HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: How to Kill a Hip-Thrusting Frankenstein
by Suzanne Mattaboni
I realize that pitchforks and torches are the traditional method for ousting the Frankenstein monster. Not at my house.
We’ve always been a Halloween family. When my kids were tykes (now married or touring Europe), one of our favorite fall activities was trolling Party City to check out the multitude of screaming and bloody animatronics on a weekly basis.
Each we showed up, my five year-old son Louis would test his muster by stepping closer and closer to a seven-foot tall, motion-sensitive grim reaper that played creepy Vincent Price-worthy synth music. It shook to life as we closed in on it, swinging its cob web-ridden plastic scythe at us to Satanic growlings. And when dedicated Spirit Halloween stores started cropping up—forget about it. It was Hallo-Heaven. The animatronic display gauntlets got more horrifying as my kids grew.
My daughter Veronica has a November birthday that we would “shift” to Halloween weekend, making for some extra-gory birthday parties. These affairs were led by their theatrical mother, who would turn the afternoon into a black-light production of Fear Factor for eight-year-olds. My niece Sabrina “won” my version of Fear Factor Junior when she was the only kid brave enough to eat a forkful of canned calamari, little sucker tentacles and all.
My daughter grew up to a woman who pins rhinoceros beetles and Luna moths to matting boards, then frames them as wall art. She decorates her shelves with vintage prosthetic eyeballs, antique medical equipment, and animal skulls.
I twist my xenomorphic earring and wonder how that happened.
One year we brought home a small-scale animatronic to add to our expanding personal collection. It was a cartoonish version of Frankenstein reminiscent of a 1970’s cereal box mascot, with a green complexion and articulated neck, shoulder, knee, and hip joints. Why hips, you ask?
Because Frankenstein danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” including shifting his pelvis while shoving his arms back and forth, as a Michael impersonator hooted “WOOO-HOOO!” to the music.
It was a riot. It used a lot of batteries, though, with all that moonwalking, head shimmying, and mildly amusing hip configurations. His jaw even bobbed open and shut as he sang.
Our whimsical collection of animated Halloween toys included a tombstone with a skull that slowly protruded from its mesh front, accompanied by a scream so unforgiving it drove away trick-or-treaters. I had to disconnect it. Then there was a severed head in a globe that bawled incessantly, trying to remember life before being severed and displayed among blue and magenta LEDs. And my original Halloween purchase: a disembodied zombie hand that held a bowl of fake flames (lighted scraps of orange nylon ribbon, blown by a fan tucked into the bowl.) That item came with an AC adapter so it could run perpetually.
We played with Moonwalking Frankenstein so often that it gave me an idea.
I plugged Frankie into the AC adapter borrowed from the disembodied zombie lamp, stationed him on our kitchen table, and gathered my kids to watch how it worked.
Louis pushed Frankie’s button.
The opening flourishes of Thriller blared and purple LEDs flashed, illuminating Frankie’s face. His mouth opened. His head started to fling from side to side, a little more vigorously than usual. The Thriller bassline boomed to life, as did Frankie’s version of the moonwalk, articulated knees pumping hard.
“Mom,” Veronica started, “does he look … different?
I watched Frankie’s plastic jaw lip-synching frantically.
Yes, like … is he going faster? Was it our imaginations?
For those of you who remember playing vinyl records, the Michael Jackson Frankenstein and his choreography was accelerating to a speed of 33⅓ rpm instead of 45.
I clutched my children closer as the green-faced monster pulsed his way through an emphatic merengue on his plastic slab of a stand, wrangling his head from left to right and gnashing his oversized, bolted-on mandible with fervor. The soundtrack spiraled into a higher key, LED lights blinking like emergency flares.
Frankie began thrusting his nether region at us obscenely, throwing his arms forward and back again, all to painfully repetitive, mechanical clicking noises as THRILLER’s revved-up refrain came to a crescendo…
I covered my son’s eyes. Delicate curls of gray smoke escaped from Frankie’s head.
I yanked the power cord out of his AC jack.
The music cut-out and Frankenstein powered down, hips locked in an obtuse position, head wracked to one side in defeat. His jaw slacked. The smell of scorched polymer hung in the air.
My kids and I huddled silently together.
“I think I killed him,” I whispered.
It’s true. I’m guilty. I electrocuted an indecent Michael Jackson Frankenstein, in front of minors.
I’m that kind of Mom.
I’m the Mom who wanted her kids to be original, creative thinkers. So I did stuff like introduce them (both still under the age of 6) to an experimental animation site that featured a series of cartoon shorts called “Dead Rat,” the adventures of various rodents and maggots that controlled decomposing roadkill from the inside. We called the site “The Halloween Pictures.” Veronica reminded me of this recently upon taking me to the Philadelphia Oddities Fair, where actual dead rats and diaphonized wormy departed creatures were on display in vials. Because that’s what we do now.
And sure, I started out writing women’s fiction, but even my feminist romantic stories verged toward the off-kilter and dysfunctional, where brooding women were visited by imaginary post-suicidal lovers, overambitious girls burned calendar pages in cathartic rituals on the beach, and twisted boyfriends inadvertently left chewing gum in inconveniently intimate places, um… let’s say, overnight. But there’s no market for women’s fiction short stories. Those phrases don’t even make sense together. I needed to jump genres if I wanted to my warped little stories—my other children—to see the light of day.
The Stephen King wannabe in my soul finally won out, and I transitioned to horror writing. Voilá, suddenly, ‘zines and anthologies started picking up my writing. In the literary sense, horror is kind. Trying to sell women’s fiction beat the dickens out of me. And although I moved over to the dark side, I dragged my absurd sense of humor with me. It still works in its new, unsavory surroundings.
So that’s what you’ll find in my collection of short stories, Gore, Lust and Kin, releasing October 20 from Madville Publishing. It’s not purely horror, it’s got sections that veer into warped romantic relationships and irreverent familial obligations (the lust and kin parts). But it’s all “deliciously unhinged,” as one NetGalley reviewer recently called it. Unhinged and wicked actually keep popping up in reviews so far. But in a good way.
Another pre-release reviewer surmised that the collection must have been written by “a weird goth girl.”
That’s GothMom to you, my friend. And thank you!
S
uzanne Mattaboni is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer, poet, essayist, PR pro, Newsweek Expert Forum contributor, and former Newsday reporter. Her new collection of feminist horror short stories, Gore, Lust & Kin, is set to launch October 20, 2026 (Madville Publishing). Suzanne’s coming-of-age novel set in the new wave 1980s, Once in a Lifetime, was an Eric Hoffer Finalist. It was the winner of a Pencraft Award, an IPPY independent publishers award, and an International Book Award. Suzanne’s work has appeared in anthologies and magazines including The Little Demon Digest, Mysterious Ways, Seventeen, The Huffington Post, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Miraculous Messages, Guideposts, the ‘80s themed horror anthology Pizza Parties and Poltergeists, the Hard Boiled and Loaded with Sin noir anthology, and others. She’s also a pop-culture podcaster with the GenX Book Club and GenX Journeys.
Suzanne Mattaboni’s short story collection Gore, Lust & Kin, stories of horror, feminism, bad romance, and family obligations will be released 10/20/26 from Madville Publishing.
LINKS:
https://www.amazon.com/Gore-Lust-Kin-Stories-Women/dp/1963695801/ref
https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/?text=gore%2C+lust+%26+kin&target= [until 11/10]
https://linktr.ee/suzannemattaboni
REVIEW BLURBS:
“Suzanne Mattaboni spins real magic with this collection of feminist tales. Daring, insightful, heartfelt, and unflinching. Highly recommended…but buckle up!”
—Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of NecroTek and Ink, and Netflix’s V Wars; 2025 Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
“Haunting amorphous creatures, five a.m. booty calls, and deceased loved ones visiting in dreams—so it goes in Mattaboni’s wicked, eclectic collection of short stories … Sharp, playful, sometimes shocking stories of women, bodies, and life.”
—BookLife Lightning Review Editor’s Pick
“A deliciously dark and twisted horror read … Bloody, provocative, chaotic, and wonderfully unhinged… If you like your horror with gore, obsession, and seriously dysfunctional people, this one is worth picking up.”
—NetGalley Reviewer/Educator Rudi McKay, Ed.D
“The emotions in this is what made me love it. Suzanne Mattaboni really captured the different facets of the weird, and intense, and darker corners of womanhood.”
—NetGalley Reviewer Quinn C.
EXCERPT FROM Gore, Lust & Kin:
TRAMP
The people raised my likeness in the temple at Cyprus, but little did they know the life they were carving into the curves of their statue. They never guessed that a Goddess could be more than a formation of stone to be marveled at, that she could be infused with love and anger and passion that couldn’t be contained by the boundaries of marble, however gorgeously crafted.
This is how I came to fill the colossal sculpture of Aphrodite with vitality and animation, to manifest myself in the humongous stone. In the heat of fury, I tore one sandal then another off the rocky pedestal with a crackle of marble, manipulating the rock that carried my image and making it malleable enough that I could bend at the knees and walk. Stiffly at first, I pulled myself away from the altar, watching the columns of light that flooded through the cut-out in the temple’s ceiling.
Doves fluttered like an explosion through the chamber, cutting through the streaks of sunset-orange light and marble dust as the former statue instead became a statuesque pillar of movement. Folds of robe that had been petrified for eons began to sway and flow around a body that would no longer stay still. Life and breath began to pulse as I took over the stone, stomping like a new Titan into the courtyards of Cyprus.
I had taken enough abuse in the course of serving as Aphrodite, Goddess of beauty and pleasure. Gods and mortals alike loved to persecute me. I was mocked and despised for all the lovers I dared to take for myself.
So I stomped in the body of the gigantic stone statue that had been erected in my name, traipsing through the villages of Cyprus, leaving compressed earth and flattened olive trees in my footsteps. I stared down on the clay tile roofs of the city and picked out the first house to demolish. A wave of my palm easily took down a wall and made it spill into a drape of cinders, tiles falling like rotted teeth. The house opened to reveal a pair of lovers twisted together in a corner, wailing as my form intruded into their homestead. They shielded themselves with their hands, climbing each other like futile ivy.
I raised my sandal and flattened it into the middle of the room where they cowered, stifling their shrieks. My sole mashed against the dusty debris. The contents of the lovers’ bodies squished under the stone of my sandal like grapes as I tamped the ball of my foot harder.
That was payment for the jealousy of my husband Hephaestus, as I pursued my passions with the wild Ares in his war palace in Thrace. That is, until Ares and I were ensnared, naked and humiliated, as part of my husband’s plan to make us a public spectacle. My desire was put on display like a work of theater, along with all my Godly blushing parts.
I shoved my foot deeper into the ground of the Cyprus home, embossing the lovers into the earth that was once their living room, then yanked my sandal out of the crater and scraped them off the bottom of my shoe, coating the rubble with plump, jellied mounds of flesh.
I stomped along the road that ran through the middle of Cyprus, which sprawled in front of me like an Assyrian carpet of vengeance. My form was so tall that I could see the swerving horizon of the whole island as it made a seam along the sea.
As my steps shook the surrounding homes and shops and byways, I thought of men, and how they could orchestrate war and destruction without consequence. How they could collect all manner of women as conquests, and no one held them to the fire. On the contrary, they were vaulted to the heavens as heroes. But if a woman gave her insatiable heart and body, her thoughts, and her abundant love to men, she would be torn from her pedestal, rebuffed, and lowered to the likes of a prostitute.
A woman who dared challenge her place as a virgin of the hillside, or as a Goddess on high, would not be worshipped as much as tortured. If she refused to be loved only from afar—as anything other than an idea—she would not be exalted, but punished.
I wouldn’t stand for it. I wouldn’t stand ensconced in stone a moment longer.
As I took my great heavy steps, the ground split into zagging cracks the shape of my husband’s lightning bolts, cleaving chasms into the earth. I watched a thick-calved man run around my exposed toes, his tiny figure blanched in panic. As I bent to catch him, the creaking of my colossal body reverberated through the air. I tweezed the man between my newly articulated fingers and lifted him to my eye. Terror twisted his face into a set of wrinkled lines as he hung from his tunic, squirming in the air and screeching like a pigeon. I used him to blot the sun in front of my vision.
He flipped over once in my palm before I jammed him into one of the cracks in the street, pressing him deeper into the gap with my fingertips. He became an ear-piercing, live shim. I stomped the two sides of the crevice closed with him in it, dirt puffing up between my feet in a cloud.
That was restitution for the moments I spent holding Adonis as he faded to his pallid death in my arms, after being gored by my possessive ex. Pain eddied through me as Adonis’ life sieved out of the perfection of his body. I sobbed, savoring the last instant that his warmth was allowed to press against mine. His skin went cold against my damp cheek.
All my loves, taken from me, leaving me a stained woman.
So there I was, divested of the prison of marble and expectation, kicking down graceful garden columns with a swipe of my foot. I sent heads of households scattering and hiding behind felled and smoking walls, shivering as I marched in a rampage across Cyprus, seething with anger for the population that was supposed to shower me with adulation. Instead of being idolized, I was brutalized: My son cursed, turned deformed and hideous by my disapproving mother. My adored Dionysus gone on to father the twins of some other Goddess bitch.
I walked on, trampling the men who scurried under my feet, relishing the grind of their mortal bones with each step, splintering the tinder and stone of their homes and businesses until they became as devastated as I had been as their deity.
I continued down the paths of the city, making each section of ground I walked on shudder. Beyond the shoreline, I could see the other islands of the Aegean floating like the vessels of Poseidon—another God who fought to have his turn with me. I stretched my arms and my rage boiled the surface of the ocean. The heat spread from island to island, rumbling through the volcanic valves in the Earth, making them ready to explode.
As I came to the end of the streets of Cyprus, I grated my fingers against the hillside, pulling down trees and dredging creatures under my fingernails.
Somewhere far behind me, I heard the sound of my pedestal crashing against the ground. Its crumble vibrated all the way to the shoreline.
I was free.
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