October 2016: Scary, Creepy, and Strange

Inside This Edition

It’s officially autumn, and what does that mean? The Halloween season is upon us. Around these parts, we love any excuse to celebrate creepy things and worship the (un)dead. That’s why, for our October edition, we’re offering up a slate of scary, eerie, mysterious, and maybe sometimes campy stories that are just as delicious and varied as a bag of Halloween candy.

In the terrifying Why I Don’t Let My Kids Trick-or-Treat, author S.A. Decomprosed writes such a detailed, captivating account of trick-or-treating gone awry that you’ll likely have nightmares for quite some time; first beginning with warm, familiar nostalgia for the Halloween season and slowly spiraling into grisly mayhem, this story is horror at its finest and reminiscent of a bygone era of scary movies.

Meanwhile, A Brief History of a Death by Eli Cohen is a thorough examination of a certain species of human—one we’ve come to know as the werewolf. All questions you may have about this particular breed of beast will likely be answered as the tale winds toward its chilling conclusion. But it’s not just the werewolves that give this story life, it’s also Cohen’s fantastic writing, demonstrated by numerous striking sentences and stunning paragraphs that defy criticism.

We have a trio of stories that tackle ghosts, each with a fresh take and interesting perspective. Zofia’s I Was Ghosted (By a Ghost) is a satirical look at online dating and the superficiality of modern romance, its ghostly leading man almost an afterthought, forced to take backseat to lead character (and non-ghost) Deb’s narcissism and neurosis. Dead Wrong by Hayley Nicole is told from the point of view of a character just beginning to recognize his newfound ghostliness, and desperately trying to communicate with those still alive. She Never Left by Andy Covert is a gripping flash fiction piece that takes a look at ghostly presences and motives as well as the toll their existence takes on the living-and-breathing, the writing crisp and poignant; regardless of whether or not you believe in ghosts, you’ll probably come away feeling more sympathetic toward them after reading this story, which gets into the mind of its non-living narrator so well that it’s easy to believe any actual ghosts would give this piece a stamp of authenticity. You’ll be left, much like many of the spirits in these stories, wanting more.