Tag archive: Halloween Haunts 2012 [ 49 ]

Halloween Haunts: The House on Brookhaven Road by Hugh Sterbakov

October 31, 2012
4 Comments

The following is a true story… even the names haven’t been changed.

It was the last week of autumn in West Philadelphia, and the wet, warm smell of falling leaves had just given way to the numbing chill of winter. The year was 1990, and my friends and I had just begun our senior year at Robert E. Lamberton, the same school most of us had attended since Kindergarten. We’d grown up together, and this was our last hurrah. Next year we’d be at distant colleges, carving pumpkins with new families of friends. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: Stonehenge–Up Close and Personal by Thomas Morrissey

October 31, 2012
3 Comments

My favorite Halloween (so far) was the one I spent in England.

I was researching a novel, and my research took me all over the United Kingdom, including to Northern Ireland. My itinerary had me doing half car, half BritRail pass along this circuit, and once I’d crossed back over from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead in Wales, I was driving to get to Stonehenge for Halloween. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: My Troubled Halloween Adventures by Charles Day

October 30, 2012
10 Comments

As a child, I’ve always loved Halloween, including the night before. The cool crisp autumn winds howling outside. The brisk air through my open windows. The colors of the changing leaves, a golden brown or bright red and orange, these reminders always seem to get me in that halloweenish mood. But above all, it’s the costumes, the candy, and the scary movies played over and over on the TV right around Halloween. These are the kinds of things that send chills up my spine, goose bumps all over my flesh, and make me love this holiday every times it comes around again. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: The Joys of Halloween and Nightmares by Nancy O. Greene

October 30, 2012
3 Comments

Halloween, and cemeteries, and nightmares, and zombies! Oh, my!

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a fan of all of the above. Well, maybe not always the nightmares, though I can’t deny that they fascinate me and have often played a central role in my storytelling. Until I met others with the same leanings, I suspected (and was told) that my fondness for these things was odd, especially for an African-American girl. The strangeness was irrelevant, and while I’ve long since met multitudes of people from various cultures with the same fascinations, I’m happy to say that it is still strange by most standards, and deliciously so. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: Heroes and Monsters by Patrick Thomas

October 29, 2012
2 Comments

The monsters come out at Halloween. It was the time when they didn’t have to hide and the adults could see them and not realize what they were. Some kids could, while others didn’t until it was too late. They blended in, until they pounced with eggs, shaving cream and fists. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: HWA & BookExpo America 2012 by Leland Pitts-Gonzalez

October 29, 2012
3 Comments

I arrived at the Javits Center in New York City for the BookExpo—an oversized, rolling suitcase in hand to tote back all of those advanced copies of my novel that I would surely fail to give away. Inside, the Javits Center was somewhat aesthetically pleasing in that express, faux-luxury-hotel kind of way. Yet, mainly it was a beehive of suited and badged industry folks, shuffling as quickly as possible through the aisles and offshoots lined with publishers and author’s associations—some of which by this time next year will have gone under. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: Stoker Spotlight Interview with Joe McKinney

October 28, 2012
6 Comments

Joe McKinney is the recipient of the 2011 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a Novel for Flesh Eaters. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: Setting the Record Straight–The Horror Writer as Truth-Seeker by David Sakmyster

October 28, 2012
4 Comments

Sometimes horror writers have big egos. It goes with the territory: we are entrusted with the godlike power to instill fear, to make mere mortals quake with terror, or at the very least, be too afraid to sleep without the light on. It’s a noble profession stretching back to ancient days of bedtime tales by firelight while real terrors prowled around in the night. But sometimes, as a writer you find yourself faced with a greater calling. A chance to couple your talents with all those skills you’ve learned at conferences, classes and organizations like the HWA, to promote and publicize the fruits of your work in support of a different sort of venture. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: In a Gulf Coast Graveyard by James Kendley

October 27, 2012
4 Comments

I found something in a cemetery last Halloween season.

I want to tell you what it is. You know I want to, but we must stroll through this cemetery first. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: The Age of Halloween By Helen Marshall

October 27, 2012
4 Comments

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 behind an indelibly deep and visceral fingerprint of fear — not that delicious, fluttering shiver that most of my friends got out of it. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: The Unknown by Max Booth III

October 26, 2012
6 Comments

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? ...More...

Halloween Haunts: The Devil’s Path by Douglas Wynne

October 26, 2012
3 Comments

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. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: My First Horror Book by Teresa Lo

October 25, 2012
4 Comments

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. ...More...

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

October 24, 2012
2 Comments

“When the water rises, the fish eat the ants; when the water falls, the ants eat the fish.”- Traditional Lao Proverb ...More...

Halloween Haunts: Those Damn Horror People by Eric Miller

October 24, 2012
1 Comment

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. ...More...

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

October 23, 2012
5 Comments

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”. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: Every Day Is Halloween by Peter Salomon

October 23, 2012
2 Comments

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 boys and girls right before cake (because we needed still more sugar). Though, come to think of it, I did tend to receive gifts of candy rather than toys so that might not have been the best thing. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: Stoker Spotlight Interview with John Skipp

October 22, 2012
2 Comments

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. ...More...

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

October 22, 2012
1 Comment

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. ...More...

Halloween Haunts: Creating Halloween by Norman Prentiss

October 21, 2012
2 Comments

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. ...More...