It’s always been a concern of mine that as a site we weren’t topical enough in terms of our timing; in short seasonal. So I gathered the BookSpot Central clique to offer our readers some Halloween recommendations. Now, as we are people, of course a simple request turns into a committee situation which at it’s heart is Halloween - a gathering of friends, not a night to roam solo (unless you’re a weirdo - and probably on the run at this point) and if you’re like me you may need some entertainment recommendations to both hold you over and keep your mind off the guilt attacking you in waves via doorbell rings over as you (much like in many SF films) shut down all power and act like you’re not home.

At first I was going to put some limitations on this and due to that you will see one offering from most who participated, but I felt to kick off the era of BookSpot Central timeliness, I would unleash Maria from Bear Mountain. She’s one of those good neighbors, the one who gives multiple goodies, not at all like the Bodhisattva who does indeed buy candy specifically for Halloween, but uses them as rations for the night his home is in stealth mode. I hope everybody enjoys!

Maria -

Ammie Come Home by Barbara Michaels:

It begins as a lark — a harmless diversion initiated by Washington, D.C., hostess Ruth Bennett as a means of entertaining her visiting niece, Sara. But the séance conducted in Ruth’s elegant Georgetown home calls something back; something unwelcome … and palpably evil. Suddenly Sara is speaking in a voice not her own, transformed into a miserable, whimpering creature so unlike her normal, sensible self. No tricks or talismans will dispel the malevolence that now plagues the inhabitants of this haunted place — until a dark history of treachery, lust, and violence is exposed. But the cost might well be the sanity and the lives of the living.

Witch by Barbara Michaels:

For Ellen March, the secluded old house nestled in the pine woods is more than the dream home she’s long been searching for. It’s an escape, a chance to start over, to forget the pain of her failed marriage and enjoy the restful pace of small-town living. Here, too, is a golden opportunity to get to know Norman McKay, her handsome and worldly new neighbor. But after dark in Ellen’s “perfect” house, strange visions invade her restless mind: silent strangers moving through the twilight shadows, the ghostly figure of a woman and a spectral white cat. Ellen came here hoping to bury the past, but something terrifying has taken its place. Her safe haven has become her prison . . . and there is no escape.

House of Many Shadows: by Barbara Michaels

Meg Rittenhouse fears she is losing her mind. The doctors tell her the strange and disturbing hallucinations she’s been experiencing ever since her accident are all in her head, and that, with a little rest, the haunting visions will vanish. But accepting an invitation to stay with her cousin in the country may be the worst decision Meg has ever made. Here, in a remote old house miles from anywhere, the terrible sights and sounds have gotten even worse. Suddenly eerie black shapes dance in the shadows—mocking Meg, haunting her . . . threatening her. And the presence of kind, considerate Andy Brenner, the caretaker, both reassures her and terrifies her—because Andy also sees these dark specters . . .

The Crying Child by Barbara Michaels:

Joanne McMullen’s fears for her sister’s sanity have brought her to remote King’s Island, Maine. Mary’s grief over the loss of her child is threatening to send her over the edge—and her insistence that she has heard an eerie, childlike wailing in the woods fuels Joanne’s anxiety. And now Mary’s taken to disappearing at midnight in search of the source of the heartrending moans. But it’s not just her sister’s encroaching madness that is chilling Joanne’s blood—it’s her own. Because suddenly, impossibly, she also hears the crying child.

Most of Barbara Michael’s work has a disturbing, haunting element to it. These are all good reads (as is her other work and the novels she writes as Elizabeth Peters). These are definitely novels to be read by a fireplace while dusk looks over your shoulder.

Brian -

Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge manages to take just about every image and item associated with Halloween and bring it down to its essences and then combine them all into what is, in many ways, the ultimate book about the holiday. Everything from cornfields and candy to jack-o-lanterns is in Dark Harvest and not only do these things appear but they also have a more sinister meaning in their place in the holiday then what you might expect. It will definitely throw the trappings of the holiday under a new light.

As always each year around the holiday I try to read some horror titles. Books that I’ve picked up over the course of the year get bumped to the top of the TBR pile and I grab a couple blind off of the shelf too.

Virgin Books in the U.S. has just recently started a new line of horror books. The first title in it is The Unblemished by Conrad Williams and I just finished it today. I’m currently writing a review for it but this HAS to be one of the scariest damn books that I’ve read in a long time, if not ever. Brutal, intense and again, scary.

I also just started reading The Wolfman by Nicholas Pekearo and I also picked up the second title (I think) in the Virgin horror line, Banquet for the Damned by Adam LG Nevill that looks very promising.

Trinalor -

In keeping with the traditions of dressing up in scary costumes and creating mischief, my recommended reading for Halloween is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

A little boy dressed up in his wolf costume wreaks havoc throughout the house. For his naughtiness, he is sent to his room without dinner. But his adventures have only just begun as he travels to a land inhabited by big monsters with big teeth and big claws.

Although the scariest part of this children’s classic is when the little boy talks back to his mom, the charming story and wonderful illustrations make it a fun read for all ages.

Medora -

I love Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, a short story collection by a variety of authors. Some are fantasy, as the title claims, but others are actually horror, and you have to read to find out which ones they are. The Joyce Carol Oates contribution, Six Hypotheses, literally gave me nightmares. I photocopied it out of the library volume, but I have it hidden in a stack of articles for school because it makes me nervous to look at it.

Steven Mosby -

My favourite scary story is an urban legend. There are a few different variations on it, but my favourite is this one.

A girl’s parents have gone away for the night and left her in the house by herself, with only the family dog for company. That evening, she checks all the doors and windows are locked, then goes to sleep in her parents’ room with the dog at the side of the bed. Some time in the night, she wakes up and hears the shower dripping in the en-suite. Frightened, she puts her hand out and strokes the dog’s head in the dark, and it licks her hand reassuringly. She goes back to sleep. The next morning, she wakes up, stretches, and heads into the bathroom, where she finds the real source of the dripping. The dog’s corpse is hanging in the shower, blood tapping down.

I like the story to end there, but often it continues a little. The girl finds a note by the side of the bed that says ‘humans can lick too’, which gives the story its common title. And sometimes she runs from the bedroom in shock and the intruder leaps out of a room to one side…

Pretending that last event doesn’t happen, the tale is a ‘lucky escape’ story, an element it shares with a number of other urban legends. The vet who frantically calls a woman and tells her to get out now, because the object her dog was choking on is a man’s finger, and he might still be in the house with her. Or the student who creeps into her shared room late at night, then wakes to find her room-mate butchered and - written in blood on the wall - the message ‘aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?’.

They’re unbelievable stories, of course. (Unlike the one about the couple who repeatedly complain about the stench in their hotel room, then eventually find a dead body hidden underneath - that’s based on truth). And perhaps it’s strange I find the ‘humans can lick too’ story so creepy, because, in its basic form, the danger is all in the story’s past; the horror stems from looking back and re-evaluating events rather than facing some terrible threat in the present. There’s the strange behaviour of the psycho - allowing himself to be stroked; licking the girl’s hand - but what makes it doubly frightening is the fact that it’s already happened and she’s only just realising. (And of course, we’re putting it together at the same time). Maybe it’s also partly down to a sense of powerlessness: the notion that, if we don’t recognise a danger, how can we protect ourselves from it?

And I find that far more scary than the idea of a monster attacking the hero, which very quickly descends into an action scene. You see the effect deployed in more subtle horror movies from time to time (the recent ’so … who was that in bed with me then?’ scene in The Orphanage springs to mind), but perhaps in fiction it’s more suited to short stories than novels, which, arguably, is where the horror genre is most at home. I remember being frightened the first time I read H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness. The chill didn’t come from all the winged aliens, but from the realisation, at the end, of who the narrator had actually been speaking to all along. And also, though billed as non-fiction, some of the vignettes in Whitley Strieber’s Communion set my hair on end. Beyond the ‘uncanny valley’ effect of strange faces peering round doorframes - and, of course, the anal probes - the most disturbing part for me was a simple re-evaluation, as Strieber worked back through various strange events in his past and began to see them in a new light. Specifically, a dream he had - a nightmare - about being in his car, screaming, trying to get it to start, while a demon pressed its face to the side window. As you begin to think about what might have been really going on there (if ‘really’ is the right word), it’s unnerving in a similar way to the licking story: a shock in the present casting previously innocent events in a new, more sinister light.

For me, the scariest horror stories work in that way. They’re like looking down and seeing a huge spider resting on your leg. The chill isn’t just in realising something’s there and you’re unsafe. It’s understanding that it’s been there for a while, and that you were never safe and you just didn’t realise.

_{Steven Mosby is the author of The Third Person, The Cutting Crew, The 50/50 Killer and Cry For Help}.

Damon -

The Halloween book that I am enjoying this season is Goodnight Goon (Halloween books are sometimes tough for the kids because you want them to be interesting if not outright scary. I do not need a book that is going to make my kids come crying in the middle of the dark or give them bad dreams. Goodnight Goon gets the whole formula correct. Michael Rex gives us illustrations that are spooky, not scary or gruesome which is perfect for the kids to look at before they go to bed. Goodnight Goon is a parody on the classic Goodnight Moon that I am sure most of us have either read as children or read to our own kids. This also means that the children are familiar with the actual story, which seems to make the children more at home with it as well. My children have read it many times already since first getting it last month. This should become a Halloween classic for the little ones.

Jay -

When you’re the trail you either get left out because everything is already taken or you are about to get the rock and going to posterize somebody. Trinalor picked Where the Wild Things Are which for me is probably Speculative Fiction ground zero for me - should be and probably is on every kid’s shelf.

This year Halloween falls on a weekend…

Honestly, the first thing I think of when considering Halloween is a song, My Mind Playin Tricks on Me by the Geto Boys. It was that song that much like Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff’s Summer Time got constant seasonal rotation every year. The 90’s were an odd time where I lived, I can’t say anybody was straight street, but everybody was, and it created this wild west like atmosphere in the town I lived in that in a way felt only right in Halloween but perpetuated the masquerade for the whole year . This song is good times that reminds me of a time that shifts from being the realest time of my life and looking back, the most surreal. I lived in a town full of characters - and this song was its theme.

I live by the sword
I take my boys everywhere I go
Because I’m paranoid
I keep looking over my shoulder and peeping around corners
My mind is playing tricks on me

I’m a Simpsons fan. Really. I am. In a way that can apply when I tell you I may be the biggest fan on the planet who has only watched a dozen-and-a-half episodes in the last decade. I was there when Fox was kind of this upstart that was half-joke being headlined by Homer, Al Bundy, Tom Hanson, and a tune “Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you”. The thing was. . . People were watching and when they got the NFL it only made that official. I was in the generation where kids were getting d-hall in middle school for flexing the “I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you” T-shirt. Among those rare actually viewings - otherwise watched due to appearances of people like Alan Moore - are all the Halloween episodes. It’s a bit like animated 30’s Weird Tales (though they are actually parodying a lot of material from bit later - like from EC Comics and Rod Serling Twilight Zone) and it’s just become a bit of an institution for me and one of those people who usually looks very strangely at people who have those televisions seasonal television rituals (like watching a parade; people, you are watching other people take an official and organized walk - umm. . . what‘s wrong with you - you‘re scaring me!?). These things are fun a bit disturbing and isn’t down with Kang and Kodos?

I don’t know about anybody else, but if not at the House of Mystery you’ll find me at the Tree House of Horror.

From a reading standpoint I kind of avoided picking just a recent work that could be called the most outstanding horror work I can think of - something like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves or a collection by Thomas Ligotti and wanted to for something a it more directly Halloween orientated and came up with a novel and a bit of sequential goodness. First is Scary Godmother by Jill Thompson. Many people may know Thompson from her arc in Gaiman’s Sandman or have seen Scary Godmother in other media but the comics/books are very nice and feature Thompson’s beautiful art - she’s a top shelf artist and for me anytime she does anything it’s a bit of an event (like Vess in that way). These books are basically based on Halloween itself (and it’s creatures) and are treats themselves - and good family fun! My next pick is by one of fiction’s masters, Ray Bradbury. Much of Bradbury’s work is based on childhood whimsy, and his Halloween Tree is in that mode. A group of friends go out trick-or-treating only to find out they are going on a missions to save a friends life and world/cultural/time traveling tour of Halloween? As usual Bradbury makes you smile and regret; Nostalgic scaring mixed with delightful memories of youth? If there ever was a writer born to write a Halloween story, it’s Bradbury.

That’s it folks! I want to thank the BookSpot Central contributors and special guest, author Steve Mosby (thanks Brian!), for pitching in!

To our readers - be on the lookout for our next Holiday feature where we will share our favorite dinner table scenes (no Red Wedding allowed)!

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Topics: Adam L.G. Nevill, Banquet for the Damned, Barbara Michaels, Conrad Williams, Dark Harvest, Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, Geto Boys, Halloween, Jill Thompson, Maurice Sendak, Nicholas Pekearo, Norman Partridge, Ray Bradbury, Scary Godmother, The Halloween Tree, The Simpsons, The Unblemished, The Wolfman, Tree House of Horror, Where the Wild Things Are