Weird thing about this cover. In the editorial for TUO4, John Tynes tells the story of how cover artist Blair Reynolds found a frozen severed dog head in a dumpster, then  secretly mailed the dog head to Tynes, who received and opened it on Halloween. Tynes is emphatic that Reynolds found out a perfectly reasonable explanation for the dog head, but doesn’t explain it to us. Neither does he explain why Reynolds was poking around a dumpster in the first place. Fuzzy too: the thinking behind making the grisly bit of mail the cover illustration. It isn’t my favorite, not gonna lie. Also, in a story too long to share here: I recently realized that TUO was part of a nexus of things in the early 90s that set me on the road to writing and independent publishing. I’ve had some hijinx for sure, but none of them have involved severed dog heads, for which I am grateful.

Anyway, this issue (Five, Spring, 1992) is a fun one, arranged around Call of Cthulhu in the UK (anticipating, somewhat, Cubicle 7’s Cthulhu Britannia line). There’s all sorts of good stuff here, stats for Dracula, locations rich in folklore, a Tynes-written scenario, some very good material on the Lambton Worm, the coolest dragon in UK folklore. Shame that didn’t make the cover, honestly.