i've not usually had a very high opinion of the DC Comics horror anthologies of the late sixties and early scventies, though they did serve as the crucible for the company's rebirth of horror in the 1980s. However, since I have an abiding interest in Gothic fiction, I decided to read through the whole run of a title initially devoted to Gothic romance, SINISTER HOUSE OF SECRET LOVE. Wikipedia claims that DC sought to emulate the craze for DARK SHADOWS, though there might also be some influence from the Gothic paperbacks of the period. In any case, SECRET LOVE changed its name to SECRETS OF SINISTER HOUSE with issue #5, where the company burned off its last horror-romance tale. Then for the remainder of its run it was just another horror-anthology, complete with a female horror-host named Eve (later worked into the SWAMP THING cosmos).
The only mythcomic I discerned from the title's eighteen total issues was "The Man Hater" by Robert Kanigher and Bill Draut, and it's like the majority of anthologized horror-stories of the period, focused mostly on the notion of "the biter bit." However, Kanigher gets a little more into sexual mythology than the rest of SINISTER's contributors-- which might be said to make the story more "Gothic" than all the other offerings.
The story first shows us the central character Valla, in the act of offing her first husband, a big game hunter, by the unlikely method of dropping his stuffed rhino-head on him and thus impaling the unfortunate fellow. The next page reveals that Valla became a "black widow" murderess because she formed an Electra-style fixation on her father-- and when her father failed to return her affection, she killed him by rigging the brakes of his car-- skills she obtained while trying to emulate the father's interest in cars, by learning the "masculine" skill needed to work on automobiles.
Kanigher doesn't dive too deeply into Freudian waters, but it's pretty clear that Valla suffers from a repetition-compulsion: she likes the feeling of having killed her nasty dad, and she seeks to re-experience the emotional thrill by marrying rich older man and killing them, ostensibly for their inheritances (she calls one of these two husbands a "dirty old man" as she murders him). She claims that her first husband called her "princess," which Valla may or may not have instigated: either way, it sounds not unlike the sort of pet-name that a father might use for his daughter. "Man-hating" mania aside, Valla does maintain a strong relationship with one older male: a Hindu whom she addresses only as "Guru."
Kanigher wastes no time explicating Valla's relationship with Guru, and for the most part he exists just to set up the "biter bit" finish. At most one might hazard that Valla hangs out with the old fellow because he's too old to seem threatening and because he feeds her ego by telling her that she used to be a real princess in ancient India.
However, Valla's murder-lust makes her impatient for more victims,. and the police become aware of the unusual rapidity of her three mates' deaths. So they pursue Valla, who flees to her guru for help, as if he was indeed some all-powerful father-figure. The guru seems OK with helping Valla escape the long arm of the law, and he works a reincarnation-magic that sends the man-hater back in time, so that her soul will inhabit the body of that archaic princess mentioned earlier. (What happens to Valla's body? Who knows?)
Now, even though Guru has no hostile intentions toward Valla, he's patently Kanigher's means of doling out poetic justice to the murderess. And many writers would have simply placed the princess in some terrible but unimaginative situation-- being imprisoned for the rest of her life, or being sick with a plague. But Kanigher works things so as to avenge the men who were deceived with female deceptiveness, by having her wake to find herself about to die by the Hindu custom of suttee, wherein the wife is burned alongside the body of her deceased husband. Thus patriarchy has its fit revenge, as a girl desirous of being a princess found out that in India at least, to be a princess was to be little more than an appendage to the fate of a hated man-- even when the man himself was already dead.
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