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.
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