SOURCE: "The Genre of Horror," in A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, Pluto Press, 1984, pp. 112-39.

In the following essay, Barker praises the censored horror comics of the 1950s as meditations on doubt and subjective identification.

In 1964 Ballantine Books produced a series of reprints in pocket-book size of some of EC's classic horror tales. The back cover of one of these, a reprinting from Tales from the Crypt, exactly caught something important about these strips and their relations with their readers. Readers were being invited in with a wicked grin. 'Come in if you dare,' was the echoing chuckle. This is a very important clue to the nature of these comics. We are dared to come in and test, by reading the tales, the limits of our courage and endurance. The form of the dare in the first instance is...