I got so wrapped up in the fulfilling of pre-orders and the like (not to mention the run up to NecronomiCon, which is in less than a week somehow) that I almost forgot to acknowledge the fact that today is actually the official book birthday of Revenge of Monsters from the Vault!

If you pre-ordered your copy direct form the publisher, it should be hitting your mailbox any day now, if it hasn’t already. If you didn’t, well, there’s not time like the present to correct that deficiency.

I love writing spooky short stories, but I also love writing about monster movies – on my best days, I manage to smash the two together to relatively satisfactory results. In my freelance work, I am lucky enough to write occasionally about movies both modern and antique, but one of my favorite things to do is to just share the joy that I get from tracking down some moth-bitten old movie filled with cobwebbed sets and some painted monsters.

Those are the movies that, as Joe R. Lansdale hisownself once put it better than I ever could, “kick open doors to light and shadow and let us view something that otherwise we might not see”.

I’ve been lucky enough to get to write about a lot of them and, with any luck, I’ll get to write about a lot more before I go to wherever good skeletons finally go, but Revenge of Monsters from the Vault closes the door on a chapter, to be sure.

When I first started writing for Innsmouth Free Press, I wasn’t yet a very established voice in the field. Silvia Moreno-Garcia was kind enough to give me a soapbox from which I could share my love for these delightfully creaky old movies, and she was even kinder to add another step to that soapbox by re-publishing all those columns in Monsters from the Vault.

Now, together, we’ve gone a step farther yet. With any luck, Revenge of Monsters from the Vault won’t be the last time I write about these movies, but it will probably be our last trip to the Vault of Secrets. We’re sealing up that tomb and moving on to unearth another.

It’s not an occasion for mourning, however, but celebration. I got to write about Mystery of the Wax Museum and Horror Island and The Return of the Vampire and Zombies of Mora Tau and The World of Vampires and Yog, Monster from Space. And, what’s more, somebody put all of that writing into not one book but two.Most poor skeletons never even get half so lucky.

I hope, if you choose to read either of these volumes, that you come away from them with a new favorite movie that you otherwise might not have seen. I think I agree with Mr. Lansdale that that’s the purpose of all great art, and while I don’t think these books are necessarily great art, hopefully they can be your portal to some.

A large number of years ago (let’s not worry ourselves overmuch about how many) I started writing a column for Innsmouth Free Press. In it, I had the fairly wide charter of writing about “vintage” horror films, which meant, in practice, everything from the silents to the ’70s. We called it the Vault of Secrets, and I wrote it for five years.

Around the end of that time, Silvia, my publisher at IFP, approached me about the idea of collecting those columns into a book, and Monsters from the Vault was born. What we didn’t know, as we were putting the book together, was that the Vault of Secrets was about to shut down, as IFP ceased online publication. Hence, Monsters from the Vault collected every Vault of Secrets column that was ever published into one convenient tome.

However, being me, I didn’t write my Vault of Secrets columns one a month as they came out. Instead, I ran ahead, and there were several columns I had written before the publication of Monsters from the Vault that hadn’t ever seen the light of day.

For a while, I was unsure what to do with these columns. I considered publishing them on my own website or offering them as rewards on my short-lived Patreon, but ultimately nothing felt quite right, until I hit upon the idea of adding to them and putting out a companion volume to Monsters from the Vault.

Revenge of Monsters from the Vault collects those orphaned columns, sure, but they represent only a tiny fragment of its total page count. A few of the pieces collected here have even shown up online in one place or another, but not many. Most of this book is made up of totally new stuff, written specifically for this volume.

Beginning with a beautiful but underseen film released in 1926 and ending with Toho’s “Bloodthirsty Trilogy” of vampire movies from the 1970s, Revenge of Monsters from the Vault covers a lot of territory. There are sixty films packed into these pages, which is fewer than last time, but each entry is longer, on average, with the shortest entries in Revenge averaging about as long as the longest entries in the previous volume.

Within these pages you’ll find ape fiends, invisible dinosaurs, wax museums, devil bats, zombies, hunchbacks, haunted stranglers, cat people, flying serpents, creatures with an atom brain, terrors from beyond space, cities of the dead, snake women, men with x-ray eyes, and weirder things. There are four films from producer Sam Katzman, a couple from director William Castle, and an exploration of all four of the movies that spun out from Roger Corman’s purchase of the Yugoslavian crime film Operation Titian, to name just a few.

Pre-order today and you can get signed copies of both Revenge of Monsters from the Vault and its progenitor, not to mention some cool swag including a bookmark, postcard, and sticker, all for just $22 plus shipping!

If you’re already a proud owner of Monsters from the Vault, you can always pick up just the new one, which boasts matching cover art from Thomas Boatwright, and keep them both on your entertainment system for quick reference as you’re unearthing old, spooky movies to watch on a dark and stormy night…