Uncanny Tales #27

From Atlas Comics' monthly anthology of dread, this December 1954 issue poses a question right on the cover that's hard to shake: "Why did no human being dare stay inside of the House?" Carl Burgos's cover art sets the scene with atmospheric menace — a looming, darkened mansion perched at the edge of a chasm, its gnarled dead trees clawing the night sky while a woman in red and a man scramble desperately away from the property. The eerie orange glow of the pit below and those twisted, reaching branches make this one of the more unsettling entries in Uncanny Tales' run, promising the kind of strange, shivery storytelling that made 1954 Atlas horror anthologies genuinely compelling.