“Dead Beats”

Tales from the Crypt meets Empire Records in this new anthology from A Wave Blue World in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I am a close personal friend of one of the editors of this anthology, Joe Corallo, as well as one of the contributors, Matt Summo.  Please note as well that several stories deal with sensitive and triggering subject matter, like suicide and self-harm.)

Cover by Lisa Sterle

Written and Illustrated by Various
Edited by Joe Corallo and Eric Palicki

The Dead Beats music shop is filled with deadly secrets. Run by the mysterious Shoppe Keeper, customers can browse through cursed records, evil sheet music, and instruments of the damned! Our host has dozens of spooky stories to tell you from some of the top names in comics. You’re gonna wanna put on your favorite album when you crack open this anthology.

An anthology is like a mixtape. (That’s what we called Spotify playlists back in the day, young people.) It’s both carefully curated but still uniquely individual.  Each part of the mixtape/anthology can work on its own, but creates a whole new work when in concert with the other parts. And now, six months after Rex Manning Day, but just in time for Halloween, comes the tale of the haunted Dead Beats record store, in which every item for sale has a spine-chilling story to tell.

What immediately makes this anthology stand out from others that I have read (and reviewed) before is the use of interstitials, which take place with the Shoppe Keeper in the record store.  Playing as late night horror host in the vein of Svengoolie or Elvira, moments with the Shoppe Keeper serve as bridge from story to story, picking up on the threads from the previous story before leading into the next.  This turns the anthology from just a jumbled collection of moments into a cohesive work, adding a dash of storytelling to keep the reader entertained.  It helps to curate the theme well without having each story lose its own identity. That said, there is still some room for improvement. Grouping the stories around subject matter – – such as sheet music, instruments, and records – – would enhance that storytelling layer, as long as there are enough stories in each section to evenly distribute the interstitials.  And the final interstitial, revealing the presumed fate of the customer/reader, is a bit predictable, but will still raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

As with any good anthology, the stories themselves are hit and miss, some being better than others.  Those that work the best are the ones with the most emotional resonance, whatever emotion that may be.  Effective horror plays on your mind and plays it in a slow burn way, something you see executed quite well in Eric Palicki and Liana Kangas’s “The Interview,” “Renfamous and Caroline Autospy’s “Metronome,” and Christof Bogacs and Giles Crawford’s “Earworm.”  Taylor Esposito’s lettering in “Metronome,” and the artwork in “Earworm,” in particular underscores the horror in small ways: the ticking of a metronome, a small spider (or several). The smallest features can be the ones that invoke the most fear, apprehension, and dread.

Ghost stories don’t also have to instill fear.  Vita Ayala and Raymond Salvador’s “Let’s Stay Together” and Tres Dean and Kyler Clodfelter’s “Hey Darling, Do You Gamble?” make you long for their protagonists and their desires for just one more moment with their lost loves.  Some stories also have a dual purpose of scaring and teaching.  Nadia Shammas and Sweeney Boo’s “Reversed Cards” dispels popular myths and misconceptions about the tarot.  Kwanza Osajyefo and Eva Cabrera’s “ABM” is a murder tale that spooks you both in the act of murder itself and the racism at the heart of that murder.

It doesn’t have to all be emotion driven, though, to be good.  Sometimes the right spooky story to get you in the spooky spirit are the ones that are pure blood, guts, and gore — the cheap Halloween candy equivalent of storytelling.  And those appear here in fair measure, from “Grotesque” by Cameron Deordio and Brent Schoonover to Daniel Kibblesmith and Rafer Roberts’s “There Might Be Monsters.”

Whether it’s creeping fear, pure bloodlust, or wistful reminiscing, all these stories (and the ones that work the best) have one thing in common: close integration with the source topic of music. When music works in beautiful tandem and connects with the horror in an organic way, you craft an attention grabbing story.  When one has more emphasis than the other, the story elements end up muddled.

Although this may not have been intentional in solicitation, praise is due to Corallo and Palicki for ensuring representation from first page to final scene.  The Shoppe Keeper is a woman of color.  LGBT characters are front and center in several stories, but their sexuality isn’t treated as otherness; it’s just a part of them. The creators that are a part of this anthology come from several underrepresented communities in the industry. Visual sequential storytelling belongs to everyone, and everyone has something valuable to tell. More of this in comics, please.

Will “Dead Beats” shock you, shock you with its deviant behavior?  Maybe.  Will it have you wondering about your deepest primal fears, perhaps confirming some of them or revealing new ones? Quite possibly.

Damn the man. Save the Dead Beats!