Jack Oleck – The Vault Of Horror

[dem bones]

Jack Oleck – The Vault Of Horror (Bantam, July 1973)

Midnight Mess
The Neat Job
This Trick’ll Kill You
Bargain In Death
Drawn And Quartered


Blurb:

Welcome to Death’s waiting room, a vault of impenetrable concrete in which five doomed strangers seek comfort in confession only to discover that even more chilling evils await them …. Meet Rogers, whose greed for an inheritance gives a bizarre new meaning to the term “blood money” …. Maitland, who believes he can cheat death and his life insurance company, too …. Sebastian, the magician who discovers the ultimate “rope trick” ….. Critchit, the fastidious husband who berates his wife’s housekeeping skills one time too many and discovers just how meticulous she can be – about murder ….. And Moore, the embittered artist who dabbles in voodoo and death …. They are all captives in the Vault of Horror!

Harold Rogers always thought of his place of work as a mausoleum, and turns out he was right. It worse on the late shift, when the miserable skyscraper office block is almost deserted. Tonight he's one of only five people in the entire building - funny how they all meet in the elevator - and the lift is taking a bastard age to reach the ground floor. In fact, it's opted for the scenic route, via a sub-basement that nobody knew existed! The five spill out into what appears to be an exclusive drinking club. "What a strange situation to be in. It's almost like a dream" remarks Mr. Critchet. "Oh, dreams are far more frightening than this. At least, mine are," replies Rogers, and we're off.

[Midnight Mess]: You wait all those years for your rich old man to die, and then the rotten bastard wills everything to your stupid estranged sister! That's the dilemma facing Rogers at the outset of this gory story. At least he has the good sense to hire - and murder - an expensive private investigator, to locate Donna's current whereabouts. Harold takes the bus to Waterville. Maybe Donna isn't so pleased to see him because she keeps blethering on about "vampires" taking over the village after nightfall - like that's going to save her life! With his sister dead, and the money all his, Roger's heads over to the restaurant for a celebratory meal. Man, but the clientèle are a rum bunch, and he doesn't much appreciate the macabre menu ....

[Bargain in Death]: George Maitland, a struggling horror author, fakes his own death to get his hands on a life insurance policy. The daring fraud entails his swallowing 'heart pills' and a liquid drug which, he is confident, will "cut down my pulse and heartbeat, my entire metabolism, so that even the best doctor in the country will think I'm dead." The funeral passes without a hitch, the coffin is committed to the earth. All that remains is for his really trustworthy best pal Alex to come and dig him up. Unfortunately for Maitland, two young medical students, Tom and Jerry, bent on lifting a corpse for dissection purposes, get to him first. Ending on loan from Ambrose Bierce's One Summer Night.

[dem bones]

[This Trick’ll Kill You]: Desperate to revive their flagging stage show, Sebastian and glam assistant Inez travel 10, 000 miles to Calcutta in search of a new trick to steal. Sebastian humiliates a street fakir by exposing his "supernatural" powers as phoney, but can't explain away a young Hindu woman's amazing rope trick. That's because, according to her, there is none; it's magic! Undeterred by her mumbo jumbo, Sebastian offers to buy the trick for a pittance. When the girl refuses, he drives a sword through her back so hard the blade protrudes "a good twelve inches from her breast." To the accompaniment of the murderer's abominable flute solo, Inez strips to her underwear, shins it up the rope - and vanishes. Blood splatters down from the sky. Sebastian makes a dash for it, but none can escape the yellow hemp of justice!

[The Neat Job]: A place for everything, and everything in its place. Have to feel a little sorry for Arthur Critchit. Obnoxious bully he may be, but, unlike his fellow damned, he's no murderer. Arthur is not even criminal, just .... fastidious to an intolerable degree. You can't bash a fellow's brains out with a hammer and dismember him for being tidy! Well, you can, if you're Eleanor Carruthers, the Colonel's daughter, and our "butterfly yoked to a wasp."

Just the artist's tale to go. As with the film, so too the novelization. Good fun, but somehow not quite as endearing as its predecessor, Tales From The Crypt.

[ripper]

'The Neat Job' is so typical of those tales of domesticity that EC produced where one partner is driven to homicidal insanity by the behaviour of the other. I thought Terry Thomas was very good in his role, driving his young wife to madness with his obsession with neatness.

I agree that 'Vault' doesn't reach the heights of 'Tales' but is still fun. A pity that Amicus couldn't have produced a 'Haunt of Fear' so they would have had a full set of EC horror titles.

[dem bones]

There are a few minor departures from the film (e.g., in the book, our next victim is flattened by a tube train), so perhaps Jack Oleck was working from the screenplay Milton Subotsky wanted to shoot?

[Drawn And Quartered]: Voodoo art terror! Depressed, disillusioned and questioning his own ability, Frank Moore, painter, swaps the bright lights of London for self-exile in Port-Au-Prince. A chance meeting with an acquaintance reveals that the three men who ruined him have colluded to make a fortune from his work. Bent on vengeance, Moore visits the local Houngan, where he's obliged to dip his hand into a cauldron of burning oil before the voodoo man can grant his lust for death and destruction. But anything's worth it! As he's a craftsman, Frank won't require a voodoo dolly. All he need do is commit an enemies images to canvas and then destroy it. After successful trial runs with a vase and a loaf of bread, Frank spends the next seven days locked in his hut creating portraits of Arthur Gaskill, the famous art dealer, Fenton Breedley, millionaire celebrity art critic/ Franklyn Marsh tribute act, and Laurence Dilant, the world-renowned art collector. Then he heads back to London to obliterate the ghastly trio one by one. Mission accomplished! But ....

.... If only he'd not painted that selfie.

With the possible exception of Then Came Bronson #3: Rock!, this might the least demanding novel(isation) ever written. Last word to the rotting remains of Mr. Critchit.

"That's how it always will be ... Telling our stories every night, and each morning forgetting. Night after night, morning after morning, for all eternity."

Sure sounds like a Vault to me.

[bobby]

    Jack Oleck actually wrote some EC horror (and crime) stories during the last year or so of the New Trend, when EC was relying on outside writers.