Page 1 (1/1)

I&039;ve been hooked (or should that be impaled?) on vampires ever since I was a kid But don&039;t ask o It was probably those old books h shelf he knew I couldn&039;t reachwithout the aid of stepladders

The stepladders would come out whenever Mom and Dad would make one of their rare excursions out into the world, maybe to the Picturehouse or the Ritz or the E picture - the latest &039; with Betty Grable, maybe, or Dick Hay, heavy, black-bound books? Fifty Great Mysteries! Fifty Great Tales of Terror and the Iination! Fifty This and Fifty That Perhaps those weren&039;t the precise titles - it&039;s hard to reht and the looks, and the smell, of those books; they werecloth; the claw-like hand drawing back the curtains, and the sinister figure beyond the curtains And the interior illustrations The horrid interior illustrations! The naked black girl wrapped in a carnivorous tree&039;s tendrils, being hoisted to her doom like a cocooned fly That one stuck intime; it&039;s still there, in fact, just as fresh (and as monstrous) as ever

All those books, and some of them must have contained vampire stories, I&039;ht, and I think I was h Bram Stoker&039;s Dracula before &039;they&039; even noticed But that was okayDracula was a classic after all Thenbrother, Harry -just about to be drafted for National Service - started to read it, and he asked the Old Folks: &039;Do you really think he should be reading this? Won&039;t it give hi brother! After that I had to read it chapter by chapter in the library

Before I was sixteen, I was out of school and had a job as an apprentice machinist That meant a bus ride into town every workday, and there was a newsagent opposite where I got off the bus ItI saw this garish h theof the shop Weird Tales, And the &039;s&039; looked like it was about to fall off the end of the title

Those British edition WT were - ! - a whole shilling each in those days That was good money

In pristine condition they&039;d easily fetch two hundred tioodat the cover of that first ofone of those ancient end &039;Here be Monsters,&039; stamped over uncharted waters And in WT&039;s terazines were definitely roup And I used to suck &039;em bone dry

1958 The year I was drafted And that was a horror story in its own rightwell, until I got to like it And I liked it so ned on for twenty-two years But that&039;s not the only reason I remember &039;58 Not a bit of it, for it&039;s also the year they released Dracula on filain - only this time with Christopher Lee as the bloodthirsty Count Now tell me, isn&039;t that scene where he strides past the castle&039;s battle behind him just one of your favourites? It&039;s one of mine, be sure!

But whoa - I&039;veat that Do you remember EC? No, of course you don&039;t, &039;cos you were a little kid then and your big brother would probably have told on you Tales From the Crypt, and The Vault of Horror, andGod, there was a whole gaggle of them! Not only EC but other publishers, too Frankenstein, Black Magic - man, I remember those titles! And they were called &039;comics&039;?

You know, I&039; too many exclamation marks But honestly, how could I write this without them? I need exclamation marks to make my point Which is that EC was Vampire Wonderland to me Was there ever an issue without a vampire story? Well, maybe, but I can&039;t remember one (Or maybe I just don&039;t want to)

Even worse, I can&039;t remember where or when I first read Richard Matheson&039;s / Aend, but I do know I&039;ve read it half a dozen times since It probably delayed my attempts to write my own vampire novels by, oh, twenty yearsBecause it was that da (in a couple of decades I&039;d learned a lot, not only about authorship but about the world)

And if I was going to do it at all, I kneould have to be wide-screen

And eventually I did do it, let all of that stuff I&039;d once soaked up so avidly leak back out of me, and even occasionally splatter The Necroscope novels and Vay are the end results

Between tih, I had worked up to it in a host of shorter stories that explored the vales, soinal that even I didn&039;t realize what I was really writing until the stories were finished

A host of them? Well, a coven of them, in fact Thirteen tales that dance widdershins around the central concept, and occasionally rock &039;n&039; roll with it, too Stories that are ht out of Lovecraft&039;s Cthulhu Mythos

So there you go I &039;blame&039; this collection on EC Comics, Weird Tales, Christopher Lee, Richard Matheson, et al, whose stories in this sub-genre really bit otten I offer my thanks They all have a stake in this collection

Brian Luland, February 1997