I’m a bit of a sucker for horror anthologies, trained as I was from a young age by British weekly comic, Scream (which was pretty controversial in its day, 40 years ago).

Comics such as Tales from the Crypt, with their short, sharp, twisted morality tales, always hit the spot for me.

So I was really excited to check out Permadeath, a ‘two-shot of terror’ written by Jonathan Chance.

The first story, The Big Game, sees a group of old men in a home sneaking about at night to dabble in magic, with one of them deciding to use it for a very gross purpose indeed.

Scattershot, the second tale, sees a video game player pushing himself into trying to complete a game at the insistence of his friends, and going way too far in the process.

Both stories are technically well done, at least from a visual perspective (Rafael Lanhellas providing the art for The Big Game and Dell Barras on art duties for Scattershot).

I felt that The Big Game ended on such a sour note, in terms of the way the story beats were handled, that it made me feel kind of icky. Though that is arguably the point of a horror story, it just felt exploitative and unnecessarily leering, with the characters not doing enough to push back against their friend’s disgusting intentions.

Scattershot seems to fizzle out and, as shocking as the last scene is in terms of its art, I was just left with an overriding feeling of, ‘is that it?’.

Both competent stories and both competent, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed either story, ultimately. It’s a neat idea and I applaud the creators for trying something different, but this first pair of stories, assuming there’s going to be more, just didn’t work for me.