The Seers’ Table – January 2019

The Seers Table! December 25, 2018 by HWAWeb Janet Holden, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community In the northern hemisphere the days are short, the nights are long, while down south the summer season approaches. What better time to curl up with a good book or watch a good movie? Here are our suggestions for January. Janet Holden suggests Laura Purcell is a former bookseller and lives in Colchester with her husband and pet guinea pigs. Her first novel for Raven Books, The Silent Companions, won the WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award 2018 and featured in both the Zoe…

The Seers’ Table – December 2018

The Seers Table Kate Maruyama, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community Happy December! Just in time for your holiday shopping, our Seers’ Table brings you some creepy, wonderful reading! Linda Addison recommends: Zig Zag Claybourne. Zig Zag Claybourne grew up watching The Twilight Zone and considers himself a better person for it. His fiction and essays have appeared in Apex, Strange Horizons, Vex Mosaic, Stupefying Stories, UnCommon Origins, The City (a cyberfunk anthology), and more. He loves promoting great art and posing the Great Questions, such as whether or not anybody can ever be funkier than Prince. You can…
YA Writing Prompt: Cabin Fever

YA Writing Prompt: Cabin Fever

Young Horror brings you writing prompts to energize your week with spooky writing idea inspiration. Are you writing picture books, chapter books, middle grade, or YA? Your next great idea could be sparked right here. The Horrors of Winter Break Ah...take a breath, because December brings with it Winter Break. There's a short vacation for kids, teens, and parents from the usual routine of packing lunches, school buses, and homework. Picture togetherness, smell the holiday spices, taste the hot cocoa, feel the soft flannel of matching family pajamas. Sometimes, there can be TOO much togetherness. If the weather's terrible or the…
Murder Most Fowl and Other Holiday Horrors

Murder Most Fowl and Other Holiday Horrors

Somewhere in the United States this moment, a large turkey—with glorious plumage, I would like to imagine—doesn’t know that he’s already been selected for presidential pardon for the American Thanksgiving holiday next week. In classrooms across the country, kids are consuming read-aloud picture books about other turkeys running from feast centerpiece fates. Many classroom games and educational activities are built to the theme of staving off the imminent death of the turkey—hide the turkey, disguise the turkey. Can you, young schoolchild, alter this bird’s fate and save his life? It’s all fun and games, and then we expect the child…

The Seers Table November 2018

Linda Addison, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Community November contains National Pizza Day; enjoy new work with your meal! Andrew Wolter recommends Larissa Glasser is a librarian, genre writer, and queer trans woman from Boston. Her short fiction has appeared in Wicked Haunted (New England Horror Writers), Tragedy Queens: Stories inspired by Lana Del Rey and Sylvia Plath (Clash Books), Procyon Science Fiction Anthology 2016 (Tayen Lane Publishing), and The Healing Monsters, Volume One (Despumation Press). Larissa co-edited Resilience: Surviving in the Face of Everything, a collection of stories by trans writers (Heartspark Press) and which was a nominee…

A Portrait of the Halloween Expert as a Young Woman By Lisa Morton

When my father passed away in 2015, I received an unexpected and lovely inheritance: thousands of color slides, many of which featured me as a baby, a toddler, and a child. One of the reasons this was remarkable was because I really thought there weren’t many photos around of me as a kid. My mom only had a handful, and for some reason – even though I remained close to my dad after my parents split up – I hadn’t realized he had so many photos. I bought a little device that would allow me to digitize the slides and…

Under the Autumn Stars by Tim Waggoner

Halloween night is one of my first –and best – memories. I was just shy of eight months old. I was my parents’ first child, and my mom was excited when Halloween came around. She dressed me in a pink bunny costume, and I had no idea why she put me into this strange outfit. Mom put on a light jacket, picked me up, and we headed out. It was cool, but not cold. The weather was near perfect. I hadn’t been outside at night before, at least not for very long, and I was fascinated with how different the…

Hyaku-monogatari kaidankai or, This Halloween, Why Not Tell a Hundred Scary Stories in the (Growing) Dark? By Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Japan is a latecomer to the Halloween party.  Since the millennium the holiday has grown in popularity, mostly in Tokyo, utterly influenced by the representations of Halloween at Tokyo Disney and Universal Studios Osaka, and entirely among young adults. Trick or Treating is out of the question (violates far too many cultural taboos), so kids don’t get much opportunity to do anything, and many adults find it foreign and annoying (and messy). But for the young adults of Tokyo, it is an excellent occasion to party and engage in two of Japan’s favorite things: cosplay and street gatherings.  Roppongi used to be…

Horror and Halloween in Singapore by Christina Sng

When you grow up in a haunted house, you expect to see something supernatural at some point, especially when an aunt claims to have heard chains dragging along the hallway and another family member allegedly saw ghosts. But my skepticism grew up with me when I saw nothing. Not even a moving shadow. It was terribly disappointing. Then we moved, and I left my childhood home behind, along with the ghosts. When I was 7, it became clear to me that what was on TV was not reality. Reality felt crisp and real while fantasy was a fantastic ride to immerse…

How to Make a Monster By Janet Joyce Holden

I’ve always thought book-signing events should be cool and awesome, and with that in mind I always bring a few treats to give away. Buttons, flash fiction postcards, gift bags, and the occasional monster. Everyone, it turns out, loves monsters. They make people happy, so here’s how to make one (or a dozen) and if you haven’t done this before, it’s time to assemble a bunch of sharp, stabby objects and scare yourself silly (after all, what would October be without a few scares, eh?). Gather the following  – Half a yard of wool felt (body). A square of craft…

Interview Spotlight: Robert Payne Cabeen

Happy Friday All! Today marks the last interview spotlight as Halloween Haunts welcomes writer, artist and poet Robert Payne Cabeen. At Stokercon this past spring, Robert was the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel for Cold Cuts (2017, Omnium Gatherum Media). Halloween Haunts:  Welcome Robert! You have worn a number of career hats over the years, having become an accomplished artist, poet and writer. Of the three, which came first for you?   Robert Payne Cabeen:  Thanks for including me in Halloween Haunts, Michele. I’d have to say that art came first. I…

Interview Spotlight: Aric Cushing

Welcome to another interview spotlight! Halloween Haunts chats with writer/actor Aric Cushing, who is also a screenwriter. He is the author of the award-winning YA book, Vampire Boy, and with director Logan Thomas, co-wrote (and starred in) the forthcoming film, There’s No Such Thing as Vampires. Halloween Haunts:  Hello Aric and welcome to Halloween Haunts! You studied at the American Conservatory Theater and the London Court Theater in England and established an acting career on stage, film and television. What led you to get into writing screenplays? Aric Cushing:  I actually started writing plays and screenplays in college. Actually a…

Interview Spotlight: K. A. Opperman

Happy Wednesday! Today Halloween Haunts features an interview spotlight with poet K. A. Opperman who penned The Crimson Tome (2015, Hippocampus Press) and who has a poem in the newly released Black Wings of Cthulhu Volume Six (2018, Titan Books). Halloween Haunts:  Welcome Kyle! What was your first experience with poetry? K. A. Opperman: I can't recall my first ever experience with poetry, but the pivotal moment was when I discovered the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith sometime in my early 20's. It was the discovery of his work that first awoke in me a deep appreciation for poetry, and a desire to…

Halloween Reanimated by Tori Eldridge

When I was a kid, the horror was mild, the giggling loud, and the worry left to a minimum. Gypsies and fairies roamed the neighborhood streets at night in unsupervised hoards, gathering sacks of candy, homemade cookies, and sticky popcorn balls wrapped in cellophane—eaten with glee and nary a thought of razorblades and drugs. When I had kids of my own, Halloween became a time of bonding: school events, messy projects, family fun. The candy still played an important role but those home-baked treats disappeared. And parents, at least in our town, could be seen hovering at a discreet yet…

Setting, The Other Character by Frazer Lee

Setting is such a vital component of any horror story, to the extent that the place in which the narrative is framed can become a central character. Take, for example, the eponymous building in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, which she describes so chillingly as being “not sane.” Susan Hill’s 1983 ghost story The Woman in Black finds protagonist Arthur Kipps shacked up and shivering in Eel Marsh House, a haunted pile that is accessible only via the ominously named Nine Lives Causeway. In these narratives, the setting becomes an omnipresent, living (or un-dead) force to be…

68 Years of Halloween by Steve Rasnic Tem

I believe I was seven years old the first time I went trick-or-treating. Before that I wasn’t much aware of the holiday, and I certainly didn’t connect it with anything scary. I remember kids coming to the door in costume and getting candy—not too many because we lived in a very small Appalachian town. I was in my PJs, peeking out of the bedroom I shared with my two younger brothers. But that’s what I did when anyone came to the door—I was a painfully shy kid, and outside school and church I hid from people. But the summer I…

Interview Spotlight: Eric J. Guignard

Happy Saturday! Continuing the interview spotlight series, today Halloween Haunts chats with writer/editor Eric J. Guignard, whose debut collection, That Which Grows Wild: 16 Tales of Dark Fiction, was published this past July by Cemetery Dance Publications. Halloween Haunts:  Eric, you have written short stories, collections, novellas as well as working as a technical writer, but you have also edited critically acclaimed anthologies. Can you describe your start as a writer and editor? Eric J. Guignard:  Hi Michele! Well, I’ve only been pursuing creative writing/editing with the purpose of publishing since about February, 2011, which isn’t that long compared to…

Zoinks! By David Ghilardi

            Mitts was dressed as the Fonz, but now lolled at me like Droopy Dog.             I couldn't figure why. We'd decided Halloween was done for us. We were hungrily stuffing our faces. It wasn't time to consider anything other than sugary satisfaction. We'd worked hard for our huge bags of swag. Enjoyment was set to last until Thanksgiving, at least. Mitts had decided to be like Ewell Gibbons, chomping into the toffee apple oozing with caramel and nuts.             There was a pulpy crunch, then my friend turned towards me.             “Roo rushes id…
Scary Out There with Dawn Kurtagich

Scary Out There with Dawn Kurtagich

Scary Out There recently interviewed Dawn Kurtagich, author of And the Trees Crept In and The Dead House. In this episode of the podcast, Dawn discusses the importance of horror in the world of children's and YA literature, shares some of her own fears, and she gives us the scoop on her forthcoming book: Teeth in the Mist.  Listen to to the episode HERE! Podcast Music by John Leonard French. Dawn Kurtagich is an award winning author of creepy, spooky, and psychologically sinister YA, where girls may descend into madness, boys may see monsters in men, and grown-ups may have something to hide. Her debut…