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!

HALLOWEEN READS

It’s that time of year. The oppressive light and heat of summer have given way to the subtler, darker invitations of autumn. For me, that always comes with an inclination to watch my favorite horror movies—but, this year, I’m trying something different. Instead of watching one horror movie per day for the month of October, I’m going to try to read at least one horror short story each day. To prepare, I decided to reach out to some of my horror writer friends for recommendations. The response has been overwhelming...

One of the first people who responded was Lisa Morton, the reigning Queen of Halloween (thanks to her 2012 book Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween). Lisa suggested starting with the foundational Halloween trilogy of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” and Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” “Even though none of these mention Halloween by name,” she says, “they became Halloween standards read at parties throughout the nineteenth century and helped confirm the black cat, the witch, and the jack-o’-lantern as the three major Halloween icons.”

Lisa is not the only person to invoke Poe’s name. Nicole Willson, author of the 2024 gothic YA novel The Keeper of the Key, recommended Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” saying, “I’m pretty sure this was the first horror short story I ever read, and the incredibly creepy setting plus mounting tension leading to the gut punch of an ending blew me away.” Another respondent vouched for “anything by Poe” to get readers in a Halloween mood—and I concur. A few years ago, I read Poe’s late essay “Eureka” for Halloween, and quickly became as obsessed as a Vincent Price character in an old AIP movie. Evidence HERE. 

Author Sonora Taylor, who has a new short story collection titled All the Pieces Coming Together, seconded Lisa’s recommendation of Washington Irving—but with a twist. Sonora said she recently read and enjoyed the nonfiction book Washington Irving: The Definitive Biography of America’s First Bestselling Author. I’m intrigued because, a few years ago, I read an older “interpretive biography” of Irving (The World of Washington Irving by Van Wyck Brooks), which helped me to imagine “Sleepy Hollow” taking place in the rural Hudson Valley of the early 1800s. Brooks writes:

“For Irving this was a haunted region, and he heard all sorts of stories there that he was to retell in later years, the story of Hulda the witch, for instance, and the woman of the cliffs, who was seen on the top of the rocks when a storm was rising […] and there was the wooden bridge where the headless horseman passed along the hollow with rushing speed. He was the ghost of a Hessian trooper, hurrying back to the churchyard, and he frightened people who encountered him at midnight. He sprang into the treetops with a clap of thunder and vanished in a flash of fire.” 

Sonora also recommended Zora Neale Hurston’s memoir Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, which sounds fascinating. 

Another name that has come up a lot is Ray Bradbury. Lisa Morton and Sidney Williams (who has an excellent new column on wickedhorror.com, about vintage horror paperbacks) both point to “The October Game” as a good starting point. The short story was first published in Weird Tales magazine in March 1948, but Bradbury didn’t include it in one of his own short story collections until 1976—because he quickly decided it was too bleak. “The October Game” exemplifies early Bradbury, the author at his most savage, before he became a family man. Lisa promises, “Everyone who reads it will gasp at that last line.”

Several of my friends also recommended longer works by Bradbury. John Palisano reminded me about The Halloween Tree, a 1972 novel that finds the author in a more family-friendly mode. Stephanie Ellis recommended Bradbury’s first short story collection Dark Carnival and subsequent novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Dark Carnival features more of those fiendish early Bradbury stories (“The Handler” is a particularly nasty piece of work), which is probably why the collection went out of print for many decades. Luckily for us, Valancourt Books recently republished Dark Carnival, so now you can read it in all its gory glory. As for Something Wicked, Stephanie Ellis describes it as the perfect Halloween novel: “There’s something about Bradbury’s prose that just captures the essence, the sense of an idea of there being something just beyond our sight, a touch of darkness crawling ever toward us.” 

It’s no accident that Bradbury is the dedicatee of both volumes of Cemetery Dance’s Halloween anthology October Dreams, named by my knowledgeable friend Mark Sieber (he who types behind the Horror Drive-In) as his favorite seasonal anthology. Vol. 1 of October Dreams includes the Bradbury’s “Heavy Set,” a tale of arrested development with a skin-crawling ending. Vol. 2 includes “The October Game.” And the very first story in October Dreams, Glen Hirshberg’s “Mr. Dark’s Carnival,” owes a literary debt to Bradbury. Lisa Morton says it’s one of her all-time favorite pieces of Halloween fiction, explaining, “It’s one of those amazing pieces of fiction that’s like a magic trick; there’s no literary equivalent to a jump-scare in here, but by the time you finish it, you’re left deeply unsettled and you’re not sure why.” “The Circle” by Lewis Shiner is another reader favorite that appears in the collection (Vol. 2). A great starting point for anyone’s reading list.

Lisa also recommends Kate Maruyama’s “A Gentleman’s Suit,” a novella in the 2022 anthology Halloween Beyond: Piercing the Veil, which she says is “gorgeous and very much in the spirit of 2026.” And I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the 2017 anthology Haunted Nights, co-edited by Lisa Morton and Ellen Datlow. Christi Nogle, author of the 2024 story collection One Eye Opened in That Other Place, especially recommends Brian Evenson’s short story “Sisters” in the Haunted Nights anthology. It’s a story about a pair of siblings who decide to “dress up” as something other than humans for Halloween. 

And of course, it wouldn’t be Halloween without throwing some Lovecraftian monsters into the mix… but I’m going to save that for the next post. Stay tuned.