“The Angry Woman” By Marlena Frank

Back before Katrina dumped the Gulf on top of New Orleans, my sister and I decided to celebrate Halloween on Bourbon Street. We met up with four of our online friends who we had never met or spoken to outside of chat windows. This was at a time of pagers and pay phones, so it was a little nerve-wracking. Fortunately they were all awesome people, and we talked just as easily in person as we did online. We picked up our bags at the Louis Armstrong International Airport and drove down to see the hotel owner. You see, we were…

“Who Says They Can Ban Halloween? By David B. Riley

They say you never really believe in ghosts until you’ve encountered one. Two Halloweens ago I was working in Vail, Colorado at a hotel. I worked graveyard shift. October tended to be a dead month.  There was very little going on and all thoughts were on the approaching ski season. They kept the place open, but most of the daytime staff were doing cleaning and maintenance type duties to get everything ready for winter. So, I worked on night reports and posted what few special charges there were and set about generally being bored. I was particularly in a sour…

“The Time Halloween Almost Didn’t Come” By Charie D. La Marr

As news of Hurricane Sandy grew in the days leading up to Halloween, 2012, those of us who love Halloween were torn. More and more, it seemed like New York was going to take a major hit. It couldn’t have been coming at a worse time of the month—it would be a full moon and major surges in the tides would only make things worse As we began our preparations, down came the Halloween decorations. One by one, houses took down the tombstones on their lawns, the ghosts and witches flying in the trees and the bright orange and purple…

“Horror for Tweens” By Kristina Stancil

Traditional or normal are words that I would not use in descriptions of my family.  Examples of when we are not normal include a certain family member who will watch Christmas movies eleven months out of the year but refuses to watch between Thanksgiving and New Years and the fact that the only thing that was ever censored from my viewing growing up was sexually explicit content.  So yes, 90% of Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and all of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Children of the Corn was all watched by little me before I was in second grade. So,…

“How to Make Witch Books” By Annie Neugebauer

  Halloween is the best season for crafts! It’s also the best season for horror. AND the best season for books. So what better than making your own spooky book craft? I found the perfect combination in these DIY Halloween ‘witch books’! They can be as intricate or simple as you’d like them to be, really. I even ended up painting some page edges and drilling into some of my books. They don’t have to be witch-themed, either; that’s just what I was feeling this year. You could make them demon books, monster books, whatever strikes your fancy. I took…

“One Cool Way to Get Yourself Out There” By Tom Leveen

“The day Joe Pipkin was born all the Orange Crush and Nehi soda bottles in the world fizzed over…”~ Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree This is one of those sentences I wish I’d written. It says it all, so effortlessly and completely. We know in an instant the kind of boy Bradbury is talking about. For as purple as Bradbury got once in awhile, his poetic take on language was not easily matched by any other author, then or now. While Bradbury was known to the outside world principally as a science fiction writer—most folks probably know his name from reading Fahrenheit 451 in high school—those…

“Kids Can be Monsters” By Dave Jeffery

Kids can be monsters. It’s an adage we hear all too often, the cry of desperate, sleep-deprived parents run ragged by their ‘little darlings’.  As observers, we tend to sit in two camps: those who have been there, nodding our heads, sympathising through a haze of figurative nostalgia, or those who wonder why the hell any self-respecting couple would put themselves through what appears to be some kind of perpetual state of sadomasochism. Of course, all of this is relative, and the focus always softened by the unconditional love of a parent. On Halloween, however, I find this abstract concept…

“This Small Window of Acceptance” By Joseph VanBuren

The Halloween season is the time of the year when the rest of the world accepts us. I mean that in two different ways. Growing up, my mom was not only a super hero single mother raising three boys, she was also Wiccan. My brothers and I were raised with the sense that Halloween was “our” New Year’s. Yes, we went trick-or-treating like all the normal kids, but we also celebrated the dead. I have fond memories of setting a place for the spirits at Samhain dinner. While my brothers and I were running around the house on a sugar…

“A Little Halloween Chat” By Lisa Morton and Ellen Datlow

HWA’s next anthology, the Halloween-themed Haunted Nights, debuts on October 3rd. Including sixteen brand new stories about every horror writer’s favorite holiday, the anthology – published by Anchor Books and Blumhouse Books – recently received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Below, editors Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton talk about their editing processes, the thrill of finding a great story, and how they’re celebrating Halloween this year. Lisa: When I first approached you about co-editing a Halloween-themed anthology, did you ever think, "Wow, is there really anything left to say about that holiday?" Because I know that thought has crossed…

“The Hearse” By Robert Stava

Halloween, of course, evokes all sorts of childhood memories, including – in my case – my very first haunted house at the age of six, which was in an abandoned Victorian mansion in Rochester in the late 1960s. That one scared the living hell out of me, and invoked a lifelong passion for being spooked at haunted houses that wasn’t matched again until I was an adult and started attending “Horseman’s Hollow’ down the road here in Sleepy Hollow, New York. But one of the most iconic events in my memories of October hails back to my junior HS year…

“Welcome to Halloween Haunts 2017” By Michele Brittany

The leaves are beginning to turn golden oranges, yellows, and reds, and there is a subtle change to cooler weather as I write, sitting here in Southern California. Appearing in my neighborhood and local stores are banners announcing the arrival of autumn and Halloween decorations. Soon bowls of sweets will sit near front doors and at the end of the month, little ghosts, goblins, superheroes, and such will appear on doorsteps singing out “Trick or Treat!” For aficionados of the horror genre, October is a fantastic month in which to catch broadcasts of classic and contemporary horror films, while for…
Halloween Haunts: A Condemned Man, A Halloween Memory by Steve Rasnic Tem

Halloween Haunts: A Condemned Man, A Halloween Memory by Steve Rasnic Tem

Back then, for me, it was all about masks. For Halloween, sure, but I'm also talking about day-to-day.  This all started with the perception that people seldom said what they really felt about anything.  I wasn't sure why, but apparently there was something impolite about frankness, and politeness was something we took pretty seriously in my part of the South.  The only person I knew whose face invariably expressed whatever passed through his head was the town's developmentally disabled fellow who sat on a bench by the drugstore when he wasn't out with his burlap sack collecting roadside treasures.  Whether he…
Halloween Haunts: Halloween Defines Fall, At Least for Me By John F.D. Taff

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Defines Fall, At Least for Me By John F.D. Taff

I have found, in 25 years of fiction writing now, that the surest way to a feeling of verisimilitude in a story is to process the experiences in my life and put them down on paper.  I refer to this process as strip-mining my childhood, and so far, it's been very good to me. Not only has this practice helped me to work my way through past experiences, both good bad, it has also lent an air of reality to a lot of the scenes I have written.  Write what you know is, perhaps, the oldest saw in the art…
Halloween Haunts: Emotional Realism in Extreme Horror Fiction by Nicole Cushing

Halloween Haunts: Emotional Realism in Extreme Horror Fiction by Nicole Cushing

  First things first: let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. Extreme horror fiction hasn’t always enjoyed the best reputation. Despite the commercial success of books like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, the field is often seen as only catering to a niche audience. Despite a pedigree that arguably extends at least as far back as the Marquis de Sade, the field is often seen as a playground for recent generations of subliterate hacks. Perhaps that’s why so little has been said about how to write extreme horror fiction skillfully: so many people…
Halloween Haunts: Exorcism for Fun and Profit by Loren Rhoads

Halloween Haunts: Exorcism for Fun and Profit by Loren Rhoads

I read The Exorcist early in high school.  My mom was a school librarian and didn’t place any limits on what I read, figuring that if it was too mature for me, I just wouldn’t understand it. She limited what I could watch, though.  I wasn’t allowed to see The Exorcist in the theater, but I could read the novel.  Long after everyone I knew was terrified – or claimed they were terrified – by the movie, I checked the novel out of the public library. The part that struck me more than anything else was Blatty’s introduction, in which…
Halloween Haunts: The Real Creeps, or How to Create Horror Non-fiction Shorts by Lisa Morton

Halloween Haunts: The Real Creeps, or How to Create Horror Non-fiction Shorts by Lisa Morton

One of my favorite pieces of advice for new writers looking to make more sales is to consider trying some non-fiction. As an author who is known for both fiction and non-fiction, I periodically get requests for articles from editors who tell me that for every 300 short story submissions they receive, they get…well, zero non-fiction submissions. I think many writers have this notion that non-fiction requires a different skill set, or doesn’t provide the emotional satisfactions they get from fiction. My answer to that: Then you’re doing it wrong. Certainly some non-fiction is intended to be first and foremost…
Halloween Haunts: It’s Not a Season, It’s a Lifestyle by Greg Chapman

Halloween Haunts: It’s Not a Season, It’s a Lifestyle by Greg Chapman

You all know my tale of woe. I am forced to live without the true spirit of Halloween because I live on the other side of the world. :( But instead of crawling into my coffin when October comes around and crying myself to sleep, I bring the Halloween alive through fiction and art – all year round. I may live in a town without any bonafide haunted houses, or urban legends (yeah pretty boring right?), but that doesn’t mean I can’t create my own. I paint and draw and write all year round. Mostly I do it to relieve…
Halloween Haunts: It Was a Different Time by JG Faherty

Halloween Haunts: It Was a Different Time by JG Faherty

Recently, I had the opportunity to go on a vacation with a group of friends. Five couples, and 2 of them had their daughters with them, ages 17 and 19, respectively. One day, while sitting on the beach, conversation turned to the topic of Halloween. I mentioned that “back in our day,” Halloween was very different. Sure, we went to parties, dressed in costumes, and as kids even got into our share of shenanigans on “Gate Night” or “Mischief Night.” But even growing up in the 1970s and 1980s was a very different time than now. We had no fear…
Halloween Haunts: Meet Joe Pipe by Pete Mesling

Halloween Haunts: Meet Joe Pipe by Pete Mesling

I grew up in a small town in North Dakota. I’d say the population was around 16,000 to 18,000 back then. In a town that size, there aren’t a lot of celebrities, but there are generally a handful of legends, or myths. Joe Pipe was one such legend among my circle of friends. Stories about his past varied some. He’d suffered a horrific injury when he got his leg caught in a power takeoff, according to some versions. Others had it that he’d left his mind in Vietnam and come back something of a husk. Me, I like to think…
Halloween Haunts: The Widow By Erik Hofstatter

Halloween Haunts: The Widow By Erik Hofstatter

  A billow of fruity vapour swirled around me as I waited to begin my morning commute. It smelled like peaches and reminded me of a smokescreen employed by the military but fused with a potent, aromatic flavour. I cast a disapproving glance in the boy’s direction, watching smoke camouflage his acne as he puffed on his e-cigarette. He inhaled the poison with short, raspy breaths. A flock of gaunt faces engulfed me and I surveyed them with distaste. Vague melancholy leaked out of their fissured facades. Like them, I abandoned expectation long ago. Like them, I was trapped in…