Horror

The Six Weeks of Halloween may appear to be a movie watching exercise, but all is not what it appears: the Halloween season is filled with other nominally spooky activities like hayrides, haunted houses (and haunted dining establishments and haunted mini-golf and haunted bonfires/cookouts, you get the picture), pumpkin mutilation carving ceremonies, and of course, lots of Halloween Reading. This year’s selections have a mix of old and new, classic and… not so classic (and everything inbetween). A few new-to-me authors, a couple of folks only discovered the last few years, and some legendary names that I wanted to brush up on… I think I found a pretty good balance, so let’s take a closer look:

Halloween Reading Roundup 2024

Dracula, by Bram Stoker – One of those foundational novels that everyone should read, if only because so much of the genre can be traced back to here. Stoker didn’t invent the concept of the vampire and this wasn’t the first novel to tackle the subject, but he established and codified so much of what we know that nearly everything that followed is dependent, in some way, on this novel. We’ve already covered a few of the filmic adaptations this year, and it’s always interesting to read the source material, especially when it’s so divergent from its adaptations.

This is an epistolary novel, meaning that the story is told entirely through diary entries, letters, and newspaper articles. This is the sort of thing that doesn’t translate well to screen adaptations, though the story itself isn’t all that complicated. Still, reading the story in its original form does help smooth over some of the issues you might have with the various adaptations. The very form of the novel emphasizes the perspective of various characters, including their lack of knowledge. This leaves certain gaps in the overall story that feel natural in the context of the novel, but can be difficult to adapt. Perhaps as a result of its unusual format, it holds up surprisingly well. It’s also worth noting that you get more information about various side characters, several of whom are more prominent in the novel than the various adaptations.

Dracula himself is only described by other characters, so you don’t get anything from his perspective. In previous posts, I’ve mentioned that Dracula is a character that tends to suffer from Flanderization, and it’s interesting that his eponymous novel actually has less background and detail than many of the adaptations, which usually add a tragic backstory, more personality, and even romance (or horniness) than is present in the original novel. He is far more monstrous here than we are accustomed to from the movies, though some get it reasonably correct I guess.

I have the dead tree edition and referenced that, but I mostly just listened to the Audible Edition, which is an excellent production featuring different voice actors for each character, including some big names like Alan Cumming and Tim Curry. Recommended if you’re looking for a new way to experience the novel (or if you’ve never read it). It’s also free if you have an Audible subscription (there are several other editions available on Audible, but I have not sampled those).

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The Portable Edgar Allan Poe – I was already familiar with some of Poe’s more famous stories and poems (i.e. The Raven, The Tell Tale Heart, etc…), but I wanted to have Poe fresh in my mind before watching Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher Netflix series, so I picked up the Penguin Classics collection (which is not comprehensive, but good enough for my purposes).

In terms of his fiction, the collection splits the stories up into various themes, like Predicaments, Bereavements, Antagonisms, Mysteries, and Grotesqueries. If you’ve read any Poe, you know he has a dense, baroque style that can be impressively moody, but he is also able to anchor many of these stories with good storytelling and plotting. The stories in the Bereavements and Grotesqueries (and some, but not all of the Predicaments) sections are less effective in terms of plot, but no less potent (even if those stories are usually more difficult reads). The Mysteries often hinge on things that will be immediately obvious to modern readers, but were true innovations in their time (as such, your mileage may vary, especially if you’re not in the mood or right frame of mind).

Indeed, many of these stories have permeated throughout culture such that you can probably see various twists and turns coming even if you haven’t read the story before, but Poe’s evocative style helps keep it fresh. It’s still great to read “The Black Cat”, even when you know where it’s going to end up because you’ve seen countless imitations throughout the years. There are still some stories that aren’t very well known, but which are clear precursors to more modern stories (take “William Wilson”, a clear precursor to Fight Club…)

Look, you probably don’t need me to tell you that Edgar Allan Poe is worth reading, but even though I’d read some of his stuff before, I’m really glad I took the time to do a more thorough exploration of his work.

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The Dracula Tape, by Fred Saberhagen – Remember when I said that the original Dracula doesn’t feature that much information about its titular character? Well, this is a novel that retells the original story entirely from Dracula’s perspective. It’s an interesting idea, but one that strikes me as a bit too slight to support an entire novel. It’s the sort of revisionist work you see all over the internet these days, but I guess this approach was considered more valid in 1975.

Saberhagen attempts to paint a more sympathetic portrait of the famous monster here, to middling success. I mean, he’s still clearly a murderer and not everything can be explained away so easily, but he does point to the most glaring issue with the original novel. Blood transfusions were incredibly risky at the time of the novel and the concept of Blood Types wouldn’t be discovered for a few years. It’s something that’s pretty easy to gloss over when reading the original novel, but it’s funny how Saberhagen uses it to justify Dracula’s actions here. He was simply trying to protect Lucy from that idiot Van Helsing, who was killing her with unsanitary blood transfusions from multiple different people (who probably had incompatible blood).

It’s a fun idea, but has difficulty sustaining the approach for the whole story, which can get a bit tedious after a while. On the other hand, I wonder if that’s just because I had just read the original novel? It might play a bit better if you haven’t done that…

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The Holmes-Dracula File, by Fred Saberhagen – I guess the aforementioned Dracula Tape was successful enough to warrant this sequel, where Saberhagen attempts a crossover between the two most popular (or, at least, frequently portrayed) characters in all of fiction: Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. While “versus” stories like this don’t exactly have the greatest reputation, there’s plenty of potential here, and it’s a more complete story than The Dracula Tape.

That being said, Saberhagen is no Arthur Conan Doyle, and the mystery at the heart of this story isn’t the greatest. Even the interactions between Holmes and Dracula, which are effective enough in themselves, are taken too far, as Saberhagen develops an elaborate backstory and family relationship between the Holmes clan and Dracula. I won’t spoil it, but it’s more than a little silly. It’s all in good fun though. It’s no classic, but a worthwhile, if lightweight, Halloween season read.

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The Painter, the Creature, and the Father of Lies: 30 Years of Non-fiction Writings, by Clive Barker – I probably should have looked into this book further before buying it, because it’s not what I was expecting. I was hoping for something like Stephen King’s Danse Macabre or On Writing, but it turns out that this book is simply a collection of previously written introductions to Barker’s novels and other stories. Some of these are pretty good (there’s a good overview of Faust stories, for instance), but many (particularly the introductions to the various comic book projects he worked on) are disjointed and repetitive. It’s not completely without value, but I would not recommend seeking this out.

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Murder Road, by Simone St. James – A couple on their honeymoon get lost and find themselves in the middle of an infamous local legend involving a haunted roadway, hitchhikers, and unsolved murders. This novel starts out strong, with relatable characters thrust into a dangerous situation where they don’t know what’s going on, can’t trust the police, and find themselves in the middle of a mysterious local legend.

After that initial burst of excitement, things bog down a bit as the couple begins to investigate the mystery. The small town atmosphere is well crafted, and some of the townfolk are memorable, if a bit cliched (i.e. the ornery landlady who has a connection to the mystery, the gossipy sisters that know all the town’s dirty secrets, etc…), but our intrepid heroes do act a bit dumb from time to time. The supernatural stuff is minimized, and thus this isn’t all that scary, but it does all resolve in a satisfactory way. There is a big twist that I must admit that I didn’t see coming (in part because I was a bit checked out by that point), and the ending, while exposition heavy, is strong. Ultimately, it’s a fine little thriller, but not exactly a new classic or anything.

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Phiction: Tales from the World of Phantasm, by Don Coscarelli – Longtime readers know that I’m a big fan of the movie Phantasm, so I jumped on this short story collection by the writer/director of the movies. Each story is told from the perspective of one of the side characters in the movies, sometimes including folks with just a few seconds of screentime.

The story involving Reggie encountering something spooky during his tour in Vietnam is clearly the best of the bunch, with some solid action and a genuinely creepy encounter at its core. One story is about the Morningside Cemetery caretaker (the one who gets, er, sphered in the first movie) and fleshes out his backstory in a surprising way. Another story features Tim, the resourceful little lad from Phantasm III, and has an interesting post-apocalyptic feel to it (that is honestly better than the movie he’s featured in). Tobe was a character who showed up in one scene of the first movie as one of Jody’s friends attending a funeral, and this story has him encountering creepy stuff in town that parallels the events of the movie (one of the less effective stories of the bunch, but not bad or anything). The nunchuk-wielding Rocky gets a story that leads into the events of Phantasm III (another underwhelming story, but still probably more interesting than the movie). Finally, another post-apocalyptic story told from the perspective of Chunk from Phantasm: Ravager. I got a distinct Stephen King vibe (particularly The Stand) from this story, and I love the way Coscarelli forms a found family around Chunk.

The collection starts and ends on a strong note, and it’s obviously recommended for fans of the Phantasm films, who will get a real kick out of these stories. I think Coscarelli has some chops as a fiction writer too, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more fiction from him…

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Crypt of the Moon Spider, by Nathan Ballingrud – Short novella (novelette?) that is apparently first in a trilogy, this one almost defies description. It speaks to Ballingrud’s facility with worldbuilding that he’s able to set this story on the moon with a whole history of giant spiders whose silk is used in medical procedures and, yeah, I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around this. It’s not Ballingrud’s best (“The Butcher’s Table” is my favorite for sure), but I’m interested enough to read more. I normally would have waited for the rest of the trilogy before starting this, but Ballingrud lives in Asheville, NC, which is still suffering the effects of Hurricane Helene, so I figured I’d throw some support his way.

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My Soul to Keep, by Tananarive Due – Investigative journalist Jessica has married David, who is seemingly the perfect husband. But when mysterious deaths start to crop up around them, David reveals that he’s actually a 400 year old immortal being, and others from his sect will try to keep this secret at all costs.

There’s some fascinating stuff explored here about the practical realities of what it’s like to be an immortal being. It’s hardly the first book or story to tackle the subject, but it’s a good portrayal of the issues involved. Unfortunately, a good deal of this comes at the price of pacing and storytelling. Due is generally able to craft good, page turning sequences, but her extensive use of flashbacks just wreaks havoc with the pacing, leading to a disjointed reading experience. The flashbacks do inform the story and flesh out character and again, as individual sequences, they’re well executed. The flashbacks having to do with slavery, in particular, are important to the rest of the story and provide an effective illustration of the effect that could have on an immortal being (which is a good metaphorical way of showing how slavery in the past still impacts us today). But it all felt a bit too episodic for me (this is clearly a “me” problem; it’s just an approach I don’t love for storytelling).

Then there’s the fact that David is a bit of an arse. I mean, yes, that’s the point, but for an immortal guy who’s supposed to be very smart, why does he do so many stupid things? Why does he engage in impulsive murders, like Jessica’s best friend and coworker? I mean besides the petty, selfish ones that are obvious. Yes, he’s a flawed human who has become immortal and that leads to many complications, but still. Jessica, as a character, is a little better, but where this story ends up is kinda wild (and almost breathtakingly stupid given the setup – it’s actually kinda weird that none of the other immortals ever broke ranks and did what Jessica is doing at the end of the novel, but despite all the flashbacks, we don’t really get to know the immortals that well).

I’m clearly the outlier on this, as this is a popular book. It’s thematically complex and interesting, but there are several choices that I just couldn’t go with, particularly in the ending (both from a plotting and character standpoint). There are sequels, but I probably won’t be seeking them out.

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Songs of a Dead Dreamer, by Thomas Ligotti – I’m only about 2/3 of the way through this collection of short stories, and the Penguin edition also includes another of Logotti’s short story collections (Grimscribe) in the same volume (both were basically out of print and impossible to find up until Penguin rescued them not quite a decade ago). All of which is to say, I will probably finish up Songs of a Dead Dreamer next week, and won’t tackle Grimscribe until some later time.

As for the stories themselves, they’re good. Maybe even great. But they are a bit… much. Ligotti may be the bleakest, most pessimistic writer I’ve ever read, but he’s certainly got a knack for… something. So I can’t exactly call these stories enjoyable, but they are strange and beautiful and evocative and they get under your skin in an odd way. My biggest complaints have more to do with nuts and bolts plotting and storytelling, but even that isn’t for all the stories. It’s one of those things that probably shouldn’t work for me as well as it does – other stories that engage in this sort of thing often don’t work. Something about Ligotti’s writing just works well, even if I can’t quite figure out why.

It’s certainly very dark, but there is sometimes a faint spark of black humor underlying some of the stories. Or maybe that’s just me. For instance, I couldn’t stop visualizing the narrator of this story called “The Chymist” (first in The Nyctalops Trilogy) as a Christopher Walken “The Continental” sketch. Obviously, the story isn’t as jokey or funny, but there’s a real similarity that I found amusing. These stories are not for everyone, and frankly, I’m not entirely sure they’re my thing either, but somehow I think they work and I’m glad I made the effort to seek them out.

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Another successful Six Weeks of Halloween in the books (literally!) At 9.5 books, it seems I’ve surpassed the pandemic fueled record I set in 2020, though I think several of these are much shorter books, and I will admit to starting a little early (plus, listening to audiobooks always helps).

From all appearances, the Six Weeks of Halloween is primarily a movie watching exercise, but all is not what it appears: the Halloween season is filled with other nominally spooky activities like hayrides, haunted houses (and haunted dining establishments and haunted mini-golf and haunted bonfires/cookouts, you get the picture), pumpkin mutilation carving ceremonies, and of course, lots of Halloween Reading. The past few years have led to several new discoveries on the horror writer front, but I also like to dip my toes into some more obvious choices, so let’s see how this year’s selections fared:

Halloween Reading Roundup 2023

Wounds, by Nathan Ballingrud (aka The Atlas of Hell) – A collection of six stories ranging from short to novella length, it’s named after a (not very well regarded) movie adaptation of one of the novellas, but the original title of The Atlas of Hell is a much more fitting descriptor of the collection. (Now that the movie has come and gone, future editions of this will revert back to The Atlas of Hell as title and man, even the artwork is much better…)

All of the stories touch on Ballingrud’s peculiar conception of hell as a physical location, some more than others, and “The Atlas of Hell” is also the name of the first story, a horror/crime hybrid that works well as an introduction to this vision of hell. “The Diabolist” veers in a completely different direction, taking a mournful first person perspective that speaks to the reader in an odd way. It’s a stylish approach which only serves to make the more traditional horror elements more effective. “Skullpocket” goes even further afield, telling the story of how a particular town is coexisting with literal ghouls with an almost YA tone to it (my guess is that this would be the most divisive of the stories). “The Maw” returns to more conventional territory, though as the characters start to explore Hell’s intrusion into our reality, the distressing imagery and creepy ideas become more effective. “The Visible Filth” is the aforementioned novella that got adapted into a movie. It’s about a bartender who finds a cellphone in his bar and starts getting increasingly disturbing text messages. It’s a neat setup, and it actually reminded me of a more serious and sober take on something like Unfriended 2: Dark Web. It wasn’t my favorite story and it’s not an obvious choice for an adaptation, but it’s certainly creepy.

“The Butchers Table” is the longest story in the collection, and by far the best. Ballingrud accomplishes in just 100 pages what most writers would spend 500 pages (or more) to do. Several of the other stories in the collection touch upon the mythology that Ballingrud is building, but mostly on the periphery. Here, it emerges fully formed and perfectly calibrated. This story packs in so much: pirates, satanists, cannibal priests, disturbing hellscapes where, like, the characters hang out in a giant corpse of an angel, and absolutely terrifying monsters called Carrion Angels that are hot on our protagonists’ heels. It’s truly impressive how much worldbuilding Ballingrud was able to pack into this story without descending into tedious info dumps and still finding room for the requisite intrigue and betrayals that you’d expect given the type of people involved. I will most certainly be reading more Ballingrud during future Six Weeks of Halloweens…

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X’s For Eyes, by Laird Barron – A genre mashup evoking the like of the Hardy Boys and The Venture Brothers taking on elder gods and touching on cosmic horror, this is a short novella (novelette?) that incorporates plenty of corporate skullduggery, science fiction, and a heaping helping of adventure.

Not quite as impressive or seamless as Ballingrud’s “The Butcher’s Table”, this nonetheless manages to pack a lot of ideas and worldbuilding into a quickly paced thriller. It’s not quite episodic, but there are some jarring and sudden twists and turns that might throw you for a loop, but I wound up quite enjoying this. Recommended!

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Skeleton Crew, by Stephen King – Over the past several years, I’ve been working my way through King’s major short story collections. As with all such endeavors, especially longer ones like this, the stories can be hit or miss. But it’s Stephen King, so most are a hit.

Notable stories include “The Mist”, a novella that’s almost too perfectly constructed (with a great movie adaptation as well). “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” has a great progression and might be my favorite of the collection. “The Jaunt” is the odd science fiction story that King manages to add his usual touch to. “The Raft” is also quite effective for such a simple story (and the best part of Creepshow 2). “Survivor Type” has a delightfully macabre premise that would be a spoiler by itself. “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” is also quite effective and clearly taps into the fears writers (perhaps particularly fears of horror writers) have about where their inspiration comes from.

As usual, some of the stories fall into King’s standard traps. He sometimes writes himself into corners, and some of the stories can get wordy and go on for too long, which brings down the pacing some too. That said, he’s a consumate storyteller, and his skill is on ample display. I’m a little disappointed that I’ve seemingly exhausted his major short story collections, though there are a couple of other collections (of novellas and the like) that I could check out in future marathons. Or maybe I’ll finally bite the bullet and read It.

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The Dead Friends Society, by Paul Gandersman & Peter Hall – Longtime readers of this blog know that I have an inexplicable love of slasher movies, but I’ve had a lot of trouble finding books that can execute the formula well. This is actually a decent example of that sort of thing, though there are some severe flaws. An old house with a tragic past is haunted by a masked killer known as The Fireman, and our heroes must find a way to prevent the tragedies of the past from being revisited upon the present.

There’s the shape of something quite good here, but several aspects of the story kept pulling me out of it. We spend too much time in our main character’s head. She has the makings of a solid final girl, but is hamstrung by uncertainty and constant whining about this or that. Look, there’s plenty to whine about, but it’s boring as hell and makes the story drag. Oddly, if they made a film out of this, I think it could be far more effective, as we wouldn’t get the agonizing inner monologue of the final girl. Her actions are competent and even effective, but it doesn’t feel like it because she’s constantly berating herself. Side characters are marginally better, but they come off as one dimensional and it’s still slow going after the exciting initial set-piece. The pacing bogs way, way down for a long time in the middle before picking up again towards the climax. The motivation and powers of the Fireman are unclear, though that’s more or less par for the course on this type of thing.

I listened to the audiobook for this one, and I didn’t especially like the reader, which I’m trying not to hold against it. Not sure if, for example, the excessive pop culture references are as annoying as they seem because of the way it was performed, but regardless: there’s too much of that sort of thing here. All of that said, there’s some surprising twists that I was definitely not expecting, and there’s an effective mix of slasher and ghost story going on here. I genuinely think a movie adaptation could greatly improve upon this story, if only because we wouldn’t have to deal with the constant whinging.

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Traveling With the Dead, by Barbara Hambly – The sequel to Hambly’s Those Who Hunt the Night, one of my favorite discoveries of last year, comports itself quite well, though it does perhaps go on a bit too long. That first novel was about a former spy being recruited to hunt down a vampire killer that was plaguing London’s vampire community. This time around, Asher notices an infamous spy from a foreign power smuggling a vampire away from London. He immediately pursues, while his wife follows on his heels, enlisting the services of Don Simon Ysidro, the suave London vampire that has become something of a friend to the Asher family. Like the previous book, there’s plenty of tradecraft, intrigue, and vampire worldbuilding. This does bog down in the middle section as all of the chess pieces are being maneuvered for the final showdowns and revelations, and some of that maneuvering is repetitive, but Hambly is a good storyteller, and I appreciate the attention to detail. I don’t think this is as successful as the first book, but I like it well enough.

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Dead Silence, by S.A. Barnes – A deep space salvage crew stumbles upon a long lost ghost ship and sets about securing a big payday. Naturally, they don’t call it a ghost ship for nothing, and our salvage crew starts to find all sorts of suspicious stuff about the long dead passengers, who all seemingly went insane and killed each other. Will our heroes suffer the same fate?

Unfortunately, I don’t think this novel clicked with me. Part of this might be that the main protagonist is absolutely obnoxious and, like the protagonist in The Dead Friends Society, we spend a lot of time getting inside her head. It also speaks to modern horror’s obsession with characters who are severely traumatized and emotionally stunted. I suppose it could be something of an empathy shortcut to give someone a tragic backstory, but it’s getting tired at this point, and the romantic angle feels a bit perfunctory as well. Later, we get the bog standard modern sci-fi explanation of corporate greed as the root of all evil, another trend that’s becoming overused these days.

It’s not a terrible novel, but it’s one of those things where I feel like the blend of horror and science fiction clash a bit. Sometimes that oil and water approach can work, but, um, you need an emulsifier like mustard to really get it going properly. How’s that for a tortured metaphor? Unfortunately, the science fiction elements generally take a back seat to the horror here, and the horror… isn’t very scary or even creepy. This does seem to be a popular book though, so I’m clearly the outlier, though it’s ratings are not astronomical…

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Hidden Pictures, by Jason Rekulak – Fresh out of rehab, Mallory hopes to get her life back in order by taking a job as a nanny to 5-year old Teddy. Things are going well, but soon Teddy’s normally playful artwork starts to depict a grisly murder, and Mallory begins to suspect something supernatural at work. As she sets about to solve the mystery, she discovers more than she bargained for…

This apparently won the Goodreads award for Best Horror novel of 2022, and to be fair, Jason Rekulak does have a knack for turning pages. Unfortunately, the overall story leaves a lot to be desired. It spends too much time on a particular red herring, and once the revelations start flying later in the book, they all feel pretty implausible.

I think I can see why this is successful and I didn’t hate it or anything, but there were just too many little things that kept bugging me… There’s always some tolerance for this sort of thing, but I’ve learned that when I find myself nitpicking things, it’s a sign of some sort of deeper problems in the story. In some ways, the protagonist here is more likable than the ones in Dead Silence or The Dead Friends Society, but there’s a similar sort of focus on a character who’s been traumatized that’s, again, getting kind of tired these days. And while she’s able to make progress on the mystery, she does seem way too willing to jump to the supernatural, and she makes some baffling choices throughout. Again, I can see why this became popular, but I wasn’t quite able to get on its wavelength…

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Another successful Six Weeks of Halloween in the books (literally!) At 7 books, I didn’t really approach the pandemic fueled record of 9 in 2020, but I’m still averaging about a book a week, which is a pretty solid pace…

Yes, we watch a lot of movies during the Six Weeks of Halloween, but that’s not the only way to celebrate the season. I don’t talk much about the hayrides or haunted houses (or haunted… dining establishments?) or pumpkin mutilation carving ceremonies that I partake in during this most hallowed of seasons, but there’s not really a ton to say about those experiences other than the fact that the pandemic has eased a bit, such that social interaction is actually possible these days, which is nice. Anywho, I also like to tailor my reading towards the season though, and while we’re a far cry from the pandemic fueled record of 9 books, we’re still averaging about a book a week (which is generally my target for the whole year). Let’s see what kinds of spooky literature we could scare up this year:

Halloween Reading Roundup 2022

Dark Entries by Robert Aikman – While most of his stories are pretty firmly categorized as horror, Aikman was an ornery sort who seemed to look down on the genre, instead referring to his stories as “strange tales.” Which isn’t entirely wrong, because these stories are unlike anything I’ve read. Even stories that hew to some semblance of conventional tropes end up in a flummoxing place. Like you get to the end of the story and ok, the woman’s house is haunted by the ghost of her father, but… is her father’s ghost also her baby’s father? Aikman, of course, would never answer that question directly and the story itself barely hints in that direction. Maybe I’m the weird one? That’s the sort of feeling an Aikman story gives you. Indeed, it’s difficult to capture what makes these stories work because almost anything I tell you about them will sound deeply unsatisfying. But they’re not, which is a neat trick that I don’t think many writers can pull off. The prose is not baroque or otherwise filled with hooptedoodle; Aikman certainly knows how to let things breath without making a story feel like an empty stylistic exercise. These aren’t propulsive action-packed stories, but neither are they dull literary experiments. Again, difficult to encapsulate.

Dark Entries was his second collection of stories, originally published in 1964, and it seems like a pretty good place to start. Six stories, most of them memorable and disconcerting in their own way. The highlight, to my mind, was “Ringing the Changes”, a sorta horror story about marriage, but as previously mentioned, it’s hard to really capture the essence of the story. It invokes a wonderful atmosphere of creeping dread that grows more and more surreal as the story progresses (while always remaining grounded). At one point, a crowd of townfolk parade through the town chanting:

‘The living and the dead dance together.
Now’s the time. Now’s the place. Now’s the weather.

Page 76, Dark Entries by Robert Aikman

Something about the whole thing just struck me as wonderfully macabre, and it’s almost the perfect slogan for The Six Weeks of Halloween as a concept. You better believe Aikman will be revisited in future 6WH reading (I’ve already secured a copy of The Wine Dark Sea for just that purpose).

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A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson – My favorite discovery of last year’s 6WH reading was Brian Evenson, so I took a flier on another short story collection of his. While I do think that the collection I read last year, Song for the Unraveling of the World, is superior, this one ended pretty strong. Unfortunately, it’s a little more uneven and it starts slow. About halfway through, things pick up, and Evenson’s stripped down, simple, but still evocative prose always keeps things moving. His stories tend to be on the shorter side as well, so even if you find yourself not like a story, it won’t be long until you get to the next one.

Highlights include the story “The Dust” (which is actually one of the longer stories), “The Window”, and the eponymous “A Collapse of Horses.” A couple of the stories contain Aikman-like strangeness, albeit in a more obviously horror story framework, like “Click” or “The Moans.” Altogether a solid, if more uneven, collection (which, to be fair, is generally what collections tend to be like.)

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Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly – Alright, I think we’ve covered the highfalutin literary stuff I’ve read this year, let’s get to something a little more pulpy. And to be clear, I love pulpy, and this is a great example of that sort of thing. A retired British spy named James Asher is recruited to hunt down a vampire killer that’s been plaguing London’s vampire community. His handler is one Don Simon Ysidro, a 400 year old vampire that does not trust humans, but needs a human ally, as Ysidro cannot investigate during the daylight hours (which is when the vampire hunter strikes). Naturally, there is a deep lack of trust between Ysidro and Asher, both worried about the sudden but inevitable betrayal this situation seemingly demands of them.

There’s some nice bits of tradecraft as befits Asher’s history as a spy, and his background in linguistics comes in handy as well. There’s plenty of vampire lore which is slowly doled out as Asher investigates. This dynamic, where someone is trying to investigate an insular group who won’t share information, is normally something that might get on my nerves, but everyone’s motivations are well established and the consequences of sharing too much are also high enough that it all works without feeling like lazy storytelling.

Hambly is an established writer of fantasy and historical fiction, but her style here does appeal to the science fiction nerd’s attention to detail. Lots of speculation and exploration of unintended consequences, historical context, and so on, that I found quite engaging (though I suspect fans of more schlocky horror might be bored by this level of detail). Thematically, she’s exploring the ideas of predation and trust in a careful way (i.e. What are the ethics of hunting humans for survival’s sake?), and just in case you were concerned: the vampires here are basically portrayed as sympathetic but asexual monsters, only touching on attraction and desire as a tool for hunting (i.e. there’s no Twilight or Anne Rice-style fetishization of vampires to be found here).

This is apparently a long-running series, and yes, I will most definitely be revisiting this in future 6WH. Recommended!

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October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween – An anthology featuring stories from a wide variety of authors. The stories themselves are a bit of a mixed bag, which is par for the course when it comes to this sort of thing, but one thing I will say about them: They really take the theme of the anthology seriously. When they say this is a “celebration of Halloween”, they mean it, and nearly every story takes place on Halloween night and prominently features the holiday in some way. As such, it’s kinda perfect reading for the season.

Highlights include Peter Straub’s excellent “Pork Pie Hat” about a jazz musician’s memorable childhood Halloween, “The Black Pumpkin” by Dean Koontz (about a pumpkin monster, I guess?), “The Circle” by Lewis Shiner (about authors reading spooky stories to each other on Halloween night), and several others. I also have to laugh at “Buckets” by F. Paul Wilson, the sort of story that touches a political third rail, but really goes for it.

The stories are interspersed with nonfiction chapters where authors share “My Favorite Halloween Memory” that are probably more miss than hit. Some are decent and interesting, but most come off as pure filler. Similarly, there are a few chapters about Halloween movies and stories that are solid, but not exactly authoritative. Still, all in all, a pretty fantastic little collection, especially for the time of year.

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On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony – Pulpy tale of a man who inadvertently kills Death, and therefore must take over the job himself. He thus travels the world, reaping the souls of those whose balance between good and evil are in question, determining if they belong in heaven or in hell. New to the job, he quickly stumbles into a trap set by the devil himself.

I heard of this book decades ago, but never really pulled the trigger until now. I thought about a normal guy learning to become the personification of Death would be spooky, and to some extent, I suppose there’s a little of that. But ultimately, this becomes a sorta episodic story as each victim of death pleads their case (or doesn’t, as it were). The nuts and bolts of the afterlife are not especially interesting (and I’m once again struck by how many stories people tell about how badly human beings do succession planning – is this really the best way to fill the office of Death?) and there’s a whole love story subplot that is pretty cringey. Ultimately, the book winds up being fine, I guess, but I wasn’t taken with it enough to want to explore the whole series, so this is one thing you won’t see me revisiting in future 6WH marathons…

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The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson – The Keep was one of my favorite horror books when I read it as a teenager, but for some reason, I’ve never revisited that series (dubbed The Adversary) or Wilson in general, so I thought it was time. This book is supposed to be the second in the series, but it’s the first appearance of another character that Wilson has built a series around, one Repairman Jack. He’s basically a mercenary, living off the grid, fixing things for people who cannot find help elsewhere.

As this novel opens, Jack is hired by two people. One, to find a necklace stolen in a mugging, and the other a British heiress who had disappeared. Wanna bet that these two stories connect? Of course they do, and along the way we’re treated to Indian folklore and monsters and magic elixers, and so on. As a character, Jack isn’t quite as impressive as he’s made out to be (it’s one of those things where everyone has a lot of respect for him and talk about how great he is, but when you see his working methods, they don’t seem particularly impressive), but he’s still a solid character and Wilson is a decent enough storyteller such that even when you can see where the story is going or you’ve predicted a twist, it doesn’t really matter that much.

This doesn’t really connect with The Keep at all, at least, not directly, but from what I gather, future books in both series have some sort of connection. This is not a total homerun, but I’m still amenable to revisiting the series at some point…

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So there you have it: Six Weeks of Halloween, six books read. This pretty much wraps up the 6WH for 2022, but as per usual, I’m already looking forward to next year’s festivities…

We watch a lot of movies during the Six Weeks of Halloween, but there’s also a fair amount of spooky season’s readings to cover as well. As with this year’s movie watching, our Halloween reading pace has also slackened somewhat from the pandemic-fueled record set last year. I still ended up getting through eight books, which actually isn’t that far off the record, though a couple were shorter and I was still chiseling away at one even after the big day. I used to interweave some book posts throughout the marathon, but we’ll just have to do this one big roundup at the end of the season. We’ve got a lot to get through, so not all will be particularly in-depth analyses, but let’s take a looksee:

The Six Weeks of Halloween: Reading Roundup

Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King – At this point, it’s almost a cliché to read Stephen King during the Halloween Season, but after reading Night Shift last year, I resolved to explore more of King’s short fiction. As it turns out this was the first book I started and the last book I finished during the season. Short Story collections tend to be, by their very nature, uneven affairs. But when you’ve got a stack of seasonal reads, a book like this makes for the perfect transition between larger works. As such, I was continually dipping into this collection throughout the entire marathon, only finishing it off yesterday (almost a week after Halloween). Clocking in at around 700 pages, that’s not too surprising, I guess, but it was an overall enjoyable read.

“Dolan’s Cadillac” kicks off the collection with a bang and it’s one of the best in the entire collection. More of a horror inflected crime/revenge story than anything else, I appreciated the procedural attention to detail and care with which King constructed the story. “The Night Flier” is a neat little modern (er, for the 80s) spin on vampires, and I very distinctly remember enjoying the movie adaptation that probably won’t live up to my memory (but it’s conspicuously absent from streaming and I’m not willing to spend $65 for a used VHS or DVD to test that theory out). “Home Delivery” is my kinda zombie story. “The Ten O’Clock People” is great, reminiscent of Carpenter’s They Live, but to my mind, better and more horrific (perhaps less pointed or angry in political terms, but creepier in execution for sure). “Crouch End” features the obligatory Lovecraft homage, and is pretty well done iteration of those tropes.

As expected, some stories didn’t really strike a nerve with me (like “The Moving Finger” or “My Pretty Pony”) and one thing I noticed in comparison to Night Shift is that these newer stories all seem longer and more verbose than the earlier ones. When it comes to the good stories mentioned above, that’s not really a problem, but there are a fair amount of stories that I thought were decent but dragged a bit (like “Sneakers” or “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”). Finally, there are some things that don’t especially fit at all, notably “Head Down”, which is non-fiction about King’s son’s little league baseball team (which, oddly, is also the longest story of the bunch). All in all, though, it’s a pretty solid collection, and while it sags at times, it feels like it got stronger as it went. I will probably continue this trend of a Stephen King short story collection next year, as I kinda enjoy having something to slip in and out of throughout the season.

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Winter Moon by Dean Koontz – I know Koontz takes a lot of heat, especially from Stephen King fans, but he’s always been a favorite. That said, he’s extremely repetitive and I’ve never quite managed to rekindle that initial burst of enthusiasm I got from his stuff when I discovered his books in high school. Part of that may be because I’m older and wiser now (haha, right – ed), part of it may be that I’ve already read his best stuff, but most likely it’s that Koontz is very prolific and tends to repeat certain tropes over and over again. That said, there was a period in the 80s and early 90s in which he was really on fire. I’ve actually had some luck earlier this year reading Mr. Murder and The Bad Place, both of which were quite fun (especially the latter, which I found surprisingly entertaining and weird).

Winter Moon was apparently a rewrite of one of Koontz’s earlier works, published under a pseudonym. Supposedly the rewrite used very little of the original text, so it was kinda considered a new novel at the time. Anyway, it’s a fun little alien invasion flick, with the usual sprinkling of Koontzian tropes. Great opening shootout with our police officer protagonist, after which his wife becomes a little paranoid (but not without reason), and the precocious child does his best, etc… Then there’s a parallel story in set in Montana that’s a little more unusual, but you eventually see how the two stories will dovetail. There’s some time spent just kinda waiting for the pieces to fall into place, but it’s easy-going page-turner stuff. Certainly not one of Koontz’s best and not something I’d recommend starting with, but it was entertaining enough.

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Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror by W. Scott Poole – The premise of this nonfiction book is that the devastating violence and bloodshed of World War I planted the seeds of all modern horror. Poole is a historian, so it’s not surprising that a fair proportion of this book is spent chronicling various factual aspects of WWI. He’s good at capturing the outrage and senselessness of the war and even if you’re more interested in the artistic side of this premise, the historical details are still engaging and interesting.

These details are then applied to the emergence of various horror trends of the era, particularly given the prominence and influence of German filmmakers on the genre. He briefly sketches out the lives of several prominent authors and directors, including the likes of F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, James Whale, H.P. Lovecraft, Franz Kafka, and several others. Biographical information is relayed in addition to the prominent works of horror they produced.

Unfortunately, it does feel a bit like he’s stretching to make the details fit his thesis, rather than truly developing it. As a result, the book feels narrowly focused, like Poole was only concerned with a small part of what makes a lot of these works great. There’s also not much in the way of tracing this influence far beyond the war. It seems obvious that art produced during the 20s and 30s would be influenced by the war, but how does that influence expand beyond those works through the subsequent decades (even up until today).

None of which is to belittle what the book is doing here. If you’re already interested in the horror stories of the era, it’s a pretty good overview (if you’re not, then it might not hold interest – as mentioned, it doesn’t do much connecting those works to contemporary horror, so there’s not even an in there). I suppose if you were a history buff who never had much interest in the horror genre, it might be eye opening. I liked it well enough, though again, I do feel it was stretching to fit the thesis.

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The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix – I feel like I should like Hendrix’s work more than I do. I really enjoyed the nonfiction Paperbacks from Hell, and We Sold Our Souls was a nice spin on some specific tropes that I found diverting enough (if not amazing or anything). This book, chronicling the travails of real-life final girls as a killer starts picking them off one by one, should really be up my alley.

To be sure, there are a lot of interesting elements here. In the world of this book, all the slasher franchises we know and love from the eighties were based on real stories with real final girls. They have slightly modified names (i.e. our main protagonist is the basis for the Slay Bells series of movies, which are very obviously styled after Silent Night, Deadly Night), but they’re all there. Of course, this sort of exposure comes with its own challenges. There’s a whole seedy and exploitative side to the situation that Hendrix covers aptly. Some of the girls handle it well, others do not. Twenty years later, they’re mostly a group of basket cases. This is perhaps not unrealistic, but it’s also no fun at all. Which I get. The trauma of such events should not be minimized. But you have to make up for that somehow, and Hendrix seems to think having a main protagonist be utterly and completely incompetent is compelling, and it’s not.

I really, really disliked our protagonist. It’s excusable that she did dumb stuff as a teen that wasn’t expecting to be hunted buy a Santa killer. Twenty years later, being paranoid and supposedly prepared, it turns out that she still constantly makes dumb decisions. Perhaps this is more of a “me” thing than the book’s fault, but I really had a hard time rooting for her. The reason we like final girls in horror movies is that they aren’t generally dumb and are capable of fighting back and even defeating the killer. I get that this story is supposed to be more based in realism, but the precept holds: competent protagonists are much more likeable than stupid ones. She even admits, late in the story when she did something tremendously stupid and underestimates a suspect: “I am stupid. I am dumb.” Right, but self-awareness does not inoculate the author from having a stupid protagonist. The worst thing is that she doesn’t need to be incompetent for this story to work. You could make a commentary on how paranoia and preparedness are sometimes not enough and maybe even the price of such precautions is too much… without having to make the character a total dunce.

There’s arguably too much weight on realism in this story, but otherwise, there’s a skeleton of a good plot here. Even some of the realistic stuff represents interesting extrapolations on a world where final girls were real things, and the various explorations of each final girl’s story and the franchises they spawned are great. As mentioned above, though, Hendrix chose perhaps the least likeable of the bunch as his main protagonist – the others all seem much more interesting and active. I listened to the audiobook for this, which probably didn’t help. It’s read by Adrienne King, who was the final girl in the original Friday the 13th. She’s not the worst reader I’ve heard, but it still comes off as more of a stunt than a great choice. I found a lot of things grating about the book, so maybe it’s hard to separate that from the performance, but whatever. I really did not enjoy this book, which is a shame, because it should have been up my alley. One of these days I’ll find a slasher novel that works for me…

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Last Days by Brian Evenson – Evenson is my favorite discovery of the year. There’s something of a cult status being built up around him, and after having read a couple books during this Halloween season, I can easily see why. He’s got a simplistic, straightforward style that is deceptively cerebral in nature, and deeply unsettling.

This story of this novel concerns an amputation-obsessed cult that hires a detective (who had his hand chopped off during his last case – and thus is considered trustworthy by the cult) to solve a murder. Naturally, all is not what it seems. What starts as a detective procedural with a Kafka-esque bent, eventually turns (or perhaps curdles) into something more odd and violent than you might expect.

I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t spend much more time on it, though I guess that implies the story has more surprises and gotcha twists than it really does. I mean, our detective certainly makes deductions I wasn’t expecting and there are twists, but they’re hard to describe and unlike your usual mysteries. I really enjoyed the weirdness though, and while it’s subtly stylish stuff, it’s still page turning material. Worth seeking out if you’re not scared of strange stuff off the beaten path…

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Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson – This collection of short stories might be a better place to start than Last Days, but they’re both pretty short books. I found it interesting reading this in contrast to King’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Where I found King’s stories to be relatively long (approximately 30 pages with small type/spacing) and verbose, Evenson’s are generally very short (approximately 10 pages, not as densely printed), stripped down, and simple… but no less disturbing.

Stories range from the straightforward horror type, to more adventurous blends of genres, even including a few science fiction tales. You’ve got the obligatory Lovecraft homage (one of the aforementioned SF stories), and there are multiple stories about filmmakers that delve into the horrific.

I liked the initial entries in the book, but either the stories got better as it it went or I simply got on Evenson’s wavelength, because my opinion of this book kept rising as I read (an unusual experience with a short story collection, which is typically more of a wave of ups and downs – I suppose that’s also true here, but the stories are short enough that the amplitude of said waves isn’t that high). If Evenson’s brand of weird and disquieting horror sounds like your thing, check it out. I will most certainly be revisiting his work next year.

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Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar – A serial killer story with a metafictional twist, this novel is essentially a fictional true crime novel. As such, you don’t get the bombastic serial killer tropes here, only the difficult to reconstruct details of each murder scene and a little about the victim’s life. It’s a fascinating exercise and a premise that mostly delivers what it promises, though I will say that I’m not exactly an expert on true crime.

It did feel more like a memoir than true crime at times, but again, I’m not sure how much of this is a departure from true crime or not (i.e. are a lot of true crime novels also sorta memoirs about the author’s life too?) Either way, the story works well enough for what it is. Again, don’t expect the exciting, pulse-pounding tropes of more trashy serial killer narratives. But it’s not a hollow, overheated stylistic exercise either. It’s a sorta sober examination of a series of murders in the author’s hometown. Unlike a lot of true crime, this one is eventually solved, and the book takes the form of a second edition, with some additional chapters at the end (because the fictional crimes were solved long after the fictional true crime book was fictionally published, so the fictional author was approached by the fictional publisher to revise the fictional book for a fictional second edition – everyone got that?) It works as a story, but also as a metatextual narrative, which is pretty interesting.

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Danse Macabre by Stephen King – And so we return to Stephen King, this time working in non-fiction mode as he examines what makes the horror genre tick. Writing in the early 80s, he’s mostly covering older works from his childhood, though he does spend some time on contemporary (i.e. late 70s) horror as well. That part represents an interesting time capsule to see what horror movies resonated at the time, versus the ones that have survived the test of time and are still well known today.

He covers literature and movies, with some time spent on radio and the pulps and whatnot. There’s good overviews of a lot of what makes the genre tick, and he traces things back to originators like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the latter of which King posits as the origin of modern werewolf stories, which I’m not sure I’d ever heard before).

It’s always interesting to get some perspective on an author like King and how he understands his own work, but I’m guessing there’s a lot to quibble with too. If you’ve ever read King’s column in Entertainment magazine back in the day, well, it’s perhaps not quite that lightweight, but sometimes he strikes off in a direction that seems a bit more flimsy than you might expect. Still, if you’re interested in horror’s evolution through the 50s and 60s, with a little of the 70s, this book will be most interesting for you. Personally, it feels like he might have written it a few years too early – the 80s were an interesting time for horror, and most of that is elided here simply because of when he wrote the book. Hard to blame him for that, so this is definitely another me problem, but the horror heart wants what it wants. I’d recommend King’s On Writing much more than Danse Macabre, but they’re also very different takes on non-fiction, so make of that what you will. King’s always interesting though…

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Another Season’s Readings in the books. I’m allready thinking of things I’m going to watch and read for next year’s Six Weeks of Halloween marathon, which is always a good sign…

The Six Weeks of Halloween isn’t just for movies, it also includes some season’s readings. In accordance with this year’s record-setting pace of movies watched, I’ve also set some sort of record for number of books read. This is due to basically the same reason, which is that there’s a raging pandemic on and thus I’ve got more time for reading/watching. I love books and movies, so it’s not the worst thing in the world, but I’d rather not do the same next year! I’m going to try to get through all of them in this one post, so they probably won’t be as in-depth as normal (not that these recap posts are usually that in-depth, but still).

The Six Weeks of Halloween: Season’s Readings

Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin – Struggling riverboat captain Abner Marsh receives a too-good-to-be-true offer to supervise the construction of and co-captain the grandest steamboat the Mississippi has ever seen. While wary of the mysterious benefactor making the offer, one Joshua York, a pale aristocrat who keeps strange hours, Marsh ultimately can’t resist. As the boat makes its way down the Mississippi, Marsh starts to notice even more suspicious behavior from York and his strange friends.

This was definitely the best thing I read all season and maybe even this year. While not quite as ambitious or intricate as his Song of Ice and Fire, it holds plenty of similarities. Lots of historical detail, this time placed on the 19th century riverboat trade. Strong, likable characters facing malevolent villains you love to hate. And of course, plenty of lovingly described feasts for our main character. Look, some of the digressions might rub folks the wrong way, but Martin is a consummate storyteller and it shows here. He also manages a spooky atmosphere that was perfect for Halloween season. Take this line, thrown off early in the book:

Once a raft came by, a fire burning on its deck, and they heard the raftsmen calling out to them, vague faint cries that echoed over the river before the gray swallowed raft and sound both.

So spooky. As usual, Martin has his historical ducks in a row, and he references all sorts of riverboat lore that is no doubt fascinating all on its own (i.e. the phantom steamer of Raccourci is briefly mentioned, and it turns out that it’s a real thing), then adds his own twisted tale of chills to the misty river. Plus, unlike the Song of Ice and Fire, this one is self contained and has a satisfying ending. Recommended!

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Night Shift by Stephen King – Speaking of consummate storytellers, this collection of short stories was a pretty solid read during the season. Here’s the thing with Stephen King: Even when I don’t like the story, or the characters are awful, or something silly is happening… King finds a way to pull me in and turn the page. Only a few of these stories really standout in my mind as great, but all of them are supremely well written.

This is one of the reasons that so many King adaptations fail to translate on the screen. A lot of times, the story itself is rather silly (i.e. “Trucks”, “Battleground”, “The Lawnmower Man”, etc…), but King is such a virtuoso writer that he can make them work… That makes it difficult to adapt, for sure. Still, some of these stories are great. I really loved “The Boogeyman”, “The Ledge”, and “One For the Road”, but really almost all of them were interesting in one way or another. I go back and forth on Stephen King and short story collections are often uneven, but this book has convinced me to check out more of King’s short story collections.

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14 by Peter Clines – Nate’s a down-on-his-luck schmoe who lucks into a cheap apartment. The only problem is that his apartment has some odd features. Weird mutant cockroaches, a light fixture that only emits blacklight. And hmmm, it looks like his neighbor’s apartment also has a mystery or two. And so does his other neighbor. Soon, Nate and his new friends are full-on investigating the mysterious building. What shall they find!?

It’s a fun little read. Take J.J. Abrams Mystery Box concept, apply to an apartment building, and sprinkle a little Lovecraftian cosmic horror on top, and you’ve got a fun little dish to eat for Halloween season. It’s not going to blow you away and the characters, while not exactly deep, are a likable enough bunch. The conclusion gets a bit kooky, but hell, it’s far better than the ending for Lost! It’s sorta perfect audio-book fodder.

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The Fold by Peter Clines – In the same universe as 14, this is a mostly independent story (there are a couple of brief mentions of some of the events in 14 and some characters show up, but otherwise completely separate story). Mike Erikson is whip smart and he’s got an eidetic memory. That’s why he’s hired to audit a team of DARPA scientists who have invented a device they call the Albuquerque Door. It’s basically a teleportation device. It appears to work perfectly, but the team is not very forthcoming with any details and they refuse to release to the public until they complete some additional tests. Mike’s job is to figure out if they’re blowing smoke or really onto something. Naturally, the device doesn’t quite work perfectly, and soon, more mysterious and troubling things come to light.

Like 14, this is a fun read. It veers a little more into science fiction territory this time, which might not satisfy the hardcore SF reader, but should hit the general audience just fine. For my part, the moment someone mentioned that the Albuquerque Door relied on some sort of Quantum Mechanics, I know almost down to the last detail what was wrong with the project. That being said, Clines is a decent enough storyteller to keep things moving along and entertaining, even to a dork like me who thinks he knows everything. There are apparently additional books in this series that are out (or coming soon), and I’d actually be curious to check them out, which is usually a good sign. Again, not going to blow you away, but it’s entertaining and fun and again, good audio-book fodder.

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A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay – When fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display aberrant behavior, her family tries everything to help, eventually turning to the Catholic Church for an exorcism and hiring a reality television crew to document the strange happenings. Fifteen year’s later, Marjorie’s younger sister recounts the whole experience to an interviewer.

I can certainly see why this book turned some heads (it infamously garnered high praise from Stephen King), and there’s a lot to like about it. I can’t say as though it hit on all levels for me, but I’ll give it points for ambition and putting a new spin on a hoary old tale. Tremblay manages this both with plot devices but also an unconventional narrative structure, which includes straight recapping of the possession, interview segments, and blog post excerpts reviewing the television episodes. It’s an effective mashup of stylistic elements and story, with an ending that I did not see coming. Ultimately, I’m not sure it worked perfectly for me, but I’m glad I read it.

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Weaveworld by Clive Barker – Barker has long been a staple of my Halloween season’s reading, but I’ve long since exhausted his excellent Books of Blood short story collections, so now I’m working back to novels that I haven’t caught up with yet. This one features a lot of Barker’s appeal… but it also feels a bit like an inferior take on several of his other stories. In particular, I remember Imajica being a much better version of a similar sort of tale… But then, I haven’t read Imajica for decades, so the details escape me.

Still, this book about a hidden world and various attempts to capture or protect it, has some interesting things going for it. A meditation on memory and the past’s pull on the present, it hits those themes hard. However, it does perhaps drag on a bit too long and while Barker is always stylistically impressive, it’s not quite enough to save the flabby plot. Clocking in at over 700 pages, it somehow feels even longer than that, without really justifying the length. It became repetitive at times, and I dunno, maybe I was just turned off by the more fantastical elements, which aren’t particularly well defined here.

I didn’t hate this or anything, and maybe if I had read less Barker in the past, it would have hit me better… Still, I’ll probably continue to explore Barker’s oeuvre and dammit, wait for the third Book of the Art (which he’s been talking about for going on three decades)…

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The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron – Another short story collection, this one a bit less successful than the King, but then, that’s a high bar. Still, this is my first experience with Laird Barron, and I’m not entirely sure I’m on his wavelength. The collection starts out strong, with the story “Old Virginia,” a creepy tale of a CIA project in the 1960s that touches on the Roanoke Island disappearance and eventually gets into cosmic horror. Next is “Shiva, Open Your Eye,” which is short but all style over substance, again with the Lovecraftian cosmic horror element that’s actually pretty effective.

From there, things start a downhill slide. Some of these should work, but almost all of them go on for far too long (even for short stories, they feel more like novellas sometimes) and aren’t quite as satisfying. The only exception would be the titular Imago Sequence, which is a strong way to end the book.

So I didn’t love all the stories, but there’s plenty to like, even in some of the lesser stories. Lots of creepy imagery and Barron’s overly descriptive style sometimes helps accentuate the scares. There are some commonalities to the stories as well. Tough guys who are normally competent getting thrown for a loop when presented with cosmic horror. Curiosity killed the cat, and apparently also leads humans to investigate things beyond their ken. There’s a cyclical feel to a lot of these stories. Stuff that’s happened before and will happen again. Unfortunately, that last aspect, while sometimes neat, isn’t always particularly satisfying, especially when you don’t like the characters involved. Ultimately, I’m a bit mixed on this book, and despite the stories that I liked, I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to read more Laird Barron (though it’s not completely out of the question, I guess).

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Draculas by Blake Crouch, Jack Kilborn, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson – Man is this book just totally trashy stuff. A rich guy on his deathbed purchases a creepy old skull found in the Romanian countryside. It’s a strange archeological find and the rich guy basically just grabs it and rips his own throat out with it. His nurse and research assistant act quick and take him to the hospital, where he turns into a vampire and starts turning the staff/patients.

From there on out, it’s pure trashy action. Lots of blood and gore and there’s a clown vampire and people who take down vampires with chainsaws and so on. It’s not really good, but it’s trashy and fun. It might be more fun if I liked some of the characters more, but whatever, this book really isn’t that concerned with being realistic or anything like that. Not the worst thing in the world, but probably not something I’d recommend.

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Hunted by Darcy Coates – A woman disappears while on a hike. Her camera is discovered with a series of strange pictures that vaguely suggest she was being stalked by… something. As her family and friends head into the woods to find her, a detective starts to piece together other parts of the puzzle. Not a bad setup and I will admit that it gets better as it goes, but wow did this thing start off on the wrong foot.

In particular, there’s this character named Todd that is just… why on earth would we ever want to have anything to do with this guy? He’s basically a stalker who is in love with the woman who disappeared, but is so creepy that I think she’d be better off not being found. Honestly, all of the characters are just awful stereotypes and caricatures and I don’t especially like any of them, except maybe Carla, the detective. She’s got all sorts of baggage that the author thinks will help us like her, I think, but it’s so cliched that I didn’t really connect with her until she started actually doing her job. Which she’s actually good at once she starts doing it, and thus the book does end much stronger than it begins. The twists at the end are welcome, I just wish that I cared about the characters at least a little bit.

Still, the whole exercise really isn’t worth it, and you’d be much better off watching The Wolf of Snow Hollow which had a similar vibe and is much, much better. In the end, it’s a pretty silly book, and unlike Stephen King, Darcy Coates can’t quite sell the silliness.

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Phew, that’s a lot of spooky books. We shall return to our more SF inflected reading soon enough…

Just catching up on some of this Halloween season’s readings. I’ve already covered Stephen King’s Christine and Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs (and their corresponding filmic adaptations), but here’s the rest of what I read:

• Death Count: All of the Deaths in the Friday the 13th Film Series, Illustrated by Stacie Ponder – As a big fan of the recently revived Final Girl blog and Stacie Ponder’s associated offerings, I was happy to see that she decided to collect her artwork from the Death Count blog into a fancy schmanzy book.
  

  Ponder’s artwork is distinctive and generally fun, even when depicting horrific scenes of terror (some choices are absolutely inspired), and her short writeups of each movie are well done. Most of the actual content is still available online, but fans of the Friday the 13th series might want a copy all for themselves.

• Deep State by Christopher Farnsworth – I’ve long been a fan of Farnsworth’s Nathaniel Cade books, particularly Red, White, and Blood. For the uninitiated, Cade is a vampire who is magically bound to serve the President of the United States. It’s ridiculous, of course, but a whole lot of fun. The series has been on a bit of a hiatus since Farnsworth switched publishers, but he’s published a couple of novellas, including this most recent one, which actually picks up after the cliffhanger at the end of Red, White, and Blood. A nuclear missile silo has gone dark, and the president calls in Cade to resolve the matter. The only problem is that he needs a handler for the vampire, and no one seems up to the task since Zach Barrows was unceremoniously fired during the events of the previous book. So the president finally admits his mistake and rehires Zach, then they go fight some vegetal monsters and save the world. Again. Spoilers, I guess, but Cade is kinda like a superhero – you know he’s going to win. It’s great to see the duo paired up again. This wasn’t quite the continuation of the story I was expecting, but the greatest part of these stories is the esoteric bits and pieces of horror lore, not the overarching meta-story. Someday I hope Farnsworth can free himself from whatever legal bonds are preventing him from a proper, novel length Cade story. In the meantime, this is a decent story (and better than the previous short offering, The Burning Men) and worth checking out for fans.
• Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon – This is a hard one to talk about without spoiling anything, but if you like Sturgeon and horror-adjacent psychological stories, it might be your bag. It doesn’t seem like much at first. Told in an epistolary format, it initially covers a sort of auto-biography of George Smith, followed by some correspondence and documentation from his psychiatrist, who manages to deduce Smith’s true nature. It makes for a good companion piece to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, only instead of focusing on physical explanations for vampirism, Sturgeon goes into psychological reasons, positing a non-supernatural vampire. It takes a while to get there, but overall the story is very short and strays considerably from whatever you might expect from the description above. It’s slow and oddly structured, but I kinda appreciated that and ultimately really enjoyed the book for what it was.
• Final Girls by Riley Sager – I originally picked this audiobook up because I thought it was the next book on this list (the titles both involving “Final Girls” in some way), but I immediately realized my mistake when I started listening. But hey, both are literary takes on my beloved slasher sub-genre, so that’s fine by me. The story follows one Quincy Carpenter, lone survivor of the Pine Cottage massacre that claimed the lives of five friends. The ever considerate media thus associated her with two other women who had survived similar ordeals, thus dubbing them “The Final Girls”. Ten years after her traumatic experience, Quincy is doing ok for herself. A popular food blogger with a loving boyfriend and a support network that includes Lisa (one of the other Final Girls) and Coop (the cop who saved her life that fateful night), she almost feels normal. Then Lisa turns up dead, an apparent suicide. And Sam, the only other remaining Final Girl shows up at Quincy’s doorstep. Is someone trying to finish off the Final Girls? It’s a neat premise that has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, Quincy isn’t the greatest protagonist, constantly filled with self-doubt (understandable!) and getting herself into obviously dumb binds (not so understandable). Sager does a great job implicating just about everyone we spend time with in the story, such that any of them could turn out to be the killer in the end… but there aren’t enough characters for this to entirely work, and she makes these ambiguities so conspicuous that by the time she actually does reveal the killer, it’s not as surprising as it could be, since we’ve already been considering that person the whole time (and we’re never quite able to really rule anyone out). Still, despite dragging a little in the second act, the finale works well enough. I admit I was hoping for something more slasher-esque, but this doesn’t really deliver on the potential of its premise, even if it was a diverting enough read.
• The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones – Lindsay, homecoming queen, has just survived a typical slasher movie style massacre at the hands of a madman wearing a Michael Jackson mask. But the killer’s body was never recovered, and it seems like the replacement homecoming court is in for a bumpy ride. Now this is more like it, a story that is drenched in slasher tropes and explicit references, sorta like Scream on hallucinogens. The prose style is unusual though, and I’m not entirely sure it works. It’s kinda like a hybrid movie script and novel; explicitly specifying camera movements and cuts, but adding a little literary flare too. It does imbue the story with momentum, but clarity suffers a bit. There’s not a ton of exposition, so some stuff feels a little unexplored, and it’s hard to keep the characters straight. Stephen Graham Jones clearly knows his stuff though, and not just the big names of the sub-genre. And so do his characters, who all know they’re in a slasher film and have seen enough to know the ins and outs. The final revelations are, perhaps, a bit too twisty, but this is definitely better than the previous book on the list in that respect, and this one’s a lot shorter too. Fans of the sub-genre could enjoy this, assuming they can get past the odd formatting… I certainly did.
• Shutter by Courtney Alameda – Micheline Helsing is one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing line, and she continues their monster hunting ways. Her weapon of choice? An analog camera, which can capture spiritual energy on film. A seemingly routine haunting turns complicated when her entire team (including herself) is infected with a curse that could kill them all in seven days if they don’t exorcise the ghost that infected them. Cut off from the Helsing organization, they must find this powerful ghost and figure out a way to defeat her. A decent, light YA novel with some creepy atmosphere and imaginative creations, it also struggles a bit with exposition (not a huge deal in my book, honestly) and there’s simply not much here that we haven’t seen before. It’s a little formulaic, but well executed and generally fun. Not something you need to rush out and read, but it’d be a good introduction to many of the tropes it relies on. Those of us already steeped in those tropes might find it a bit staid, but you could do worse.

We’re in the homestretch now, stay tuned for a Speed Round of short reviews of all the movies that didn’t make it into the weekly (usually themed) recaps…

Movies tend to be the focus of the Six Weeks of Halloween, but I like to mix things up with some seasonal-appropriate written tales of terror as well (with the occasional work of non-fiction thrown in for fun). It makes for a nice change of pace from my normal dorky reading diet, while still maintaining high levels of dorkocity, which is important. Some of these are arguably not horror, but they’re at least seasonal, which is the whole point. I’ve already written about one epic-length book I read this season, and here’s a few others:

• NOS4A2 by Joe Hill – Vic McQueen discovers at an early age that she’s able to use her fancy Raleigh Tuff Burner bike to find whatever she desires by driving across a seemingly impossible covered bridge. It doesn’t matter how far away the object she seeks is located, she gets there in moments. Charlie Manx has a similar talent, though his magic vehicle is a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith, which he uses it to pick up young children and spirit them away to a horror-filled inscape he calls Christmasland, where he feeds on their life essence as a sort of vampire (the license plate on his car reads NOS4A2, a play on Nosferatu.) One day, in a fit of pique brought on by her feuding parents, Vic hops on her bike with the intention of seeking out trouble… and finds Manx. Due to sheer luck, she survives the encounter, but decades later, Vic’s son has disappeared and Vic has to confront Manx again. So Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, and indeed, this book features a certain kinship with King’s brand of horror. There’s an archetypal quality to the supernatural elements of the story and the talismans that allow our characters to do the impossible. The book perhaps meanders a bit and lingers too long on certain aspects, making it feel a little loose and flabby, but it’s generally compelling, page turning stuff. It leans a little too heavily on dysfunctional relationships and pessimistic attitudes for my taste, but on the other hand, it never veers into full misery porn and what’s there does serve the story. Christmasland is a fascinating creation, clearly a worthy subversion of that holiday’s good cheer. I enjoyed this quite a bit. It’s a little too long, but it comports itself well.
• The Long Halloween by Joeseph Loeb (writer) and Tim Sale (Illustrator) – Not at all horror, but certainly seasonal. It’s a 13 issue arc of Batman where the caped crusader works with Harvey Dent and Commissioner Gordon to try and catch a mysterious murder who kills on each major holiday. Along the way, we’re treated to various episodic encounters with Batman’s infamous rogues gallery of villains… I picked this book up back when I got all fired up about Batman comics earlier in the year, but saved it for Halloween… mostly because of the title. It’s an interesting story, even moreso since it appears to be the basis for Christopher Nolan’s films. Those movies and particularly Batman Begins are clearly not an adaptation as there are tons of major differences, by many elements of Nolan’s Batman seem to originate here. Notably the focus on various crime families, which was apparently new at the time these comics were being published in the late 90s. The murder mystery itself does feel a bit on the sloppy side, but it’s all executed well enough, and it’s neat that we get to touch base with tons of iconic Batman villains throughout. The artwork was effective enough and the pacing was pretty good for such a long arc. This clearly isn’t perfect, but I really enjoyed it, and the added dimension of its influence on the movies does give it some extra zip.
• In the Flesh by Clive Barker – I believe that, with this volume, I’ve exhausted all of Barker’s “Books of Blood”, those long running series of short stories that lit the horror world on fire in the mid 80s. This is technically the fifth collection of stories (ironically, the first collection I read was Cabal, the sixth collection, not that it matters, since these are all disconnected short stories). This one only features four stories of moderate length (I believe they’d qualify for novellette or novella status), and they’re all decent. There is one standout, but the others tend to fall behind the stories in other volumes. The titular “In the Flesh” proceeds from the fascinating premise of a prisoner who committed murder with the objective of being incarcerated in a specific prison. You see, his grandfather was buried on the grounds after being executed decades earlier, but his spirit calls out to the new prisoner. The story is told from the prisoner’s cellmate, who gets wrapped up in the supernatural mumbo jumbo and eventually gets trapped in the afterlife. Or something. An interesting and creepy premise that sort of peters out in the end. This is an unfortunate theme in this particular collection, it seems. “The Forbidden” is arguably Barker’s best-known story from the Books of Blood, having been adapted into the movie Candyman. It features a university student visiting the slums in order to study the graffiti there. Most of the graffiti turns out to be boring and unenlightening, but then she stumbles on a particularly striking area depicting an urban legend known as the Candyman. This is probably the best overall story in the collection, though it does feel a bit overlong. Still, interesting stuff. “The Madonna” is about an abandonned pool complex. Some shady real estate developers are trying to figure out how to purchase it and make money off of it, but the otherworldly residents of the pools have other ideas. This one is also pretty effective, though again the ending is a little iffy. There’s some interesting themes here though, power and gender dysphoria among them. “Babel’s Children” is about a woman who stumbles upon a mysterious compound where, decades ago, a group of scientists and scholars were brought together to secretly rule the world. They are now elderly, sick of their task, and desire escape. This is mostly treated as mystery, but again, the ending leaves a bit to be desired and the whole idea is a little more on the silly side. Overall, this is a worthy read, but not quite up to par with the other Books of Blood collections.
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie – Technically a murder mystery, but Agatha Christie’s classic is also an originator for many horror tropes. A group of seemingly unrelated people are lured to an island under different pretext. It turns out that all of them are responsible for the death of another person, but escaped justice through legal technicalities. One by one, they die in mysterious circumstances, seemingly to match the details of an old nursery rhyme. Extremely complex, but simple to follow, this story is very detailed and exquisitely designed from start to finish. It is, maybe, a bit difficult to come up to speed on the 10 strangers right away, but as the book proceeds to kill off each one, we learn more and more, and begin to suspect more and more. I believe the term of art for this is “locked room mystery”, as there’s no apparent explanation for how or why the 10 murders were accomplished. And the solution actually works (it may be slightly underwhelming to jaded modern eyes, but I was pretty happy with it). Its influence on the horror genre is clearly apparent, with many stories relying on a similar structure. I think you could even say that this influenced the modern body-count story (like slashers!) Regardless, it was quite an enjoyable book, all the moreso because it’s short and concise.
• Horror Movie A Day: The Book by Brian W. Collins – I won’t say too much about this one since I have not gotten too far into it, but if you don’t know about Horror Movie A Day, this guy Brian Collins vowed to watch a horror movie every day (and write a review of said movie) and proceeded to do so for over 6 years. In this book, he’s chosen 365 of the more than 2500 movies he saw during that run, one for each day of the year, and written a quick overview of the movie (including a brief plot summary, an exerpt from his original review, and an updated commentary). Initial reading and scanning through the book indicates that Collins went for deep cuts here (rather than obvious horror classics), no doubt a welcome approach for horror hounds. I will almost certainly lean on this book when it comes to planning out next year’s Six Weeks of Halloween…

And that just about covers it. We’re in the final homestretch now, and all that remains is the customary Speed Round of movies I saw that didn’t conform to a weekly theme and, of course, the big day…