a circus freak-show. They keep their "employees" as virtual indentured servants, forcing them to work for next-to-nothing, unable to pay off the loans Stan and Ned gave them. One day, the two men notice a misshapen figure lurking in an alley. They pursue him into a building, shouting offers of employment in the show. When they catch up to the figure, they find out he's a mutated human from a nuclear-irradiated future-Earth. And Ned and Stan have just been pressed into duty in a future freak-show as rare "normal" humans.

Astronauts land on a deserted planet and begin hunting for archaeological evidence of the former inhabitants. They find a huge skeleton of a creature that apparently walked on all fours, but are baffled by its nature. As they take off in their spaceship once again, we are given an overview of the creature. It turns out the astronauts are tiny aliens, and the skeleton was that of a human baby.

Captain Vance Kaye is the commanding officer of an exploratory spaceship. He's obsessed with searching every derelict ship his crew discovers, but nobody knows why. The latest derelict carries a diary that relates the story of how it came to be floating lifelessly in space. The crew had accidentally landed on a planet of vicious exiled criminals, who slaughtered the crew, keeping only the captain alive to pilot the ship to other planets. While in space, the captain sabotaged the ship, sacrificing his life to kill the criminals on-board with him. The captain was Vance's father.

A young boy is adopted by a couple who turn out to be vampires and only want to fatten him up to drain his blood. The surprise is on them, though, as he turns out to be a werewolf and tears them to shreds.

A landlady falls for the Jekyll of a Jekyll-n-Hyde type, and when she discovers his closet of severed heads, she becomes his seventh victim.

This story is told by a mansion. The occupant is a lunatic old woman who lost her mind when her husband was killed in WWI and kept her new born infant uneducated and in shackles for 40 years. But this night, her 'baby' is dying, and a luckless traveler is clubbed into unconscious and when he awakens, finds that he has become the new 'baby.'

A man uses his new garbage disposal to eliminate the remains of his wife's body, but his plumber friend who installed it doesn't have experience and connects it to the water intake, so when one of the man's friends tries to get a glass of water his wife's gory remains come oozing out.

The old witch tells us a story with two endings. The first ending relates what would have happened to the protagonist if he had pursued a relationship with a new office girl who turns out to be a ghoul using human meat to feed her mother's cats, but the old witch tells us that's not what actually happened. What actually happened was he was so taken with her beauty he mistakenly tumbled out of an open window 20 stories to a very easy death while being cursed for his stupidity by the girl.

A man snowbound in an Alaskan cabin makes his obese wife into candles and oil for him to read by.

This editorial illustrated page purports that the Communists are the ones trying to destroy the comic magazine industry, citing the Soviet "Daily Worker" newspaper and Dr. Frederick Wertham.

A woman who was murdered by her husband for her money comes back from the dead to fulfill her wifely role in a zombified way. He begs her to return to the grave and says he is sorry but she refuses saying "till death do us part means both of us die. Not just one." while calling him to bed.

A man murders his wife making it look like a suicide in order to marry a wealthy woman. As he leaves her grave site in the evening he notices he has picked up an unwanted companion, his dead wife's shadow. At first the shadow ruins his relationship with the wealthy woman, then strangles her while framing her husband by appearing to a policeman around a corner to be a victim's shadow being strangled by the husband's shadow. The husband tells the truth on the stand but obviously the jury doesn't believe him and he is executed and buried next to his dead wife. Only then does her shadow return to the grave and rest.

The wife of a brilliant surgeon and her lover have cause to regret their affair when the doctor cuts off their heads and places the woman's head on the man's body and the man's head on the woman's body.

A man who has barricaded himself in an unprovisioned Arctic cabin with a vampire outside feels he's safe since he can leave once the sun comes up until he remembers that the Arctic nights can be very long...

A father thinks he has twins, a beautiful girl and a deformed girl. When he shoots the hateful, vindictive monstrosity to free himself and his beautiful daughter from her presence, he realizes that his wife had given birth to a Siamese infant with two heads joined at the back of the skull and hidden the secret from him.

A man in a Puritan colony kills his wife and dumps her body with a weight attached into a pond in order to solicit another man's wife to run away with him. He is caught kissing her and so is sentenced to three dunkings in the pond, where on the third dunk, the dead wife loops the coil of rope over him and pulls him off the chair while he drowns.

In this grim fairy tale a remorseful king demands silence after his boisterous merry-making prevents him from hearing his daughter's shouts for help leading to her death. Eventually his demands on the peasants get so absurd he orders them to stop breathing because of the racket he claims to hear they make. They revolt, and one of them sews a sensitive metronome into the king's body that goes off with the slightest disturbance, and when the still-lying king brushes away an insect, the sound so bothers him he throws himself off a cliff.

This story is told by a shack in the swamp whose occupant is an idiot cannibal. He disposes of his victims beneath the rotting supports of the shack and eventually it collapses bringing him down into the bog to join his victims.

Notice of cancellation of New Trend titles.

A man in an adulterous relationship deals with the guilt of his mistresses' suicide by campaigning against all forms of public affection until he finally has a law passed requiring separate cemeteries for men and women. The good women will not stand for this however, and they unbury themselves during the night to rebury themselves next to their mates. At first he doesn't believe the gravedigger when he relates what is happening so he stays in the cemetery at night and observes them rise. His former mistress drags him back into her grave.

This story is told by the skull of a sadistic animal trapper in Africa who traps animals only in order to inflict pain on them before he kills them. One day he falls victim to one of his own pit traps and as various sorts of animals gather round, the ants strip his flesh clean.

One girl so desperately wants to be in Phil Vitale's all-girl orchestra that she is willing to kill herself so he gives her a lethal injection that makes her into a zombie. She assumes that they are all zombies and she doesn't care because she still wants to be in the band, and in a way, she gets her wish as they turn out to be Phil Vitale's all-ghoul orchestra.

A man is so unsatisfied with the commercial attitudes of his fellow morticians, including that of the son-in-law he fruitlessly tried to impart a sense of art, that he builds his own robot mortician to euthanize him and do a job he himself would be proud of.