What Halloween Is Like as We Grow Older

No children to take out trick or treating, and it’s likely we won’t see any coming by the house this year because it’s going to be downright frigid where I am in Colorado. Ah, well. It’s been a long, difficult road to Over It.

You’d think a horror fiction writer, zombie post-apocalypse division, would be more into the Halloween aesthetic, with photos of my decorations and morbid musings, etc., posted every day. I’d have thought so, too. I’m not crazy about the fact that my last half-dozen posts have been old geezer griping about who-cares-what, but that’s how it turned out.

My enthusiasm for Halloween has dialed back considerably since 2007, my last good year for trick-or-treating with one of my children. I hasten to add it wasn’t just my children aging out of walking around the neighborhood with their old man. The housing crisis and recession that followed began making their presence known in Colorado Springs after 2007. There was a vast difference in the mood of the people we saw in 2007 and 2008. People were happy and sharing rum shots with attendant parents from folding tables set up in the cul-de-sacs in ‘07. In ‘08 they scowled from behind closed doors.

It was in 2010 that my 17-year-old daughter, taking pity on my poor depressed carcass, slapped a full-size rubber skull mask on me and took me out trick-or-treating for the last time ever. There were a few moments out there, especially when it got thick with children on that one street and it looked like the spirit was back, if only on that one street. 

Overall, though, the joy was gone. After that I resigned myself to staying home and passing out candy. It was a difficult transition, to say the least. Like everything else about my children’s growing up, I took the loss of Halloween badly.

As for reading and writing macabre fiction, I do that year-round. The month of October doesn’t make it any more special. I used to make a point of reading favorite stories from Ray Bradbury’s The October Country, “The Wind,” “The Scythe,” The Lake,” and especially “Homecoming” on Halloween night. After a while, it felt simply repetitive. The psychic gum was losing its flavor.

The same happened to a lot of the music I listen to. I still play In the Court of the Crimson King: An Observation by King Crimson throughout the month, but it’s no longer how I open my All Hallow’s Eve drinking session. Like all of my “traditions,” it just came off forced. I didn’t want to resent the season—any season, for that matter—feeling forced to do things simply because that’s we’ve always done.

My wife still decorates with a different mix from our many boxes of seasonal decor every year. I’m content with that. I delight to see the younger children who show up for candy. I’ve trended hard towards the happy and wholesome aspect of those three to four hours of evening. I don’t even feel an urge to watch a horror movie when its done. Just groove to the orange and purple lights, and hope these children I saw who said “trick or treat” and “thank you” in their cute little voices have many happy Halloweens to come.

Afterwards, I’ll go upstairs, turn on the music, crack some beers, maybe get some writing done. Like any other night, except I’ll have some candy and pretzels with the beer. I’ll also look forward to hearing the melancholy woodwinds of King Crimson’s “I Talk to the Wind” at some point before I turn in. That much is indispensable. It is, dare I say, haunting.

It’s not that I’ve lost the ability to take pleasure in the season. I’m just not forcing it. My party days are well behind me. Also, at this late point in my life, I have ghosts to last the year. I speak to them in my office every night. Here’s to all those people I know on the other side of the veil between worlds. Maybe I’ll see some of you in costume tonight.

As for the rest of you, you know the drill. Don’t drink and drive, etc. And Happy Halloween.

The Real Ghosts of Halloween

It’s by no means a profound thought, but it occurred to me this morning as I took the Halloween decorations back out to the garage that Halloween makes a good practice run for Christmas.

It’s the same setup. Decorations and candy and costumes are in stores nearly two months before the actual holiday. (The candy and other Halloween seasonal items appeared at my local Safeway in mid-August.) The movies and TV specials are hyped. Parties are thrown and attended. No gifts bought or given, though. This is the practice run.

Eventually, unless you’re one of the many young adults spending the actual night of the event getting inebriated while in costume, you might be home for the thing Halloween is actually about: three to four hours of waiting by the door for the trick-or-treaters to come.

I got all of two pages edited and a couple of lines of a poem started when the pen started drying out on me. (All four colors! Actually, it’s just a super-cheap pen I picked up for free at a job fair, so I got what I paid for.) Then it got too chilly to sit still, so I went inside.

What 31 October means as I get older: the dying light of a dying season, as the old year’s life fades into a long interregnum (at least here in Colorado) of cold, dry, brown death until next year’s life takes hold. Happy Halloween!

Like Christmas, these weeks of lead-up culminate in a few hours of actual observance on the special day. Halloween, with its 5 pm - 9 pm window for trick-or-treating, probably lasts longer than Christmas for most people, whose entire Christmas proper is less than one hour spent around the tree tearing the paper from presents, before wandering off to watch television.

It’s probably just me and maybe half a dozen other people, but I always feel a tinge of melancholy among the celebrations. I’m reminded of Halloweens past, when I used to escort my small children about our old north Colorado Springs neighborhood. I remember when that neighborhood used to be a lot quieter and friendlier, in happier, more stable economic times.

I’m over the hardest part, which is the crushing sense of irrelevancy one feels when one’s children no longer needs him to take them through the neighborhoods. Still....

I’ve been turning this around in recent years by reminding myself again that this is a fool’s despair spiral. Neighborhoods change. Everything changes. Children grow up, as well they should. We all grow old, if we’re lucky. 

“For soon all shall go dark.” Is that gothic enough for ya?

Halloween 2017 went quietly, as it did last year. We saw maybe all of ten trick-or-treaters, most of them small children. I would have liked to have seen more, but maybe that will change over the years. Everything else has.

And so we begin the run-up to Christmas. 

The large secondhand store along the main drag where I live traditionally closes the day before Halloween and opens a couple of days later in full Christmas mode. It’s the only place that does this in town that I know of, and it doesn’t come across quite as “Oh, dear, Christmas decorations right after Halloween!” obnoxious as one might think. It’s just what they do.

I’m blessed to live in a small town, without broadcast television leading us into the temptation of leaving the set on to blare commercials for whatever fad toys/gadgets/etc. the Lords of Commerce seek to promote this season. My wife will decorate the house accordingly after Thanksgiving, which is our tradition. We stand a good chance of having both our grown children home for the holiday.

“But first, we must enter through this door.” [*evil cackling laughter*]

You’d think this lack of external stimulation would slow the days down for us, but I’ve noticed it has the precise opposite effect. Charles Bukowski was right, as always, the days really do run like wild horses over the hills, so much so that my ghosts are falling behind me. As they should. The Good Old Days are now.

See you next year!

Towards a More Splendid Retelling of a Holiday “Classic”

Yes, those scare quotes are there for a reason. Happy Halloween.

Fortunately, Charlie Brown had a trick-or-treat bag full of rocks. Which is the one part of that half-century-old holiday TV special that’s always bothered me...honestly, what kind of neighborhood is this where everyone seems to know who you are, even in costume (granted, it was full of holes), and the adults managing the candy of every house drop a rock in your bag while giving the rest of the children candy? (Don’t even get me started on the soul-crushingly depressing Christmas special.) 

Fortunately, this meme redeems the Great Pumpkin storyline. Here, the adults of Charlie Brown’s neighborhood recognize Charlie Brown as the Chosen One, though they dare not speak of this in front of their cruel and hateful children. For Charlie Brown is mankind’s best hope to resist the emergent Great Evil Foretold, who was prophesied to appear to them as a neurotic, but preternaturally articulate and intelligent kindergarten boy with a somewhat off-putting predilection for sucking his thumb while rubbing a dirty blue blanket on one side of his face. 

That Linus and and the eternally outcast Charlie Brown were the next best thing to best friends makes the showdown all the more poignant. For only one can walk away....

Drive By Reviews: THE WITCH

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY/TL;DR: Apparently I alone among reviewers found Mark Korven’s soundtrack loud and annoying. Fortunately, a well-established sense of impending doom and fine acting by the cast salvage writer/director Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New England Folktale as a watchable film. If you enjoyed watching those three college students lose their minds over the course of The Blair Witch Project, you shouldn’t get too bored as the Thing in the Woods slowly exerts its cruelty on this exiled and isolated family in 1630 New England. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it was an extremely qualified enjoyment, hence the long review.

Robert Eggers’ The Witch reminded me a lot of The Blair Witch Project, which is an issue that should be dealt with immediately, as the latter film elicits strong feelings on either side. Although The Witch is a straightforward narrative showing the viewer many things the film’s characters do not see, as opposed to the found-footage pastiche of The Blair Witch Project, both films evoke a deliciously oppressive sense of isolation and dread. 

When the colonial New England family is banished from “the plantation” as it’s referred to at times throughout The Witch, we watch from the family’s point of view as they ride away. Settlers and even the Indians of the village regard them briefly and turn away to their business, and it’s right there that the viewer realizes the characters are riding away to a lonely execution. It’s the same feeling one has watching The Blair Witch Project’s trio of college students leave their car. You look at the car in that shot, and know that’s the last you, or the future human sacrifices entering the Dire Woods, are ever going to see of it. 

You can’t see the Evil for the trees. Good thing this will all be strip malls and fast food joints one day.

In both films there is an Unseen Evil in the Dire Woods that plays with its hapless victims before going in for the final kill. The difference between the films becomes more acute in the details, though. In The Blair Witch Project, you see and hear the reactions of the terrified students, but it’s difficult to make out the exact noises in the woods that are unnerving them. 

In The Witch, an infant disappears from a blanket in an instant in the course of a game of peek-a-boo with his angel-faced sister. It would be enough to drive anyone insane for the sheer unreality of it. Yet the frantic girl looks to the woods as if they indeed did make an infant vanish. A wolf ends up taking the blame, the 17th century New England equivalent of “a dingo ate the baby.” But the girl—and everyone else—comes to suspect dear Thomasin of something.

The director and cinematographer like this angel face so much it fills the screen in the film’s opening shot (this isn’t it), in case you don’t get later that she’s going to be a focal point.

The family set against one another is another dominating sub-trope of the fatal isolation of our victims that The Witch shares with The Blair Witch Project. In this movie, though, the director is not content to leave his audience wondering what is going on in those woods. 

Cue the loud and annoying “Are you scared yet?” music, and we’re seeing flashes of an infant wriggling naked by flickering firelight. The flat of a blade is pressed against his chest. We see the naked—sagging and unattractive, alas—buttocks of a woman thrusting suggestively in the dark, but given the blood that’s filling the container by her side, she’s into something as good as sex for her.

This scene bothered me, and for all the wrong reasons. Why did we need to see this? That the baby vanished within mere seconds in a game of peek-a-boo, far from the line of the woods or any animals, with no evidence of its abduction beyond the empty blanket, should have sufficed to inform the viewer that a supernatural agency is at work. As it is, we know the baby has met a sticky end, and this viewer, for one, was grateful the writer/director had enough restraint to spare us the poor child’s cry, let alone the sight of its dismemberment.

One would think they would blame Indians in the woods over a wolf for the abduction of the baby. However politically incorrect it is to ascribe any negative tendencies whatsoever to pet demographic groups, these things did happen—and if, indeed, as stated on a title card at the beginning of the film, that the very dialogue was taken from contemporary writings—writer/director Robert Eggers had to know this. 

As it happens, Indians do not exist to so much as hunt or travel through this blue-gray corner of New England in 1630. It might have added a more sinister note if someone had brought that up, e.g., “Is it not strange that even the savages avoid these accursed woods?” As the patriarch of a family exiled to the wilderness, I would be very interested in why this common 1600s problem isn’t a problem where I am. Is it the lack of game? So what is keeping the game out of these perfectly good woods?

Instead of asking existential questions about his infant brother’s chances of going to heaven since he died unbaptized, how about, “Father, of all the places we may have settled, why this patch of perpetual blue-gray gloom where nothing can possibly grow?”

This is a factor in the family’s rapidly deteriorating circumstances. A blight has taken their crop and they will not have food to last them the winter. A hunting trip turns up nothing but a revelation that the family patriarch has taken and sold one of his wife’s heirloom possessions for—I wasn’t quite sure. All we’re left with is that the father is morally compromised, and we’re under the impression this somehow has made him and his family vulnerable to some form of dark retribution.

For all that got so needlessly spelled out in the humping hag buttocks/knife on the baby scene, there’s much more that’s needlessly murky. The business with the silver cup the father sold is the one that’s most annoying, because the mother brings it up time and again, accusing her children of taking it. The father, to his credit, comes to their defense. (It’s a big plus in this film that the father is not an evil hardass as one might expect of religious family patriarchs.) There are other matters, however.

The murkiest for me was the time frame. How long was this family in this eternally blue-gray clearing outside of the woods before the evil in there decided to take an interest? We see the family tried and exiled at the beginning, then the next thing we see they not only have a house, but a barn, and corrals for livestock. How long did that all take to build? And where did they get livestock, when all they’d left with was the clothes on their backs? 

For that matter, what were they doing with an oversized billy goat named Black Phillip? I didn’t see any female goats he would be mated with. When did the goat start talking to the twins? There is a set of younger twins, a girl and a boy, who taunt Thomasin for being the witch who sacrificed their unbaptized brother. Black Phillip supposedly told them all about it. What on earth are they doing with this clearly Satanic creature?

The twins seem to know something is up, which alarms Thomasin, as she’s not sure. Meanwhile, the pubescent middle brother, Caleb, whom we’ve already caught making furtive glances at his angel-faced sister’s chest, is on some kind of quest to prove himself. Separated from Thomasin in the woods, he finds himself before a house where a seductive brunette comes out to meet him. You know once she starts kissing the innocent Caleb that an arm is going to come around, and it isn’t going to be an arm, but something more like a claw. (It is!)

Caleb returns home naked in the rain and...I don’t want to give away the whole movie. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed The Witch for precisely the same reason as The Blair Witch Project. It isn’t the supernatural element that provides the terror so much as isolation and the fragility of the human mind under stress. Some people find this process boring. For me, it’s the only thing that makes the movie watchable.

The CinemaSins YouTube channel covers everything that bothered me about the film, from the murky dialogue to the murky cinematography, to the fact that this family, for their own supernatural ability to get an entire compound erected in no time flat, haven’t gotten a handle on hunting and fishing. For those who have already seen The Witch, or those who don’t care about spoilers—I have the same issues with The Witch’s ending as the CinemaSins guy—this is a good, comprehensive watch.

“What happened in this barn? Why did the witch kill all the animals? How? What happened to the twins? How did I sleep through all of this? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS, and a sick feeling the writer doesn’t have a good answer for any of them. He’s just making it up as he goes along by this point.”

If you’re bored and like watching doomed people meet their ends, you’ll enjoy this. But this is one of those films that falls apart the more time you have to think about it. For all the rookie sloppiness of the story and its execution, The Witch is far from a classic. It is, however, a decent diversion.

A Freshly Haunted Office for 2016

My office space in Monte Vista is over three months old and I’ve yet to get settled. I have the same shelving I had at the last place, but the feeling here is different. Even the books aren’t arranged the same.

Time and Halloween wait for no one, though, so we have to take...stabs (heh) at bringing the spirit of the season into my holy reader’s/writer’s sanctuary. We’ll begin with the cheapie Sam’s Club bookshelf seen at right, and work our way around the room.

Individual books have come and gone, but the basic concepts regarding the content of the shelves remain. The top shelf is still comprised of those first books I bought with my own money as a grade-schooler, with other volumes honoring my favorite early reading experiences. (Yes, I favor Stephen R. Donaldson’s first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever for inspiration over Tolkien. Fight me.)

The second shelf expands on those early experiences, including one of my more indispensable volumes I wish I’d had as a younger man, namely, the precise scores to all The Beatles’ songs. Also included are my favorite collection of Hunter Thompson essays in the original Rolling Stone Press hardcover, along with a Vonnegut omnibus, almost all of my all-time favorite novels, my favorite book by Hemingway, my favorite miscellaneous short story collection....

Of course, I’ve put copies of my own books in between. The sight of them from across the room makes me sit up straighter in my chair.

Uncle Harlan gets his own shelf, as always. The papier-mache ghost in the middle was constructed by my wife while on the night shift sometime in the early 1990s. The stack of glowing skulls to the left are a 2016 purchase. I have no idea where vampire Abe Simpson came from. We have a lot of stuff like that. The Burlap Bunny by the skulls is from my wife’s family, going way back to nobody knows.

The decorations as a whole peter out by the Great Wall of Bukowski below, and are absent entirely from the bottom row with its novel galleys and coffee table books.

There is an overflow shelf, incidentally, for all the Bukowski and Harlan Ellison that didn’t fit, along with some more Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and one of Bukowski’s favorite novelists, John Fante.

Back to regularly scheduled Halloween decor, already in progress. My reading/review corner on the west wing of the office looks good lit up. The Jack in the Hat shows very well.

As does the dormer area where my desk is. Unfortunately, the lights hanging here began blinking out of nowhere one night—they hadn’t for weeks of use beforehand—before burning out entirely. It’s just as well. Those were old-school lights, and I intend to replace everything with LEDs as we go.

These characters have my back. The married couple in the right background are another new addition. My wife has been very good about bringing in some new to mix with the old. That cauldron at right has proved too handy for holding my Sharpies and is in imminent danger of becoming a permanent fixture.

You may recognize the Moon-Faced Rogue from my 2013 post. He used to live on one of the Sam’s Club bookshelves.

Again, more newcomers. As is appropriate to things Halloween, they twitch uncomfortably in direct sunlight. The click-click-click of their swinging provides a rhythm for my staccato typing to follow.






















We close with the three-string concatenation of orange lights in that difficult-to-resolve east wing of my office. They’re the best lighting that dark, blighted end has seen in a while. My wife has offered to affix the the adhesive-backed plastic hooks for string of LEDs, white, orange, or Christmassy to be run through. I’m thinking, heck, why not?

Happy Halloween to you and yours.