Welcome to the 'Orribe 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat!

A couple of years ago I decided to take a look back at the old Horror Top Trumps cards I had enjoyed so much in my admittedly much mis-spent youth. And what I intended to be merely a few idle bits of bloggery, turned into an epic series of posts as  I set about trying to identify the origins of the imagery featured in these fondly remembered but highly lurid decks. The trail led to all manner of interesting places in horror history and fantastic fiction and provided a heaps of fun along the way. However sadly Top Trumps decks, even the blood-drenched, gore-splattered, utterly insane Horror Top Trumps are finite, and so last year the series drew to a close...

However I missed delving into obscure corners of monster culture and making daft remarks about some of the more demented cards. And so, after some thinking, I came up with a new concept for some bloggery, but running very much in the same vein. And this time, we wouldn't be limited in the slightest. And hence dear friends, the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat was summoned into existence! 

And what is this newly minted dread edifice I hear you cry? Well, it lies at the more disreputable end of Memory Lane, a crumbling old building of sinister aspect with bits dropping off here and there. Look even its 'h's have fallen off! You may think of it as the slightly grubbier, more troublesome little brother of my usual haunt the Great Library of Dreams. Like its more respectable elder sibling, the 'Orrible 'Ouse is a repository of many weird and wonderful things, however while the Great Library is host to many classics of fantastic fiction, the 'Orrible 'Ouse contains less reputable items, things that were always more state of the tat rather than state of the art. It is home to terrible tie-ins, silly spin-offs, and bizarre bric-a-brac. Here you'll find catastrophic comics, baffling board games, macabre merchandise, and curious confectionary. In short, it's a treasury of odd things, things that kids obsessed with monsters, robots, and dinosaurs (you know all that high-brow stuff) used to hanker for... Some are fondly remembered, some are maybe forgotten, and a fair few were mistakenly thought of as a good idea at the time. 

I've spent ages marshalling the spiders to spin the proper sort of cobwebs to festoon everything, and it took weeks to get that creak in the old wooden door just right. But now we're ready to open... I've spent a good deal of time rummaging around in here, and I've already got a good selection of bizarre items to share with you... So then dear friends, welcome to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible of Tat...