Halloween Haunts: The Age of Halloween By Helen Marshall

Halloween has always been one of my favourite holidays. This is an oddity because, growing up, I was a particularly frightened child: the kind of kid who clings to cotton bedsheets at three in the morning as some kind of foolproof protection against the unknown, who would rather make a running leap onto the mattress than place a delicate foot within one meter of the dark space under the bed. The kind of kid who had learned the fine art of rationalizing away the inexplicable noises, the tricks of light and shadow. I couldn’t watch scary movies. Ghost stories left…

Halloween Haunts: The Unknown by Max Booth III

Quick, what is more scary: Freddy Krueger’s burnt, ugly face, or the sound of his knives scrapping against a boiler room wall? Why is it that we are still obsessed over Jack the Ripper, a century after the fact, when we hardly give the Unabomber any thought at all? How come children need to sleep with the light on, when a monster could just as easily eat them without the darkness? It’s because the unknown will always be more scary than the known. With Freddy’s face, at least we can see him, at least we know what he looks like.…

Halloween Haunts: The Devil’s Path by Douglas Wynne

I grew up in a pretty typical suburban town on Long Island. We didn’t have any haunted houses or creepy graveyards in Smithtown—you had to drive all the way to Amityville for a look at the famous haunted house—so I’m afraid I can’t regale you with a non-fiction story of a spooky Halloween.  But I can tell you about the most enchanted Halloween I’ve witnessed, and that was in upstate New York, when I moved to Woodstock for a couple of years in the late nineties to work at a recording studio there. Woodstock is well known for weirdness.  The…

Halloween Haunts: My First Horror Book by Teresa Lo

I grew up a shy, homely nerd in a small town in Kansas. There wasn't a ton of stuff for me to do in my community and my strict Chinese parents wouldn't let me go out much anyway, so I spent the majority of my childhood sheltered up in my house, reading books or spending hours in front of the television. The few times I was forced outside, I often encountered various degrees of racism, which only further made me not want to interact with the real world. On the Halloween of the year that I was six, I was…

Halloween Haunts: A Slice of the Southeast Asian Underworld and Spirits of Laos by Bryan Thao Worra

“When the water rises, the fish eat the ants; when the water falls, the ants eat the fish.”- Traditional Lao Proverb Laos isn’t the first place people think of when it comes to international fear and horror.  But whether your tastes are for the supernatural or otherwise, Laos has many surprises for those willing to look, from secret wars to eerie ghosts and weretigers. Laos is a country of 6 million people, the size of Great Britain and a little bigger than Minnesota. But from a literary standpoint it is still largely terra incognita. Many readers became familiar with Laos…

Halloween Haunts: Those Damn Horror People by Eric Miller

I’ve been immersed in the horror world since I was a child, from sneaking into movies I was way too young to watch, to staying up on Saturday nights and watching the latest gems from horror host Sammy Terry, to attending conventions when I was a bit older, and moving on to working on a slew of horror films in an twenty-plus year movie career and finally in my latest pastime of horror anthology publisher and editor. I’ve seen, heard, and read heads being chopped off, limbs ripped from sockets, people being stalked and haunted, sprays of arterial blood splattering…

Halloween Haunts: Beneath the Veil of Flesh and Blood by Greg Chapman

Being from Australia, a land where celebrations centre more on sport than the change of seasons, I never had the pleasure of indulging in trick or treating. I knew of Halloween from seeing it on US television shows growing up, but it just wasn’t practised in Australia. “It was an American thing”. That’s not to say that no one in Australia celebrates Halloween, but I’d hazard a guess that those that do are in the minority. However, I have over the past few years, seen a return to Halloween, but its re-emergence seems to be sadly rooted in commerciality. As…

Halloween Haunts: Every Day Is Halloween by Peter Salomon

Little known fact: my due date was Oct. 31, 1967. Unfortunately, I ended up being three days late so even though I do not have a Halloween birthday, I was supposed to and, to be blunt, Nov. 3 is close enough. Growing up, every birthday party was associated with the holiday, whether it was the costumes or the Halloween-themed invitations or even just the ever-present piles of candy collected on the holiday itself. My birthdays were always candy-filled celebrations and I have vivid memories of dumping pillow cases filled with candy into the middle of a ravenous horde of young…

Halloween Haunts: Stoker Spotlight Interview with John Skipp

John Skipp is the recipient of the 2011 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in an Anthology for Demons: Encounters with the Devil and his Minions, Fallen Angels and the Possessed. 1. How would you describe Demons: Encounters with the Devil and his Minions, Fallen Angels and the Possessed? JS: I'd describe it as a book with an absurdly long title... (laughs) ...which also happens to contain a staggering array of tragic, terrifying, haunting, hilarious, insanely great fiction on the subject at hand, by some of the finest writers ever to tackle the tropes. Mostly, of course, it's about us,…

Halloween Haunts: “The Board” Spoils the Fun by George Wilhite

That year’s Halloween party was a tremendous success -- drinks flowed and the mix tapes pounded our favorite tracks by the giants of eighties rock and the more obscure artists our group of twenty-somethings had discovered. The police had been by once, asking us to quiet down and please remove the fake body hanging in the tree in the front yard, but the body in the bathtub remained a success throughout the night. It fooled many of the partiers more than once. Then, someone had the bright idea to get out a damn Ouija board. I’m sure some of you…

Halloween Haunts: Creating Halloween by Norman Prentiss

Recently I was invited to contribute a story to a project sponsored by Cemetery Dance Publications—a series of eBook singles focusing on Halloween. A “theme” invitation is always fun, since it challenges you to write a story that you might not have written otherwise. This one should have been especially easy: I’ve always loved stories that take place on Halloween, and I always wanted to write a Halloween story of my own. Halloween is such a rich subject because of the shared trick-or treat memories—with your parents and then, when you’re old enough, with your friends—and the iconic images of…

Halloween Haunts: The Ten Movies That Should Always Haunt Your TV On Halloween by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

1. Young Frankenstein From the lovely violin score, to the great performances, to the authentic sets, to one of the single best comedy dance numbers I’ve ever seen, this movie is a Halloween gem. My favorite line: “Open this goddamn door or I'll kick your rotten heads in! Mommy!” 2. Beetlejuice A couple years back I watched this Tim Burton classic with my wife, who had never seen it before. I appreciated the film in a completely different lens. The first part of the movie suggests almost a haunted house comedy—this would have probably been routine and forgettable, and even a safer…

Halloween Haunts: Peculiar Genius–The Ghost Stories of M.R. James by Brad C. Hodson

“The peculiar genius of M. R. James, and his greatest power, lies in the convincing evocation of weird, malignant and preternatural phenomenon... It is safe to say that few writers, dead or living, have equaled him in this formidable necromancy and perhaps no one has excelled him.”  -Clark Ashton Smith When the leaves change color and the wind cools, we find ourselves imagining what could be lurking in the shadows, what could be waiting in closets and under beds and inside dank, dark spaces. It’s a time that, whether through tradition or the influence of pop culture, begins to conjure…

Halloween Haunts: Samhain Stories by Frazer Lee

Samhain Publishing launched its Horror line this time last year, and was proud Platinum Sponsor of the Bram Stoker Awards® in Salt Lake City. Readers visiting the website http://www.samhainhorror.com will know that the roster of authors (including some HWA members) and diverse titles have grown month-on-month, with no sign of slowing down. Samhain Horror authors have been spotted at conventions like Horrorfind Weekend and KillerCon, signing copies of their books and reading their stories to horror fans. All such events have taken place in the USA—until now. When the time came to put together the first ever UK Samhain Horror…

Halloween Haunts: A Lucero Haunt by Brick Marlin

Twisting the doorknob and carefully peeking behind a few doors in my mind (As a writer, I have learned the hard way by “things” jumping out at me in the past; so, yes, I am very cautious!), I remember my parents dragging me off to different haunted houses. Whether it was witches holding skillets filled with human eyeballs inches away from my nose, stepping into a room where a mad doctor is severing the leg away from a woman whose guttural screams scurried down my spine, or perhaps walking along a five-foot wide path, people dressed in rags behind prison…

Halloween Haunts: How the Application of Corn Starch Prepared Me for Novel-Writing by David Annandale

Halloween taught me the virtue of suffering for one’s art. Right. That sounds insufferably pretentious. That’s because it is. But there is a grain of pragmatic truth I’d like to try to tease out of that statement, if you bear with me for a little bit. Horror stories and monsters have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My first Halloween costume consisted of a plastic Frankenstein Monster mask (and I was still too young to have even heard the word “Frankenstein”), along with a crepe-paper crown and cape my mother had fashioned for me.…

Halloween Haunts: Fight for Your Right to Halloween by Jennifer Harlow

As I’m sure all of my fellow HWA members can claim, Halloween is my favorite holiday. Horror movies on every channel, pumpkin seeds roasting in the oven, slutty cats and nurses trolling the street galore, and those are my least favorite things about the holiday. (Hello? Candy! Children!) But once I went to college, then moved back home into our rural suburb, I never got a single trick or treater. It was so depressing. I missed seeing the smile on mini-Spiderman or a fairy princess’ face. And it’s just pathetic if you’re an adult dressed in costume alone eating candy.…

Halloween Haunts: Specialty Press Award Spotlight–Derrick Hussey and Hippocampus Press

Derrick Hussey and Hippocampus Press received the 2011 HWA Specialty Press of the Year Award. 1. How would you describe Hippocampus Press? We are a small press specializing in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and their circle. Each member of our team brings their experience and enthusiasm to the projects we undertake, motivated primarily by our own taste in horror and literature. 2. Tell us about how Hippocampus Press came into existence. Hippocampus Press was conceived to fill the gap created when Necronomicon Press more or less stopped its activities in the late 1990s. At that time,…

Halloween Haunts: Three Ways Anyone Can Have an Awesome Halloween by Lincoln Crisler

Halloween can be a galvanizing time of year for some. People who don’t go to church except maybe on Christmas and Easter suddenly RISE UP! against the blasphemous evil nature of the holiday. Others, who may be fairly apathetic though the rest of the year awake from their walking slumber sometime around mid-September, attacking a flurry of party arrangements, costume decisions, decorating opportunities and meal options with the drive and ambition of any ten normal people. To me, Halloween isn’t about the Hairy Goat Man (or any other deity, though as a student of many religions, I’m well-versed in the…

Halloween Haunts: Fort Fear–Writing the Origin Story for a Haunted Attraction by Adrian Ludens

“We want to build a haunted attraction and we'd like you to write a back story for it.” An origin story for a spook house? What a novel idea! More of a short story idea, really, but still an inviting challenge. One I readily accepted. Four summers ago, I sat in an Irish pub in Rapid City, SD with the creative team behind a new Halloween attraction. Fort Fear, as they called it, was to be set up inside a chuck wagon supper establishment that would conveniently be closed for the season. “We want an Old West theme.” “We have…