Suburban Nightmares: The Science Experiment

Suburban Nightmares

by Larry Hancock, Michael Cherkas, John Van Bruggen

The fifties—a time of mindless happiness masking fear. Fear of the bomb, fear of commies, fear of dandelions.

Genres: Comics

112 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

Larry Hancock was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1954. He gradu­ated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics and since then has toiled in Toronto as a Chartered Accountant. However, counter to the view of accountants as boring, he has written The Silent Invasion and The Purple Ray with Michael Cherkas and Suburban Nightmares with Cherkas and John van Bruggen. He enjoys reading mysteries, science fiction and comic books (as if you could not guess!).

Reviews

[Allan Olley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an anthology of stories about horror, suspense and paranoia in the 1950s suburbs told as black and white comics. The exact style of drawing varies a bit but the simple iconic artwork helps treat the subject matter well. The stories are very twilight zone with often macabre twists, but also some playful humor. The dialogue and characters are usually pretty straightforward but it is still entertaining.

I read this in a recent (2024) reprint that includes one story not found in the original 1990 collection (a 1995 story entitled Mr Ford), but it fits the character of the other stories (it is about 110 pages of comic with about 7 pages of front matter). I have requested that the librarians add this new edition but no luck yet, so I'm putting my review here.

[Mike Aragona · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Silent Invasion. So much that I thought I'd easily love this book, too. And, I really started getting into The Science Experiment... and then we switched to Suburban Nightmares. Huh? TSE was great. SN were... okay. It just left me feeling flat. Perhaps if I had read them over time, individually, as opposed to during the same road trip I would have been able to enjoy each story more. But, that was not the case, and thus it got a low rating from me.