GUEST POST: Somer Canon

The Halloween Mood

It’s that time of year again. Summer has come to an end, the days are getting shorter, and the color orange is starting to saturate our world of capitalistic vice and consumption. There’s pumpkin spice, well, everything and the general cozy feeling that comes with the season, and then we have the people who are annoyed with the deliriously evangelical followers of the autumnal cult of joy. Fall is the favorite season of many, and the favorite punching bag of others. Personally, I’m a big fan of the season and the mood it sets. I haven’t even touched on the best day of the season, in my opinion at least: Halloween.

I sit pretty comfortably in the opinion that Halloween is one of the best holidays. I’m not even close to being alone in that belief. In 2019, almost 70% of Americans celebrated Halloween. It dropped a bit in 2020 and looks like the downward trend may continue this year, thanks to the pandemic. But still, more than half of Americans, pandemic or not, are going to be indulging in the spooky, in the morbid, and in the deliciously decadent delights that horror can give. Children and adults alike love Halloween. Horror fans and otherwise love Halloween. The love of Halloween spans various belief systems and religions. How is this so? Why is Halloween such a hit?

I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that it happens at the end of October, just as fall is getting into full swing. Like Christmas, we start celebrating Halloween before the actual day with trips to pop-up stores for new costumes and goodies for our homes, visiting haunted houses and hay rides, and scary movies play on the television every night. Summer is the season that we spend mostly out of our homes, away on vacations and with school being out, mostly on a relaxed or nonexistent schedule. Fall begins with school going back into session, the return to routine and to the end of the vacation season. We’re home, we’re settling in, we’re getting cozy, and we get to do that as the lush beauty of nature prepares to wow us one last time. In the autumnal season, nature proves that she saves the best for last. The sweet smell of dead leaves and their lovely crunch under our feet as we walk, it romances us. Death woos and charms us. Pumpkins start appearing everywhere, flanked by decorative baskets of chrysanthemums. But alongside that magazine-cover pretty picture, there are skeletons, spiders, black cats, corpses, vampires, bats…all of the ambassadors of the decidedly spooky. And they go together wonderfully. I put a seven-foot werewolf on my front porch, but I’ve also got mums and pumpkins. I put out a small cemetery in my side yard with zombies and skeletons climbing out of the graves, but they’re surrounded by beautiful falling leaves from the large tree. The beauty of nature’s death pairs nicely with the human macabre.

Halloween also has the distinguished position of being a holiday that normally doesn’t come with family obligations. Every season comes with a holiday that carries some sort of requirement that can stress us out. Halloween has no such demand. It stands as one of the special days on the calendar that is set aside purely for fun. Obligations are minimal, usually, and having to eat a big dinner next to your judgmental aunt is still at least a month away. Halloween is so much more casual. I know the history of Halloween and I know the pagan-held beliefs of the day, but it has become a day of laughter, fun, sweets, and ridiculousness. It has a few songs, it has a lot of movies, and it has costumes. Halloween is an absolute delight, and I know that I start looking forward to it every August. I sometimes hold out through September before bringing out my spooky and corny decorations, and sometimes I don’t. But, at the very least, the month of October is dedicated to Halloween in my house. My giant porch werewolf and the many other outdoor decorations pale in comparison to what I have inside of my house. A disassembled skeleton hangs from my dining room chandelier, I drink my coffee from Halloween mugs and have my evening tipple in Halloween glasses. For crying out loud, I have Halloween bedding and bathroom hand towels! I love every stitch of it. All of it.

The U.S. is an enormous country with many different regions and not all of them necessarily have four seasons, and yet, they still celebrate Halloween. I live in Eastern Pennsylvania where we certainly experience the full four seasons, but Halloween is pervasive in this country of ours regardless of whether autumn happens or not. Again, why? I’m not an academic and I have no deep philosophical answer for you. What I do have is my observation, and my knowledge of both your average person and the horror community. Halloween is popular because it’s fun. Being scared is fun. Horror carries a stigma of being sick and taboo, and yet I rarely meet a person who doesn’t have a favorite scary movie. People tell me all the time that they don’t like horror, but they love Halloween. Yes, it’s the day for the horror-lovers, but it’s also the day for the “normies” to take a walk on the spooky side and it turns out, they have just as much fun as us horror folk. It’s fun! That’s not a deep answer, but it is an obvious one, and a truthful one.

So, if you’re like more than half of us and celebrating Halloween, enjoy it. Have the fun. Watch the movies, eat the treats, put up the decorations, and do it with people that enjoy it as much as you. Do a Halloween night recitation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and eat some apple dumplings. But could you do this horror author a favor? Pick up a scary book from an author you’ve never read. Give a smaller name a chance. Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree is a terrific book and everything by Stephen King can be appropriate at this time of year. But there are so many horror authors out there who are putting out works that will surprise you with the imaginative takes and amazing storytelling and it’s a shame to only read the biggest names, or only a few names. Try something new, someone new, and allow yourself to be surprised and delighted. After all, ‘tis the season!

I’ll start you off. I’ll throw some authors at you, and you pick what thrills you most.

If you love monster books, authors Hunter Shea and Mary SanGiovanni write some of the best monster-based fiction out there. Wile E. Young is really climbing the ranks here as well.

If you love a good haunted house book or gothic horror, check out Catherine Cavendish.

If you like really strange, creative horror that takes unexpected turns, Wesley Southard, Stephen Kozeniewski, and Armand Rosamilia deliver.

If you like it spicy and want your horror a little sexy, check out Sephera Giron and Jessica McHugh. But don’t be fooled by the erotic bent of these works, they are every bit as brutal and horrifying as any other horror book, just with an added bonus.

Do you like horror that doesn’t really fit into a category but can be emotional and somehow beautiful? Robert Ford and John Boden belong on your shelves, then.

Grab a short story collection from a new author. As a reader, I find the best authors out there put together amazing short story collections. Most of the authors I mention here have short story collections in their bibliography. Also, try one of Matt Wildasin’s Horrors Untold volumes. They’re wonderful and varied fun.

Lots of authors write Halloween-themed works. Ronald Kelly, Kevin Lucia, Douglas Clegg, and yours truly have Halloween works out there.

I’m barely scratching the surface here, and could spend all day pointing you to terrific authors, but if you start here, and do a little digging of your own, I guarantee you’ll find your new favorite author. Happy Halloween!


Somer Canon lives in Eastern PA with her husband, two sons, and three cats. She loves to read and write and although she is polyamorous when it comes to genres, horror always seems to be her favorite.

Boneyard
Halloween is a night of spooky fun…at least it is for the living. What about the dead? What kind of fun do they have? Read and find out how the no-longer-living entertain themselves at the expense of very much alive and disrespectful people!

A Fresh Start
Still hurting from her divorce, Melissa Caan makes a drastic life change for herself and her two young children by moving them out to a rural home.But the country life came with some extras that she wasn’t counting on. Doors are slamming, she and her children are violently attacked by unseen hands, and her elderly neighbor doesn’t like to talk about the murders that happened in the strangely named hollow all those years ago.Ghost hunters, witches, and a sassy cancer survivor come together to help Melissa fight for the safety of her children and herself.All she wanted was a fresh start, will she get it?

Slaves to Gravity (with Wesley Southard) —
After waking up in a hospital bed, paralyzed from the waist down, Charlie Snyder had no idea where life would take her. Dejected, broken, and permanently bound to a wheelchair, she believed her life was truly over. That is…until gravity no longer applied.It started out slow. Floating from room to room. Menial tasks without assistance. When she decided to venture outside and take some real risks with her newfound ability, she rose above her own constraints to reveal a whole new world, and found other damaged individuals just like her to confide in.But there are other things out there, waiting in the dark. Repulsive, secretive creatures that don’t want Charlie to touch the sky. And they’ll stop at nothing to keep her on the ground.

Halloween Extravaganza: Somer Canon: Adventures in Candy Soliciting

I always love it when people share their experiences trick or treating when they were younger, especially when they compare it to what their kids experience now, because trick or treating was always such a huge thing for me and my sister.


Being a child of trick-or-treating age is a magical time. The concept of going door to door and threatening your neighbors with mischief unless they pay you off with candy is hilarious to me now as an adult with children of my own. Children tend not to question the whys of such things and just go with the flow, and when the flow includes free candy, asking too many questions would be a waste of time. You want to get going, show off your cool costume to your friends and get to those delectable treats!

But, as memory serves, trick-or-treating was also a bit of a mixed bag. I was a small child in the 1980s and early 90s and I experienced some really weird things when doing my yearly candy-fueled reign of adorable terror. Times were just changing when I was a kid. I remember when we had to start closely examining our candy and we couldn’t eat anything homemade given to us anymore unless it was a family member that provided it. That sucked because so many nice old people used to hand out popcorn balls back then and homemade popcorn balls are the best.

I’d like to share a few of the stranger things that happened to me as a kid trick-or-treating in my weird little town in West Virginia. We never had anybody spray us with garden hoses or offer us whole barnyard animals or anything, but we ran into some real characters that my classmates and I would talk about in school the next day.

One year, my mom took us to a different county for trick-or-treating. It was the neighborhood close to where my grandma lived and I think she talked my mom into bringing us down there with the promise of more candy and less time out walking to get to it. There were two strange encounters on that night. The first was this big, beautiful house with an honest to goodness white picket fence around it. I kept seeing camera flashes from the front door and assumed that the homeowners had relatives stopping by and they were taking pictures of the cute costumes. We got to the door and were greeted by a man and a woman smiling at us.

“Ah, Jesus loves the little children,” the man said, patting my little brother on the head. “On this night of darkness, His light will guide you to glory!”

He then dropped copies of a book titled, Good News America, God Loves You into our bags and then posed with us while the lady took our picture. Now, we were churchgoers and there were some people that were part of our congregation who were very much opposed to Halloween festivities. We understood that it happened, but that guy creeped my poor little brother out and, yeah, I was uncomfortable.

Later that night, we got our second strange occurrence. We stopped at a house that had the front screen door propped open. When we peaked in, we were greeted by a room full of very old men and women slumped in armchairs. An excited woman greeted us at the door and took us by the hands and led us inside.

“Say hello to these nice men and women,” she commanded. We did as we were told and the lady dropped generous handfuls of candy into our bags. We said our thanks and turned to head to the door where our mother was watching.

“Stay for just a minute!” the excitable lady said to us. She then picked up my brother and sat him in the lap of an old, barely conscious man and led me by the hand to stand next to an old lady who looked slightly more awake. She snapped a couple of pictures and then my mom came into the room, all smiles, and led us away. My brother and I were deeply unsettled and when we said as much to our mom, she got mad at us and scolded us for not being charitable to those “nice old people.” I don’t know. Times have changed and I know I’d have a problem with someone plopping one of my kids on a heavily sedated stranger’s lap.

This last one made an impact on everybody I knew. In college, I ran into an old classmate and we were talking about Halloween and he said to me, “Hey, remember that Lurch guy at the insurance house?”

A little background: my usual trick-or-treating route consisted of trailers, old tract houses, and your basic run-down lower-class domiciles. But there was one house, a grand old brick house that was used as the office for a local insurance agent. It was a neat place that they decorated beautifully every Christmas and it stood out like a sore thumb among the poverty around it.

It never had the porch light on for trick-or-treaters. Why would it? We understood that it wasn’t a home and that nobody actually lived there. We usually just drove past. But that year, there was a light on and there were other children on the porch, so my mom stopped the car and my brother and I got out.

“Oh boy,” we thought. In a place that big, we were sure to be getting the holy grail of trick-or-treat conquests: the full sized candy bar. We met some kids on the stairs as they descended the porch. I greeted a girl that I knew, but she hurried down the steps gripping her little sister’s hand. I shrugged, assuming she hadn’t heard me or that her mom would be grumpy if they kept her waiting.

My brother rang the doorbell and we smiled at each other excitedly. When the big door opened, our perky greeting died in our throats. A very pale man in a tuxedo ducked in order to clear the door frame and loomed over us. He was holding, and I swear this is true, a silver platter. He looked down at us with a bored expression. I’ve never been so terrified of a well-dressed man in all my life.

He said nothing. We said nothing. Finally, remembering my manners, I squeaked out a “trick-or-treat,” and my brother followed suit. The large man said nothing, just picked up two small silver bundles from the tray and dropped them into our bags. We said our thanks as quickly as we could and ran down to get back into our mom’s car. She was excited to hear what they had given us and I took the bundle out of my bag and looked at it. It was five pennies wrapped in aluminum foil and my brother had the same.

As an adult, I have to think that it was an act put on by the festive people who made that house so beautiful during the Christmas season. It was a one-time deal, though. That porch light was never again turned on for trick-or-treaters.

The next day at school we couldn’t stop talking about it. We all had our little bundles of foil-wrapped pennies but that was nothing compared to the big-scary-butler-guy who dropped them into our bags. We all got lots of candy, yeah, but that experience was what made Halloween for us that year. It was one of the better years, actually.

As a parent now, I watch to see what my kids experience as trick-or-treaters. The sweet old lady down the street who gave them old VHS tapes reminded me of the sweet old lady who handed out old cough drops, mistaking them for hard candies. They still get shiny apples like I did and they love, as I loved, those lollipops that look like jack o’lanterns. As much as things change, so much stays the same. I hope so very much that my kids can accumulate a wealth of weird experiences from their own childhood jaunts on Halloween.

Somer Canon is a minivan revving suburban mother who avoids her neighbors for fear of being found out as a weirdo. When she’s not peering out of her windows, she’s consuming books, movies, and video games that sate her need for blood, gore, and things that disturb her mother.  

A Fresh Start

Still hurting from her divorce, Melissa Caan makes a drastic life change for herself and her two young children by moving them out to a rural home.But the country life came with some extras that she wasn’t counting on. Doors are slamming, she and her children are violently attacked by unseen hands, and her elderly neighbor doesn’t like to talk about the murders that happened in the strangely named hollow all those years ago.Ghost hunters, witches, and a sassy cancer survivor come together to help Melissa fight for the safety of her children and herself.All she wanted was a fresh start, will she get it?

The Hag Witch of Tripp Creek

A NEW HOME

Dawna Temple let herself be moved from the familiarity of Pittsburgh to the wilds of West Virginia, all so her mentally exhausted husband, John, could heal from a breakdown. Struggling with the abrupt change of location, Dawna finds a friend in her neighbor, Suzanne Miller, known to the locals as The Hag Witch of Tripp Creek.

A NEW FRIEND

Dismissing it as hillbilly superstition, Dawna can’t believe the things she hears about her funny and empathetic friend. Suzanne has secrets—dark secrets—and eventually she reveals the truth behind the rumors that earned her the wicked nickname decades earlier.

OLD WOUNDS

Now in possession of the truth, Dawna has conflicting emotions about Suzanne’s past deeds, but when her husband’s well-being takes a downturn, she finds there is no one else to turn to. Will she shun her friend as others have done before? …or can she accept that an act of evil is sometimes necessary for the greater good?

Halloween Extravaganza: INTERVIEW: Somer Canon

Meghan: It’s been awhile since we sat down together, Somer. What’s been going on since we last spoke?

Somer Canon: Oh boy, SO MUCH! I’ve had the release of my book, A Fresh Start, from Crossroads Press as well as a few anthologies. I also embarked on a co-writing journey with my friend and talented author, Wesley Southard. Our work is still in it’s nascent form, but it’s shaping up to be something pretty amazing.

Meghan: Who are you outside of writing?

Somer Canon: Suburban wife and mother of two sons. Minivan driving menace to aggressive drivers in BMWs and grill master extraordinaire.

Meghan: How do you feel about friends and close relatives reading your work?

Somer Canon: My two childhood best friends are NOT horror fans. Not even a little bit. They’ve read one of my works and were kind enough to ask me what was wrong with me, but I am very understanding of their abstaining from reading my stuff. I can’t really help it if my family reads my works and I try not to think about it too much for fear of censoring myself, to tell the truth. If I offend, I’m happy if they don’t tell me about it.

Meghan: Is being a writer a gift or a curse?

Somer Canon: It’s a mixed bag, honestly. I think creatives are some of the most empathetic and wonderful people to know and I love being in their midst. By knowing them, I’ve learned to embrace the parts of myself, my creative self, that have for so long been hidden by me for fear of them being weird or off-putting by members of polite society, and not just because I am a horror writer, although that comes with its own cabinet of weird. We notice things some other people don’t, we’re sensitive and vain, and we tend to be frightened of putting to paper parts of the lush and colorful wilderness that is our imaginations. That place in our heads is where we do most of our living and sharing it is difficult, and yet most of us, myself included, are compelled to put it down and get it out. It’s freeing and wonderful, but also terrifying and loathsome.

Meghan: How has your environment and upbringing colored your writing?

Somer Canon: Well, they certainly color ME, so they would have to bleed into the work that I wring out of myself, you know? My upbringing wasn’t a happy one, so I tend to not write child protagonists because I hated so much being a child…I don’t want to revisit that. Things that anger me make it into the books, things that scare and hurt me make it in. My weird preoccupation with snack cakes made it into my book Killer Chronicles! The things in my past and in my surroundings can’t help but be part of the creative process and I think it’s good for the final product. It makes it more relatable, I think.

Meghan: What’s the strangest thing you have ever had to research for your books?

Somer Canon: Crime scene photos. I’ve had to describe some horrible things and in order to keep it grounded, or at least semi-grounded in reality, I had to get a good look at it. I’ve lost sleep over a few of those.

Meghan: Which do you find the hardest to write: the beginning, the middle, or the end?

Somer Canon: Endings are HARD. Not to say that beginnings and middles are easy (they’re SO not) but endings have a lot of responsibility towards the overall tone of the book. Where do you end it? How do you end it? What questions do you answer or leave hanging? How many of your readers do you want sending you angry emails? I consider books to be like thrill rides and they’re absolutely more about the journey than the destination, but if the destination is ill-fitted and all wrong, it certainly has influence over your impression of the overall experience.

Meghan: Do you outline?

Somer Canon: I might do a page-long idea of the overall story sometimes, but mostly I pants it.

Meghan: Do you start with characters or plot?

Somer Canon: Plot.

Meghan: Do you just sit down and start writing?

Somer Canon: It might look like that from the outside, I suppose, but my mind is totally bent on that current work in progress. Every waking moment is spent thinking on it.

Meghan: What works best for you?

Somer Canon: I need to do things that are quieting. By that I mean, my hands are busy, but my mind is in this really great, quiet, almost zen place and I get my best ideas when I’m quieting. I bake, work out, do yard work, or clean my kitchen cabinets. It helps a lot.

Meghan: What do you do when characters don’t follow the outline/plan?

Somer Canon: My characters start off as cardboard cutouts of the more well-rounded people they become in the process of writing the story. If they want to go off script, I’m okay with it.

Meghan: What do you do to motivate yourself to sit down and write?

Somer Canon: I want this. I’ve always wanted this. Hard work has never scared me off. Someone once said to me, “Just sit down and write the damn thing.” Reciting that like a mantra actually helps me a lot!

Meghan: Are you an avid reader?

Somer Canon: I try to be, I really do. I don’t read as much as I’d like.

Meghan: What kind of books do you absolutely love to read?

Somer Canon: I love haunted house books. I’ve never passed on one. I also love a good biography.

Meghan: How do you feel about movies based on books?

Somer Canon: I’m always dubious about it because so many movies change parts of the original story that… WHY. There was no need to change that, why did you do that? I watch plenty of movies based on books, but I’m usually left cold.

Meghan: Have you ever killed a main character?

Somer Canon: Yes.

Meghan: Do you enjoy making your characters suffer?

Somer Canon: It’s not that I get joy from it. There is something to learn from pain and there’s an opportunity to grow or learn something about yourself if you make it out of the suffering intact. It has to happen, but I don’t necessarily love it.

Meghan: What’s the weirdest character concept that you’ve ever come up with?

Somer Canon: I have my idea book where I jot down little ideas for stories or characters. I used to keep it by my bed so if I woke up with a thought I could jot it down. I stopped keeping it there after I found an entry with only two words and, for the life of me, I have no idea what I was thinking. Grandma Boobie is the entry. I just… HUH?

Meghan: What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve ever received?

Somer Canon: I’ve been really lucky to work with editors that have helped me catch some annoying habits in my writing. I can’t imagine how tedious I must be to them. What’s the worst? I once had a fellow author tell me that I’ll never again hit the high of the experience of signing my first contract and it was all downhill from there. I disagree with that. Big time. Every time someone wants to publish one of my tales, every short story acceptance, every invite to do a blog tour or a convention… it all means so much to me and I let myself be humble and flabbergasted by all of it. I’m living my dream and I don’t want to let myself become numb to it.

Meghan: What do your fans mean to you?

Somer Canon: We have to hide how demoralizing this writing thing can be. Rejections happen, things go quiet and you’re forgotten, self-loathing is the grease that keeps my writing engine going and I’m very hard on myself. And then, in those darkest times, someone will message me and tell me that they liked my story, or send me an email asking when my next book will come out. I can float on those tiny nuggets of encouragement for a week at least. My fans startle me and lift me up and I really don’t know if I could handle the drudgeries without them.

Meghan: If you could steal one character from another author and make them yours, who would it be and why?

Somer Canon: I would love Larry Underwood, from Stephen King’s The Stand. Larry is such a mess and I’d like to play with him in a timeline where I can continue his storyline and Captain Trips never happens. He’s a victim of good intentions swallowed by pride and vanity, until everything goes to hell and he has to lead with his better side. His better side is full of mistakes, but it perseveres.

Meghan: If you could write the next book in a series, which one would it be, and what would you make the book about?

Somer Canon: I’d like to write another Southern Vampire Mystery book (True Blood was based on them). I love the character of Sookie Stackhouse as she was in the books (don’t make me talk about the show… I get loud) and I feel that Charlaine Harris got tired of writing in that world, which I understand. But as a fan I would geek out so hard.

Meghan: If you could write a collaboration with another author, who would it be and what would you write about?

Somer Canon: I AM writing a collaboration with someone, the previously mentioned Wesley Southard! But fantasy-wise? I think it would be cool to write with one of my high-minded, intelligent friends like Mary SanGiovanni or Catherine Cavendish. They’re so much smarter and more eloquent than I am and it would be a real experience to live in their process.

Meghan: What can we expect from you in the future?

Somer Canon: I’m not stopping! I’m working on a novel right now that will be my homage to both Clive Barker and Tobe Hooper! After that, who knows?

Meghan: Where can we find you?

Somer Canon: I’m on Twitter and I’m on Instagram and I have a website.

Meghan: Do you have any closing words for your fans or anything you’d like to say that we didn’t get to cover in this interview or the last?

Somer Canon: Thank you to anyone who has given any of my words even a cursory glance. It’s easy to feel lonely and alone and to every person who has ever interacted with me in even the smallest way, thank you so very much. And thank you, Meghan’s House of Books, for having me again! This interview was a doozy!

Somer Canon is a minivan revving suburban mother who avoids her neighbors for fear of being found out as a weirdo. When she’s not peering out of her windows, she’s consuming books, movies, and video games that sate her need for blood, gore, and things that disturb her mother.  

A Fresh Start

Still hurting from her divorce, Melissa Caan makes a drastic life change for herself and her two young children by moving them out to a rural home.But the country life came with some extras that she wasn’t counting on. Doors are slamming, she and her children are violently attacked by unseen hands, and her elderly neighbor doesn’t like to talk about the murders that happened in the strangely named hollow all those years ago.Ghost hunters, witches, and a sassy cancer survivor come together to help Melissa fight for the safety of her children and herself.All she wanted was a fresh start, will she get it?

The Hag Witch of Tripp Creek

A NEW HOME

Dawna Temple let herself be moved from the familiarity of Pittsburgh to the wilds of West Virginia, all so her mentally exhausted husband, John, could heal from a breakdown. Struggling with the abrupt change of location, Dawna finds a friend in her neighbor, Suzanne Miller, known to the locals as The Hag Witch of Tripp Creek.

A NEW FRIEND

Dismissing it as hillbilly superstition, Dawna can’t believe the things she hears about her funny and empathetic friend. Suzanne has secrets—dark secrets—and eventually she reveals the truth behind the rumors that earned her the wicked nickname decades earlier.

OLD WOUNDS

Now in possession of the truth, Dawna has conflicting emotions about Suzanne’s past deeds, but when her husband’s well-being takes a downturn, she finds there is no one else to turn to. Will she shun her friend as others have done before? …or can she accept that an act of evil is sometimes necessary for the greater good?