Halloween Haunts: On Halloween, The Family’s a Saw by L. Andrew Cooper

TAKE ONE

At the end of October, you may approach an unfamiliar door.

The door belongs to a stranger. When it opens, you show the home’s anonymous inhabitants trust, revealing yourself in fragile form, expecting a brief moment of hospitality when the strangers might, with equal or greater ease, offer a trick far more permanent. Your trust might astound someone unfamiliar with this custom, practiced by young children in Halloween cultures or—to foil the conceit before it becomes overbearing—by horror writers who dress up their personal nightmares in gore and the costumes of classic creatures to go dancing with neighbors and other readers who laugh and scream in delight. Readers delight if you’re lucky, that is; the critics might smash you to oblivion as soon as the door opens.

TAKE TWO

The strangers behind the door are horror writers, too. Halloween is the time of year when we are most eager for folks to come knocking, as it’s the one time of year when we can answer with our masks on and not expect an unwelcome reaction. Sure, horror’s a year-round thing for me. I think and write about it when I’m not creating it. When I sell books at conventions, most earnings go toward DVDs, movie posters, Cthulhu plushes, other necessities and, most important, other authors’ books, all of which will fill the luggage space left by wares that didn’t ship separately. Such behavior is quotidian, but October crosses into new dimensions, as it is our month. Non-horror people start putting out decorations reminiscent of what suits me most of the time, and folks who share my aesthetic interests talk about their likes more freely while the curious set out on new macabre journeys. Horror movies fill up cable TV and become available 24/7 even when the internet’s “intermittent connectivity” means no NetFlix AGAIN. My obsessions (which reflect the worries of a thoroughgoing scaredy-cat rather than a hardcore badass) start looking like a cultural phenomenon. “My” becomes “our.” We open the door. Not everyone can see the smile, but October’s ending has prompted visitors, and we’re pleased as spiked punch.

Our stories are our houses of horror. Take a tour [sound cue: flash bulb, self-developing photo].

We’ve been saving up details all year. Even for people who took a peek earlier in the year, now is the time to go back and look again at what we made from the pieces of real horror we crafted into fiction.

Returning visitors who don’t reread should remember. Now is the time to mine those stored-up images for the best nightmares. Pick mine! If not mine, pick one by one of the writers whose work I love.

Cut! Getting ahead of myself.

TAKE THREE

One religion extended pseudopods and absorbed others’ rites as demonic alternatives. Halloween is the result of early Christianity’s amoebic appetite, a deliberate—dare I say cannibalizing?—devouring of local custom in order to make conversion go down more smoothly (see Lisa Morton’s more helpful history, http://halloween.lisamorton.com/history.html).

As a child, I attended a Southern Baptist event called “Hallow-Him,” during which we kids dressed up as Bible characters and collected candy indoors instead of going house to house like other children (I’m showing my age, I know), as to do otherwise would be (one believed, erroneously) to indulge in a kind of Pagan demon-worship. Thus I participated in the repudiation of a ritual that never existed but was instead projected on people who are among my many ancestors by people also among my ancestors (I am a proud American mutt, guilty of historically oppressing and massacring myself in many different ways). The resulting ambivalence shows more than a little in my horror fiction (viz. e.g. my novel titled Burning the Middle Ground about a seriously nasty supernatural battle between Southern churches). However, it does not affect my ability to enjoy the holiday (holy day) with anyone who’s either one of us or willing to admit we’re not so bad.

TAKE FOUR

Don’t look at me like I’m crazy—you can’t; it’s October—but I’m lucky because I spent most of the first half of my life in school reading books and watching movies and, being me, focused on the scary stuff. I built a strong enough foundation to feel pretty good about tuning my reading nowadays almost exclusively to what other writers in and around my favorite genre are doing. Sure, I take a break every now and then to read around, and I still have a couple of big fat Russian novels to curl up with some year, but overall, I’m committed to contemporaries these days, in no small part because I’ve been fortunate enough to meet many of my living heroes (not all, Mr. King, not all). And you know what?

They’ve all been very, very nice to me. Every single one of them. Who knew, right?

This “one of us” Freaks (1932) phenomenon has substance. Horror writers have experienced both sides of the door, knocking and answering. We have known the fear of rejection not just for being writers but for writing through passions for the bizarre, outré, scary, disgusting, and just plain wrong. Fear makes family stronger than blood. That writers and other artists form familial communities isn’t exactly a revelation, but dammit, our community is special.

That’s why we have our own holiday, isn’t it?

If you haven’t already, come over to our place this Halloween. Don’t just knock. Come inside. Stay. You might join us. You’ll definitely have a good time.

You might get hooked.

All images from Tobe Hooper, director, Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen, performers, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Vortex, 1974, DVD (Special Edition), Pioneer, 2003.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: Andrew is offering one paperback copy of Burning the Middle Ground and one of Reel Dark. Enter for the prize by posting in the comments section. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail. You may enter once for each giveaway, and all entrants may be considered for other giveaways if they don’t win on the day they post. You may also enter by e-mailing membership@horror.org and putting HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header.

L. ANDREW COOPER’s first collection of short stories, Leaping at Thorns, was just released by BlackWyrm Publishing, Sept. 19, 2014. 13 of the 15 tales were first drafted on Halloween. Previous work includes the horror novels Burning the Middle Ground (2012) and Descending Lines (2012), the latter of which Kirkus describes as “a Grand Guignol cat-and-mouse tale” and “an undeniably horrific thriller.” Cooper also wrote the non-fiction studies Gothic Realities (2010) and Dario Argento (2012). He directs the program in Film and Digital Media at the University of Louisville, where he is Assistant Professor of Humanities. He holds degrees from Harvard and Princeton, but don’t hold that against him. You can find his work at www.amazon.com/author/landrewcooper, his homepage at www.landrewcooper.com, and his Facebook headquarters at www.facebook.com/landrewcooper.

Book covertly plugged, with many HWA family members, rescreening in 2016: