Hi All!

Boy, there’s one September I’m glad to leave behind. It was a rough one, with: the loss of a beloved animal companion (Pinky); one affectionate feral cat (who fathered the litter of black kittens I had to deal with last year) has gone missing; and of course 2025’s usual “let’s watch the world fall apart in real time” nightmare.

On top of everything else, I’ve been trying to finish off a bunch of old paperwork-kinda stuff (my accountant wanted me to close this old crap out before the end of the year), and that’s eaten into my time and attention.

But at least it’s the month of Halloween now, even if it’s been a strange Halloween season thus far - I’ve had waaaaaay fewer interview requests this year, probably the least amount I’ve had in the last ten years. My guess is that the media outlets - the newspapers, magazines, and documentary crews - that used to reach out have lost a lot of reporters/staff and have cut back on the kind of lifestyle articles that Halloween pieces fall under. There’ve also been less podcast invites; that I chalk up to a lot of the interest in podcasts that sprang up during the pandemic, when so many of us were housebound, now tapering off.

Or maybe it’s just zeitgeist, although Halloween is on track for a $13.1 billion year, it’s biggest ever. So maybe it’s just me. Who knows.

On the plus side, we added our little yard haunt to the SoCal Haunt List for the first time this year, and we’re already working on what we hope will be our best Halloween display ever.

Have a great spooky month!

Lisa

NEW STUFF I LIKE

September saw the release of an absolute TON of stuff I want to read, including Alma Katsu’s Fiend, Ilise S. Carter’s When We Spoke to the Dead: How Ghosts Gave American Women Their Voice, Annie Neugebauer’s The Extra, and more stuff I’m probably forgetting to mention, but Becky Spratford’s Why I Love Horror is the one I’ll be digging into first.

If you don’t know who Becky is: she’s the American Library Association’s horror expert, and her RA for All: Horror blog has been a must-read for ages. She wrote the ALA’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, but Why I Love Horror is her first book really intended for a popular audience.

The book opens with an intro from another horror powerhouse, Sadie Hartmann, and includes a ton of essays from incredible writers (my favorite title has to be Cynthia Pelayo’s “My Mother Was Margaret White”).

In the interest of full transparency: Becky’s a friend, someone who I probably owe part of my career to, and I’m thanked in the book, but screw all that - you should get this book because Becky’s a queen and this is the BOMB.

Because this is October, you’re getting two more recommendations: First, Patrick Tumblety’s book The October Children is a delightful Halloween romp with illustrations from the fabulous Drew Rausch. If you need something to get you in the mood, I highly recommend this little treat!

And lastly, Craig Engler has just launched a Kickstarter for “The Great Halloween Puzzle & Podcast,” an ingenious (and beautiful!) mix of puzzle, podcast, recipe (for soul cakes!), and more. Just slap that button to back it.

The Great Halloween Puzzle & Podcast

THE HALLOWEEN SPIRIT

It’s time for my annual summing up of Halloween trends! After visiting Spirit Halloween, Michael’s, Home Goods, Home Depot, Target, and World Market, here are a few observations:

• Merchandising your own mascot is a growing trend, with Spirit offering up stuff based on their “Jack the Reaper” character and Target having fun with “Lewis,” their viral animatronic figure that debuted in 2023.

• Hocus Pocus, The Haunted Mansion, and Trick ‘R Treat seem to have finally faded slightly in terms of popularity, while Squid Games, Wednesday, and Terrifier have surged; Beetlejuice is holding steady.

• Vintage/retro is still hot. I was especially surprised to see retro-style costumes at Target.

• Blow-molds are bigger than ever. Note to self: I need to go back to Target for the animated blow-mold owl.

• Spirit is pushing evil babies this year, and masks based on animals, like creepy scarecrow versions of rabbits (huh?).

• Political costumes just ain’t happenin’. No big surprise there, I guess.

• Best goofy toy of the year: The Screaming Halloween Goat

• 2025 breakthrough that I hope will become a trend from 2026 on: programmable audioanimatronic figures. Home Depot’s Ultra Skelly is THE Halloween product of the year.

STRANGE DOINGS

This time around, I’m just going to point you to a series of fun videos I’ve been doing called “Halloween History 101,” in which I choose an object from my Halloween collection and use it to talk about some part of Halloween history. Here’s the first one:

I’ve got five up so far and I’ll be adding a new one every few days. You can check ‘em out here on my Substack, at my Instagram, on Facebook, or at my YouTube channel.

BEHIND THE SCREAMS

“The Witch at Midnight”

(written for the The Horror Zine)

I like to try to put out a new piece of Halloween fiction every year, if for no other reason than to challenge myself. Having written…well, probably several dozen short stories and novellas at this point, it’s always fun to try and find some aspect of Halloween I haven’t explored (or at least explored enough) in fiction.

This year I decided to go with the witch. I’ve certainly written about witches before in other stories, both Halloween and non, but I wanted to look at both the cinematic representation of the witch - which really formed our modern conception of this character - and some of the odder witchcraft legends, specifically the idea that witches derive from some ancient, secret sisterhood practicing throughout western Europe.

Knowing that I wanted to explore witches in both older history and more recent, I knew I needed a young female protagonist, one who probably felt deprived of power and agency, who would find her confidence via a Halloween presentation of a witch. My lead would be a monster-loving gal, somebody like me who grew up loving monster movies and monster magazines; the latter in particular are usually associated with boys, so I was happy to create a heroine who would, in essence, say, “Hey, c’mon - a lot of girls have always loved monsters, too!”

From there the plot just kind of fell into place, and you can read the finished product for free at The Horror Zine’s website (or you can buy a print copy here).

"The Witch at Midnight"

THE WRITE STUFF

(This is a slightly abridged version of a piece I first wrote in 2012, and revised in 2021.)

A Halloween Primer for Horror Writers

As a Halloween expert, I’ve been asked to do a lot of interesting things. I’ve been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal about the proliferation of sexy Halloween costumes, I’ve jabbered away on the supplements for the Blu-ray release of the movie Trick ‘r Treat, and I’ve been asked by writer and editor friends to fact-check works of Halloween fiction.

Most horror writers love Halloween (of course!), and I’m betting most of them know more about the holiday than the average joe. They’ve seen the yearly documentaries, they’ve read enough Halloween-themed fiction to fill a haunted house, and maybe they’ve even scoffed up a non-fiction history or two.

But do they really know enough about Halloween to write an accurate piece of fiction about their most beloved of holidays?

I’m going to address here a few of the most overused mistakes of the Halloween fiction sub-genre, the ones that make anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the festival’s history grit their teeth and wince, the ones that make me want to close the book or hit the “Stop” button no matter how far into the story I am.

Let’s start with “Samhain”, possibly the single most misunderstood part of Halloween’s history, and the one thing I see done to death in fiction (and film). Part of the dilemma regarding poor Samhain dates back to the eighteenth century, when a British engineer named Charles Vallancey was sent to Ireland on a surveying mission. Vallancey, who fancied himself a historian, fell in love with Celtic lore and Irish culture, and wrote hundreds of thousands of words collecting everything he studied. Here’s the thing: Vallancey was wrong…willfully, disastrously, wrong. Scholars had already deciphered the word “Samhain” as meaning “summer’s end”, and had linked it to the ancient Irish Celts’ New Years’ festival, held on October 31^st; but Vallancey arbitrarily dismissed this standard definition and decided that Samhain was the name of a Celtic “Lord of Death”, who was feted on October 31^st.

Even though Vallancey was dismissed by his own peers (one critic famously said that Vallancey had written “more nonsense than any man of his time”), his books had already found their way onto library shelves around the world, and soon formed a strange alternate history for Halloween, one in which savage, bloodthirsty primitives offered up human sacrifices to their diabolical Lord of Death on Halloween…as compared to the truth, which was that the Celts likely celebrated their end of summer with a great feast, governmental gatherings, and sporting events like horse races (and yes, it’s likely that the Celts really did practice human sacrifice on Samhain, but archaeological evidence suggests that it was an honor to be chosen for sacrifice, and that it was performed only in years when the harvest was substandard).

Now, compound Vallancey’s awful error with a mispronunciation – “Sam­-Hayne” instead of the correct “Sow-in” – and you get the single most common trope in Halloween fiction. How many books/films can you think of that have included a character called “Sam Hain”? Believe me, there are a lot. Now, I’m not saying these works are bad; far from it. One use – in the afore-mentioned Trick ‘r Treat – produced one of the very best Halloween-themed horror films ever. But I am suggesting that before you read about Samhain somewhere and run off to write your epic novel about a Halloween maniac named “Sam Hain”, you should probably be aware that it’s both been done before and was wrong to begin with.

Obviously most of the writers who pen trick or treat-related works can draw from personal childhood experiences…but I still see them get certain key elements wrong more often than you’d think. Here’s a CliffsNotes version of trick or treat’s history: It is not based on some ancient Celtic ritual, nor is it even strictly a European tradition (although it certainly bears a resemblance to practices like “souling”, in which beggars once went from house to house performing little songs in exchange for special breads on All Souls’ Eve, and some Guy Fawkes Day traditions, in which British children, on or about November 5^th, costumed themselves in rags and begged “a penny for the Guy”, or money to buy fireworks). Trick or treat may have actually started in Canada – the phrase was first recorded in association with Halloween in Alberta in 1927 (although there’s no mention of costuming). It wasn’t until after World War II that the version of trick or treat we know now – i.e., costumed children going from house to house uttering the phrase “trick or treat” and being rewarded with candy – spread throughout the United States, and it came about largely as a way to control the destructive pranking that had cost cities millions of dollars in the 1920s and 1930s. It turned out to be cheaper to buy pint-sized vandals off with parties and candy than replace broken windows, burned buildings, and shattered light fixtures. Any suggestion that Halloween arrived in America via a direct line from some ancient practice is simply incorrect, as is the notion that it somehow derived from scaring off spirits on the most haunted of nights.

While Halloween fiction seems fixated on letting writers and readers recapture the magic of that special autumn night, the real-life celebration has moved on. Adults began to reclaim the holiday in the 1970s, and by the 2000s the haunted attractions industry – which incorporates everything from seasonal amusement parks to suburban front lawns – was generating a billion dollars a year in revenue. Halloween sales of beer and decorations have overtaken every other holiday except Christmas, and over the last decade Halloween’s popularity has exploded globally, with Halloween celebrations and events now recorded in places like Ukraine, South Africa, and China. The related holiday of Dia de los Muertos is catching on, especially in U.S. cities with a large Spanish-speaking population, and also with young people who feel that Halloween has become overly commercialized.

I mention all this just by way of suggesting that Halloween is a holiday that is almost constantly changing, and I have no doubt that we’ll see Halloween fiction change with it. But please – don’t keep saying that every new Halloween practice “dates back to the ancient Celts”; even though your work is fiction, you are endangering that all-important suspension of disbelief when you offer up false history like that. I’d frankly like to see us lay the ghost of Charles Vallancey to rest permanently.

NEWS & WORKS IN PROGRESS

The Kickstarter for Subversive Sci-Fi: Evolution just launched. This book will include my examination of Georges Melies’ classic A Trip to the Moon, so I hope you’ll consider backing it!

The anthology New Writings in Horror and the Supernatural Volume 3 was just announced by PS Publishing, and contains my story “Forgetting.”

My story “Compliance” will appear in the upcoming AI issue of Weird Fiction Quarterly.

I was just in the LA Times talking about seances.

I’ll be participating again in the Green Ink Sponsored Write to benefit Macmillan Cancer Support. The theme this year is “SOMEWHERE THAT’S GREEN: STORIES ABOUT PARADISES, UTOPIAS AND HAPPY PLACES.” Oh gawd, I’m in trouble.

I just did an interview on Halloween history and Anoka, MN (“The Halloween Capital of the World”) with USA Today, so look for that to appear soon.

I got an invite to write the liner essay for an upcoming Criterion release of a movie I’ve loved for decades, so I’m very excited about that (I’m a longtime Criterion fan and have always hoped to work with them someday).

And…I currently have one novel, one novella, and five short stories out in submission, so here’s hoping there’s more news soon!

SALE!

The Halloween Encyclopedia (2nd edition) and A Hallowe’en Anthology can both be ordered directly from the publisher right now for 25% off! Through October 15, use code MYTH25. You can also pick up a copy of Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern (which include my foreword), or a lot of other great titles. (Hint: use the link below - you’ll find the Encyclopedia on the second page and the Anthology on the third).

McFarland's Mythology Sale

UPCOMING APPEARANCES

• October 12 - I’ll be part (with Joe Lansdale and Eric Guignard) of a panel to promote Scaring and Daring at the Los Angeles Public Library downtown

• October 19, 5 pm PST - I’ll be on the Ghost Show podcast

• October 27, 10 am - I’ll be a guest on the Book Lights podcast

• October 31, 7 am PST - I’ll be chatting again with Jimmy and Lindsey on Radio Nemo

• June 4-7, 2026 - I’ll be at StokerCon in Pittsburgh

THE WHOLE HAUNTED WORLD

My paid subscribers got the first installment of my investigation into The Cock Lane Ghost, and were also treated to some of the best demonic possession stories I’ve already uncovered in my research for my next book, My Name is Legion: The Strange and Terrifying History of Demonic Possession.

WHERE YOU CAN BUY MY BOOKS

• Amazon

• Barnes & Noble

• Bookshop.org

GIVEAWAY

This month I’m making two of the articles I’ve written just for my paid subscribers free for everyone to read, just for the month of October*:

• The Whole Haunted World #12, in which we dig into the incredible story of Odysseus summoning the dead

• The Whole Haunted World #6, about the notorious Villisca Ax Murder House in Iowa. Who was the killer behind the crimes, and did he leave a trail of clues - and ghosts - across America?

*=Yes, of course I’m hoping that some of you might enjoy these two pieces enough to become paid subscribers. There, I’ve been fully transparent.

Thanks as always for reading this far!

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