The old saying, "Be careful what you wish for!" is an overused cliche for an infinite number of scary stories. Minoan Publishing Corp. had only a few horror titles nearing the end of the Golden Age, one of which was Tales Of Horror that lasted for over a year, and in Issue #6 we get the tale of The Treacherous Genie. Edgar Tilbert is a diminutive man in a dead-end job and had a dented outlook on life. He would nab people's laundry off the clothesline, take toys from kids, steal from the blind, and other acts of misery that further outcast him from being very acceptable. One night, Edgar walked into a random curio shop and strait up asks the owner if anything was there that could make him rich. Of course, if the shopkeeper had something like that lying around, he wouldn't have waisted his life in an antique store. The curio collector does have an impressive display of trapped genies just lying around, each in their own bottle on a shelf. One is a hot little Barbara Eden lookalike that sparks Edgar's fancy and wants to get her but is instead offered a pointy-headed male genie it a bottle for only five dollars. Why Edgar didn't just get the bottle with the hot blonde in the first place was never clarified, but he uncorks the conehead and wishes to be insanely rich with a fully staffed palace. Edgar then wishes for a harem of historic beauties like Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, plus the blonde genie he original got horny for which he releases from her bottle. The lady djinn doesn't seem to reciprocate her feelings for her liberator, even though by genie law Edgar should be her new master, and Edgar asks his original genie what the problem is. The male genie says the lady genie has a lover inside her bottle and tricks Edgar into wishing himself down so he can go in and whoop his butt. The lustful lout gets trapped in the bottle as the boy and girl genie reveal themselves to have been lovers for centuries and banish Edgar into his glass prison deep in the ocean to never be heard from again. The moral of getting your wishes granted has been interpreted in a several different ways, and rarely ends good in horror stories for the person doing the actual wishing. In this story, it spends the first half of it showing how abysmal Edgar was to begin with, although that might have been the way society treated him as a short person and a corporate wage slave. The bit of irony of Edgar getting trapped in the bottle could have been avoided if he implemented some strategy by just wishing for the girl genie to fall in love with him, even though it doesn't follow Disney's flimsy laws of wish making. It's not what you wish for, but how you wish for it that counts, so make sure you have a good lawyer handy if you happen to come across a cursed monkey's paw or a fairy godmother with a twisted sense of humor.
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