At my elementary school, it was a thing to send the entire sixth grade class off to a campground in the Nashoba Valley for an entire week to learn about nature and shit from a bunch of earthy crunchy undergrads.

I absolutely dreaded the experience — not just because the prospect of being with trapped for five full days with the same kids who’d made my life a living hell was uncut nightmare fuel, but also because my twelfth birthday happened to fall during the week in question.

To make things even worse, my only friend in the class got sent home a couple of days in because of a broken leg and we got socked in by a late season storm which dropped a foot of snow halfway through the week.

I ended up spending most of the time on a little ledge I found in the rafters of the communal bunkhouse, reading and rereading the copies of the original Marvel Handbook’s Books of the Dead I’d had the foresight to pack in my duffel bag.

When I got tired of those, I checked out what was on the shelves of the camp’s micro-library. Most of the books were, unsurprisingly, YA treatises on loving trees, hating pollution, and believing in yourself — all messages I can get behind, but are hardly stirring stuff for a tweenaged nerd. The library did have a copy of this, however —

— Rod Serling’s Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and Werewolves, a 1963 anthology from the YA school of “familiar horror-adjacent celebrity lends their name and a quickie into to some anthology of spookshow standards.” Being a mark for that sort of fare, I devoured it over the course of a couple of evenings even though only one of the dozen stories made any lasting impression upon me, “And Not Quite Human” by Joe L. Hensley.

The short version (with spoilers) is that the the crew of an Arcturan Empire spacecruiser is returning home after nuking poor Planet Earth. The ship is carrying a small contingent of captive earthlings who’ve mysteriously managed to survive said nuking, and their presence has started to make the otherwise emotionless and dreamless Arcturans have sheet-soiling nightmares and a crippling sense of dread. That’s because the captive “humans” are actually vampires whose wooden stakes have been burned away by atomic fire and are tickled pink at the prospect of feasting on an entire galactic empire of hapless dipshits with zero knowledge of their strategies and weaknesses.

WHAT A SHOCKING TWIST! No wonder Rod dug it,

(To be fair, the combo of nuclear annihilation and a bunch of asshole fascists getting turned into snack food was very much up twelve year old Andrew’s alley.)

Recommended listening: In early 1980s Los Angeles, it would’ve been called deathrock, but in early 1980s Britain it was called “neither true goth nor true punk and thus destined for the memory hole.”