Hard Looks #8

The eighth and final chapter of Dark Horse's gritty noir anthology series, Hard Looks closes out with a brooding cover by Harry O. Morris — a close, pixelated portrait of a heavyset man staring out with quiet, unsettling intensity, his face rendered in deep reds and oranges against a swirl of cool blues and blacks that feels both dreamlike and oppressive. It's a fitting visual mood for stories drawn from Andrew Vachss's hard-edged fiction, and Morris's fragmented, almost digitized style gives the image a raw, unsettling texture that suits the "Exit" title perfectly. Readers who appreciate crime fiction with genuine weight will find this 1993 series a compelling corner of the Dark Horse catalog.