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It
was hosted by the Vault Keeper and featured tales of deception, corruption,
passion, murder, and intrigue. There was always a twist ending to these tales but
the bad guys didn’t always get their just desserts. Sometimes, the hero took
the fall! For the American government, that just couldn’t do! Thus, when the
Comics Code Authority was established, titles were required to tell stories in
which the villain got punished for his crimes. An allowance was allowed for
stories to have cliffhangers throughout several issues as long as the villain received
punishment before the story was captioned ‘The End.’
In
this issue, a young wife who’s trapped in a loveless marriage takes advantage
of a sinkhole on their family farm. We then meet a talented surgeon who loses
his arm and conducts dangerous experiments in an attempt to make himself whole
again. Then a young man meets the woman of his dreams at a masquerade ball. But
when it’s time to unmask, it becomes his worst nightmare. Lastly, a weight loss remedy bears some
dangerous fruit.
The
masquerade story, entitled “the Mask of Horror” is such an example of a story
in which a rather innocent man meets a tragic demise. The man is spurned by his
finance whose is cheating on him with an older gentleman. Determined to get
over the harlot, the bachelor goes to a party only to take his troubles off his
failed relationship. It’s when a drunken friend introduces him to a woman
dressed as a miserly vampire does things go sour. The guy forgets his troubles
and feels that this woman is his true love. But the only thing he feels at
story’s end is her fangs in his neck.
The only thing that guy did was fall in love
with another woman. But, I don’t see him as immoral because his first
relationship was destroyed by his fiancé. Just because the guy didn’t end the
relationship while his girl was in another man’s arms, that doesn’t mean it
wasn’t kaput. Still, I am sure that the message of the story was a misogynistic
“beware of wanton women” that was the moral of many of EC’s stories involving
passion. In the sinkhole story, the woman falls in love with a handsome health
inspector but he turns out to be married. The wife had previously killed her
husband, faking his death in a sinkhole, but she is forced to be with her
loveless hubby forever, when his bloated corpse rises from the household well
and snatches her into the underground river below that formed the giant crevice.
EC
was as nourish and ghoulish as they come and I loved it. I still do. My dad
until he died took pride in how I saved my money doing odd jobs to buy the
complete Vault of Horror Collection from Gemstone in the late 80s. It was the
first time I ever set a financial goal and made smart decisions with my hard
earned cash. Nowadays, I continue to save my money trying to collect the entire
EC library that Gemstone reissued continuously from circa 1988-2000.
Along
with the reprint of Vault of Horror #18, this edition also reprints Weird
Science #11. In those pages, the great Wally Wood regales us with a futuristic
story in which a uranium company condemns both the earth and the moon with its
questionable mining practices. Then a computer system learns about love for the
first time and gets terribly confused. Then a ship is stranded on a planet of
giants while a man goes back in time and ends up becoming his own father in a
head-scratcher that makes Terminator seem plausible.
Worth
Consuming
Rating:
9 out of 10 stars.
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