Round up YOUR DEAD

Or is that bring out?

Did you know Halloween is not Christian but is based on a pagan festival? Sure your Sunday School teacher befuddled you with just-so stories that the pumpkin heads with candle flames in their mouths represent the tongues on fire at Pentecost. You might still have a dim notion that Trick-or-Treat is the much sanitised, role-reversed knock-knock announcement of King Herod’s infanticides.

But these are actually hijackings of the pre-Christian past, especially as related to those ancients’ attempts to understand our ‘dark half’: Hallo, from hello, ween from the Old German wähnen, to imagine wrongly. Greetings to bad thoughts. Hail, imps of the perverse. Think on that the next time you’re complacently dancing along to the theme from Holy Ghostbusters.

Some short horror stories and not-stories

Bart: Lisa, that wasn’t scary, not even for a poem.

Lisa: Well, it was written in 1845. Maybe people were easier to scare back then.

How do you write a horror poem? And what’s a fresh way to do the ‘trapped and doomed did they but know it’ trope of the genre? Find out here.

And one more for All Saints Day: ‘Is This to Be a Psychopath Test?’

The Office series

Speaking of festivals: over on Medium I’ve completed my look-backs at all episodes of the first series of The Office (UK), in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the finale this Christmas. Here’s that first batch, listed for your laziness:

-Professionalism is.
-Seedy little men with seedy little jokes
-University Challenged
-I'll probably write a song about this
-The Office on the pull
-I know this much is true

Someone better give me a book out of this.

This month’s body-count of newsletters

The doping scandal in English literature - They’re all on it, they’re all doing it: but what is it?

James Clarke and the triage of fiction - I interview the author of Sanderson’s Isle, an Actually Good new British novel.

Genocide out of sight, out of mind - Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest, making horror without horror, and answering that perennial Q: who is this for?

From the Artless Black Library

What do zombies and prestige TV shows referencing Douglas Sirk have in common? They’re both Imitations of Life.

And criticism from the crypt

What do zombies and Anneka Rice have in common? One Cut of the Dead.