HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: UNDERWORLD CONNECTIONS By Lee Murray   Another spooky season is upon us and, once again, I’m scratching my head, trying to come up with something to contribute to our HWA Halloween Haunts blog. Because, as I’ve said many times before, Halloween isn’t really a thing down here in Aotearoa New Zealand. There are lots of reasons: the mostly secular nature of the nation, the bouncy southern hemisphere spring-lamb timing, and the fact that uncanny supernatural things are a part of our everyday, so perhaps we don’t see the need for a unique celebration of the macabre. Very few…

Halloween Haunts: THE LEGEND OF STINGY JACK by Debra Every   Herein lies a tale fit nary for babe nor child. Only the brave shall know the legend of Stingy Jack. In a town long gone, nestled ‘tween the McGillycuddy Reeks of Killarney, lived John Finnegan O’Connell, a blacksmith by trade; a wastrel by pleasure. Born under a black moon, he grew from churlish child to mean-spirited man. A trickster. A drunkard. A miser of coin and conscience. He stole bread from the sick, clothes from the poor, coin from the clergy. And ne’er did he help his brethren in…

Halloween Haunts: The Great Pumpkin Massacre By Paul Carro   Okay, we all know one. A neighbor. Yeah, that neighbor. The one that might not quite be a demon but certainly knows them personally. My neighbor (let’s call him Toby) was my friend by proximity. He lived two doors down from me, but make no mistake, in any other universe, I would have run in the other direction were I to encounter him in the streets. It is with some pride that I admit I survived the Toby experience. Then again, I became a horror author, so I guess we…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: ABRACADABRA, I KNOW WHO I AM Rosemary Thorne   I remember my name and the year I was born. My beautiful house is so nearby that if I close my eyes, I can feel the familiar shine that leads to its shape. No, seriously, I’ve always had a prodigious memory, I know every detail of my life exactly as she wrote them back then: the smell of the rose bushes, the vivid color of the petals at sunset, the drops of blood on the wooden desk, her sudden flat face covered in white powder jumping over me, and…

Halloween Haunts: The Horror We Share By Naching T. Kassa   Every time Halloween season comes around, I think of my dad and how he introduced me to horror. My mom, the kindest person I have ever known, wasn’t very fond of our favorite genre. She’d been terrified after seeing Psycho for the first time and lost all interest in anything that wasn’t Universal Horror or Kolchak the Nightstalker. My dad, on the other hand, had been a big fan of drive-in movies and had watched them as a teen in the 50s. I think I was three when he…

Halloween Haunts: Rekindling The (Halloween) Magic By DJ Slater I remember when the feeling hit me, the one where you realize something that once brought you immense joy no longer reaches those heights. Since my early childhood, my parents always found the time to take my sister and me to a haunted house attraction every October. We were probably too young for the experience, yet it was common for an 80s kid to be exposed to certain things way too soon. We watched horror movies before we ever walked the halls of an elementary school. We witnessed increasingly violent media…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween in a Theatre By Kevin Wetmore   There is a running joke in the theatre, often expressed on a t-shirt, stating, “I can’t – I have rehearsal.” This has felt like a truism for much of my professional life. I am often too busy doing theatre to do much else, including seeing other theatre. Don’t weep for me or my people, however, because we are, like the Halloween People, able to keep the Halloween spirit all year round. Think about it: I get to put on costumes regularly. I play dress up. I play, period. One of…

Halloween Haunts: An Oingo Boingo Halloween By Joshua Millican   I’ve always loved horror more than Halloween. Horror, that feeling you get when you face the darkness of the unknown, has fascinated and excited me since I was a kid. Horror movies, comics, stories, toys… you name it, I loved it! By my pre-teens, horror had already become a lifestyle for me. I was a spooky kid with morbid curiosities and a love of fear that made me a standout—for better or worse. When you live horror 24/7, Halloween was just another day. Don’t get me wrong—I loved the fall…

Halloween Haunts: KRAKEN, AND RAVENS, AND RAPTORS… OH, MY! By Evan Baughfman    October’s not just for things bumping in the night. It’s also when sports grab ahold of me, slide their fangs into my bookish flesh, and transform me into a fanpire. The NFL season is alive, and my fantasy football teams have (once again) been some frustrating version of the undead—ripping opponents apart one week and fumbling around in the dark, headless and heartless, the next. My kids are both playing soccer. Their games have had me on the edge of my seat more often than the newest…

Halloween Haunts: What Ben Cooper Taught Me About Life By Den Shewman   The things that made me: The famous Shock Theater package of Universal Studios monster movies, licensed cheap to local TV stations. Aurora’s monster kits, especially the glow-in-the-dark versions, and their wonderfully dark (and horribly short-lived) Dr. Deadly’s Monster Scene snap-together kits, featuring the Doctor, the Pain Parlor, and the Saber-tooth Rabbit (we won’t mention the Victim, who got the PTA all riled up). The Comics Code Authority, the loosening of which in the early 1970s released a slew of monsters into mainstream comics in all their four-colored…

Halloween Haunts: Have You Ever Shaken the Devil’s Hand on Halloween Night? By David Sandner   Was it a Halloween night when Robert Johnson walked out to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil? I don’t know, I’ll ask him next time I see him. There’s lot of versions of this story (because there’s lots of ways to go to hell, but only one way home). Here’s one account of things: Robert Johnson wanted to be a Blues guitar player, but when he stepped on stage as a young man, he got hooted off. He just wasn’t good…

Halloween Haunts: Healing Halloween By Lauren Drinkard   A Child of the 80’s Being a first model Millennial (1981) my love of all things spooky and haunted started as a young child. My gateway drugs were Hellraiser, Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, Child’s Play, Dracula, Pet Sematary, and Misery. I was just as influenced by my generation's young adult horror books: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, The Halloween Tree, Goosebumps, and The Witches. Dark thrillers and evil plots had become part of my DNA. Like most parents, my mom also heavily influenced me. She is a water…

Halloween Haunts: Eat, Drink, and Be Haunted by Paula Cappa What traditional Halloween supper do you conjure up on October 31? How about ghost-steaming penne pasta, murdered sliced-up sausage, and green spinach playing peek-a-BOO. At our house, this is a Halloween night favorite. This dish Penne Alla Vite is served at the Twisted Vine Restaurant in Derby, Connecticut, where diners report hearing disembodied voices, seeing apparitions—a little girl is said to haunt the tables—and a jukebox starts playing at its will.     The pasta recipe is published in Food To Die For by Ami Bruni, Recipes and Stories From…

Halloween Haunts: Obsession by Dean Cade   Costumes and makeup effects have always been a part of Halloween for me. When I was a kid in the 70s, I would get one of the simple plastic outfits with a generic mask of a skull or a not quite Frankenstein’s Monster from TG&Y to go trick or treating. There was also a brief period of running around in Superman Underoos with a red towel for a cape to my mom’s chagrin. As I got older, I took an interest in painting my face and using fake blood. Fascinated with horror films,…

Halloween Haunts: Evoking Dread: A Balancing Act By Alexa Tanen   I’ve always loved horror stories; the scarier, the better. But there have been so many examples of an idea I adore that’s given a not-so-scary execution. As both a reader and an editor, there are a few key areas where writers can lose that all-important tension that’s integral to horror. Unsettling Universes Sometimes, the real horror lies in the implications. Writers must rely on their readers’ imaginations to bring their words to life, but you don’t need to spell everything out. It’s like seeing the monster in the movie.…