Forbidden Worlds #17 (American Comics Group, May 1953) is a six-story pre-Code horror anthology under a Ken Bald cover, and one of the tidier examples of the series at its monthly peak. "The House in Grosvenor Lane" sets an American man against a British woman in a fight over ownership of a haunted mansion — a transatlantic property dispute settled by whatever is already living there. "The Recorded Monster!" is the issue's cleverest idea: a recording made of an archaeologist's death turns out to summon the ancient evil that killed him, so that playback itself becomes the trap. "Werewolves of the Rockies" strands a party of skiers high in the mountains with something hunting them, one of a string of werewolf stories ACG ran across all its horror titles through 1952–53. "His Master's Will", "The Face of the Fiend" and "Lost Island" complete a 32-page, full-colour, ten-cent package, with interior art by Charles Nicholas, Al Camy, Leo Morey and Jon L. Blummer, under editor Richard E. Hughes.

Forbidden Worlds launched in July/August 1951 as a dime comic subtitled "Exploring the Supernatural!", the companion to ACG's Adventures into the Unknown — the medium's first ongoing horror title. ACG was a small, resolutely independent New York publisher founded by Benjamin W. Sangor and co-owned by Fred Iger; the corporate name on the paperwork was Preferred Publications, Inc. of Buffalo. Its horror line kept a house style distinct from the competition: atmospheric, often wry, and far lighter on gore and sexual content than the EC and Harvey books of the same year — one reason both ACG horror titles survived the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings and the Comics Code without wholesale reinvention. Leo Morey, one of the artists here, is a notable presence: before comics he had been a mainstay pulp illustrator for Amazing Stories, and his arrival on ACG's books is part of the wider migration of pulp science-fiction artists into the comic-book industry in the early 1950s.

Read today, issue #17 is a good demonstration of how pre-Code horror kept updating its haunted objects. The genre's stock furniture is all here — the disputed mansion, the werewolf in the wilderness — but "The Recorded Monster!" hangs its dread on magnetic tape, brand-new consumer technology in 1953, exactly as the previous issue's "Subway Spectres" had hung it on the New York transit system. That instinct for putting the supernatural inside the newest machine in the house is one of the through-lines from these dime comics to modern horror. Because the 1953 material is generally treated as public domain in the United States, the original issue remains freely readable through Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum.