Third installment from EC Archives.

Vault Lines

Vault 20

The Vault of Horror 20 was yet another plateau for Craig, as he decided to upgrade his art with a new approach. The front cover of mob frenzy ranks alongside #15 as the best of his early Vault covers, and like #15, it could have dispensed with the unnecessary speech balloon. Jack Davis’ “The Reluctant Vampire!” was chosen as the cover story, and Craig offered his interpretation of Davis’ closing page. Yet the cover is imbued with Wally Wood atmospherics, as Craig explained to John Benson, “I think of Wood when I see the cover of #20. He inspired that cover, probably, by his ability to handle that type of situation. It’s another example of spotting something an artist does and trying to see if it works for you. I think that in “About Face!” I was trying to change my technique a bit. I was trying to become more illustrative, with a thinner line. My girls were starting to improve, too.”

“Revenge Is the Nuts’!” and “The Reluctant Vampire!” were both adapted for HBO’s Tales from the Crypt series. In the sixth season, “Revenge Is the Nuts” was telecast 16 November 1994 with a cast of Anthony Zerbe, Teri Polo and John Savage.  In the third season, “The Reluctant Vampire” was telecast 10 July 1991 with a cast of Malcolm McDowell, Sandra Dickinson and George Wendt.

The short story “Mr. George” by August Derleth (1909-1971), writing under the pseudonym Stephen Grendon, provided the inspiration for the ghostly bodyguard of “Grandma’s Ghost!!” (again with two exclamation points), illustrated by Jack Kamen for another in his “widdle kid” series. It borrows the major plot elements of Derleth’s “Mr. George”. (Coincidentally, “Craig” is George’s surname.)

Derleth’s story was published in the March 1947 issue of Weird Tales. Because the prolific Derleth had so many stories in Weird Tales (a total of 137), he used his Grendon pseudonym, but the pen name seemed pointless since the front cover of the March 1947 issue proclaimed, “Mr. George by August Derleth”. The contents page carried a deceptive disclamer: "Through a regrettable error, this story is announced on our cover as by August Derleth. Mr. Derleth acted as agent for Mr. Grendon's story, and someone in our office confused the agent's name for the author's. The error was discovered too late to stop printing of the cover." To make matters more confusing, Derleth used Grendon as both a pseudonym and a character name.

In his introduction to the collection Mr. George and Other Odd Persons (Arkham House, 1963), Derleth wrote, 'The tales in this book were written all in one month 20 years ago specifically to swell the log of Weird Tales… All these stories appear here as they were first written down--for time did not permit revision and re-typing in those hectic days; each story was put down on paper ready for the printer, and went off next day in the mail.”

By day, Derleth was working on a novel, so he wrote the stories late at night amid interruptions from visitors and students:  “Never earlier than nine o'clock, and on, frequently, to two o'clock in the morning… These narratives were written under conditions in which the average writer could not have begun to function.”

Derleth often employed plots with a “revenge from beyond the grave” premise. Darrell Schweitzer described the story in Discovering Classic Horror Fiction 1 (Borgo Press, 1992): “It was in the 1940s and 1950s, however, that Derleth matured as a writer of weird fiction. This is shown by the high percentage of original and impressive work from this period in Lonesome Place (1962) and Mr. George and Other Odd Persons (1963). Appropriately, the stories in the latter—his best collection—were published under the pseudonym of Stephen Grendon, the name of the autobiographical character in the Sac Prairie saga. For in many of them the contributor toWeird Tales merges with the mainstream author. In the story “Mr. George” itself, for example, the working out of a vengeance from beyond the grave is given conviction by the matter-of-factness of the style, and still more by the vivid characterizations, the realistic texture of the background, and the touching depiction of the relationship between a child and her father, which continues even when he is dead.”

“Mr. George” was adapted twice to television, first for a telefilm by Revue in 1953. Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff, carried an adaptation on May 9, 1961. Directed by Ida Lupino, it starred Gina Gillespie as the child, along with Virginia Gregg, Howard Freeman and Lillian Bronson.