Halloween Reading

 

  Somehow Halloween has snuck up on me. In Sept. I pulled a pile of my horror paperbacks to go through, started, and then was distracted by my ongoing science fiction discussions with my buddy Doug. Last night I realized Halloween was Monday.  So I was up at 4:00 bringing up decorations and thinking about Halloween. Which for me means books. There are two novels and a short story by Scott Thomas that I always read around this time. Since I have covered them already I have provided the links below. I then decided to expand my reading list and chose Something Wicked This Way Comes (how was this not already on the list), "Dr. Locrian's Asylum" by Thomas Ligotti (a bit of Coultophobia anyone), and Matt's Cardin's "Chimeras & Grotesqueries". I am not going to discuss the Bradbury novel and two short stories here but I certainly am going to recommend them

 The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-halloween-tree-by-ray-bradbury.html

A Night in Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2019/11/new-eldritch-tomes-and-night-in.html

"The Night is A Sea" by Scott Thomas

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2019/01/2018-more-of-less-part-1.html

Since my discussion of the Thomas story is short, I will include it here. 

"My wife is a huge fan of the magazine Fortean Times, so our household is well aware of the work of Charles Fort in recording the weird, the uncanny and the just plain odd. Here Thomas has captured the universe spanning scale of Lovecraft with the type of news items beloved of Fort. Indeed our narrator, Emerson a collector of the strange and mystical, is also the writer of the column Emerson Bridge's Journeys to the Border for the newspaper Free Worchester, producing columns taylor made for the pages of Fort's The Book of the Damned. Emerson loves to share the stories he has uncovered like that of the Ice Sisters, 

"As for the Ice Sisters… A boy searching for his missing dog found three dead women dressed in colonial mourning gowns lying in the middle of a field in the Coddington property. They were spaced evenly apart with their heads nearly touching, though their hair and faces could not easily be seen. Each had a dark wooden box enclosing her from the neck up, and underneath, shaped to the dimensions of the boxes and further encasing the women's heads were blocks of ice.  (11)

The story wanders happy along, as we follow Emerson, researching and relating stories as well as assisting in a search for a missing senior, until all the elements come together in a outstanding climax. This story is a wonderful fusion of Lovecraft and Charles Fort and any aficionado of the weird is sure to enjoy it. "

Boo