Cast
Regular voices include Tara Charendoff (later credited as Tara Strong), Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Pat Musick, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West. Guest voices are Joe Alaskey, John Ingle, and Keith Szarabajka.
Plot
A waiter named Jimmy is strapped to a surgery table by three monsters who regard him as a blank canvas. Despite his pleas, they begin their procedure.
In the Firehouse rec room, Slimer and Eduardo Rivera watch a news segment on reclusive horror novelist J.N. Kline, who has not been seen in months. Kylie Griffin dismisses Kline as giving demonology a bad name, while Eduardo quietly hides his own copy of Kline's Gore Series. Garrett Miller reveals he has sent a manuscript to a horror magazine, the same one that gave Stephen King and Kline their starts, admitting his real goal is celebrity rather than literature.
Egon Spengler sends the team out on a reported abduction. The cook who witnessed Jimmy's kidnapping describes one of the captors as having a saw for a head, which Eduardo recognizes as Crainiac from Kline's books. At Tuck's Inn Bed and Breakfast, Jimmy reappears transformed into a monster like his captors, and more guests are taken. When the team arrives, they find the patrons tied up and Crainiac descending the stairs with his henchmen Corpuscle and Gristle. Garrett's fire makes Crainiac explode, but the creature regenerates, and the team learns the monsters cannot be trapped because they are not ectoplasmic. The villains drop vials and vanish, taking Roland Jackson with them.
Consulting Spengler's Spirit Guide, Kylie identifies the monsters as Vathek, spectral forms that cross into the living world through the act of writing. Whatever Kline writes about them becomes true, including their indestructibility. The remaining three trace the activity to Kline's mansion, where they find guests already "re-imagined" into monsters and Kline himself restrained at a desk, forced to type. Garrett tries to rewrite the script to undo the Vathek, but cannot find the words. Crainiac demands Kline write the Ghostbusters' deaths, reminding him the alliance brought him wealth and fame and would let the Vathek live forever. As the team is captured, Eduardo shoots the typewriter, which collapses the surrounding circle of fire into a vortex that pulls the Vathek away. The victims return to normal and Kline is freed.
Back at the Firehouse, Garrett receives another rejection while Kline publishes a new book based on the events, in which the team appears, Garrett included, as "the loudmouthed guy in the wheelchair."
Production notes
The script's epilogue was set "a month later" than the main action.3 Jimmy was described in the cast list as a "Jimmy Olsen-type," after the Daily Planet photographer from Superman.4 Kline's mansion was placed in the Connecticut countryside.5
The Vathek take their name from the Gothic novel Vathek by William Beckford. In design and concept they resemble the cenobites of Clive Barker's Hellraiser, though their motivation differs.
Garrett's failed writing career is later referenced in his profile in the IDW Publishing comic Ghostbusters 35th Anniversary: Extreme Ghostbusters. Roland's mention of his younger brother reading Kline's books points to Casey Jackson, who appears in the episode "Grundelesque."
