The Horror from the Vault is a series of horror fiction written by Isaac Boissonneau.
While searching for mineral samples, a teacher and his students discover an underground burial chamber with five rooms. They uncover a sarcophagus made of an unknown material, and in their eagerness to see what is inside, unleash a nightmare onto the nearby town of Alden, from there things go from "Distinctly Not Good" to "Apocalyptic."
The Horror from the Vault contains examples of:
- Attack of the Monster Appendage: At the climax of Part 1, a cop sees his partner nabbed by a pair of arms on the end of a tentacle.
- The Assimilator: The Horror can absorb and repurpose biomatter directly without needing to actually eat it, similar to The Thing (1982).
- Beneath the Earth: The Horror is found in an underground vault as per the title, yes.
- In Part 2, a survivor from the original incident says that it's basically an immune cell from a planet-sized creature that lives between the crust and the mantle of the Earth (take this with a grain of salt, since she's literally insane). Part 3 throws this into question, however.
- Body Horror: Oh yes.
- Body of Bodies: The Horror itself is a crab-like creature made out of fused corpses. It even induces a nightmare about Legion from Castle Vania replacing the sun.
- Captain Ersatz: Take The Thing and imagine it came up from below instead of down from above, and this happened in Anytown, America instead of Central Nowhere, Antarctica. Now add in Cthulhu's ability to give everybody nightmares. That's the Horror.
- Eldritch Abomination: An entity that assimilates biomatter into its body, creating a mass of fused corpses and Meat Moss.
- Empty Piles of Clothing: The Horror assimilates all body tissues and fluids, including sweat and spilled blood, leaving behind a heap of torn but perfectly laundered clothes.
- Evil Smells Bad: The Horror smells like an infected cut.
- Kill It with Fire: Part 2, "Ash Cloud," reveals that this is an extremely bad idea. It causes the Horror to become airborne and constantly produce a smokescreen to hide its true form.
- Kill It with Ice: Part 3, "Bloom," reveals the Horror is vulnerable to cold, as it nearly freezes to death in the winter.
- Meat Moss: The Horror creates "pods" that spread it out of the biomatter it doesn't assimilate directly. Occasionally, there is a still-alive, boneless animal in it.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The Horror isn't seen until the end of Parts 1 and 2.
- Oddball in the Series: Part 3 has the Horror "on camera" for its entirety and concentrated entirely within someone's appartment. This one is apparently a larvae that somehow made it to London, England. It doesn't start eating people until the end, either. It's written more like a traditional creepypasta instead of a novella.
- Our Ghouls Are Creepier: The Horror's coffin is decorated with a painting of "a ghoul with no face."
