#HALLOWEEN: MASQUERADE

#HALLOWEEN: TRICK OR TREAT

Don’t bother trying to find it. You won’t find anything about the name of the town or what happened here. This manuscript will be found long after the events that transpired in this place, but I hope against everything else that you’re someone in a position of power. I pray to God Himself that you can prevent this from ever happening again, but I don’t want to give you too much credit. Like me, you are only human, after all. They are not. They’ve been around for a very, very long time. 

Fat chance, really. You probably don’t want that responsibility, and even if you did take it upon your shoulders to track them down, you can’t single-handedly stop the children. Their manipulators are not “on the grid.” Whoever engineered this is in control of the world on a very disturbing level.

This is what I want you to do. Read this, if they’re still legible, and take what you will from them. Don’t go on a wild goose chase, and realize that when you find this book that it will not be in the place where I left it. They’ll move it somewhere else, to deceive you. I’ve left my mark on a tree there. Only then, when you see my name, will you know, “this is the place.” You may have even heard of it in the history books, but be assured, any rumors on Wikipedia or Google pages that you pull up will be guess-work at best. None of them are even close to the truth. When you find the place, there may already be another town just like it. That’s what I’m trying to stop. If we’re not successful, then just realize, above all things, that evil exists. I’m not talking about bad people, or tragic accidents. I’m talking about real, intelligent, ancient evil. It is calculated, and it is always one step ahead of you. Should you decide to take my place and become the paragon to prevent the corruption of the hearts and minds of children, I thank you in advance.

I told you that I’m human. I lied. I used to be, before All Hallow’s Eve on that fateful night. I’ve been alive since then, far longer than any human being, and the reason is because I love children. I’ve always loved them in their purity and their innocence. That’s why I was taken in by their ruse. That’s why I’ve finally decided to put all this down, centuries later. I won’t be here much longer, and someone has to take up the burden.

I’ve waited… until I saw them return. They’ll be back this year. They’re planning the same thing again, and I can’t stop them. Again, I can’t expect that much from you, but I’m only giving you all this so you’ll believe me. I have to be believable. If you think I’m crazy, you’ll ignore this, and more people will disappear. It’s time to tell you what happened. I’m rambling.

Back then, All Hallow’s Eve was the time for evil’s ascension. You’ve all forgotten. If you left your house on that night in the old country, you were a devil worshipper. “Halloween” was not the term we used. We fled to the shores of this country because we were persecuted for our lifestyle choices. We worshipped nature, the changing of the seasons, the solstice of spring, autumn, winter, and summer. In the purest sense of the word, we were Druids. Our names and accents were English, but we were servants of the earth.

We were some of the first to celebrate it as a holiday. The natives here were puzzled by our behavior, but also frightened by it, and so they left us alone. They misunderstood. We were not the ones to be afraid of. At the time, I was relieved. They’d attacked us in our settlements, time and time again, but as it drew closer to the end of October, they stayed away. Maybe in their own noble bonds with the earth and soil, they knew something terrible was on the horizon.

They were right. John Hunter’s little boy wanted to be a native, with a bow and arrow and a real headdress. Little Mary Taylor made a dress that was crafted after the local schoolhouse teacher’s prettiest outfit. She idolized her educator, of course. They all had their get-ups; they were the first trick-or-treaters in what was to become the United States of America, one hundred and fifty years later. We sent them out to frollick about the settlement, collecting apples and tarts and other sweet things in to their burlap goody bags. There were no Snickers or Milky Ways, and yet, the magic of this “holiday” held no less sway over them than it does the youth of our current time. They dress up as the Joker, the Power Rangers, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These children were their predecessors.

I sent my daughter with Mary and John Hunter, Jr. Despite our mistrust and wariness of the Anglican church and the monarchs that presided over it, my little girl was dressed as the Queen of England. I refused to crush her fantasy world, and so I simply indulged her. We heard promises to return after sundown, to say yes ma’am and no sir, and not to linger too long if they were invited inside the households of our community.

We didn’t realize that the house on the edge of the settlement existed until we saw the children go inside. There were no lanterns or sources of light in the windows, no fire or harvest dolls on the outside of the dwelling. As we sat in the middle of the town hall, imbibing in the pleasures of distilled moonshine amongst our brethren, we watched our young ones gravitate across the middle of our town, to the foreboding household that had seemingly been constructed overnight. When we gazed upon it, it seemed as though the place were “shimmering.” It pained my vision to look upon the building, as if my senses were being forced and propelled in another direction. Such a thing is difficult to put in to words, but I seemed to be the only one who realized that our kids were all heading to the same place. When I questioned John Hunter as if something were odd about their actions, he stared at me as if I were insane.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “There’s no house there. They’re going to play by the stockades.”

The sun had set by that point, but as I said before, none of them were concerned. The natives hadn’t shown up for weeks. I decided to walk to the phantom dwelling that only I and the children could see, to peer inside and see who these new settlers were, and why it called to the youths as if it were a black hole in a sea of stars.

I tried to stand outside, to look through the window, but when I saw what was happening, it was too late. I breached the doorway with my buck-knife drawn, but there was nothing about the things inside that I could harm with a weapon.

There’s something deep inside of us, something embedded within the human spirit, that’s perfectly aware when we encounter something truly terrible. Fear, horror, evil, revulsion…. it all hits you in a spastic wave, like a fierce exploding bullet that shatters the innermost parts of your soul with a relentless and powerful fury. I saw it in that moment, standing in that darkened doorway.  

They weren’t people.

They were halfway there, lingering over the unconscious bodies of my daughter and her peers in their hooded black robes of half-existence. There was one, in particular, who made me feel as though my eyes would pop like ripened cherries when I stared at it. It was the leader, the source of that tug, that pull... and it was slowly fading, disappearing like a gaseous black cloud of death, through my little girl’s nostrils and mouth. She was gasping for air, as if every breath after the one that preceded it were filled with acid... as if she were hungry for real, fresh air in her small lungs. With every breath, the figure faded deeper in to her, along with the rest of them.

I wish I could say that I was a hero, and that I hacked them all to bits; I wish I could say that I saved the day and made Halloween a night when the worst thing that children have to worry about is poisoned candy. It didn’t happen. There was one of them left, floating toward me on elongated, blackened tendrils of shimmering nothingness. By all real means of my imagination, it shouldn’t have BEEN there, but it was, and soon, it was going inside of me. The last thing I saw were their little feet, scurrying out of the phantom-house and in to the town. I FELT that something terrible was about to happen. I had no idea. Everything went black, and then, I was outside of myself. I was conscious, but observing my feet, my hands, doing things beyond my own scope of physical control.

They led me and our children in to our meeting hall, where, of course, the kids were embraced by the open, loving arms of their parents. I witnessed the betrayal, the brutal moments in which the truth instilled by the love for family and offspring would transform in to a cause for the destruction of our village.

They absorbed them. There’s no better adjective for what happened. One moment, they were there, and seconds later, they were nothing but dark essence, filtering in through the eyes and noses and mouths of their devil-children. It was over in minutes. A night that should have been a celebration of nature, of the seasons, had turned in to the end of everything that we knew and loved here in our new land.

I started to fight it. The kids knew. The moment I began to resist, to try and reclaim my limbs and mind from the corrupting influence within, their heads snapped back from their feast of souls to survey me in my struggle. My daughter’s eyes were sunken, black pools of the abyss, devoid of any emotion, any semblance of the bright-eyed stare that she once held for me in all her love and adoration for father. I miss that the most, really. The way she’d run to me when I came in from the fields every evening as the sun went down. I lived for that. What reason do I have to live now, other than to find her and stop them? I’m incapable. That falls on you, my friend.

They took the part of my daughter that counts, the part that I loved and cherished, and turned her into a servant. You ask me why I’m still alive, and again, it’s because I love her, so very, very much. Her body is a hollow shell, filled with the malice and blackness of evils beyond our world.

The black-robed things have grown as centuries have passed. They are from some place that is not of this universe, but their urgency, their hunger, to devour and destroy, is insatiable. It’s an exponential, amplifying contagion on mankind, and All Hallow’s Eve is their pinnacle, their Christmas. I’ve done my best to warn you throughout history, to leave my mark in places where their desolation has left nothing but dust on the wind and empty houses. A deserted football field in a Texas ghost town. A card room in the back of a night club in Chicago, right under the nose of civilization. Roanoke Island, North Carolina, before John Rolfe found it in the aftermath. 

The thing that I expelled through sheer force of will alone has left me with an unusually long and empty life, devoid of anything but my desire for revenge. I have failed. I’m pleading with you. October 31st is not long away. My little girl, or what’s left of her, is going to lead them to the same place. It’s been re-founded, except now, it hums with sport utility vehicles and cell phones. I don’t want this to happen to your child.

Go to Roanoke, and stop them from repeating the ritual. Those bodies they inhabit now are frail, on their way out. It’s been almost five hundred years. They’ll need new ones on this Halloween. Look for a building that appears as though it shouldn’t be there. It will be across from that very tree where I signed my name, where I made my mark. I changed my title, named myself after the tribe of natives who knew it was coming…. who, perhaps, tried to warn us, but for some reason, we failed to heed or recognize their warnings. They were more closely attuned to the earth than us, and yet, they were still wiped out, eventually. 

Trick or treat?

Go now. You don’t have much time.

- Croatoan

Story source.

REVIEW: JUG FACE

Jug Face is a tough film to breakdown and criticize. It is extremely well-made with what no one would refuse as an original story. It is an uncomfortable experience at times, and injected with the kinds of seediness you'd expect in a film featuring incest, filthy backwoods simpletons, roadkill for dinner, and Larry Fessenden. 

In Jug Face, a young girl named Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) looks her destiny literally right in the eyes and refuses it. This decision sets off a chain of events that will rattle her small backwoods community and leave behind a wake of blood. As simple a summation as I can make without sending readers less willing to sit through an uncompromising experience like Jug Face running for the hills. To offer up additional story details (as I'll do in a moment) is to risk turning off those looking for a more straightforward story about forest voodoo, but, you should know exactly what you're getting into.

Writer/director Chad Crawford Kinkle has crafted an interesting story here. It's layered enough to bring legitimacy to even the most absurd development, but purposely vague enough that the events of the present aren't overshadowed by the mythology of the past. And from a stylistic standpoint alone, Jug Face is very good. Its unique story is backed up by a great cast, including Larry Fessenden and Sean Young as Ada's parents, and Sean Bridgers ("Justified") as the simple-minded shaman of sorts. 

Deep southern territory is always an interesting place in which to set a story. It is in these areas where ties to religion remain the strongest and the most unshaken. At first its people were only characterized by their religion, but recently, under the political microscope, their religion has come to define them. And it's made them an easy target for mockery. Their beliefs mixed with their unfortunate histories of offensive ideologies (and add a dash of that long southern drawl) can sometimes make them seem simple, foreign, and even intimidating. So, when you've got a film in which a small group of inbreeding families live deep, deep in the southern woods and who offer human sacrifices to a magical pit in exchange for said pit's healing powers, and when the person being sacrificed is chosen by a ceramic jug made by a simple-minded man with ties to a mysterious force, well, you might just respond with, "Yeah, and? This is the south, after all. Who knows what goes on there?"

None of that is really supposed to read as offensive; instead it's supposed to shine a light on the extreme chasm between the northern and southern sensibilities that have been in place since basically the formation of the United States. The north thinks the south are simple and crazy; the south thinks the north are godlesss baby killers. This is not something with which I necessarily agree, but a person can only resist such broad beliefs and stereotypes before some of them begin to take root. (I bet I'm one of the few with the balls willing to admit that.) 

The events of Jug Face are far-fetched, ridiculous, and some might argue stupid. What's not far-fetched, ridiculous, or stupid, is that I could very easily read in tomorrow's paper that a small patch of isolated people living in the woods passionately believed in the power of a magical pit, human sacrifice, and anthropomorphic jugs. I'm not making fun. I'm saying this because this is where Jug Face is at its most affecting and powerful. When it comes to religion, people will believe anything. They will believe in the resurrected dead, angels, demons, magic, miracles, reincarnation, and anything else, so long as their parents before them believed it and bestowed it at a young enough age. 

Jug Face is creepy, seedy, disturbing, startling, and a little fucked up.

And I highly recommend it.

#HALLOWEEN: MOUNDSHROUD

“Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.”

#HALLOWEEN: RECOMMENDED READING: HALLOWEEN – MAGIC, MYSTERY, & THE MACABRE

The Halloween anthology has become a large part of my yearly October traditions – whether decades old or hot off the press, I’m always eager to snap up a “new” one and give it a read. These days it’s easier than ever to slap together an anthology, upload it to CreateSpace or whatever self-publishing medium, and unleash it onto the world. Amazon is dripping with e-books available for free download offered by hopeful authors, and like anything else that becomes saturated to that extent, it becomes difficult to find the truly special collections.

And here we have Halloween: Magic, Mystery and the Macabre, edited by Paula Guran, barely a month old as I write this. The cover sports names that I certainly recognize, but most of them do not ring a bell. I did enjoy Guran’s previous collection, simply titled Halloween, for the most part, and she was kind enough to lend me a copy of her second anthology to read and present as part of my October celebration.

Eighteen stories make-up this collection, and let me just spare both you and myself the following: This time out I’ll avoid doing my usual breaking down of each story, as we’ll be here all day and no doubt there are pumpkins out there to be carved and witchy ceremonies to perfect. As I’ve mentioned before, anthologies by nature are a Rorschach test. For those of a less critical mind, I suppose it’s easier to find an anthology in which every story enthralls and entertains, but frankly, it’s tough to put out such a collection with different authors taking different directions that still manages to please everyone. That’s the beauty of the individual.

Halloween: Magic, Mystery and the Macabre is no different.

So, the standouts:

Norman Partridge is an author with whom I am well familiar, as his novel, Dark Harvest, is frankly one of my favorites. (Read all about that one here.) His contribution here, “The Mummy’s Heart,” is hands-down one of – if not the – best in the collection. A story that begins with two brothers setting out for an innocent night of trick-or-treating and encountering a local kid named Charlie Steiner, who may very well have lost a little bit of his mind and perfected his mummy costume to the extent that he ordered water scum from the River Nile and cut off his own tongue. When the boys cross paths with this mummy, the story is legitimately eerie and upsetting—and it packs a rather hurtful revelation. Partridge is great with details, insofar as making each minor thing such as the moon or darkness seem alive and contain motive. He writes his story with such a realistic approach that it honest-to-gosh feels like it happened to him. At one point he even says something to the effect of, “Google it and see for yourself,” which I fully admit to doing.

The first part of “The Mummy’s Heart” seems like nothing more than haunted childhood recollection. You nearly expect it to end once the faux ending occurs, but there’s much more to this story – so much that it goes from a pulpy monster story to something much more haunting and heartbreaking. “The Mummy’s Heart” plays around with this idea of becoming someone else on Halloween night with the aid of a mask and costume, but what it really seems to be about is being driven to insanity by the idea that one is not happy with the person they are and wishes to become someone/thing else – and will do nearly anything to make that transition happen. And that’s just for the “villain.” It also plays around with refusal to recognize reality for what it is – to be haunted by dreams much more than nightmares. It’s the reason I continue to celebrate Partridge the author as years go by. He so easily writes about human emotion and longing that frankly it doesn’t matter what kind of ghastly device he’s using to frame his story – it’s always about much more.

Laird Barron continues this theme of love lost and found with “The Black Dog,” a tale in which a young (?) couple meet on a blind date in a restaurant. They embark on witty banter and attempt fact-finding missions about each other – the usual first-date kind of stuff. But here’s the thing: Is she, in actuality, dead? Is he? Both, or neither? Under the All Hallow’s sky, these two lost souls meet and remember what it is to yearn again. Though it’s told primarily from the man’s point of view, the woman provides us enough insight that it’s clear she’s just as troubled and lonely as he is.

There’s a beautiful ambiguity draped over every inch of “The Black Dog.” As the story progresses, you nearly want to race through every sentence to unearth the revelation that will hopefully explain the very odd circumstances in which these two people have found each other. A meal at a restaurant to a night walk across a bridge to sitting together in the woods – it’s a first date many would be consider to be ideal…except for that ominous idling van, of course.  By my nature I’m attracted to things with a certain kind of sad beauty. It’s a reason why I love the works of Norman Partridge, and it’s also why I’ll certainly be checking out more work by Laird Barron, as well.

Source.

Switching things up is “For the Removal of Unwanted Guests” by A.C. Wise. A story about a man named Michael moving into his new house who must contend with the random witch who shows up on his doorstep telling him she’ll be moving in. Just like that. The witch brings with her a black cat, as well as every manner of magical skill – she knows that one of the steps in the house is made of wood taken from a shipwrecked vessel, or the answer to one of the riddles in the old crossword puzzle Michael is holding. (She’s a witch, after all.) At first Michael wants nothing more than for her to leave – he even finds a spell in the witch’s book of magic strictly dedicated to (insert the story’s title here) – but after a while, what should be an easy decision to make becomes one with which he wrestles, to the point he might even MISS her once she’s gone…

“For the Removal of Unwanted Guests” is wonderfully and addictively absurd, yet charming. It’s a quirky story that seems to become more so as the pages turn. It’s nice counter-reading to the other darker and more haunting stories. There’s nothing especially horrific about the tale, except of course for something Michael’s unwanted guest states:

“Life isn’t fair. Nobody gets to choose whether they have a normal happy one or not. If they did, do you think anyone would get sick, or have their hearts broken? Would anyone die? It doesn’t work that way.”

Still, it might just be the most horrific statement in the entire book…because it’s absolutely true.

“We, the Fortunate Bereaved” by Brian Hodge breathes life into the scarecrow legend of Halloween, which may or may not be rooted in historical lore. The scarecrow has been associated with Halloween for a long time, and Hodge’s story concocts a perfectly appropriate scenario as to why. Every year on Halloween night, in the town of Dunhaven, townspeople gather objects that symbolize the dearly departed in hopes that, if left as an offering, the spirit of their deceased loved one will fill the scarecrow and share a message with the bereaved. Many townspeople vie yearly for this chance, and among them for the first time are Bailey and her young son, Cody, who wishes to see the resurrected spirit of his father, Drew. Also hoping to see the return of a loved one is a young woman named Melanie, whose sister, Angela, went missing several years before and was never found, so was presumed dead.

I rather liked this story, as it reinforces the idea of “maybe it’s better not to know.” Cody is eager to ask his father about the afterlife and what the “rules” are, while Melanie wants to ask Angela who was responsible for her disappearance and death. The story’s themes are open to multiple interpretations, but I prefer to think that existence, as we know it, is so terrible – lacking actual humanity amongst its humans – that the dead don’t so much as choose to come back as they’re forced to.

As you can imagine, I’m really fun at parties.

These aren’t the only stories in the collection worth a read, but they were my personal favorites. Halloween: Magic, Mystery and the Macabre, as they say, has something for everyone. I’m personally drawn toward the dark and bleak, and so stories of that nature were my own highlights. But the book celebrates every kind of genre and approach – real history is intertwined with lycanthropy; real international conflicts are explored through themes of cults, insanity, and vampirism; some stories are quirky, some are anything but. My one real complaint about the anthology (and it’s one I often have with Halloween anthologies) is that while many of the stories contain Halloween elements, they’re not actually about Halloween in any way. Werewolves and vampires are fun and all, but their only ties to Halloween are that they’re spooky and monstrous, and so is Halloween, and so therefore, a connection. However, I can’t in good conscience say any of these stories are poorly written because they’re not; they’re just not entirely what the title promises.

Still, I heartily recommend Halloween: Magic, Mystery and the Macabre. The book itself is nice and weighty; its girth confirms you'll be getting a lot of bang for your buck. It's not quite as large as, say, October Dreams, but it's certainly one of the larger anthologies out there that (mostly) celebrates this time of year. Pretty jacket art, too.

Paula Guran has released a second collection of strong stories, and though not all of them will scratch that Halloween itch, most of them will, and that’s worth the price of admission alone.

Contents:

Introduction: New Boo – Paula Guran
Thirteen – Stephen Graham Jones
The Mummy's Heart – Norman Partridge
Unternehmen Werwolf – Carrie Vaughn
Lesser Fires – Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem
Long Way Home: A Pine Deep Story – Jonathan Maberry –
Black Dog – Laird Barron
The Halloween Men – Maria V. Snyder
Pumpkin Head Escapes – Lawrence C. Connolly
Whilst the Night Rejoices Profound and Still – Caitlín R. Kiernan
For the Removal of Unwanted Guests – A. C. Wise
Angelic – Jay Caselberg
Quadruple Whammy – Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
We, The Fortunate Bereaved – Brian Hodge
All Hallows in the High Hills – Brenda Cooper
Trick or Treat – Nancy Kilpatrick
From Dust – Laura Bickle
All Souls Day – Barbara Roden
And When You Called Us We Came To You – John Shirley

Buy.

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Contest!

If you've read this far, then you're in luck. I'll be giving away one copy of Dark Harvest, a novel by Norman Partridge, one of the authors featured in the above collection. 

You only have to do two things:

1. "Like" The End of Summer on Facebook.

2. E-mail endofsummerblog@gmail.com (subject line DARK HARVEST CONTEST), verify your Facebook name, and share with me one of your favorite Halloween books. It doesn't necessarily have to be about Halloween – just something you may read every year to celebrate. Most importantly: Tell me why you read it! 

That's it!

(Contest closes at 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, October 19. Winners will be contacted via e-mail.)

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#HALLOWEEN: CRAPPYPASTA: THE ACCIDENT

The one was a bunch of kids that always dressed up like it was Halloween and there parents didn’t like them so they told the bud driver to chain them up and take them to a quarry and run the bus of the cliff so the bus driver turnened into the quarry and the little vampire kid got out of his chains and killed the buss driver and drove the buss right off the cliff the all died and 8 years later on Halloween 4 kids investigated the place and the kids came out of the quarry and ate all the kids butt one

Um...[sic].

God love you, Crappypasta.

#HALLOWEEN: THE OCTOBER GAME: EC STYLE