October's FEATURED AUTHOR: Kevin and the old-school creepies...

It's the last Wednesday in October (already?? how??) and our Featured Author Kevin Hearne is here to talk about Halloween and creepy stuff... Read on!

For Halloween, I am posting a sign on my door that says KNOCK AND I WILL CHEERFULLY CONTRIBUTE TO THE DESTRUCTION OF YOUR TOOTH ENAMEL. I may or may not append a postscript with the season’s greetings, “Muah-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!” Because there is nothing so terrifying as a visit to the dentist.

There is some debate in my house as to whether this celebrates the spirit of Halloween or not.

I may retort that we honestly don’t want to celebrate the spirit of every holiday—look closely at what Christopher Columbus did, for example, once he got to the New World, and you won’t want to celebrate that man anymore. But fine: let us celebrate an ill-defined spirit of Halloween. Creepy stuff! Yeah!

Hollywood has its own definition, but I don’t mean creepy in the modern sense—someone stalking you or sociopathic serial killers who were abused as children and now must abuse everyone else—I mean old-school creepy. Dread. A pants-crapping fear of the unknown. My stomach can’t handle modern horror: it basically turns people into victims, knocks them down on the food chain somehow, and that’s it. But Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft—those dudes knew how to crawl inside your head and mess with it a while. They created tension with mere words, not camera tricks and close-ups on the victim’s face and loud noises to startle you. So in the spirit of Halloween, why not visit (or revisit) their stories? The horror genre owes much to them. Heck, every Scooby-Doo episode with a creepy mansion in it should give credit to Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

If you have a Kindle or other electronic reader, you can get the complete works of Poe and Lovecraft either for free or for less than a dollar. But if you want to kick it old school with these old-school masters of horror and turn actual pages, there are plenty of collections out there, often with critical essays lumped in, that would look quite lovely on your shelf—after you’ve read them, of course.

My bestest recommendation: participate in All Hallow’s Read. Give someone (an age-appropriate) scary book to read. Used or new. It’s better for them than a visit to the dentist.

And in completely other, non-Halloween related news, I’d like to thank Drey for featuring me on her blog this month. I appreciate the love and I’m very grateful to you all for reading my (completely non-scary) books!

Actually, there is nothing quite so terrifying as a visit to the dentist when in need of dental work... Just visiting isn't so bad, but I hate that drill... All Hallow's Read sounds interesting, I've got it bookmarked to check later--thank you for sharing! And you can come back anytime. I love your books, and your sense of humor, and your letting me make you work! *grin* Thank you for taking the time to visit!