Friends from the crypt

The coolest dorks

My friend Matt and I have been friends for almost 20 years. We met in the autumn of 2007, and in spite of the odds against finding new friends as an adult, have been thick as thieves ever since. Sure, we’ve experienced the ebb and flow of friendship over the years, but we always seems to find our way back to each other. We’ve seen each other through some major life changes as we traversed from our 30s to our 50s. And during that time, we’ve seen a lot of horror movies.

Honestly, we’ve spent a lot of time immersed in pop culture. He keeps me up to date on TV which I seem to be hopelessly out of touch with. We have reading challenges every year and we check in with each other to see how we’re doing. He’s fascinated with my movie-watching challenge this year (basically to watch as many movies as I can) because in his estimation, it’s consuming art rather than just doomscrolling or watching short form video on a phone.

We exchange gifts every Christmas and they’ve run the gamut. Usually, it’s something small but every now and again we’ve found bigger things. We went through a phase where we gifted Kindle books to each other - books we’d read that year or earlier that we thought the other might like. I have to admit that he’s gotten harder to buy for lately, which has kind of puzzled me and made the holidays a little bit more stressful.

The other day I was at lunch and scrolling through Threads or BlueSky or something and ran across this.

You read that right - a hardbound, full color, 1000+ page collection of the complete run of Tales From The Crypt. I didn’t really discover horror comics until I was in college when I found a few hardbound omnibuses of Tales From The Crypt and The Vault of Horror at the local public library but I remember sitting there in the afternoon after class when I probably should have been studying reading tales of the creepy and macabre instead. I graduated and am 30+ years into my career so clearly, that was a wise choice.

The price tag is a hefty $150, and I sent the Amazon link to Matt and jokingly said “We should just agree to get this for each other for Christmas this year and call it good.” Surprisingly he was kind of down with it, especially once he found out it was full color and hardbound. So 10 minutes after I sent him the link, he was ordering me a copy to be sent to my house, and after I got home from work, I ordered his. The book is out on November 10th, but we have both agreed to not open it until Christmas, which will be a pretty hard thing to do, I admit. As he texted me later, “we are the coolest dorks, but at least we aren’t BORING.”

Truer words never spoken.