Halloween Haunts 2013: The Old Stories Return by James Chambers

October raises dark dreams of chill breezes and the aroma of dead leaves.

Dreams of streets and houses, dead black in silhouette against sunset’s orange and indigo skies.

Twilight dreams.

Memories of things that never existed.

Things we obsessed over in childhood when the ritual of donning a Halloween costume and trick-or-treating meant more than simply harvesting candy because it still seemed possible when we were young that on Halloween the supernatural might reveal itself.

Ghosts might drift through the air and shadows come alive.

Lights might appear in abandoned houses.

Black, driverless cars might cruise down the road beside us.

We ached to glimpse these things on Halloween.

Yearned for a scrap of proof for the existence of all the things adults told us didn’t exist.

Things bumping in the night. Things living under our beds or in our closets. Things that appeared in mirrors challenged five times with the name of a bloody, lost soul. The things our teachers and parents labeled nonsense and superstition. Of course, we lied and said we knew that, but secretly we believed. And oftentimes we had good reason to.

Everyplace has its secrets, after all. Its skeletons in the closet.

Legends that fuel childhood nightmares of evil clowns, anonymous white vans driven by child molesters, windows that drip blood at midnight, and strange sounds and lights dancing in the woods along the railroad tracks.

The kind of myths that inspire horror writers.

On Halloween, I trick-or-treated a world transformed into a land of Satanic killers and haunted horrors, of voices in tunnels, and streets that seemed desolate after dark in spite of the brightly-lit houses crammed along them. The stories never drifted far from our minds as we walked. The names of places stuck with us. Amityville. Anthrax Island. Brooklyn. Aztakea. Places far away from our neighborhood despite being part of the same island. The stories of those places accreted in our minds from fragments overheard from adults, or dished out by older siblings, or gleaned from television and movies. Those older than us shook their heads at the first hint of anything paranormal, but we kids knew better.

In Amityville, a house full of evil spirits sat atop an ancient burial ground.

Plum Island housed not only horrible diseases such as anthrax and smallpox, but also demons summoned by top-secret government experiments.

If you listened by the railroad underpass at midnight, you would hear a child crying.

To the west, in Brooklyn, a man with a .44 caliber pistol sought victims parked on lovers’ lanes, while some years later to the east, in the Aztakea woods, Satan worshippers turned on one of their own and left him buried beneath a blanket of leaves.

We believed these things with conviction. Some of them were true.

Evil was evil then, supernatural or otherwise. It all blended together. Even though much of it occurred well outside our neighborhood, there was no shaking the hair-raising feeling that it might creep our way at anytime.

Especially on Halloween.

Our thrill came from the sense of danger in being allowed to roam free after dark in disguise, going house to house, when each door and turn of a corner seemed as if it might put us face to face with those horrific, secret things.

None ever did.

We always made it home, on time and tired, eager to devour candy.

Years passed. We grew. Trick-or-treat dropped by the wayside.

The stories changed.

Amityville proved a hoax, its only true horror in the awful murders of the DeFeo family. We learned that part of the story so much later, long overshadowed by tales spread by the movies and best sellers. I’ve driven by the house. It’s an ordinary, nice house in a well-kept yard in a neighborhood like the one where I grew up.

And Anthrax Island, better known as Plum Island, horrific as its purpose may be as a deadly disease research center, houses no demons, except maybe Hannibal Lecter in some alternate reality version of Silence of the Lambs.

We never did hear the voice in the tunnel.

The Son of Sam remains in jail to this day, and still sometimes speaks of a Satanic cult connected to his killings, but no one much seems inclined to listen. The drug-addled teen who tortured and killed his friend in the Aztakea woods of Northport died a long time ago. Only days after he was arrested, in fact, and it seems the Devil died with him. I live in Northport now. It’s a quiet place and free of Satanists as far as I can tell.

Halloween makes me nostalgic for the old stories, the ones I traded with my friends, the ones we dared each other to believe as much as we dared each other to scoff—because we’d seen plenty of horror movies, and we knew what tended to happen to skeptics. It was safer to believe even if only a little. The world seems much smaller now without the mysteries we cherished. And knowing the truth behind the myths makes it seem a darker and far crueler place.

This time of year, I welcome those mysteries back for a time.

Some days I’d rather live in a world of ghosts and evil spirits, of demons and mysterious voices, and people driven to violence by evil forces outside their control rather than one where horror is too often defined by simple brutality, inhumanity, or insanity—terrible acts and killings committed out of derangement or petty disputes. October is a special time of year, when time shifts backward, and the veil between the world today and the world back then truly does grow thin, and we have an opportunity sink back into the old stories. They’re waiting for us, always, ready to send a welcome shiver down our spines, wrap us in their cold touch, and remind us that it’s okay to believe that maybe, waiting around that next corner, behind that next shadow, is thing we sought so many years ago.

A better world, maybe, if not an altogether brighter one.

Welcome to Halloween Haunts 2013!

The crypt reopens! Dark stories and the ghosts of Halloween escape!

It’s time once again to celebrate the season of the witch and the one night each year when the dead are said to walk the earth freely. It’s time again to spend Halloween with the horror writers.

This year’s Halloween Haunts posts contain a treasure trove of Halloween memories, book excerpts, giveaways, and interviews with recipients of the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards®. A horde of HWA members—Mort Castle, Greg Chapman, Keith Deininger, Ed Erdelac, Amy Grech, John Mantooth, Lisa Morton, Gene O’Neill, Loren Rhoads, Marge Simon, Lucy Snyder, L.L. Soares, Jinx Strange, Steve Rasnic Tem, Marty Young, Matthew Warner, Rocky Wood, Johnny Worthen, and many others—have contributed to serve up a daily diet of treats and chills through October 31. So bookmark this page, join our Facebook event page, and don’t miss a day of the fun.

If you’re a horror writer or horror reader who hasn’t yet joined the HWA, I hope you’ll consider doing so. The HWA offers writers many benefits, including mentoring, networking, market news, and professional resources. It presents the annual Bram Stoker Awards® and holds the annual Bram Stoker Award Weekend.

You can learn more about joining here: https://www.horror.org/joinhwa.htm. Or send questions to: membership@horror.org.

Our contributors have put their hearts and souls into making this the biggest Halloween Haunts yet. A special thanks to all of them, whether they wrote a post or gave an interview, for sharing their Halloween anecdotes and traditions, suggestions for celebrating the season, and thoughts and advice about writing horror. It’s a great pleasure to coordinate and edit Halloween Haunts and to have a chance to work with so many of my fellow HWA members. Thanks, as well, to Rocky Wood, Lisa Morton, and Angel Leigh McCoy, whose continued support make this event possible. Thanks to Greg Chapman for drawing and designing our wonderful Halloween Haunts banner and to Doug Murano for his help in promoting Halloween Haunts on HWA social media.

And now, the treats! In addition to their posts and excerpts, many of our contributors are offering e-book and print copies of their books for lucky readers who enter in each giveaway. If an author is offering a giveaway with their post, it will be noted and the format specified (print or e-book). Enter for the prize by posting in the comments section. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail. You may enter once for each giveaway, and all entrants may be considered for other giveaways if they don’t win on the day they post. You may also enter by e-mailing membership@horror.org and putting HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: James is giving away one signed paperback edition of Three Chords of Chaos, one a signed paperback edition of Corpse Fauna: The Dead Bear Witness, and one signed paperback edition of Corpse Fauna: Tears of Blood.

Read an excerpt from Three Chords of Chaos.

Read an excerpt from Corpse Fauna: The Dead Bear Witness.

Read an excerpt from Corpse Fauna: Tears of Blood.

JAMES CHAMBERS’ tales of horror, crime, fantasy, and science fiction have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines. In 2011 Dark Regions Press published his collection of four Lovecraftian-inspired novellas, The Engines of Sacrifice. Publisher’s Weekly described it as “chillingly evocative.” In 2012 and 2013 Dark Quest Books published his zombie novellas, The Dead Bear Witness and Tears of Blood, the first two volumes in the Corpse Fauna novella series, as well as his dark, urban fantasy novella, Three Chords of Chaos. Chambers is also the author of the short story collections Resurrection House, published in 2009 by Dark Regions Press, and The Midnight Hour: Saint Lawn Hill and Other Tales with illustrator Jason Whitley. His stories have appeared in the award-winning Bad-Ass Faeries and Defending the Future anthology series as well as Allen K’s Inhuman, Bare Bone, Deep Cuts, The Green Hornet Chronicles, Hardboiled Cthulhu, In an Iron Cage, Mermaids 13, The Spider: Extreme Prejudice, To Hell in a Fast Car, Walrus Tales, and many other anthologies and magazines. He has also written numerous comic books including Leonard Nimoy’s Primortals, the critically acclaimed “The Revenant” in Shadow House, and The Midnight Hour. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the chairman of its membership committee, and the recipient of the 2012 Richard Laymon Award. His can be found online at www.jameschambersonline.com and https://www.facebook.com/ThreeChordsOfChaos.