HALLOWEEN READS (PART 2)

I received so many horror short story recommendations for my Halloween reading project that it was hard to know where to begin. One of the first recommendations that really stood out to me was a story mentioned by two separate authors, Stephen Mark Rainey and Sidney Williams. Around the same time, I noticed that same story title in editor/alchemist Stuart David Schiff’s introduction to Vol. 1 of his Whispers anthology series. The story was Karl Edward Wagner’s 1974 story “Sticks.” 

Sidney Williams says “Sticks” was “the first story I read where I realized you could take Lovecraftian elements and play with them. I’d read the Stephen King story where the guy had a Necronomicon in his closet [“I Know What You Need” from the Night Shift collection], but ‘Sticks’ went an extra mile.”  Mark Rainey remembers that an artist friend, Lew Hartman, introduced him to Wagner’s work, and that “Sticks” stood out as his favorite story. Later, he had a chance to meet and work with Wagner, who wrote a regular column for Rainey’s Deathrealm magazine. (You can read Mark’s history of the magazine, including anecdotes about working with Wagner and many others, HERE.)

Sidney Williams also recommended two stories from Wagner’s first short story collection, In a Lonely Place—“In the Pines” and “More Sinned Against”—and he mentioned Wagner’s second short story collection, Why Not You and I?, which includes the story “Neither Brute Nor Human.” Karl Edward Wagner once named “Neither Brute Nor Human” as his favorite Karl Edward Wagner story. Introducing the story in the anthology book Masters of Darkness, Wagner says it originated from a vivid dream about a psychic vampire at a sci-fi/fantasy convention. I think I enjoyed reading this story even more than “Sticks.” 

I also read Wagner’s “The River of Night’s Dreaming,” which is loosely tied to Robert W. Chambers’s King in Yellow mythology, and ends on a very Poe-esque note. I should add that Stephen Mark Rainey also wrote a damn good tribute to The King in Yellow, titled “Masque of the Queen,” which appears in his 2022 collection Fugue Devil: Resurgence.  

Rainey’s second Halloween short story recommendation is an early, Lovecraftian story by Robert Bloch—first published in the May 1951 issue of Weird Tales magazine—called “Notebook Found in a Deserted House.” Rainey remembers, “When I was a senior at the University of Georgia, a good friend of mine had a pile of the old H.P. Lovecraft / Cthulhu Mythos paperbacks, which he thought I might like. I said I’d take a lot, so he gave the lot of them to me. At the time, I lived out in the sticks in a fairly secluded house with five other people, and the night I started delving into those books, I was on the only one at home (which was exceedingly rare). ‘Notebook’ was the first of the stories I read, and I was smitten. I stayed up most of the night reading those books because—for the first time since I was a kid—I didn’t like the idea of turning off the light and trying to sleep.”

Mark Rainey’s recommendations go on to include “just about any of Lovecraft’s classics”: “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” “Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Haunter of the Dark,” etc. He also mentioned Manley Wade Wellman’s “The Desrick on Yandro” (part of Wellman’s John the Balladeer series), Jeffrey Osier’s “The Encyclopedia for Boys” (you can read more about this story in Mark’s reminiscences about Deathrealm magazine), and a pair of modern Cthulhu Mythos stories: Michael Shea’s “The Face” and F. Paul Wilson’s “The Barrens.” 

Another contemporary horror writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of Lovecraftian tales is D. Alexander Ward, whose short story collection When It All Goes Dark dropped in 2024. David recommends The Children of Cthulhu, an anthology of 21st century stories edited by John Pelan and Benjamin Adams, saying, “It has a lot of great stories in it from names any avid horror fan would no doubt recognize, but the standouts for me were Brian Hodge’s ‘The Firebrand Symphony’ and Tim Lebbon’s ‘The Stuff of Stars, Leaking.’” The anthology also includes stories by Poppy Z. Brite, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Caitlin R. Kiernan.

David also makes the first Stephen King recommendation of the season—and it’s a deep cut. Instead of selecting a classic story from Night Shift or Skeleton Crew, he points toward the underappreciated novella “1922” from the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars, saying, “King can write all kinds of ways and styles. This, however, for me, is my favorite version of him. The starkness of the landscape and time period, the grit of the characters, and the mixing of the supernatural with the horrors of everyday life just really spoke to me than and continues to do so now. Additionally, this is just King at his downright meanest and nastiest. And I absolutely love being made to feel appalled and fascinated by that novella.”

Next, author Michael Rook—my co-editor on the anthology Dark Corners of the Old Dominion, who just finished writing his first novel—prompted me to revisit Clive Barker.  Mike says Barker’s story “The Forbidden”—the basis for the CANDYMAN films—”has so many elements that fit the season. It’s set in October. There’s a back-to-school theme in its doctoral-student protagonist. It builds on the kind of urban folklore that’s driven much of the most popular horror storytelling over the last four decades, including the movies playing this Halloween time. It even includes a monstrous bonfire, which, for those of us who grew up in middle America, will always be tied to Fall. But ‘The Forbidden’ also tells a horror story that is absolutely not for children, best evidenced in the kills that go THERE, to the places that horror for the masses won’t.”

In addition to “The Forbidden,” I decided to read a few other Barker tales. “The Departed” is set on Halloween and follows a dead mother who is visiting her son for one last time. It’s a surprisingly poignant story from the author of The Thief of Always. “Coming to Grief” is a more intense story that skirts the edge of Barker’s vast abyss of metaphorical monsters and boogeymen. “In the Hills, the Cities” is one of the author’s most celebrated stories. I remember reading it for the first time and being overwhelmed by the mind-bending, reality-expanding nature of Barker’s brand of horror. 

Finally, I revisited The Hellbound Heart, the 1986 novella that served as the basis for HELLRAISER. It’s impossible for me to separate this source story from the visionary films that emerged from it. Although they’re barely mentioned in the prose story, I can’t help picturing Pinhead and the other Cenobites as they appear onscreen. Nor can I help hearing Christopher Young’s haunting, ethereal score. As soon as that earworm burrows into my brain, I can feel the seasonal chill moving in.

More recommendations to come!