Halloween

Halloween is hungry, thirsty work. All those seasonal book signings and live readings can really take it out of you, not to mention the effort it requires to fish all of the bodies out of the moat in time for the traditional midnight game of “wake the dead.” It is an industrious time where family comes together to create costumes, to transform the house into a set from a horror movie—and to cook up a feast. Ah yes, the feasting; for an army of the undead cannot march on an empty stomach. In fact, October truly begins in my home…

  The Halloween season is upon us, when the trees shed their leaves like scraps of yellow-orange construction paper that shuffle beneath your feet, every pumpkin spreads a butter-yellow grin, and every porch light becomes an invitation to fill your bucket with candy. I must admit, at the risk of sending the gentle reader clicking off to some other corner of the web, Christmas is my favorite holiday, but Halloween is a close second. But I got to thinking, one of the things I always looked forward to on Christmas as a kid were the proliferation of holiday-themed animated specials…

Dracula in French?  And Canadian French to boot?  And with songs!  Yes, all that and more is available to those who enjoy a delightful shiver on seeing a bat’s silhouette against a full moon, as nights grow chill and days shorten to herald the coming of Halloween. And it’s on DVD, “inspiré du roman de Bram Stoker, le spectacle musical Dracula:  Entre L’Amour et La Mort.”  Yes, the musical version of Dracula -- in French. Actually produced in Quebec where it ran from January 13 to December 16 2006 (with the DVD version filmed in November that year according to…

Nightmares are the stuff of dreams­­-the subtle edge of darkness that creeps across the sleeping mind, evoking inner demons to dance macabre behind the shuttered windows of the soul. I don’t remember when they started, the dreams of faceless entities, of black figures standing by my bed whispering in the deep shadows of my childhood room. Sometimes I would wake from their dark grasp and find my six-year-old self standing at the end of my parent’s bed, or in the kitchen, or walking down the hallway. Other times I would suffer from sleep paralysis, trapped between dream and reality, a…

October 31st - Halloween night: A lonely drifter wanders on a dark sandy road through the scrubby New Jersey Pine Barrens. Clouds mask the full October moon. A screech is heard from a stand of pine. Running footsteps cut through dried leaves. Night air turns chill. Heavy breathing rumbles. Something demonic approaches the drifter who trembles with fright. Earlier words echo in his thoughts: Beware of the Jersey Devil. And, the legend continues for nearly 300 years. Mrs. Leeds, so the story goes, wanted no more children. While delivering her 13th child, she shouted, "I am tired of children. Let…

I read pretty much every genre with the exception of Romance and Westerns. Nothing against them, just not my cup of tea. Although there are many things I find enjoyable about other genres, especially fantasy and science fiction, which are more or less cousins to the horror genre, when it is done right there is nothing better than horror. Horror has the ability to hit a nerve than penetrates the psyche unlike anything else in the world of entertainment. That is the reason why horror movies do well at the box office no matter how ridiculous the plot, or how…

Enter the Crypt of Forgotten Screamers! WwwwAAaaaRRrrrrGGgghhHHHh!!!!! It’s Halloween time again and that means you must have something appropriate spinning on the turntable, ‘natch. I don’t know about you, but I like to get my holiday discs out for aural pleasure to match the feeling of the season. Halloween is the best time to do this with all the great rock’n’roll themed spooks and howls. For this article, I decided to dig deep and unearth some forgotten Halloween oriented discs that you might want to give another spin. I’ve left out all the big names and well-known records like “Monster…

Halloween has always held a special place in my heart, even before I ever thought about becoming a horror and science fiction writer. While there is never one single reason a person can trace to a love of all things spooky, without doubt one of the factors in my own personal horror-mania has to be that I grew up in one of the most haunted places in the country, a region where Halloween isn't just a holiday, but a part of life. I'm talking about the lower Hudson Valley of New York. Stretching from Manhattan to Albany County, there are…

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. Growing up, I relished Halloween’s approach even more than Christmas. Santa had nothing on Halloween with Jack o'Lanterns, costumes and candy… Every year the crisp October air prompted my father to take my twin brother, mother and me to the local farm on Long Island to choose the biggest pumpkin we could find for the momentous occasion. That same night, after the dinner dishes had been cleared, Dad would put some old newspaper on the kitchen table, and hand my brother and me black magic markers and together we would draw a scary…

One of my most vivid childhood memories was of a haunted house in the neighborhood when I was young. It was the artificial variety. The guys who ran it where most likely high school students—certainly way older than me and my friends. These guys went all out. They had grave stones in the yard. Some dead guy hanging from a tree (and he was active, meaning he moved), lightning, and spooky music. It worked. It was really scary, at least to a little kid. Oh, did I mention the monster that reached out from the bushes and grabbed your feet?…

Why do we do it? Why do folks like Mike Dellosso, Brian Keene, Elizabeth Massie, Kevin Lucia, me, and any number of other writers look at the dark side of the literature spectrum? Why write horror novels when there are so many other kinds of things to write? Maybe the first line from this Associated Press story will give you a better idea. “A Louisiana man is accused of decapitating and dismembering his disabled 7-year-old son and leaving the boy’s head near the street so the child’s mother would see it – a killing that brought seasoned police officers to…

Fans of horror and dark fantasy love Halloween. There’s a reason people watch frightening films or walk through “haunted houses” to be terrorized by college students dressed as zombies: There is something incredibly exciting and entertaining about being scared. Not “being chased by a crazy man with a knife” type of scared, but rather, the kind of fear that you know is artificial but COULD be real. Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft are often cited influences of many authors and that is true for me as well. However, the biggest name in the history of horror is not lost…

Every day when he comes home from preschool, my four-year-old son, Owen, proceeds to creep us out with his artistic creations. Here are some of my favorites (with appropriate captions):                   “Follow me,” the cat said as it led me through the house of mirrors. After a while, I looked down and realized my legs were attached directly to my head. Worse, I was bald.                   Despite the warnings, I gazed directly into the creature’s eyes. Its forbidden name appeared on the wall and…

As with most authors of horror stories and ghost tales, one of my favorite times of the year is the Halloween season. My fondness for the spooky holiday stems back to early childhood, when my fellow elementary school students and I sang eerie tunes like “The Ghost of John,” and neighborhood kids spread rumors about a stuffed witch down the street coming to life at midnight on Halloween night. I grew up in a shiny, brand-new suburb in Orange County, California. Despite the nearness of the atmospheric Mission San Juan Capistrano and Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride, nothing about the area…

There are a lot of wonderful reasons to use Halloween in fiction. It’s an extraordinarily rich holiday, offering a variety of experiences. For some, it’s about the autumn season, with the sights and smells and sensations that accompany longer nights and turning leaves; for others, it’s about candy and the empowerment derived from costuming; and for many of us, it’s a chance to test our fears in safe, playful environments (movie theaters or haunted attractions). It’s also experienced by virtually everyone in North America at this point (and is rapidly spreading all around the globe). In horror fiction, many of…