Scary Go Round, by John Allison

If you're looking for a Halloween read this week and you haven't got any money (or a library card, or friends who own books), you're in luck: John Allison's pre-Bad Machinery comic Scary Go Round is available for free online, and it features pretty much every horror creation on God's green earth.

Like Bad Machinery, Scary Go Round is set in the mysterious English town of Tackleford, where the citizens shrug off everything from demons to evil robots as everyday nuisances. Sure, people get worked up about the end of the world... but who has the energy to complain to the city council about, say, a murderous, sentient cloud of gas? Younger versions of several Bad Machinery characters can be seen here, as well as a large cast of memorable (albeit frequently doomed) young adults.

Look, I'm not gonna lie: Allison's early artwork is pretty rough, and it changes—for the better—so much over the course of Scary Go Round that I occasionally had trouble identifying who I was looking at. However, his gift for both hilariously idiosyncratic dialogue and staggeringly weird world-building has always been evident, and did you not notice that this is free? Scary Go Round might not be quite up to the standard of his (super awesome) current work, but it's still consistently funny, occasionally heart-warming, and always impressively strange.