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Halloween Haunts 2013: Personal Experience in Halloween Fiction; Or, Why I Wrote a Halloween Novella Featuring a Protagonist Named Lisa Morton by Lisa Morton

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There are a lot of wonderful reasons to use Halloween in fiction. It’s an extraordinarily rich holiday, offering a variety of experiences. For some, it’s about the autumn season, with the sights and smells and sensations that accompany longer nights and turning leaves; for others, it’s about candy and the empowerment derived from costuming; and for many of us, it’s a chance to test our fears in safe, playful environments (movie theaters or haunted attractions).

It’s also experienced by virtually everyone in North America at this point (and is rapidly spreading all around the globe). In horror fiction, many of the tropes we routinely deal with will never be personally experienced by anyone because they don’t exist—vampires, werewolves, zombies. Even the ones that do exist—serial killers, for example—are unlikely to ever be encountered. But not Halloween. If you were born in the U.S. in the last fifty years, chances are that you not only know Halloween well, but you probably have warm, nostalgic feelings for trick or treat and all the accompanying decorations and imagery.

Morton_cover_SummersEndRight from the start, Halloween prose and poetry has reflected the author’s personal experience of the holiday. Robert Burns’s 1785 poem “Hallowe’en” marks the real beginning of Halloween literature, and it’s a lengthy description of the sort of Scottish party that Burns had undoubtedly attended every October 31st. In the late nineteenth-century, as new printing techniques made the mass production and distribution of magazines possible and American socialites began reading Halloween stories, what they encountered were largely descriptions of quaint children’s gatherings, complete with fortune telling games and molasses candy.

Currently, Halloween in fiction is almost synonymous with tales of trick or treat. That most beloved of baby boomer rituals started to become popular in fiction in the 1990s, and it remains probably the most popular activity when Halloween appears in a horror tale. In real life, trick or treat has faded slightly in urban areas, where it’s been replaced by large-scale parties for children (often held at theme parks, malls, or even zoos) and the explosion in haunted attractions; but in fiction, trick or treat, with its blend of childhood fantasies and adult fears, remains the undisputed story champ.

Given how much Halloween has changed just in the last two decades, I’m slightly surprised to see that its fiction seems stuck in the trick or treat mold. Obviously that favored holiday ritual had great personal meaning to many authors…but are there other parts of Halloween just as worthy of exploration?

My own personal relationship to Halloween is, needless to say, a little different from most others’. I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last ten years researching everything about Halloween, from its ancient history to its place in contemporary global pop culture. One of the questions I became obsessed with a few years ago was, Why did Halloween have a bad rep as being Satanic? Why were some Christians so opposed to its celebrations? They frequently cited books that referred to the holiday as stemming from an ancient Celtic celebration of “Samhain, Lord of Death”…yet I knew full well that “Samhain” meant “summer’s end,” and there were no records of the Celts worshipping a Lord of Death.

After many hours of research, I managed to track down the source of this mistake: In 1786, a British surveyor named Charles Vallancey published the third volume of his collected research into Celtic history, which he’d fallen in love with twenty-four years earlier, when he’d been sent to survey Ireland. Vallancey, however, was more interested in fanciful interpretations than fact, and simply decided that every other historian and linguist was wrong about the meaning of “Samhain”. He concluded that the word sounded like a Hindu deity’s name (Saman), and thus was born the “Samhain, Lord of Death” nonsense. Although Vallancey’s work was denounced by virtually every reviewer who came across it, it still wound up in enough libraries and collections to create what I think of as Halloween’s strange alternate history.

At some point after I’d finished the non-fiction book (Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween) I’d been answering that question for, my fiction writing side started wondering: What if Vallancey had been right all along? What if the Celts really had worshiped a fearsome “Lord of Death” every October 31st, and not engaged in a celebration of harvest and seasonal change?

As I considered this idea, I began to wonder how much of my personal experience as a Halloween expert I could incorporate. Including a lot of Halloween history and lore was a given, but could I go so far as to add research methods, the actual writing process, even footnotes? As a story started to coalesce in my head, I started thinking about the protagonist, who should be a female Halloween expert. I actually spent a few days trying to create the right name for her before I realized the choice was obvious:

This novella, Summer’s End, would be the ultimate personal expression of my Halloween experiences, and the protagonist would be named Lisa Morton.

I will admit that choice for my lead character proved occasionally far more troubling than if I’d named her something else. Was I creating a fictional character, or was the character really me in a fictional setting?

This is the part where I back out, and say that if you’re really curious about the answer, I hope you’ll read Summer’s End. And if you are a writer who grew up with Halloween (or even if you live in another part of the world and are just now discovering it), I hope you’ll share your personal experience of this remarkable holiday with all of us in your own fiction, whether it centers on trick or treat, haunted attractions, or an obsession with history.

LISA MORTON is an Morton_bioaward-winning fiction author and Halloween expert whose books include The Halloween Encyclopedia (now in a second edition) and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween (just released in trade paperback by Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press). She has been seen chatting about her favorite holiday on The History Channel and in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, and she maintains one of the most comprehensive Halloween resources on the web, http://halloween.lisamorton.com . Her novella Summer’s End was called “hands-down brilliant” by Gary Braunbeck, and “ambitious” and “poetic” by Publisher’s Weekly. She lives In North Hollywood, California, where she’s always researching Halloween.

Buy Summer’s End: http://journal-store.com/fiction/summers-end/

Buy Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween: http://www.amazon.com/Trick-Treat-Halloween-Lisa-Morton/dp/1780231873/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1377328472

Read an excerpt from Summer’s End:

(Up to this point: Halloween expert Lisa Morton has been called in by professors at UCLA to consult on a momentous find: The body of a sixth-century female Druid, discovered with a hand-written manuscript which completely changes the history of the Irish Celts and the origins of Halloween. Since she started researching the manuscript, Lisa has been increasingly subjected to strange happenings, and even fears she has murdered someone during a trancelike state. In this scene, she is returning from having a late dinner with friends after a book signing.)

At 11 p.m. (how had it gotten to be that late?), the shop closed up and kicked us out, we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk, and I turned to head for my car, now parked several blocks away. It was late enough that the stores had closed, and few cars drove by. In the distance I could hear the ever-present sound of sirens (in an area as big as L.A., there’s always a catastrophe happening somewhere) and the thrum of freeway congestion.

I came to an intersection, and even though I couldn’t see any approaching cars, I waited for the crosswalk light to turn green—the last thing in the world I needed right now was for a hidden cop to nab me for jaywalking.

“I’m really sorry, officer, and—what? No, that’s not blood under my fingernails, of course not…” My rational mind assured me that there was no visible blood beneath the nails of the hands I’d scrubbed until they were raw and red, but I still wasn’t taking any chances. I waited.

The shop on the corner was one of those little cluttered gift shops, the kind that you glance in and you can’t imagine buying any of this kitschy nonsense and you wonder how they stay in business. Because it was Halloween, their front display windows were full of little papier mâché pumpkins (some were sprayed with glitter or even wore little aprons, which offended my highly-honed sense of Halloween decorum), cute witch and cat figurines, and gingerbread-scented candles. There were Halloween salt shakers and mugs and hand towels.

Near the bottom was a jack-o’-lantern that made me stop and stare. It was white, almost the size of a real pumpkin, and lit with some sort of reddish glow from within. It also bore one of the most grotesquely carved faces I’d ever seen—eyes with knitted brows, a huge snaggletoothed grin, and two slits for a nose. It didn’t begin to match the other items in the window, all of which would have been more at home in an Anne Geddes photo book than a Stephen King novel, and it was the only piece that seemed to be lit.

I was bending down to look more closely at it when it moved. It turned and looked directly up at me.

Now I knew why it looked familiar. I’d seen it before, outside the window of ó Cuinn’s office.

But this time it didn’t vanish abruptly—I think it wanted me to see it. Its rictus grin widened, spilling even more crimson light out around it, although I couldn’t make out the rest of its body. I took one, two steps back—

HOONNNK! I’d backed right into the street, and hadn’t even noticed the car barreling through the intersection. Heart hammering, I leapt back up onto the curb and the car sped off into the night.

When I looked back at the window, the face was gone.

It was coming for me.

I ran, then, ran against the red light and regardless of who might see me and wonder what I was running from. I didn’t look into any of the other windows I passed, or listen for the sound of tiny footsteps coming up behind me, closer and closer…I ran, digging into my purse as I neared my car, trying to find my keys which always fell to the bottom of the voluminous bag, requiring precious extra seconds to dig them out—

I had them. I flipped up the car key, jammed it into the lock, threw the door open and fell into the front seat. I slammed the door behind me, pressed the lock button—and flinched as something hit the door outside hard, making the whole car shake. I heard a high-pitched squeal.

Somehow I managed to get the right key into the ignition, start the car, and take off, burning rubber. I’d driven two blocks before I realized the parking brake was still on. I ran one stoplight (got lucky), then risked a glance in the rearview mirror.

Nothing but a quiet street of closed shops. A few headlights in the distance. Nothing chasing me, no sign of anything unusual.

Five minutes later I was home.

7 comments on “Halloween Haunts 2013: Personal Experience in Halloween Fiction; Or, Why I Wrote a Halloween Novella Featuring a Protagonist Named Lisa Morton by Lisa Morton

  1. Great Halloween facts article, but I knew it would be. Nice teaser to SUMMER’S END as well. Can’t wait to dig in!

  2. Fascinating! I didn’t know that about Halloween’s history. I guess I need to read your book. 🙂 And the whole story behind your novel is interesting too. Great post!

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