Fearsome Five: Five Bite-Sized Halloween Treats

For many horror fans, including myself, Halloween is their Christmas. But like Christmas, people are busy doing so many things that they forget the reason for the season. And for Halloween, it’s reading scary stories. That’s why I’m devoting this Fearsome Five list to some bite-sized Halloween horror that you can digest while dressing up your little monsters or carving up . . . pumpkins.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell. Sure, it’s in your library’s children’s collection, but this is a one-way ticket to nostalgia village for anyone who’s ever told a scary story by the light of a campfire or a single flashlight. And let’s not forget the simple black and white illustrations that are way scarier than anything with a J for Juvenile on its spine has a right to be.

October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween edited by Richard Chizmar, et al. This anthology gets that Halloween isn’t simply about being the scariest, grossest, most vile monster out there. Sometimes, the horror of the season requires a little whimsy, but not too much. Otherwise, you have stories like this.

*shudders*

What also makes this a fun anthology is that it not only has Halloween tales from esteemed writers ranging from Dean Koontz to Richard Laymon to F. Paul Wilson, it also has memories from horror writers on what makes this holiday so special. An overall good chance to see and read what lodges Halloween deep in these authors’ hearts more firmly than any wooded stake.

Haunted Nights edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton. For those that like a little more bite in their Halloween, though, Haunted Nights has amassed a collection that skews less Nightmare Before Christmas and more Nightmare on Elm Street. Stephen Graham Jones’s “Dirtmouth” is a particularly dark nugget of terror while S. P. Mikowski’s “We’re Never Inviting Amber Again” offers some bittersweet humor that shows the dangers of inviting family to anything.

A Halloween Reader: Poems, Stories, and Plays from Halloweens Past edited by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne. There’s always time for the classics and this reader has plenty of classic tales in a variety of formats that can put you in mind of such literary fright giants as Poe and Hawthorne. Looking for some spooky poetry by Poe? How about Sir Walter Scott or H. P. Lovecraft? What about a scary story to tell your guests over cider? Maybe a play for you all to perform is what you’re looking for. This book has all of that. As far as Halloween anthologies, this book is like a Swiss Army knife with a snippet of text for every occasion.

Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge. Not an anthology but it’s a very quick read and one that roars right out of the gate. In a small Nebraska town, on Halloween night, the young men are released into the streets to try and bring down the October Boy, a scarecrow-like creature with a jack o’ lantern head, a candy heart, and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to make it through the throngs of teenagers looking to claim the ultimate prize of a chance to leave their small town existence behind. It’s a fun, eerie romp of a tale that brings to mind Joe Lansdale but it also has a lot to say about the power of ritual and the kind of hells that supposedly bucolic small town can become.

New Arrival: Review of Grady Hendrix's We Sold Our Souls

Heavy metal and Satan go together like peanut butter and jelly, except way more evil. Since the devil is so entwined with the genre’s demonic DNA, it makes sense that the common Faustian trope of someone selling their soul would do so against the backdrop of tight leather pants, pyrotechnics, and more shiny spikes than anyone needs. However, Grady Hendrix’s latest, We Sold Our Souls, goes beyond the band that comes to regret their decision to sell their soul. This story has less navel gazing from the female protagonist Kris Pulaski and more darkly Tolkein-esque questing as she tries to get her soul back.

Kris, once a guitar player for the band Dürt Würk, finds herself 47 and working at a Best Western night desk where no one listens to her, a blow to her ego considering she once played to many a crowd. She wonders what has happened to her life, particularly when her old bandmate Terry is the lead singer for supergroup Koffin. On the eve of Koffin’s farewell tour, Kris decides to track down her former bandmates and search for answers, leading her on a quest to rediscover what may have been taken from her (or did she give it away?).

Hendrix, like author Christopher Moore, is good at intermingling humor with horror, but Hendrix’s style can always take his characters and situations they are in shades darker. Whereas Moore’s fiction involving demons and vampires feel like, no matter what happens, the entire cast will come out smiling and bow to the audience at the end, Hendrix always reminds the readers that it can, and usually does, get much worse before it gets better and that everyone might not make the end credits. Kris Pulaski does not have an easy life, but things for her get significantly more difficult once she tries to confront her former bandmate now corporate-contrived rock idol Terry. In truth, Kris’s struggles, Kris’s character, keeps this story from becoming another Faustian tale of middle-aged regret and lets it become a concise yet epic quest for a soul as well as one’s art. And make no mistake, whether it’s a literal soul or a metaphorical search for identity and purpose, Kris goes to great lengths to find hers.

Not only must Kris deal with demonic entities and shadowy human agents, but as a woman in a male-dominated industry, she is fighting everyone’s preconceived notions of her. From never quite making it to what she feels is her full potential to taking flack from hotel guests, Kris’s path to middle age has become one large downward spiral that she can never pull herself out of. Men throughout the book patronize her, and even her old bandmates, who were once as close as family, are of no help. Kris is always pushing against a patriarchy that is always trying to keep her complacent, even an Illuminati-level threat that deploys UPS men as foot soldiers. Kris pushes back with the only weapon she has: her music. Her music is what she believes in, even when she doesn’t always believe in herself, and is the one thing that, no matter what the forces working against her do, cannot be taken from her. Frodo had a sword named Sting on his quest, but Kris has a song called “Troglodyte,” which serves as both guide and weapon which makes men and not human things very afraid.  

Women might relate to Kris being belittled, talked down to, and even seen as less than what she is, but Kris is also defiant and she channels that defiance into a sonic tsunami born from a hypothetical situation where Joan Jett sings about the #Metoo era. There is a climax where Kris discovers who she is and what she is capable of, and when she gets there, after seeing all that she has been through, readers will be able to feel her triumph.

Screen to Scream: Grace and Pet Sematary

People might remember W. W. Jacobs’ short story “The Monkey’s Paw” (SPOILERS! for this particular story, if you haven’t already read it). The father uses the monkey’s paw to wish for a large sum of money, then his son dies in a factory accident, which pays off the exact amount the father had asked for. The father, knowing and having been shown that the paw’s wishes bring the worse kind of luck, wishes to have his boy brought back to life. The story implies that the son isn’t anywhere close to what he was in life (End of spoilers!).  Jacobs’ story is often used to talk about how you should never make wishes. EVER. But also consider what the story says about grief, particularly of parents, and what devil’s bargains, paw or no paw, parents would make to end that grief, particularly in today’s Screen to Scream pairing.

Look at the cover of the film Grace and you’ll simply see a blood-spattered baby bottle, which already tells the person who’s thinking of bringing this home that they are tackling some very mature subject matter, particularly for parents. Madeline is a young mother that thinks she is doing everything right by her baby, from eating the right foods to going to a respected midwife, but she loses her unborn child. Madeline insists on carrying the baby to term and Grace is born, alive and seemingly healthy. But there is the issue her particular diet of fresh human blood. So begins the metaphor of the vampiric Grace literally sucking the life out of her mother that offers a dark interpretation of motherhood’s sacrifices. Grace discovers what her daughter is by discovering, through typical parental trial and error, just what her daughter prefers for sustenance. Throughout the movie, apart from a bossy mother-in-law, there is no doubt of Madeline’s devotion to grace. Unfortunately, that devotion, a trait heralded among the best parents, actually becomes a tragic flaw.   

That flaw also exists in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, with some minor differences. Madeline had birthed her child and accepted what it is and to sacrifice Grace would be as painful to Madeline as feeding her. The father in Sematary, Dr. Louis Creed, has pleasant memories of the child he lost. The readers also get to know him. When introduced to what the burial ground beyond the breakfall can do, it is a temptation that tugs at his broken heart and he willingly commits acts such as lying to his family up to burial desecration to try and heal that heart. He has the chance to go on, to try and heal himself, to hold onto his pleasant memories, to grieve, but he cannot bear the grief, which leads him to his bargain with the ground beyond the Pet Sematary and the tragedy that follows.

Both stories deal with subject matter that many of us, parents especially, do not like to think about: the possibility of outliving your children. For some, the scenario is too awful to contemplate, yet these stories have parental loss and grief as a main theme. To actually touch upon those subjects, some would say, should be unthinkable. But horror is often supposed to dramatize and give shape to the horrible, the unthinkable, if only to have the reader appreciate their lives once they close the book or turn off their DVD players. Who knows? Parents, after experiencing both terrifying tales, might appreciate their children more and understand the meaning they give to their lives, particularly if they are forced to contemplate what would happen if that meaning were taken away.