We begin with our cover story, "The Gardener of Eden" by John Albano and Jim Aparo. When Dr. Eden and his new wife move into their new home, it comes with Boris, a deformed workman, who at first scares Eve, Eden's wife. Eve eventually feels sorry for the deformed man and when he begins to get on the Doctor's nerves, Eve makes him the gardener. As the months fly by, the garden is transformed, but the Doctor begins to feel jealous of all the time his wife spends with Boris.
In a fit of rage, Dr. Eden murders Boris with an ax. When his wife proclaims innocence, she only pitied Boris, he repents and makes the body the recipient of the first artificial computer-fed brain. Afterward, Eden falls asleep only to awaken strapped to the operating table. It turns out the new brain has made the dim-witted gardener into a completely new person with ambitions of conquest. He has already replaced Eve's brain and plans to do the same to the doctor as well in order to begin building a new army of perfect thinkers. As Cain muses about Boris we see him sneaking up on Cain, scalpel in hand.
That is followed by a "Cain's game Room" by Lore Shoberg, later known as Lore Orion, a country music composer mostly associated with Tim McGraw. for whom he not only wrote songs but drew album covers. Shoberg's comic work was signed simply "LORE."
Next, we have "Image of Darkness" by Robert Kanigher and Gray Morrow. Cain awakens at 11:00 one night to the sound of something breaking in the room of tenant Andrew Foster. He rushes to the room to find his girlfriend, Susan, smashing an ancient mirror in his room and accusing him of cheating on her. When Andrew sees the broken mirror he breaks down. he explains that before he came to Cain's house, he lived in a different time, in a different body. When he walked the streets, people threw things at him and children taunted him for his misshapen, hunched, and hideous body. But one day going through his basement he found an old mirror and when he cleaned it, it cleaned the ugliness from his body. He left the basement, not as a hideous monster but as a handsome young man.
He emerged into a new time, modern times. He moved into Cain's house and that night he went out dancing and met Susan. He brought her back to his room but at the stroke of midnight his body reverted to its old form and so he ran away from Susan. The next morning he was transformed back into his new body and returned. However, each night at midnight he would have to leave. Susan thought he was seeing someone else and so acted out. Now, with the mirror destroyed, he will transform one last time.
Susan says she does not believe a lying word he has said, but as the clock strikes midnight, he reverts to his old, ugly self and is sucked back into the mirror and back to his own time. Susan tells Cain that she did not care how he looked on the outside, that he was beautiful inside.
Something must be said about the artwork here. It is not the standard Morrow we expect and I see the hand of another in the pencils, perhaps Howard Chaykin who assisted Morrow at one time.
We end with "Nobody Loves a Lizard" by Virgil North and Don Heck. North is the pseudonym of Mary Skrenes. Little orphan Bobby was always considered a strange kid. His parents were rumored to be witches and he loved to make pets of the lizards and snakes and frogs he found. One day when caught with a new pet lizard, Bobby is put in a closet where he finds a talking lizard caught in a mousetrap. The lizard says he was sent by his parents to help him. Bobby remarks that his parents are dead but the lizard says he will explain everything later. The lizard says that someone is coming to adopt him but that Miss Evans, who locked him in the closet, is going to try and stop it from happening. When she comes to him with some milk (drugged to keep him quiet), Bobby locks her in the closet and presents himself to the couple.
He meets the beautiful Mrs. Green and as he leaves with her we see the long green tail peeking out from the bottom of her dress. This is Mary Skrenes's first professional work and she came to DC Comics under the tutelage of Dick Giordano. Skrenes is best known as co-creator (with Steve Gerber) of Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics. She worked on other Marvel books such as The Defenders and Guardians of the Galaxy. She was the creator of and inspiration for Beverly Switzler, the companion of Howard the Duck. She wrote a half dozen horror stories for DC under the name Virgil North, and began a long collaboration with Steve Skeates. According to Skeates, a number of his mystery stories were actually co-written with Skrenes, but she insisted on submitting them under Skeates's name alone because of bad blood between her and editor Joe Orlando.
Skrenes wrote several episodes of Jem, GI Joe, and Transformers in the 1980s. In 2004 she reunited with Gerber to write the short-lived comic Hard Time.
The entire book has been reprinted in Showcase Presents: The House of Mystery #1 (2006) and House of Mystery: The Bronze Age Omnibus #1 (2019).
Edited by Joe Orlando.
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