Haunt of Fear #15
"Chatter-Boxed!" from Haunt of Fear #15 (1952) delivers a chillingly dark twist on the everyday salesman trope, with Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein crafting a tale that turns domestic appliances into instruments of dread. Jack Davis’s sharp, grotesque art and Marie Severin’s bold coloring bring to life a nightmare where a man’s routine breakdown leads to a terrifying encounter with a couple whose household gadgets have a gruesome history—each one tested on the very salesmen who sold them. The cover by Graham Ingels, with its unsettling detail and eerie composition, perfectly captures the story’s macabre tone.
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A salesman has the bad luck to break down outside the home of a deranged old couple who cover him with a shotgun as they show him their refrigerator, stove, vacuum cleaner, grandfather clock, and television set that they made sure worked by testing it out on the body of each device's respective salesman. The man asks him "What do you sell?" and he replies "It's out in the car" while the old woman covers him with the shotgun. The old man goes to get it and he tells the woman "You don't want what I sell" and offers to pay anything to be released but she just waits for her husband to return with the device, a handy-dandy meat cutter...
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).