Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Ericca Chavez

What inspired you to start writing?

I was inspired to start writing because of the ghost stories I would hear as a kid, in particular, La Llorona; they sparked my imagination. I made up worlds in my mind and found myself lost in them—still am most days. Then one day, I decided to bring these worlds to life by actually putting them down on paper.

Halloween Haunts: Arachnid Teachers

Halloween Haunts: Arachnid Teachers By Heddy Johannesen   I recall a night many years ago when I passed by a cemetery as I was walking home. Something was odd about the cemetery. Cemeteries are naturally spooky places. The streetlights lit the headstones in the eeriest glow I have ever seen. It inspired me to write a horror poem which did get published later. I have seen many other odd and creepy things in my life: a deceased dog that washed up ashore, insects crawling over rotted apples in a different cemetery, the shadow person that appeared and vanished in my…

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Erick Mancilla

What inspired you to start writing?

For a long time, I wanted to be a comic book writer/creator. I wrote various stories in the comic book medium. Unfortunately, the search for an artist/collaborator was a difficult task. After quite some time of fruitless searches, I did some deep soul-searching and made the jump to writing genre fiction where I had no one but myself to rely on. It has turned out to be the best decision I could have ever made for my creativity.

Halloween Haunts: Sparkles: A Haunted House Story

Halloween Haunts: Sparkles: A Haunted House Story by Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar When I imagine a haunted house, my mind conjures up broken windows, sagging floorboards, and cracked ceilings. I picture cobwebs in the corners and old-fashioned, dust-covered furniture. Rodents skitter about the hallways, their scratching claws punctuating the deathly silence. Generally, people don’t think of a brand new, two-story, single-family home with white siding, black shutters, and a red door flanked by similar houses. They don’t picture my former house. We moved in on Halloween night in 2007. Twice the size of our previous residence, it was constructed specifically for…

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Victor H. Rodriguez

What inspired you to start writing?

It was a combination of two things: reading, and my day job. After I started working full-time, I developed the terrible habit of not reading anything longer than a magazine article. Then, per my mother’s recommendation – which is odd, considering how not into horror she is – I picked up The Books of Blood, short story collections by Clive Barker, those slim American paperback editions with the monstrous faces on them. The stories The Midnight Meat Train, The Forbidden, and In the Hills, the Cities tore a hole in my brain. I could barely believe people could write such things. I became a lifelong fan of his work. Meanwhile, my career took me in the direction of audio production for TV, movies, and video games. If you combine high-concept short-form story ideas and my fascination with sound, you get the lion’s share of my fiction.

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Valentina Cano Repetto

What inspired you to start writing?

I’ve always been a voracious reader, and I dabbled a bit in high school with a creative writing class, but I never really considered tackling anything substantial until I went through a bout of major depression that left me grasping for anything that could bring a bit of relief. Writing did that for me. I began with free writing, choosing a word at random and scribbling everything that came to my mind without stopping or correcting myself for five minutes. I’d then try to transform the themes I spilled on the page into poetry. It was purely therapeutic at first, but as I started filling notebooks, I began sending some poems out to a variety of journals and e-zines. Surprisingly, editors liked them. It all kind of spiraled from there.

Halloween Haunts: Writing Horror For Comic Books

Halloween Haunts: Writing Horror For Comic Books By Jonathan Hedrick Long before the now defunct Comic Code Authority was slapping their seal on funny books left and right, the medium was no stranger to the macabre story telling of horror. Spinner racks were jammed packed with titles like Witches Tale, Chamber of Chills, and The Haunt of Fear. Even now, the modern-day comic book reader can still find a plethora of spooky graphic novels at their local comic shops. From The Autumnal to The Walking Dead, this sequential art form remains a breeding ground for horror stories. But beware! Before…

Halloween Haunts: “Halloween in the Hudson River Valley”

Halloween Haunts: “Halloween in the Hudson River Valley” by Katherine Kerestman www.CreepyCatLair.com An excerpt from Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (WordCrafts Press, 2020)   Halloween in the Hudson Valley – where the holiday (as we know it today) was invented by Brom Bones, who transformed a harvest celebration into a night of terror when he galloped on a midnight black steed carrying his pumpkin head and tossed it at Ichabod Crane. I was driving Route 80, spanning the breadth of Pennsylvania, back into history, to the time when the Dutch first came…

The Bloodless Birth of Blood & Spades: In the Words of Marge Simon

Being invited to Marge Simon's Blood & Spades column in the monthly newsletter is, for many of us, a goal to aspire to. I've found many of the poets I love in her column and feel privileged to have been a guest once or twice. Here, in Marge's own words, is how this dark poetry staple came about. This will also be my last poetry blog post. From here, Sumiko Saulson will be taking over the Dark Poetry Blog. We are in good hands. --aySmith Marge: First off, Kathy Ptacek is to thank for my Dark Poets column. She is…

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Monique Beasley

What inspired you to start writing?

What actually inspired me to start writing was my sister. She has two children’s books out. One is called, I’m Hungry but No Bugs, Please, and Hello, Pretty Cloud, both available on Amazon. She was trying to write her first horror book and asked for my help. I gave her advice and helped with the editing. She asked me why I had never tried to write a book myself. She knows how much I love to read. I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of trying this before. I was also about to undergo major surgery and would have weeks of recovery time. I used that time to start brainstorming plot ideas. I instantly fell in love with writing and have been making time for it ever since.

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with P.A. Cornell

What inspired you to start writing?,/p>

My parents are avid readers, so they instilled that in me from an early age. We always had lots of books in the house, and they would often read to me. Trips to the public library were frequent, and something I very much enjoyed. By age five I asked where books and stories came from, and my mother explained that there were these people called “writers” who created stories in their imaginations and wrote them down for other people to read. I knew instantly that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

Halloween Haunts: The Pukwudgie

Halloween Haunts: The Pukwudgie By Ricardo D. Rebelo   Bobby was in awe of the orange and green field. He looked forward to it every year. At thirteen he hadn’t seen many, but Bobby had savored every one. He hated September because it meant school, which was always a low point for him. No more beaches, clam cakes, fresh waffle cones filled with coffee ice cream and long summer days. Three weeks into the school year, Indian summer usually ran out of steam. The air would get crisp and his mom would start drinking pumpkin spice lattes like Dunkin Donuts…

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Marjorie Eljach

What inspired you to start writing?

When I was 12, I became addicted to John Le Carré’s novels. At that age, I had read everything because at home my parents didn’t censor my reading. I read Flaubert, García Márquez, Zola, and Homer, terrifying stories about the Tower of London, and comics about Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Snoopy. And all this mishmash of heterogeneous readings added to Le Carré’s novels, created in me the need to write a spy novel that mixed suicidal women, walled-up children, incestuous relationships, and of course, a political crisis. I read it to my friends at school who didn’t pay much attention to me and I think the manuscript, which was in several ring-bound notebooks, was lost during a move.

Halloween Haunts: A Halloween Scare for the Ghost Tour Host

Halloween Haunts: A Halloween Scare for the Ghost Tour Host By David Allen Voyles   Halloween has always been a thrill for me, even as an adult. Without a doubt, it’s the main reason why I write horror. For over forty years, my wife and I, garbed in our October aliases of Mr. and Mrs. Dark (raising a glass to you, Ray Bradbury), have hosted an annual over-the-top, themed, Halloween party. The popularity of our “Dark Ghost Tours” party in 2014, when I took guests all over our property to tell stories about the little scenes of horror we had…

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with M.M. Olivas

What inspired you to start writing?

I started writing fiction around my junior year of high school. Unlike many of my writing peers, I hadn’t grown up doing it, nor was I much of a reader. I was dyslexic and gravitated more toward visual media: comics, shows, and movies. Oh, so many movies. I didn’t have a ton of adult supervision growing up, so I saw Alien and The Exorcist when I was six or seven—having one parent hospitalized due to lung cancer while the other tends to them will do that to ya.

Halloween Haunts: A Night at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia

Halloween Haunts: A Night at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia by Nicole M. Wolverton We clustered in groups at the hulking gray-stone entrance of the prison. Twilight deepened, purple to gray. Nothing stirred beyond our nervous laughter. We waited for what came next, shivering in the late October cold. “Are you sure this is safe?” my then-boyfriend asked. “I’ve never heard of anyone dying on the tour,” I joked. “The liability waivers and hard hats are probably just for show.” At that point Eastern State Penitentiary had only been open for limited public tours for a few years, and only…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: IT’S AN EMINENCE FRONT

Halloween Haunts: It’s An Eminence Front by Mark Matthews       Trigger Warning: This post addresses mental health. Halloween is a magical night when we can transform ourselves into something else, something we may have always longed to be, whether it be superhero or super monster. Put on a mask, or craft some makeup, and we spend a night parading as a whole new being. A whole new persona. Then we walk door to door, walking on front porches, ringing doorbells, looking for others to bear witness: See, look what I’ve become? I’m no longer me.  Often we become…

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Luis Medina

What inspired you to start writing?

I have been writing since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until I went to Acting School in New York that I had to write a one-act play. That assignment focused on how to create compelling characters and situations, and how to tell a story. Years later, play/scriptwriting shifted to short horror stories for anthologies.

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Juan Martinez

What inspired you to start writing?

I loved to read. I mean, I still love to read, but I was a voracious reader, and that’s what drew me to writing. I love stories.

Tell us about your work in 25 words or less.

Strange, off-kilter, disturbing, sometimes absurd.

Latinx Heritage in Horror Month 2024: An Interview with Jessica L. Sparrow

What inspired you to start writing?

I’ve dreamed of being a writer since I could form sentences but what really ignited me was a Halloween short story I did back in the 5th grade. As I advanced through middle school, high school, and college, my passion for writing increased into an obsession almost. I truly felt that I would cease to breathe if I could not put pen to paper and bleed out my imagination all over the page. Writing is my sanctuary; it always has been a way for me to deal with my living nightmares.