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.

Bloch Booking: A Review of Bill Gillard's "Psycho Century"

This year, I’ve been doing some research on horror author Robert Bloch for an upcoming project, so I was excited to see a recent announcement for UP Mississippi’s new book Psycho Century, which they’re promoting as “the first full literary biography of the writer who shaped modern horror from Lovecraft to King.” 

The author, Bill Gillard, is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh whose previous books include The Spark of Modernism: Twenty Speculative Stories and Writings That Defined and Era, 1886-1939 (McFarland 2023) and a collection of lost fiction by Evelyn Underhill (whose 1914 book Mysticism has always seemed indispensable to me). And now he’s written a book about an iconic horror writer, promising to situate Bloch’s work “within the larger landscape of twentieth-century horror while tracing how he continually reinvented his stories for new audiences in television and film.” Bill Gillard is a man after my own heart and I came to Psycho Century with a strong predisposition to love it.

What I was expecting from the book was a deep dive into the connections between Bloch’s life and his stories. I went looking for something similar in Bloch’s 1993 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, and in the 1995 tribute volume Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master (both sadly out of print). I learned that neither Bloch nor his peers were inclined to get too analytical—even though Bloch spent most of his career psychoanalyzing fictional and nonfictional sociopaths. Bloch freely (sometimes gleefully) admitted that there was a part of him that was equally sinister, but by all accounts the man behind the mask was a mensch in real life. Much more interesting, then, to focus on his stories rather than his biography, right? .... Except, for me, a writer’s life and art are always intertwined in endlessly fascinating ways. 

Happily, Gillard’s perspective on Robert Bloch is informed by a treasure trove of relatively new (catalogued in 2024) primary research materials: the Robert Bloch Papers at the University of Wisconsin. According to Gillard, the donated materials filled nearly 400 boxes! The finding aid alone runs over 600 pages. Bloch was a shockingly prolific writer and he apparently saved everything: manuscript drafts, journals, letters, research materials, clippings, memorabilia. With such a wealth of materials available, I can’t help thinking that a literary biographer should be able to get into Robert Bloch’s head as deeply as Bloch got into the heads of his characters.

I realize that what I’m suggesting is a little mad. I attempted something similar with a biography of filmmaker Wes Craven, and I got lost down a rabbit hole for nearly four years. And I did not have access to ANY materials preserved by the Craven Estate. I was just gathering rare documents on my own, and I managed to produce a book that runs nearly five hundred pages. And, to me, it feels like just a beginning.

The question that haunts a book like this is “Who’s the audience and what are they looking for?” Speaking for myself, I love the fact that Bill Gillard aims to reassess—and reassert—Bloch’s significance. Psycho Century effectively contextualizes Bloch’s work within the frameworks of American horror fiction (from Lovecraft to King) and film (from silent cinema to slasher movies). In relatively broad strokes, he explains how Bloch’s voice and style evolved from cosmic horror to psychological / sociological horror, and how his evolution reflects the times in which he was writing. The big question is to what degree Bloch was leading and inspiring certain changes that occurred over the course of the 20th century. If he was as influential as Gillard says, then we need many more books like this, to preserve and extend Bloch’s legacy.

Decades ago, Stephen King championed his literary predecessor in Danse Macabre, praising Bloch’s contributions to the TV series Thriller, as well as his “unholy trinity” of early-60s suspense novels (The Scarf, Psycho, and The Dead Beat). King also drew attention to some of Bloch's later novels, including Firebug and Strange Eons, and cited Bloch’s short story “Sweets to the Sweet” as one of the five biggest influences on him as a writer. That particular short story was adapted to the screen in the 1971 film The House That Dripped Blood, one of several horror anthology films scripted by Bloch for Amicus Productions—and another big influence on King (specifically,  King's film Creepshow). 

Having a significant influence on King should guarantee Bloch his place in horror history… so how is it that his work has been so neglected in recent years? Bloch died in 1994, and by the end of the millennium much of his work—not to mention the smattering of books about him—was out of print. The obvious exception, of course, was Psycho. As a result, in the 21st century, readers mostly know Robert Bloch as the author of Psycho rather than as a seminal literary figure who authored more than 30 novels and 100 short stories over the course of five decades and remained very popular with audiences for at least three of those decades. In 2024, Valancourt Books made a herculean effort to revitalize awareness of the author by republishing six (so far) of his most highly-regarded works: The Opener of the Way, The Scarf, Pleasant Dreams, Strange Eons, The Night of the Ripper, and Midnight Pleasures. The publisher has vowed to keep releasing additional titles as long as readers are buying them.

A book like Psycho Century can only help the cause. For me, the most compelling sections of the book focus on Bloch’s later novels—Night-World, Strange Eons, The Night of the Ripper, Psycho 2 and Psycho House. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t read the Psycho sequels, but Gillard’s summaries have convinced me that those books must have been a source of inspiration for filmmakers behind the ongoing Scream series as well as the recent Halloween reboots. (Much to his chagrin, Bloch was at one point credited with the rise of the slasher film—but he should perhaps be recognized instead as originator of the anti-slasher narrative.)

I wish Gillard spent more time with some of Bloch’s earlier and more obscure novels (The Will to Kill, The Kidnapper, The Dead Beat, Firebug, The Couch, Terror, The Star Stalker, Sneak Preview)… but, when dealing with a creator as prolific as Bloch, it’s almost impossible to be comprehensive. Gillard says right up front that Psycho Century does not aim at “completeness,” but focuses instead on a careful selection of stories that the author revised over the course of his career. This is a worthwhile (if occasionally frustrating) approach to the material at hand. It allows the author to show how Bloch’s voice and visions, sensibilities and psyche changed over the course of his life, by illustrating the changes he willfully made to his own creations. In chapters on Bloch’s Amicus collaborations, for example, Gillard compares strikingly different drafts of the stories “Waxworks” and “The Weird Tailor.”

At the outset of each chapter, Gillard lists “things to read and watch,” providing a starter kit for the uninitiated. There is a chapter on the short stories that foreshadowed Psycho, and a chapter on Bloch’s contributions to the original Star Trek series. (I had no idea.) The goal of Psycho Century is to draw readers and viewers to Bloch’s work itself, either for the first time or with new context that will help fans see it with new eyes. Although I think the book falls short of being a “full literary biography” of Robert Bloch, it is still a very welcome guide for any serious horror fan. 

I should add that Bill Gillard’s notes pointed me toward a Robert Bloch resource that I somehow managed to overlook—a 1986 monograph by Randall D. Larson, published as part of Starmont’s Readers Guide series. I was already well-aware of Starmont, which in the 1980s published critical works by some of the best (Douglas E. Winter, Michael R. Collings, S.T. Joshi, Darrell Schweitzer, Tony Magistrale, Tyson Blue, et al). Sadly, most of Starmont’s works are long out of print. Thank the Elder Gods for Internet Archive. I found Larson’s book there, and found it to be a very accessible—also, appropriately wry—overview Bloch’s literary universe. Larson doesn’t attempt to psychoanalyze the author but he successfully analyzes Bloch’s work. Which reminds me of something that one of Wes Craven’s family members once said to me: “The work is the true biography.” Anything that points us back to the original stories—with new context—is important.

Psycho Century: Robert Bloch, American Horror Master will be released by the University of Mississippi Press in October 2026. You can order it here:

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Psycho-Century

Bonus: If you pre-order before July 22, you can get 50% off. Details here: 

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Collections/Summerween

In the meantime, Bill Gillard is blogging about every single Robert Bloch short story, in chronological order, on the official Robert Bloch website. As I said, he’s a man after my own (disembodied) heart...