I turn 41 years old this year,
the day before Halloween in fact, which puts me squarely in the world of
adulthood. And yet in some respects, I
still feel like a kid.
One of the things that makes me
feel most like a kid is Halloween. I’ve
never outgrown the holiday’s dark charms.
The entire season of autumn, in
fact, has the power to bring out the kid in me. There’s a magic in the air I can’t really explain…but I’ll try.
The crispness in the air, the
shortening days, the blazing color of the leaves—it all combines to cast a
spell over me. If I had to pick one
thing I love best about the fall, it would have to be the leaves. Even now, I will stop to just marvel in
wonder at a shower of autumn leaves raining down around me. The scratch-scratch sound as they scuttled
along pavement is probably my favorite sound in the world.
And of course, autumn contains my
favorite holiday—Halloween.
As a lifelong fan of the horror
genre (and I mean fan in the literal “fanatic” sense), I love the fact that we
have a holiday focused on the dark and ghoulish. Granted, Halloween has been scrubbed clean of some of that
darkness in modern times. It was
definitely more horror-focused when I was a kid, though if you go back even
further it truly embraced the macabre.
(If you’re not sure what I mean, check out the Halloween sequence in the
film Meet Me in Saint Louis.) Still, I love that at this time of year
almost any store I go into is going to have displays of skeletons and ravens
and black cats and witches and mummies and vampires. It’s like for a brief instant, the world at large acknowledges
and gives its stamp of approval to what I love year round.
When I was a kid, I never wanted
to be a prince or a cowboy or a fireman for Halloween. I always wanted to be monsters. Dracula, Frankenstein, the devil, one year I
remember going as the Hulk, which I think semi-qualifies. From a young age, I was embracing the darker
side of Halloween, and even though I no longer dress up in costume, I still
celebrate.
Every Halloween season my fiancé
and I try to find fun and inventive things to do for the holiday. We’ve visited our share of haunted houses
and trails, both good and bad. One year
we attended a murder mystery dinner, all done up in tuxedos and
everything. Last Halloween we visited a
supposedly haunted cemetery well after dark and wandered around. This year we’ll be attending a live
theatrical version of Night of the Living
Dead (my host for this guest blog, James Newman, is the AD of said play).
I also celebrate in the
entertainment I seek out during the month of October. I always make a point of reading Halloween-themed books every
October, and there are certain seasonal movies I watch every year at this time. And my writing always takes on a seasonal
bent as well. Every October, without
fail, I write Halloween-themed short stories.
It’s a tradition I’ve established that I very much enjoy. Over the years, I’ve built up quite an
arsenal of these tales.
Which is why this year it was
possible for Great Old Ones Publishing to release a 19 story collection of my
Halloween-themed stories. I’m always
excited when I have a new book out, but because of my unending love affair with
Halloween, this one particularly thrills me.
I think I’ve provided an eclectic mix of fiction. There’s horror both supernatural and
psychological; I have a handful of non-horror stories; there’s even one
children’s story. There are some tales
that are on the longish side, and several flash pieces of 1000 words or
less. The oldest story in the
collection dates back to 1998, the most recent are from just last year.
As different as the stories are,
they have one thing in common—they aim to entertain. Halloween for all its sinister trappings is a holiday that is all
about fun, and that’s what I hope I delivered with the collection. I hope people sit back and get caught up in
the stories and just have a good time.
I want my love of this time of year to translate to the reader so that
they fall in love with Halloween as well.
Halloween House of Horrors can be purchased here:
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