I’m not a Halloween guy, nor much of a fan of things twisted and scary. I delight in complimenting little witches and warlocks and spidermen and ladybugs on their great costumes, but the holiday itself I really don’t care for. I confess I find it hard to understand its appeal to anyone over thirteen, except that dressing up and walking around with a gang of your besties at night would definitely be fun. But the candy and cobweb stuff? Meh.
Of course, I wasn’t brought up with Halloween. When I was a kid in London, October 31st, though acknowledged and known as all Hallows’ Eve, which had its origins in the Celtic Samhain, was a non-event unless you were a pagan or a super-devout Roman Catholic. The big harvest time festival of my childhood was Guy Fawkes, aka Bonfire Night, which occurs on November 5th.
The Guy Fawkes festivities mark the capture and execution of the plotters who wanted to blow up the House of Lords and assassinate King James in order to restore a Catholic king to the throne. But as a child, I confess I believed the celebration, with all its rockets and roman candles, catherine wheels and bangers, was really in honor of what might have been had the gunpowder plotters not been discovered, and instead succeeded. Clearly, like all children, I was an anarchist to my core.
My reading and viewing habits today just skirt the edges of the horror genre. I’m a little impressionable: as a child, I remember having difficulty sleeping after reading the Sherlock Holmes story, The Speckled Band, late at night (the reveal with the bell cord…omg!). And the 1961 Roger Corman movie of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum with Vincent Price scared the daylights out of me.
Now, I do love Stephen King’s work, but curiously not the books other fans hold up as masterpieces (aside from The Stand, which is genius): I far prefer King’s less graphic and more psychological ouevres, like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Gerald’s Game, and Duma Key, to the gory shockers Carrie and The Shining, to name a few.
It’s odd therefore that in late 2014 I ended up writing Black Easter, a suspense/horror novel of sorts featuring ritual magic of the darkest kind, demonic possession, and human sacrifice, not to mention inventing a whole new demonology to drive the book. What can I say but that I don’t care to use off-the-shelf pantheons and cosmologies, and inventing your own is a lot of fun. Especially when you can bring in a shimmer of Lovecraft without actually adopting his cosmology wholesale and ending up with a fanfic piece.
If you like Halloween and supernatural fiction, and haven’t read it, Black Easter is on sale at Amazon all this spooky week for just $0.99. Grab it now and make it a week of demon worship and reading past your bedtime! And while you celebrate the spook-fest, I’ll be giving early thanks that I never lost a single finger or eye to the mad fooling with fireworks and rockets of my long-ago childhood.
Happy Halloween!
Dario Ciriello 