Halloween Haunts: Sounds of the Season by J. Rocky Colavito

The challenge flitted across my Facebook feed this morning, and it reminded me that it’s time to start planning Halloween assignments for my three classes. Since the students are just as valuable as the textbooks, I must ponder how to get them to teach me something and give them an exercise that I’ll enjoy doing as well. It is that time of year, after all, when the sounds of haunting takeover the airwaves and wideband. So, the challenge puts spur to my planning. What’s the challenge; let’s compile a playlist of scary songs! I fully expect to get a mix…

Halloween Haunts: Good Questions: Shared Spaces of Horror and Religion by Brandon R. Grafius

I was too young to remember. But as the story’s been retold in family lore, it goes something like this: My family used to go out for fast-food most Sundays after church; in hindsight, it was clearly a way for my parents to bribe my brother and me to get us into Sunday School each week. I was about four years-old, took a big bit off a fried chicken drumstick, then fixed my gaze on the piece in my hand. I squinted my eyes at it, looked up at my parents, and said, “Hey…doesn’t this hurt the chicken?” My father…

Halloween Haunts: The Ghost with One Bloody Finger by Naching T. Kassa

When I was a kid in the 1980s, long before the advent of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps, my friends and family told scary stories with a funny twist. Some were rather dirty like, “The Ghost in the Walls,” while others were clean and spooky like, “The Man with the Golden Arm” and “The Ghost with the Ruby, Ruby Lips.” The story I’d like to share with you today, has become a Halloween tradition in my family. I’ve even told it to my son’s class during Halloween parties at his school. It’s called, “The Ghost with One Bloody Finger.”   THE…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Transformations by Adele Gardner

From my very first Halloween, I learned how important sewing is to that special night. My mother wore an elaborate clown costume, complete with a separate neck ruffle with ringing bells. Her mother had crafted this costume for her when Mom was in the eighth grade, for a stage performance at school. Mom also owned a child-sized devil costume of fluffy red that Grandma sewed for my Uncle Dan in 1948, when he was five, and Mom, age three, portrayed a Little Dutch Girl; Mom wore the devil costume the next year, and Uncle Dan became (through Grandma's wizardry) the…

Halloween Haunts: Transcending Tropes by Kodie Van Dusen

To say that I never saw myself writing horror is an understatement. My earliest memory of horror was at my best friend’s birthday when we were children. I don’t remember exactly how old we were, but I doubt we could have been much older than ten. A gaggle of girls huddled in her basement for a sleepover (which was already something that made me uneasy, being the introverted homebody that I was) to watch a special movie picked out by the birthday girl. The film? Halloween. You can imagine how well that went over with me, watching Michael Myers running…

Halloween Haunts: October Baby by Melissa Pleckham

Like many people born in October — all of us beauty-loving Libras, all of those mysterious, sexy Scorpios — I grew up thinking that Halloween was my special holiday. Like I had some sort of corner on the market. Some of my earliest memories involve inhaling the smell of greasepaint and latex masks in drugstores, crunching through the corpses of once-green leaves piled on lawns in knee-deep mounds, the dull sweetness of soft wax lips clutched tightly between my own baby teeth. My childhood birthday parties further blurred the line between birthday and Halloween, especially as I got older, serving…

Halloween Haunts: A Taste of Halloween Beyond – The Talking-board by Lisa Morton

I’ve written a lot of Halloween fiction, and I do mean A LOT. As in, I’ve already had one entire collection of just Halloween short stories and novellas – The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats – published (by JournalStone) in 2017, and I’ve written a bunch of new Halloween fiction since. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that I’m both a horror fiction writer and an expert on Halloween history (with three non-fiction books on that subject to my credit). When I’m asked to contribute a new Halloween story to something, I always stop first to think about some…

Halloween Haunts: THAT’S (NOT) THE SPIRIT! by Evan Baughfman

When our son was not-quite-two, my wife and I—perhaps irresponsibly—took him into a Spirit Halloween store, scarring the kid for years. The demon-possessed animatronics and creepy-crawly creatures proved to be too much for little Mason. The incident is forever preserved in a video, annually rearing its cringe-inducing head as a Facebook memory. Not my finest moment as a parent, forcing my boy to get so close to growling monsters. Yet there he is every October, in my arms, shrieking, white-knuckling my shirt, as Mom and Dad laugh at his expense and joke that he’ll need to get used to the…

Halloween Haunts: Comforting Visitations by Damian Serbu

For some odd reason, a Halloween memory from high school popped into my head the other day. I’m not one to love going back to immerse myself in high school reflections. I didn’t love or hate that part of my life. I survived, but I also think I was tortured by being in the closet at a time frought with a ton of emotion and turmoil. Looking back, I see how much living in the closet affected who I was, who I wanted to be, and what came across to other people. At a period when those around me explored…

MHI: Why Mental Health representation in SFFH matters

Trigger Warning: This article addresses mental health. Why Mental Health representation in SFFH matters By Penny Jones Recently, I had the privilege of moderating the Fantasycon 2022 panel on mental health in SFFH with my panellists David Green and Tej Turner. And although I was both hung over and nervous as hell, my panellists at least were erudite and insightful, talking at length about both their personal and professional experiences of mental health in genre fiction. As always with these panels, an hour never seems long enough and I probably only managed to get through half of the questions I…

Halloween Haunts: Believing Myself to be a Writer by John James Lane

I always wanted to be a writer, but deep inside for most of my life, I was constantly in a struggle with my own demons. Demons of being “less than”. Once when I was in sixth grade, our English teacher wanted us to write a story. In a ruled notebook, I chose one in which a knight fought a dragon, a basic medieval type story. After she reviewed all our stories, she handed the notebooks back, one by one. When it was my turn, she had a smile on her face. The page with the ending had words marked in…

Halloween Haunts: Like All That Lives, We Eat Death: The TTRPG by Emily Flummox

I came home for the first time to celebrate Samhain, one week after someone died there, on that land.   If I were ever to write a tabletop role-playing game based on Halloween, I think I’d forego the use of dice or cards or resource management, all those usual ways by which TTRPGs introduce chance into their narratives.  Instead, I think I would instruct the players to cover up all their clock faces, remove all their watches, turn off phones and computers, and when they wanted their character to do something, they would peek at the time, the ones digit…
The HWA Honors Indigenous Peoples Day

The HWA Honors Indigenous Peoples Day

Monday, October 10 is Indigenous Peoples' Day 2022 in United States. Indigenous Peoples' Day is a holiday that celebrates and honors Native American peoples and commemorates their histories and cultures. In honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, the Horror Writers Association is re-releasing a series of interviews with Native American writers, including HWA member and Owl Goingback, who won a Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, and Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, and Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement and Lambda Award Winning author of The Gilda…

Halloween Haunts: Of Horror, Hope, and Halloween by Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray

There is nothing that says ‘horror’ more than the Halloween holidays. Ask any fan of all things macabre for their favourite time of year and their obvious response is October, the Season of the Witch. Take this annual blog series, for example. Halloween Haunts exists as a celebration, a cornerstone of the horror writing community, a time of year when all of our passions are distilled into a month of festivities. For horror fans, especially writers, Halloween lauds the awe and wonder of the fantastic and the innate terror of something unknown and otherworldly, and in doing so has us…

Halloween Haunts: Hauntingly Normal by Susan Schwartz

Writing and researching the paranormal always seemed natural to me after growing up in a haunted house. We moved after the previous owner had passed away. She was a sweet elderly lady, who was well-loved in the neighborhood. The owner didn’t want it empty for too long a time. Being right down the street, the move didn’t take too long at all. I noticed the strange sensations after a couple of weeks. Nothing specific, I would just get weird feelings about the house and the strange noises it made, especially after dark. Why is it always after dark? Footsteps down…

Latinx Heritage in Horror: Interview with Karlo Yeager Rodriguez

Karlo Yeager Rodriguez is from the enchanted isle of Puerto Rico, but moved to Balitmore, Maryland some years ago. He lives there with his partner and one very odd dog. His work has appeared in Clowns: the Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix, Galaxy's Edge #32 and Nature Magazine. Connect with Karlo via his blog, alineofink.com or through Facebook at facebook.com/unalineanegra What inspired you to start writing? Reading. Really - I was an early reader, and was drawn from an early age to old fairy tales (Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen), which in their original forms always managed to contain elements of horror.…

Halloween Haunts: Beheading Delight by Rosemary Thorne

I love to time-travel to be beheaded: I use the thin veils that Halloween procures for the living and the dead to go through the portals after pronouncing the right words and spells. For a good decapitation, my favorite destination is London 17th century. I used to go to Paris 18th century just because it has a better reputation, madame Guillotine and all. Still, after a couple of decades of being chopped off in continental Europe, I began to look for a different experience. I don't know: the French became too passionate for my taste. I look forward to a…

Latinx Heritage in Horror: Interview with Ángel Isián

Ángel Isián is the Puerto Rican author of El cuco te va a comer (The Cuco’s going to eat you, 2020), a collection of horror short stories that received an honorable mention in the International Latino Book Awards, 2021. Together with Melvin Rodríguez, he helped edit the first anthology of contemporary horror stories from Puerto Rico, No cierres los ojos (Don’t close your eyes, 2016). He has published horror stories and poetry in various anthologies and magazines. He works as an English teacher and is coeditor of Libros Eikon, a small independent publisher of Puerto Rican horror, fantasy, and sci-fi.…

Halloween Haunts: A Halloween Urban Legend: The Bunnyman by Pamela K. Kinney

Everyone knows the urban legends of the man with the hook in Lover’s Lane, the Halloween campus murder, and the babysitter story. Still here in Virginia, we have the Bunnyman. This serial killer wears a bunny costume. I know; you ask what’s scary about someone dressed as the Easter Bunny? What does he even have to do with Halloween anyway? Well, for one thing, he carries a hatchet, and not an Easter basket of decorated eggs. You never want to meet him at the Bunnyman Bridge when the clock strikes midnight on Halloween. Otherwise, he might add you to his…

CELEBRATING DARK POETRY DAY

Edgar Allen Poe's ink ceased to flow 174 years ago today and dark poets everywhere honor his legacy on this National Day of Recognition. October 7, the day Edgar Allan Poe died, is National Dark Poetry Day. Originated in 2018 by HWA Poetry Showcase founder Peter Adam Salomon, himself an accomplished poet with three poetry collections and a Bram Stoker Award®-nominated novelist. Peter's work has been performed by The Radiophonic Workshop on BBC Radio 6. "Dark poetry has existed for centuries," said Peter Adam Salomon. "One of the oldest surviving works of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates…