Dates
- Cover date
- October-November 1954
- On sale
- August 15, 1954
- Pages
- 36
Editions and covers
- Original editionSource ↗
Creators
Stories
- 4-Sided Triangle · 8 pages
A farmer tries to molest a retarded girl he keeps to work on the farm as a servant. She tells him that she's got a boyfriend that she sees in the evening. She goes out into the field to the scarecrow. The farmer gets the idea of disguising himself as the scarecrow so he can get what he wants from the girl. The farmer's wife is awakened by the sound of their love-making and goes out to the field with a pitchfork. When the girl tells the wife about her boyfriend, the wife tries to demonstrate to her that it's only straw by repeatedly stabbing the scarecrow with the pitchfork.
- In Character · 7 pages
Bela Kardiff murders all of his Hollywood contacts at a dinner honoring him after he has been typecast in horror pictures and then the company decides to dump him because they are not going to do horror pictures any longer.
- Timetable · 1 pages
Mr. Gardent just had a terrible argument with his wife, so he decided to play a prank on her. Knowing that it was her bridge night and she was away from the house, he snuck in, wrote a phony suicide note and took a bunch of sleeping pills, confident in the fact that she would come home, find him, and get him rushed to the hospital in order to save his life. What he did not know was that Sylvia, upset over the argument, skipped her bridge night out, took 20 of the sleeping pills, wrote a note and was already laying dead in the adjoining room.
- The Assassin · 6 pages
An assassin unknowingly pursues his mark to the backstage of a theater and kills the man just before the curtain rises. It turns out that the assassin has walked in on the opening scene of a play about President William McKinley and the man who assassinated him!
- The Operation · 7 pages
A diamond thief surgeon cuts open his two goons to smuggle diamonds into the country in their bodies. When he gets a big one worth $250,000 he tells the men he will operate on both of them, but place the diamond in only one so that they will not be tempted to disappear. The doctor sends them a note saying he will be delayed because he knows that this will play on their greed and they will turn on each other. They kill each other, but the doctor did not place the stone in either of them but himself. But the diamond was paste and it quickly caused the doctor's death due to poisoning.
Reprinted in
Shock Suspenstories (1981), Shock Suspenstories (1994), The Fantagraphics EC Artists' Library (2012), The EC Archives: Shock SuspenStories (2015), EC Horror Library of the 1950's (1970)