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As many folks in the United States prepare for upcoming Halloween celebrations by choosing costumes—for themselves or perhaps for their children to go trick-or-treating—it’s intriguing to think about how dressing up in costume relates to writing horror. What are some of the common effects or benefits of each? The roots of Halloween lie in the early celebration of Samhain, where Celtic villagers disguised themselves in animal skins and as monsters to welcome in their new year, and chase away spirits or goblin infestations. They believed costumes could keep them from being kidnapped by fairies or spirits of their ancestors who…

A lifelong “Halloween People” myself, I connect Halloween with libraries, and do so for several reasons.  Each year I have the great pleasure of writing and directing a Halloween Haunt in my university library, working with the librarians and student performers.  We’re in the tenth year of doing this.  As the exhibit is about “Difficult Fairies,” we have created Haunting of Hannon X: Widdershins.  We have Chinese fairies, Filippino fairies, Vietnamese fairies, Mexican fairies, Irish fairies, Welsh fairies, Scottish fairies, and all of them are terrifying. The audience walks through the library in groups of ten to twelve through fifteen…

“The Children of the Night—what music they make!” Why hello there, Halloween people. Brian Asman here, author of the viral hit Man, Fuck This House and the upcoming Christmas horror comedy Return of the Living Elves. When I sat down to write something for the HWA blog, I racked my brain for spooky topics on which I’d be particularly qualified to pontificate. After all, I already wrote an article about Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, which is basically my only artistic influence. What else could I possibly talk about? Luckily, I was listening to music at the time. I know, weird, right?…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…