The quality of Chas Addams is not strained—it is a pictorial explosion of the demonic instincts in civilized man. As you look at his gruesome masterpieces week by week in The New Yorker you are somehow chillingly cheered to find that his satanic little children have survived their past ventures in walling each other up behind their basement's bricks, blowing the household to bits with thriftily home-made bombs, serving arsenic at their lemonade stands, and so on—and are still merrily working at simple problems in murder….

Mr. Addams gets away—a very long way, indeed, too—with murder. What is the widespread appeal of his beautifully drawn examples of distinguished depravity? For, as John O'Hara points out in his foreword [to "Chas Addams's Monster Rally"], "anyone who ever saw an Addams drawing is an Addams fan." Isn't it the same urge that makes the killed-with-a-blunt-instrument-of-strange-oriental-design mystery...