Tag: Halloween

Halloween Extravaganza: Jeff Strand: The Annual Halloween Candy Trade

megHan

Two candy guest posts in a row. Cause that’s pure gold to me. And it’s Jeff Strand. Who is, by the way, pure awesomeness. (Have you read his stuff? There is no one quite like THE Jeff Strand. No one.)

One of the most mind-boggling moments in my adult life was when I went to a friend’s house shortly after Halloween, and she offered me a piece of candy from her son’s trick-or-treating stash. I declined, because that candy was sacred! She assured me that he wouldn’t care. Candy was no big deal to him.

WTF was wrong with that kid? That certainly wasn’t MY experience at that age!

I’m pleased to report that I’ve reached a level of financial security where if I want a Snickers bar, I can make it happen. That was not always the case. As a child in Fairbanks, Alaska, Halloween was ALL about the candy. Okay, 90% about the candy. Costumes and decorations were fun. But the candy was an essential component of my love of the holiday.

Interior Alaska at the end of October is, of course, quite brisk, and costumes were limited to what could fit over a snowsuit. Inevitably, the master plan to gather enough candy to last us until Christmas would fall apart because one of my trick-or-treat partners would get too cold, and we couldn’t just leave them to die. Still, we always got a pretty significant stash, with a predetermined route that was carefully mapped out for maximum candy acquisition.

(The map was purely based on hitting the most houses using the most efficient route. There were too many variables to do more analysis than that. Do you want to hit houses early, before they’ve started rationing? Or do you want to hit them late, when they’re discovering that they bought way too much candy? No way to predict that.)

We’d get home, have an adult verify that there were no hypodermic needles protruding from the chocolate, and then the trading session began. We took this very seriously. I tended to favor “longer lasting” over “chewy,” so Sweet Tarts had more value to me than a Fun-Sized Milky Way. (“Fun-Sized” would be a five-pound block of chocolate, not these weenie little bites, but that’s a rant for a different day.)

I liked getting Whoppers because they had a high trade value. Whoppers are gross. Whoppers are so gross that even as a kid, if I were given the choice between eating a Whopper and eating nothing, I’d go with nothing. Do you know how bad candy had to be for me to prefer the absence of candy? I’m not saying that I’d rather have eaten a turd, I’m saying that a Whopper is bad enough that I would have declined a piece of candy. I’d eat nasty off-brands all day long, and choke down a Dark Chocolate Hersheys or a Butterfinger, but a Whopper was one step too far.

But others didn’t feel that way. My sister and a couple of my misguided friends loved Whoppers. Loved ’em! They thought those foul things were top-tier treats, which gave me a lot of power at the negotiating table.

In retrospect, as I type this, I realize that I should have pretended that Whoppers were the most delicious candy on the planet, and that to part with a single malted milk ball would cause me intense heartbreak. But then I might have had to eat a Whopper at some point, and my grimace would expose the lie.

The trading went on long into the night. One of my best friends had a particular fondness for Tootsie Rolls, which also worked in my favor, because my trick-or-treat bag always had Tootsie Rolls in abundance, and though they are perfectly fine if you enjoy your chocolate flavor in hard putty form, there’s rarely a reason to eat one when other options are available.

Then… the feast.

The following day was always a queasy one, but if you think I gave any indication of my gastrointestinal distress to my parents, you’re out of your damn fool mind. They would always mention that the pile of candy they’d checked for razor blades and rat poison was notably smaller and suggest that I show some self-control instead of gobbling it down like a feral dog, so “My tummy hurts!” would not be well received.

Soon there would be an effort to make my riches last, but alas, they’d be gone long before Thanksgiving, which had no official candy except maybe those ones in the strawberry wrapping with syrup inside.

And I would mourn until the following year.

Jeff Strand is the author of over forty books, ranging from goofy horror to serious horror to a smut comedy. His short story “The Tipping Point” from his collection Everything Has Teeth won a Splatterpunk Award in 2018, though none of his short stories won a Splatterpunk Award in 2019, and he performed poorly at KillerCon during a trivia contest about the Splatterpunk Awards. You can visit his Gleefully Macabre website here.

Clowns vs. Spiders

Jaunty the Clown just wants to entertain families with lighthearted slapstick antics, but people think of clowns as terrifying, nightmarish creatures who hide in closets or under beds. When Jaunty, along with his fellow performers Guffaw, Wagon, Reginald The Pleasant Clown, and Bluehead are fired from the circus, they’re told that the world just doesn’t like clowns anymore.

Still, clowns have to eat. And since these clowns don’t eat children, to make ends meet they’re eventually forced to take a job in a popular haunted attraction, the Mountain of Terror. Instead of charming entertainers, they’re now scary clowns. A zombie clown. A demon clown. A creepy doll clown. 

But the town is about to discover something more frightening than clowns. Because on opening night, millions of oversized spiders emerge from a cave and begin their deadly invasion… 

From Bram Stoker Award-nominated author Jeff Strand comes an insane mix of shameless silliness and grisly creepy-crawly horror. Clowns Vs. Spiders. Who will win? 

My Pretties

A serial kidnapper is preying upon women. He abducts them, then locks them in one of the cages dangling from the ceiling in a soundproofed basement. There, he sits quietly and just watches them, returning night after night, hoping he’ll be in the room at the moment his beautiful captives finally starve to death.

Charlene and Gertie have become fast friends at the restaurant where they work. But Charlene is concerned when she hears how her co-worker spends her evenings: Gertie’s cousin is one of the missing, and Gertie wanders the city streets where many of the abductions took place, using herself as bait with a high-voltage stun gun in her pocket. Charlene reluctantly offers to trail her in a car, just in case she does lure the kidnapper and things go wrong.

Unfortunately, the women find themselves the source of unwanted fame. And now they’re on the radar of a very, very dangerous man…

Halloween Extravaganza: John Boden: The Trick

megHan

John Boden is one of the coolest guys I know. And I know some cool guys, so that’s seriously saying a lot. Even when I was living in Pennsylvania, not fifteen minutes from where he lives, it always felt like he was in some other world, too far away for me to become real friends with. I think of that often now that I live over fifteen hours from him. He’s that friend I wish I made, if that makes any sense.

I can’t imagine a Halloween without him, though, so me, not being the best at keeping in touch with people, even with Facebook being right there, made sure that I invited him once again to take part in my annual Halloween Extravaganza.

He told me he wanted to do a guest post, but he had to talk to his family first, to make sure what he was sharing was okay with them. When I received it, after they gave the go-ahead, it was a story I never expected. John Boden, being serious, and so perfectly serious at that.

It’s definitely a get-to-know-the-real-John-Boden type of piece, and something I think everyone should read, especially those of us who have siblings.

–Every Halloween either Roscoe or I went as a hobo/Old Man/Bum. It was the easiest costume for Mom to whip up as it wasn’t too far removed from our daily uniform. Worn jeans/pants, ratty shoes and a big old flannel shirt. Usually stuffed with a pillow. We were always warned to keep the pillow clean and undamaged as it would be returned to the case and its place on our bed when we got home. We’d then take our brown paper bag and walk the length of our block. The faces of our neighbors usually a cocktail of thinly veiled disdain or snotty or sad embarrassment. It took me years to realize there was an ironic joke here.

Roscoe and I were always brothers, but we weren’t always friends. We loved one another but I couldn’t say we were nice to one another. There was five years between us and a lot of circumstances, often it felt like lifetimes and fathoms deep. Our father left when I was almost seven and Roscoe was two. There was a rocky valley forged in the fact that I had a father for a few years, years that I could and can recall somewhat fondly, while he had a few splintered recollections of a man holding him as a baby. Once Dad had left, we moved around for three years, like gypsies, the not-so-politically-correct term was, and during it all I found myself more primed for the role of surrogate parent/caregiver to this bull-headed little boy who squinted when he smiled and followed me like a shadow. It was a role I’d never auditioned for and had most definitely sought to lose. A role I realize now had bounties unforetold and riches unparalleled.

–That joke being that we grew up in a poor area in the mountains of Pennsylvania. No one was rich or swimming in wealth. There were the dirt poor, the poor and those who were not as poor as the rest. I always felt we were the level above dirt. Most folks were good people. Hardworking parent. Most kids just happy to play and have fun. But there were some that were cut from different more expensive cloth. I vividly recall a girl telling me in third grade (after making fun of my Dollar Store vinyl hi-tops) that “If you don’t wear Lee jeans or Nike sneakers, you’re nothing.” That is a false statement but it sure made little Johnny feel like a little pile of nothing. I never told anyone about that. My Mom already had her hands full–multiple jobs, keeping a house around us and food on the table all while holding up the world. There always have to be some who look down on those with less than they. And I’m not talking about money specifically.

As time crawled on, I found myself bitter at my lot in life. I wanted nothing more than to be a normal kid, to play with the others my age and to experience the pains and aches of growing up. I was in no way spared the aches, but more accurately probably had some that the other kids didn’t, I always had to factor in when Mom left for work so I could be home to watch my brother. How to cook and clean the house. To do laundry, check homework and many other tasks that my friends had mothers or fathers handle for them. Mothers that didn’t work or if they did only one job. Our mom was a nurse at night and cleaned houses during daylight hours and on off nights from those, tended bar at the American Legion. For her hard work she was labeled a slut and a bad mother. Neither title being true but basically being tongue-carved into the trunk of our lives. I grew older and meaner to Roscoe. Endless name calling and fighting. And while he fought back, he was always quick to forgive and return to his usually accepting love of his big brother.

-This year I was going to go as a mummy. Mom had sacrificed one of our white sheets as had Gram to be torn into long strips of ancient bandage. It was the best costume I’d ever had. This year would be so much better.

–Better than the cardboard box robot that got me condescending snickers from other children, some hard candy, tootsie rolls and a stale popcorn ball.

–Better than the cheap plastic masks with the rubber band that held them on your head but pulled at the hair at the back of your neck.

–Better than seeing the looks on the faces of children who were nice to you once in a while, when there was no one else around. Children who’s parents were still together and both worked and brought in more income than your poor three job juggling mother did. Yeah, it would be better.

Years swirled and got away. I got married and moved across the state, won the role of a happy husband with two sons, a role I still play. Roscoe was married and had a pair of daughters. He tried to cut the leash to our hometown but never could do it. He was a boomerang that kept returning. I always did what I could to help him when called to, or even when not. We rarely talked but when we saw each other it seemed strained a little. The elastic growing dry and cracked like an old rubber band. I assumed it a resentment for the hand life dealt us, differing and wide in expanse. Too many small wounds from things I’d said or done when we were younger, given to salty scars that throbbed when I came around. When our Grandmother died and then a few years later our father, those somber events strengthened our bond in some way. We still have our moments of antagonism but mostly we just quietly accept the other. We are brothers and that cannot be changed. We vowed to call more often and see each other more. We both treat vows like a juggler treats delicate glass.

-The air was chilly, not cold but chilly. Mom said I’d need to wear my long johns under my costume, but not to get them dirty or torn as they were my only pair of pajamas until she could afford us new ones. I stood in the kitchen while Mom knelt in front of me carefully wrapping my legs in linen. Gram sat at the table and smoked her cigarette. When the wrapping was done I was covered head to toe, save for an opening left over my eyes so I could see. I ran into the living room and took in my costume via the full length mirror. It was fabulous. Gram said she’d drive us around. “Johnny will break his neck over them bandages around his ankles.” We got our bags and headed out.

First stop was old Mr. Whiteall. He sat on his porch swing with a large mixing bowl full of butterscotch discs and cinnamon lozenges. He always smelled sweaty but was a nice man.

“The Mummy walks!” he yelled and shrank away in mock terror.

I laughed and took the offered treats. As we turned to leave his porch, a few boys from school passed in the opposite direction. One of them hissed “Welfare Johnny.” I pretended not to hear.

The night was an apple halved–a sweetly tart and raw wound sticky at the same time. Gram sat in the car and smoked while Roscoe and I would hit the houses, most adults smiling and handing us candy and compliments and once in a while someone just looking at us like we’d shit on their porch and dropping the treats in our bags like used Kleenex. We went home and Gram left us to organize our spoils while Mom got ready for work.

Now, these decades later, I sit in my chair with the lights out, as I do every Halloween, and stare at the phone. It’s right there. Inches from my hand. It’d be such an easy thing to pick it up and call my brother. Sometimes you’d think the device was made of spiders and bees– a cursed idol carved of scorpion sting and snakebite the way we eschew it. I sigh and don’t make a move, choosing instead to once again take a walk through the territory behind my eyes.

-“You boys, made a haul!” she crowed as she grabbed a peanut butter chew from Roscoe’s pile. I offered her one of my starlight mints.

“No, those are your favorite. You keep them.” She went into the kitchen and got her sweater from the back of the chair. Crushed her cigarette to death in the ashtray on the table.

“Don’t you kids eat all that candy tonight.” She finished her coffee in a single gulp and sat the mug in the sink. It clattered with dirty silverware. “One more piece each, then brush and go to bed.” We nodded. She reminded me for the millionth time to lock the door behind her when she left. I stood and watched her pull out into the road and the taillights disappear into the night. We ate more than one piece of candy each and we went to bed without brushing our teeth. And the world never stuttered in its turning.

I often think of my brother and think of the years wasted between us. How all I need to do is call him once in a while, or even message him on the computer. In this day and age is there any valid excuse?! I’ve got pictures of the girls in the mail last week. They’ve grown up so much and I’ve not seen a lot of it. I’m as much a shadow to them as I am he. A pre-diagnosed stranger. I look at the table where the pictures lay and can see the face of my brother in them. See his school pictures in my mind. Green sweater and those squinting eyes when he smiled. He looked so happy. I so wish I could see him smile like that again. A smile that doesn’t know what a spiteful prick the world is. What a vicious bitch life can be. And how the sharpest blade is the slow scalpel of time and apathy. I feel my eyes begin to leak and wipe them across my arm. The tears are cold on my warm skin. I smile and stare at the spot of light near the front window, a feeble sliver from the streetlight. I can almost see a short shadow by the chair. See the alfalfa sprout of the Roscoe perpetual cowlick. I can see his eyes twinkle in the dim.

“What’re you thinking about, Johnny?”

“Bandages.”

“Like your Mummy costume?”

“Not exactly.”

“Like when you’re hurt?”

“Often.”

“Like what?”

“Like everything.”

I feel his small hand on mine.

“I love you.”

“I love you too, little brother.”

The streetlight goes dark and it thunders silence. I sit in it with my hand on the phone.

John Boden lives a stones throw from Three Mile Island with his wonderful wife and sons.

A baker by day, he spends his off time writing, working for Shock Totem Publications or watching old television shows. He likes Diet Pepsi and sports ferocious sideburns. He loves heavy metal and old country music, shoofly pie and westerns.

He’s a pretty nice fella, honest.

His work has appeared in Borderlands 6, Shock Totem, Splatterpunk, Lamplight, Blight Digest, the John Skipp edited Psychos and others. His not-really-for-children children’s book, Dominoes, has been called a pretty cool thing. His other books–Jedi Summer With the Magnetic Kid, Detritus In Love, Walk The Darkness Down— are out and about. He has also written a few collaborative novellas, one with Chad Lutzke called Out Behind the Barn, and Rattlesnake Kisses and Cattywampus with Bob Ford. There are more things in the works.

Out Behind the Barn (with Chad Lutzke)

The boys crept to the window and watched as Miss Maggie carried the long bundle into the barn, the weight of it stooping her aging back. Rafter lights spilled from the barn doors and Davey saw an arm fall from the canvas-wrapped parcel. He smiled.

“She got someone!”

Both children grinned and settled in their beds, eyes fixed to the ceiling.

The boys crept to the window and watched as Miss Maggie carried the long bundle into the barn, the weight of it stooping her aging back. Rafter lights spilled from the barn doors and Davey saw an arm fall from the canvas-wrapped parcel. He smiled.

“She got someone!”

Both children grinned and settled in their beds, eyes fixed to the ceiling.

This was family growth.

Rattlesnake Kisses (with Robert Ford)

Dallas is a man seasoned by both time and circumstance—a fellow you hire to get certain things done. The kind of man you definitely don’t want to cross.

The Kid is his protege—his younger shadow with more quirks than Dewey’s System has decimals. He’s loyal as a hound and just as likely to bite.

After being hired for a seemingly easy job, Dallas and the Kid find themselves on a wild ride. Every stop they make introduces lies, violence and memories best left buried. When the control Dallas holds so near and dear starts to squirm free, things get ugly. The routine becomes anything but, and revenge is a bloody dish best served with a .45 pistol.

Cattywampus (with Robert Ford)

There had been a plan. It wasn’t a good one, and it was rough around the edges, but it was a plan. Then things went off the rails and into places where no one was comfortable. Violent places. Unspeakable places. Places stained with blood and other things. A nesting doll of crimes and sordid deeds. Darlene and Sheila were up to no good, but the mess they find themselves in makes their original plans seem like a Sunday school picnic. And it started the way you’d expect a bad day to begin: A robbery.A death. A bucket full of teeth. Welcome to Steelwater, PA. We’re glad to have you.

Walk the Darkness Down

Some things are older than time. Older than darkness.

-Levi is a monstrous man—made of scars and scary as hell, he’s glutted on ghosts and evolving to carry out the dark wishes of the ancient whispers in his head. He’s building a door and what’s on the other side is terrifying.

-Jones spent a lot of time living bottle to bottle and trying to erase things. Now he’s looking for the man who killed his mother and maybe a little bit of looking or himself as well.

-Keaton is on the run from accusations as well as himself, he suffers alone until he meets Jubal, an orphaned boy with his little sisters in a sling.

-Every line is not a straight line and everything must converge. A parable writ in dust and blood on warped barn wood. A journey in the classic sense, populated with dried husks of towns…and people both odd and anything but ordinary. Hornets, reverse-werewolves and one of the most vicious villains you’ll ever know are all part of it.

Pull on your boots and saddle up, we’ll Walk The Darkness Down.

Halloween Extravaganza: Somer Canon: Adventures in Candy Soliciting

megHan

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: JG Faherty: Halloween & My Writing Career

megHan

I love these blog posts because I can let the authors pretty much do what they want. In this one, JG tells us about a Halloween that led him to be the author he is now. A great read.

Hello, there! My name is JG Faherty, I’m a horror and dark fiction author, and I’ve been granted free reign for today’s blog. So strap and in prepare yourself for some Halloween-themed brain musings.

I thought long and hard about what to discuss today. The topic of Halloween offers so many options – the history of the holiday, childhood memories, what Halloween means to me, things I’ve written that deal with Halloween.

In the end, I decided to do something of an amalgam and talk about not just a strong Halloween moment but how that moment impacted me as a writer.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Halloween, all the way back to when I was a little kid dressing up as Spider Man, trick-or-treating with my friends, and watching the Great Pumpkin. Back then, it would only be on once the whole month of October and I made sure to never miss it. As I got a little older, two things happened – I added the juvenile pranks of Gate Night/Mischief Night to my celebration (shaving cream, soap, flaming dog poo, all the standards!) and I discovered a book: Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury.

Wow.

To the 12-year-old me, that was possibly the most amazing book ever. Better than Poe, Shelley, Stoker, or Verne, the classic writers I’d been reading up to that point. Better than the Hardy Boys. Better than James Blish, who was writing a lot of Star Trek tie-ins that I enjoyed so much. Better even than Heinlein, who I’d recently discovered.

I fell in love, not just with the book, and Bradbury as a writer, but with how it spoke to me. A kid from a small town in the country who loved scary stuff and carnivals. (Did I mention we used to play in the local graveyards?)

I probably read that book three times before I got into high school, and another three times since. It didn’t start my life-long infatuation with all things horror and Halloween, but it did give me a particular fondness for small-town terrors, Halloween-themed stories, and coming of age stories.

Which leads me to the year 2001.

Yes, we’ve jumped forward quite a bit. 2001 was the year I started writing fiction. The previous year, I’d gotten a side job writing study guides for The Princeton Review, 4th and 5th grade, mostly. English, Language Arts. Each book was about 100 pages long and I had to write the practice reading assignments plus all the questions and answers. Although I’d always had a deep desire to be a writer, I’d never thought I had the ability, and other than 1 very abortive attempt in college, I never tried. I did a lot of writing for work, as a research scientist and laboratory manager, but never fiction.

Until those study guides. And I discovered it was fun. And it came easy to me. I’ve talked about how this led to me writing my first fiction in other blogs, so I won’t repeat that here.

By 2001, I had 2 short stories published. A few others in the works. And then it happened.

The dream.

A bunch of college students stuck inside a Halloween carnival, run by a demon. They had to go through every room in the haunted mansion, where all the monsters came alive. A cool dream, right?

But there was more.

I dreamed an entire novel, from beginning to end. And not just one story, but a whole series of them. I saw not just the haunted mansion, but also all the other rides, the side shows, the games. The monsters behind the masks at every booth. How the carnival appeared every Halloween since the dawn of time, never in the same place.

When I woke up, I immediately grabbed a notebook and pen and started writing. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. For two weeks, I wrote in the morning, at lunch, and after work. I wrote on the weekends. And I finished that novel in record time. Not an outline, the whole damn novel!

Then I transcribed it into the computer. 137,000 words. I proofed it, got it down to 129,000.

It didn’t sell. I was young and naïve then, I knew nothing about the publishing industry or how bad the quality of a first novel is. Over the next few years, I honed my skills, kept rewriting that book, took the Borderlands Writers Bootcamp and had famous writers critique it. I got a mentor through the Horror Writers Association and she helped me.

And in 2009, I sold it. Carnival of Fear. Published in 2010. Still available (feel free to buy it!).

But remember how I said I dreamed of more?

There’s a lot more.

I wrote 3 short stories based on that carnival. And a novella, which was published by Samhain Publishing a few years ago. Plus some poems. I have the sequel to Carnival of Fear half-written in my computer, and the only reason it’s not complete is because I’ve worked on other books before it. During that dream, I saw the sequel, the spin-off stories. I woke up with ideas for what could happen on every ride, under every tent. I knew which ones would be short stories and which ones longer pieces.

Never in my life had I ever experienced anything like that, and never since.

Although I have, and will, write about other things, every couple of years in one way or another I come back to the world of Carnival of Fear and pluck another story from my dream memories.

What is it about the Carnival of Fear universe that is so vital to me I keep going back to it?

It’s my Something Wicked. In the past, I’ve said my book was an homage to Bradbury’s. And it is. Teens, haunted carnival, strange carnies, bad things happen. But it’s more than that.

Because I identified so much with Bill Halloway and James Nightshade, I created characters like them for my stories. Ordinary boys, girls, men, and women caught up in something they don’t understand. Small town people, because where else would a mysterious carnival pop up?

People like me. Like my friends and family.

Bradbury wrote with a simple, everyman style, and all my favorite authors write that way. Do I like them because of him? Probably. Folks like King, Keene, Wilson, Koontz, Hamilton, Collins, Maberry.

Did Bradbury play a part in shaping the way I write? How could he not?

After I found Bradbury and read everything I could by him, I discovered other writers who focused on that small town or country vibe. Manly Wade Wellman. Karl Edward Wagner. People who made any story feel like a cold October night in upstate New York.

Bradbury has written a lot of stuff, but for me opening any of his books always makes me feel like I’m opening the door to Halloween, that it’s the season where anything can happen.

When I wrote Carnival of Fear, I wanted my book to be just like that for a new generation. Not just frightening, but exhilarating. I wanted people to remember what Halloween was like as a kid, as a teen, when they turned those pages. I wanted them to smell the popcorn and cotton candy, taste the candied apples and French fries and hot dogs.

Remember what it was like to pal around with friends or hold hands with someone special and breathe the crisp October air.

I wanted them to feel the way I did when I read Something Wicked This Way Comes for the first time.

And that’s my Halloween story for you.

Happy Halloween!

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A life-long resident of New York’s haunted Hudson Valley, JG Faherty has been a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award (The Cure, Ghosts in Coronado Bay) and ITW Thriller Award (The Burning Time), and he is the author of 7 novels, 10 novellas, and more than 75 short stories. His next novel, Hellrider, comes out from Flame Tree Press in August of 2019. He grew up enthralled with the horror movies and books of the 60s, 75, 70s, and 80s. Which explains a lot.

Carnival of Fear

The carnival is in town… What was supposed to be an evening of fun and laughter for JD Cole and the other students of Whitebridge High turns into a never-ending night of terror. Trapped inside the Castle of Horrors by the demonic Proprietor, good friends and bitter rivals must band together to make it through the maze of torturous attractions, where fictional monsters come to life, eager to feast on human flesh. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, and aliens lurk around every corner as JD and his friends struggle from one room to the next, fighting for their sanity, fighting to survive, fighting to escape … The Carnival of Fear.

The Cure

She was born with the power to cure. Now she’s developed the power to kill. Leah DeGarmo has the power to cure with just a touch. But with her gift comes a dark side: Whatever she takes in she has to pass on, or suffer it herself. 

Now a sadistic criminal has discovered what she can do and he’ll stop at nothing to control her. He makes a mistake, though, when he kills the man she loves, triggering a rage inside her that releases a new power she didn’t know she had: the ability to kill. 

Transformed into a demon of retribution, Leah resurrects her lover and embarks on a mission to destroy her enemies. The only question is, does she control her power or does it control her?

Houses of the Unholy

In this new collection of stories, genre favorite JG Faherty takes you on a tour of unholy houses, where you’ll find: 

– A man struggling to discover why all the people in his life are disappearing when he falls asleep. 
– An accident in a mountain pass that turns into a deadly encounter with a mythical beast. 
– A man who learns that the only thing worse than being a passenger on the train to Hell is being the engineer. 
– A town where the dead coming back to life isn’t the worst thing that can happen. 
– A young couple who uncover a terrible secret in the town that has ostracized them for their sins. 
– A science experiment gone wrong that could spell the end of mankind. 

The collection also includes “The Lazarus Effect,” a chilling post-apocalyptic story where survivors face off against godless undead, and a brand new novella-length sequel, “December Soul.”

Hellrider

After being burned alive by a gang, the Hell Riders, he used to belong to, Eddie Ryder returns as a heavy-metal spouting ghost with a temper that’s worse now than when he was alive. At first he is nothing more than a floating presence, depressed he has to spend eternity watching his teenage brother, Carson, and ailing mother struggle without him. Then he develops powers. And he can control electricity. He can conjure the ghostly doppelganger of his motorcycle, Diablo, and fly across the sky, but he can’t escape the boundaries of his hometown, Hell Creek. 

Eddie decides to exact his revenge on the bikers who killed him. Before he can do more than scare some of the bikers, however, he discovers something even better: he can posses people. He uses this ability to get the gang members to attack each other, and to deliver a message to the current leader, Hank Bowman: Eddie’s Coming. 

Spouting fire and lightning from his fingers and screaming heavy metal lyrics as he rides the sky above the town of Hell Creek, he brings destruction down on all those who wronged him, his power growing with every death. Only Eddie’s younger brother, Carson, and the police chief’s daughter, Ellie, understand what’s really happening, and now they have to stop him before he destroys the whole town.

Halloween Extravaganza: Charles Gramlich: Nightmare Season

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Charles Gramlich has stopped by to talk to us about nightmares. Very interesting. Enjoy.

I’ve been blessed with nightmares for most of my life. In one, I watched a sorceress rip another woman’s eyes out with magic. Then she turned on me. I began to come apart. My lower jaw tore off; it hit the ground and burst into dust. As my head exploded I realized I was dead.

That wasn’t the first time I’ve died in dreams. I once fought my doppelganger, switching from head to head throughout the bout, and when I stood over my own body with a knife in its chest I wasn’t sure which survived—the good me or the bad one. I’m still not sure. Are you?

Where do such dreams come from? As a kid, Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me watch scary shows like Twilight Zone or Outer Limits but they didn’t monitor my reading. I read bible stories, history, animal tales, football and racing stories, science fiction and fantasy. That’s probably where the imagery in my dreams first originated. I’ve since added scary shows to my experience. Recently, I published a collection called Out of Dreams: Nightmares, which contains retellings of dreams I’ve had in story form.

In dreams, I’ve been villains and victims. I’ve been children, and adults, and monsters. I’ve been the devil. Once I was a serial killer writing a novel on the walls of my house in the blood of the murdered. I wouldn’t want to be most of these things in real life, but dreams let you live many lives. They also provide fodder for creative work, either in writing or other arts. Below, I touch on some dream related phenomena that can also feed one’s creativity.

In Lucid Dreaming you become aware of the dream. Sometimes you’re just along for the ride and sometimes you can manipulate the dream. When I can, I fly. Talk about “a dream come true.” The other night I chased dragonflies through the pines. A little before that I was “watching TV” when I realized I was dreaming. Since I couldn’t fly inside the house, I pushed myself off the couch into the air and floated around the room.

Being well rested and avoiding caffeine and medications are important to the production of lucid dreams. You also need to recognize a dream. Most people experience clues that indicate dreaming. For me, light switches failing to work is often a clue. This also triggers a feeling that something bad is about to happen. But only while dreaming. When I’m awake, I just know the electricity is off.

I have a test to tell if I’m dreaming. Pinching myself doesn’t work for me but jumping does. In real life, I can’t jump very high. So, if I jump and touch the ceiling, or a low hanging branch, or if I seem to hang in the air, I know it’s a dream. And the fun begins.

Sleep Paralysis can be extremely disconcerting. Here, you wake up from the dream state but remain paralyzed. You’re normally paralyzed from the neck down during dreams to keep you from acting out and hurting yourself, but it’s supposed to end as dreaming ends. When it doesn’t, you lie there wide awake but unable to move or call out. Fortunately, my sleep paralysis lasts only a few seconds. Some attacks can last for half an hour or more.

A variant type of sleep paralysis can be much more terrifying, though. You wake up and believe yourself to be “fully” awake, but you remain paralyzed and certain dream-like phenomena continue occurring. There’s often an intense feeling of a malevolent presence in the room. It may be invisible or appear only as a shadow.

My most terrifying event of this nature occurred when I awoke and saw my wife lying next to me completely covered with the sheet. I knew something was wrong. The sheet clung to the body beneath it, which was far more skeletal than my wife. As I was about to speak, the figure turned its head toward me beneath the sheet. The linen cloth clung tightly across deep-socketed eyes. The mouth was open and the sheet fluttered as the being breathed. I thought I screamed, but otherwise I couldn’t move. The figure under the sheet shifted toward me in a slow scootch. I felt clearly that it was a ghost or a demon.

I tried to throw up my arm to block the thing and a cold hand underneath the sheet grabbed my wrist in a violent grasp. Again, I screamed, but then awareness came. This had to be sleep paralysis, which I’d had before, although never so frightfully. Struggling against sleep paralysis is counterproductive. The more you try to break free, the tighter it grips. The best solution is to relax. I did, and the hand let go and the figure deflated and disappeared. I didn’t need to write a story to remember this experience.

Sleep paralysis is a possible explanation for a variety of ghost and demonic experiences, as well as some out-of-body and alien abduction scenarios. I believe it. If I’d had that encounter a century ago, or with no knowledge of sleep paralysis, I almost certainly would have blamed the supernatural.

The term “narcolepsy” means sleep attack. The individual occasionally falls asleep without warning during normal daytime activities such as eating or talking with friends. This uncontrollable sleep is usually REM related and the person has a dream, though it lasts only a few moments.

Two symptoms of narcolepsy are hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. These are brief, vivid, dream-like experiences that occur while one is falling asleep (gogic) or waking up (pompic). My sheet/ghost experience might be described as a hypnopompic experience. Another memorable one that I had was of a train blasting its whistle while it rolled through one window of my bedroom and out the other.

Many people enjoy a good scare during Halloween season. For me, it can be as simple as going to sleep. Have a great Halloween, and… pleasant dreams!

Charles Gramlich writes from the piney woods of south Louisiana. He has authored the Talera fantasy series and the SF novel Under the Ember Star. His stories have been collected in Bitter Steel, Midnight in Rosary, and In the Language of Scorpions. He also writes westerns as Tyler Boone. His most recent releases, under his own name, are Farhaven & Other Stories, a collection of kid’s tales, and Out of Dreams: Nightmares, which are retellings of some of his most memorable nightmares in story form. Charles’s books are available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or through the author.

I’ve been blessed my entire life with nightmares. I love them. My wife has strict instructions ‘not’ to wake me up if she thinks I’m having a bad dream, no matter how terrified I might seem. From the first, many of my dreams had strong “story telling” elements to them. Some made for complete tales with beginnings, middles, and ends. All I had to do to make them into stories was write them down the way they’d occurred. This collection features retellings of some of my more darkly fantastic dreams. Most are nightmarish, but not all. Some are just strange. Many of these tales have been published elsewhere but have never appeared together before. Each has brought me joy, even if they brought me terror first! I hope you’ll like them.