Halloween Haunts: A Modest Defense of “Trick or Treating” by Darius Jones

Halloween Haunts: A Modest Defense of “Trick or Treating” by Darius Jones By now, my Fellow Americans, I’m certain that many of you are aware of a fast-moving pestilence sweeping the land. A corrupting tendency, most un-American, among many of our fellow citizens. An unhallowed abomination slowly lurching across the land… Trunk or Treat. The concept that, instead of going to a stranger’s home and asking them for candy, our children should instead meet at sterile, pre-arranged tailgates (usually featuring extremely weak Halloween signage) to politely request candy from a pre-approved, vetted group of adults. Now normally, I have no…

Halloween Haunts: SPIDER SEASON By Evan Baughfman

Halloween Haunts: SPIDER SEASON By Evan Baughfman   Recently, I picked Arachnophobia for our Family Movie Night, and my kids (over)reacted as if I’d told them we’d be bobbing for egg sacs inside a squirming tub of tarantulas. They begged for Ghostface, Annabelle, and KPop demons. Anyone or anything but SPIDERS! Arachnids have been creeping through my brain since end-of-summer. (To be honest, they’re always there, just out of view. Spiders like to crawl into my horror fiction, whether it be a twisted fairy tale or a dark Christmas entry.) It’s that time of year when orb-weaver species are on…

Terrors of Today: Lee Murray

Players by Lee Murray six players assembled to play a traditional game of cloak and dagger on the table, token representations pawns of all colours, players as young as eight   you’ll be the cook, they decide and someone’s wife, since you’re a woman they’ll have the titles and the brains the reverent, the professor, a retired colonel   the girl goes first, throwing you a look then, bold as brass, the army man advances no one suspects the reverent who takes full advantage of the secret passage   after that, everyone takes their turn the usual suspects, they corner…

Halloween Haunts: Married to Horror: Perspectives of a Collaborating Couple By Stephen H. Provost

Halloween Haunts: Married to Horror: Perspectives of a Collaborating Couple By Stephen H. Provost   Writers often approach horror from one of two perspectives: Either they’re writers who discover horror, or they’re horror lovers who find an outlet in writing. My wife, Sharon Marie Provost, was a horror fan from childhood. She’s a voracious reader who grew up on Stephen King, and she wrote a vampire-themed short story when she was in grade school. If you ask her whether she’s seen a specific horror film, chances are the answer will be “yes.” I, on the other hand, was a journalist…

Terrors of Today: L Marie Wood

Inside Out by L. Marie Wood Inside out what’s inside bared to the air tender to the touch red and slick hothouse musk. Voice loud my mind Loud in the sky Loud  Because it can be Private for me but I’m flayed for the world to see. Open cavity. Open skull. Open mind. Open shell. A husk to be filled with your words your thoughts your wants your desires you you you alone you whole you bold. Of me there’s no consequence. Of me there’s no gain. All taken with the edge of the blade lain to cut to sever,…

Halloween Haunts: In Adolescent Clouds of Gloom By Sumiko Saulson

Halloween Haunts: In Adolescent Clouds of Gloom By Sumiko Saulson 16-year-old Sumiko Saulson standing on the lanai of their apartment at Atkinson Plaza in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1984. Photo taken by their father, Robert Saulson. I landed at the Ambassador Hotel, in the historical Transgender District (where the Compton Cafeteria Riots took place in August 1966). The Ambassador was in the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s red light district, a rough-and-tumble 50-square-block ghetto rising up from the front doorsteps of City Hall, filled with single room occupancy (SRO) hotels like my new home, where the City’s poorest could rent a room in…

Halloween Haunts: This Haunted House Will Save You By Henry Corrigan

Halloween Haunts: This Haunted House Will Save You By Henry Corrigan   Everything we do, tends to have a purpose behind it. We humans might be weird, but we don’t really do random. That’s because randomness is risky. It invites chaos and if there’s one thing that both scares and offends us, it’s that something could be done to us, and we’re left with no recourse. We’re just done. So, to deal with this inescapable fact, we do what we do best. We play pretend. We create stories, structures and scenarios where we can come to grips with it safely.…

Terrors of Today: Angela Yuriko Smith

Newsfast: Menu for the Machine by Angela Yuriko Smith Thoughts are deadly gossamer, silvery filaments breaching the vacant void to reach me. Dangers tremble along my neural networks, each tentative vibration a warning that there is a ghost in the machine, a viral bug, a broken code. I see it in the clouds, weighted low with toxins. I taste it in the dew, flavored gray, wilting skin and organs from within. Language spewed to skew cellular structures, warping what began as holy into what ends in despair and disrepair. It takes one thought to derail a system, one word to…

Halloween Haunts: An Australian Gothic Haunt… Leanbh Pearson

Halloween Haunts: An Australian Gothic Haunt… Leanbh Pearson   I'm an Australian horror author which means our celebrations for Hallow’s Eve, Samhain, Dia de los Muertos occur in Fall in northern hemisphere. But for us Aussies and Kiwis the Spooky Season is in Spring. Mind flipping? Just a little hemisphere flip to the right…(insert Rocky Horror Picture Show Joke). So, let me tell you a Halloween Haunts tale from downunder. Here’s our scene. Our Trick O' treaters deal with warm-hot temperatures, their costumes and plastic or rubber masks making them sweating and Face paint melting. No worries. We enjoy the…

Terrors of Today: Pedro Iniguez

The Epidemic of Shrink-Ray-Gun Violence Plaguing Our Schools Must End By Pedro Iniguez This poem originally appeared in Star*Line #45.3, 2022   Their atoms dust the floors of every school in the country; those frightened children we can no longer console.   Their cries have faded into inaudible wavelengths inside a quantum world where hugs and spacetime both cease to exist.   They have dissolved into mere fractions of their corporeal selves, their particles swept into dustpans and mopped into oblivion.   Blame those new blasters inundating the market, stowed inside scores of scruffy backpacks; the preferred choice of disgruntled…
Call For 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award Nominations

Call For 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award Nominations

  The Horror Writers Association calls for suggestions and nominations from the membership for the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award. The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented annually to an individual whose work has substantially influenced the horror genre. While this award is often presented to a writer, it may also be given for influential accomplishments in other creative fields. The award is presented each year during HWA's gala presentation of the Bram Stoker Awards at StokerCon. To be eligible for this award, a candidate must either be at least sixty years of age by May 1 of the year of the…

Halloween Haunts: Samhain By Brooke MacKenzie

Halloween Haunts: Samhain By Brooke MacKenzie   During my senior year of high school, I had become a devout practitioner of Wicca, and I made sure everyone around me knew it.  I would offer “Blessed Be” as a standard farewell, and even the occasional, “Goddess Bless” when someone sneezed.  I performed love spells for romantically challenged friends, crafted prosperity dolls as Christmas presents, and self-righteously preached about the destructiveness of patriarchal religion.  I dyed my hair blue and then green and then purple, spilled wax all over the carpet during full moon rituals and bogarted my mom’s stock pot to…

Terrors of Today: Modern Horror Poetry

Terrors of Today: Modern Horror Poetry It’s been 180 years since Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Raven,” the poem that turned him into an overnight success, only four years before his life was tragically cut short at just forty years of age. The official cause of death was "congestion of the brain,” sometimes used as a euphemism for alcoholism-related mortality of the era. In honor of this morbid Bostonian, we honor Dark Poetry Day on the anniversary of his death (October 7) rather than his birthday.  He is one in a long list of dark poets, from Phyllis Wheatley, William…

Halloween Haunts: An HWA Halloween By Robert Cabeen

Halloween Haunts: An HWA Halloween By Robert Cabeen Instead of promoting my own dark doings, I’m going to provide photographic evidence that HWA members deserve Kevin Wetmore’s moniker, “Halloween People.” Our annual Halloween galas provided HWA members, from across the country, the chance to give their shadows the night off and go wild. Warning: to those of you who have been caught in the act here—this will now go down on your permanent HWA record. Our last Halloween party was in the before times, but we plan to carry on the tradition in the future—maybe next year. Will you dare…

Halloween Haunts: “Was I Supposed to be Scared?” By J.B. Corso

Halloween Haunts: “Was I Supposed to be Scared?” By J.B. Corso     This is the worst question a horror reader can ask themselves. If you or your reader asked this, at least one of two things is likely true. The narrative failed to connect because: it lacked the necessary emotional charge to be scary, and/ or the storyline, horror, and/ or theme was too familiar So, what might’ve gone wrong? Here are 6 challenges a horror story faces and what can be done to correct them. Let’s go! Over-saturated Market (Problem #2) Humans have evolved over the millennia to…

Halloween Haunts: Horror Influences By Dean Cade

Halloween Haunts: Horror Influences By Dean Cade I never planned on becoming a writer. The seeds were planted since I was a horror fan from a young age. My earliest memory of being scared in a theater was seeing the horror film, Prophecy, in the early summer of 1979. There was a scene towards the end that changed my life. The survivors were hiding in some kind of underground chamber, whispering and debating about the mutant bear somewhere up above. I wanted them to stay where it was safe and not open the trapdoor, but characters never listen and do dumb…

Halloween Haunts: The Frog and The Scorpion Go to Universal Studios By Michael Subjack

Halloween Haunts: The Frog and The Scorpion Go to Universal Studios By Michael Subjack   “I know you’re going to tell people about that shit.” We were barely out of the parking lot when Brian delivered this statement with a weary certainty. “I would never do that to you, buddy,” I assured him. “This stays between us.” It was a genuine promise. Too bad it only lasted a night.   We had just spent the evening at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, a tradition that began when I moved to the West Coast in 2010. The 2013 line-up wasn’t among the…
Nuts & Bolts: “Welcome to Night Vale” Co-Creator Jeffrey Cranor’s Advice on Writing Horror, Podcasting

Nuts & Bolts: “Welcome to Night Vale” Co-Creator Jeffrey Cranor’s Advice on Writing Horror, Podcasting

By Tom Joyce -- Jeffrey Cranor, co-creator of the “Welcome to Night Vale” podcast, has good news for horror writers. You’re already the world’s leading authority on what it takes to write effective horror – a knowledge of what scares you. Jeffrey should know. He created his supernatural fiction podcast with Joseph Fink in 2012, featuring a small-town radio host deadpanning his way through banal local news reports, interspersed with casual references to the outlandish conspiracies and otherworldly terrors that are part of the daily routine for Night Vale’s beleaguered residents. A year later, “Welcome to Night Vale” was the…

Halloween Haunts: My Season as a Scareactor By Rob Tiemstra

Halloween Haunts: My Season as a Scareactor By Rob Tiemstra   It’s September of 2018. At Universal Studios Hollywood, rehearsal is underway for this year’s Halloween Horror Nights. My friend Noelle walks out onto the deserted upper lot and pantomimes howling at the moon. The rest of her cast converges behind her as the soundtrack kicks into high gear and they charge forward. Even without anyone in costume or makeup, the staging is a thrill to witness. This act will become the Opening Scare-emony of HHN 2018. The inhabitants of the Upper Lot Scare Zone — themed after Michael Dougherty’s…

Halloween Haunts: When the Line Between the Living and the Dead is at its Thinnest By Amanda Worthington

Halloween Haunts: When the Line Between the Living and the Dead is at its Thinnest By Amanda Worthington   My mom had had a good day the day before and we were all unusually optimistic. The strains of my conversation alone with her drifted back to me – “If it ever comes to life-saving measures versus comfort measures, I want comfort-measures.” Those words were heavy, but I drudged them up from the deep as the heart monitor let out its disparaging whine. The next moments are a blur, even now. Cancer is a bitch. And it made her a corpse…