Vault of Christmas

It's astounding how printed material can be so closely soldered to a time in your life. 

Take for instance Christmas Holidays in Grade 4, 1992 through to New Year's 1993. Back then, they had these reprints of the old EC Comics, like Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt. Gladstone was doing them, the same company that published Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck reprints. Well, for Christmas, I had got Vault of Horror number four, I believe it was by that enumeration, a double issue that had maybe Haunt of Fear as the back half. That was my Christmas gift, I think, just that one lousy issue. But that issue was fantastic. I mean, that issue was my Christmas Holiday from 1992 to the first few days of 1993. 

I can still remember the cover, a classy antebellum dame looking on in horror at some creature we can only imagine, because our perspective is from behind a rotted hand resting on a bannister. And the inside of that comic book, well, it delineated the very parameters of that holiday period—of that time and space. I spent most of that time in my parents' cabin in the woods, with its coal-oil lamps and its wood-heating and no electricity. The space of that confining cabin became the spaces described within the eight stories that spanned those two issues. 

There was the story of a man who, in his rise up the corporate ladder in the soap factory, had thrown his ever-hectoring boss into a vat of soap. Now, as he showered before a big date with a classy gal (a consequence of his inflated status), one of the bars of soap, apparently possessed by the murdered boss, slips away from the murderer and clogs the shower drain, leading to a death by drowning. I was in that shower all throughout that holiday. 

In another story, four or five Russian people in a sleigh are trying to escape pursuit by wolves. They finally decide that one of them has to be thrown to the canines to allow the others to escape. It's sort of a trolley problem as conceived by the Crypt Keeper. And for that whole holiday, I daresay I was in that sled. The narrow confines of the cabin were expanded by that well-thumbed EC reprint. There's no conclusion to that wolf story, so I can offer no real spoiler alert here, because we never get to see who volunteered to go over the side, or who was forcibly chosen by the group. So there are as many endings written in your mind as there were Russians in that sleigh. 

And so this comic book expands the space of this one story times five, multiplying the conceptual space into something much more expansive. You read it over and over again and the possibilities multiply. As such, my minimal little winter world, the four walls that seemed perpetual throughout my childhood, began to expand. Stories stretched space and time. Perhaps the expansiveness of narrative made that reprieve from school seem a little bit longer. I wouldn't have much wanted to go back to school. 

It was that year that I was really coming to terms with how much I wasn't getting done. I had this baseless, paranoid thought that I might fail grade four, just because I hadn't finished a few worksheets. I guess that's the first time I realized I was lagging behind in my effort to do things my best, and also that I was feeling the strain doing assignments I didn't really see the point of. I never wanted, at least from that point on, to be someone who did busy work and was driven by tasks. 

I see, then, why I gravitated to stories, because they could expand not only space that wasn't there but also time I felt like I didn't have. Seconds and minutes and hours never seemed long enough. Stories opened up new spaces of possibility; the interpretations of a narrative could stack the potentialities. Stories could fold time up in heaps, creating a strata of pocket universes. I wouldn't have been able to explain it then, and I can only vaguely intimate it now. Stories, or at least the best ones, have a multidimensional quality to them. 

I am glad I have had some limited opportunity to tell stories of my own. I hope I can compound those potentialities for other people through my writing. By giving up some of their time to read my works, I hope I can actually make some time for the reader, insofar as we collaborate in utilizing that extraordinary capacity imagination has of being able to multiply what can be, such that the present always seems so full. So while people might deride the EC Comics as corny and far too often predicated on cheap moral lessons (all of them wrapped in gore and gristle), I see them, when at their best, as fantastic stories that compound possibilities. They set the imagination going, and, if you let them, they may just keep it rolling on mercilessly. 

Take it from me—I can look back into Vault of Horror Gladstone reprint number four and I'm back on the cusp of 1992 and 1993, ten years old, in a cabin in the hard nadir of winter wondering about what happened to those Russians in the back of that sleigh, and at the same time experiencing all five possible fates.