House of Fear! is an unnumbered one-shot digest sized issue from Murray Comics circa 1982-83.
It contains two stories - House of Fear!, originally from Haunted
Love #7, January 1975, reprinted in Scary Tales #33, July 1982; and Sleep, My
Love..., originally from Haunted Love #6, October 1974.
House of Fear! previously appeared in Murray Comics’ Planet Series 3 No. 2 issue of Haunted
Love in 1980, and I believe this is where the House of Fear! version is
sourced from.
What’s interesting is the rather radical surgery performed
on the strip to reformat it into the digest-sized dimensions, as you can see
from the sample scans above. This is one way in which the Murray digests differ
from the Yaffa/Page digests, as the latter tend to simply be scaled down
versions of the source material with their pages otherwise intact and in
proportion. This sort of surgery has a long track record from Murray, going
back at least to the 1960’s Superman Super Library series.
Murray digest-size titles and issues aren’t as common as the
Yaffa/Page ones, at least for the superhero and horror genres, but there are a
few around, and pending a bit more research I want to present another one soon.
Update 4/1/2021: The cover image was also used on a pulp novel John Sinclair #196.
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