I can still remember the day I stumbled upon my first Skywald Horror-Mood title; it was the summer of 1974, and I was an eight-year-old kid on holiday in Blackpool. I'd already experienced the joys of Louis Tussaud's waxworks and Ripley's Believe It Or Not Odditorium, but my childish appetite for horror was still not satiated. Then, in one of those disreputable back-street newsagents you could always count on to stock proper American comics, I came across a copy of Psycho magazine; even to my innocent eyes, it's alluring, spooky cover - proclaiming an "All Ghoul Horror Special" - promised something different to my usual diet of Marvel's spandex-clad superheroes. In search of the forbidden, I parted with my 15p.

I went on to discover Skywald's other titles, the reassuringly named Nightmare and Scream, little guessing that this trilogy of terror in comic-strip form was something of an anomaly, a glorious throwback to the pre-Comics Code days when EC's Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror had outraged a generation of moral guardians.

Although my childhood copies were long-since lost, I always spared an occasional thought for this reading matter of my misspent youth. And so, opening a new, book-length retrospective devoted to the brief phenomenon that was the Skywald Horror-Mood is a joyously nostalgic wallow in half-forgotten pleasures.

'Archaic' Alan Hewetson, editor of the Skywald horror mags in their brief heyday, guides us through the company's history, philosophy and unique attitude - a heady cocktail of Lovecraft, Poe and Kafka, with a large measure of absurdist nihilism mixed in - introduces his comicbook co-conspirators and reproduces 19 of the best Horror-Mood tales in all their gory glory. Even now, it doesn't take much effort to see how shockingly left-field they were at the time; the combination of Hewetson's fevered, hallucinogenic prose style with the often brilliant black-and-white drawings of Skywald's stable of artists brought to ghastly life tales of cannibalism, insanity and living-death that were a million miles from those of even close competitors like Warren Comics' Eerie and Creepy. Hewetson's Horror-Mood magazines were the comicbook Chainsaw Massacres of their day, and this loving tribute is long overdue. And if you didn't sample their guilty pleasures the first time round, it's never too late to get into the Horror-Mood.

Skywald! The Complete Illustrated History Of The Skywald Horror-Mood by Alan Hewetson (ISBN 1900486377), is available now from Headpress priced £14.99