That headline will show up in a Google search and stir some feelings, no doubt. It’s the least I can do this Halloween– which has been an utter pain. Halloween on a Thursday, days before an election, is simply hurtful. We should all just have a wake instead, an unholy wake where we put our hands to the threshold until the other side acknowledges us, of course.

This is my time of year and it’s more than the “Spooky Season”. What draws the most intense feelings from myself is that very human sense of change, loss even. It’s a beautiful season and it makes us feel: cold returns to the air, damp seeps right through our suddenly tender skin, and our eyes begin to question the edge of every shadow. Leaves escape the branches and we have no choice but to watch the earth shut up shop. She locks the cupboards and pulls the grey veil over herself until the sun returns in an unfathomable number of months.

There is no number of layers we can hide beneath, but hiding isn’t what we do. We’re excitable creatures, and an ending seems to ignite the air. Every chill seems more kinetic with each passing twilight. We cling to the colors with heaps of decoration and the only acceptable peeping. We milk the season until every color is rung from tapestry of our world and grey is all that remains.

I love this season because I love that energy, but I also love this transition. Samhain embodied that moment where a world changes. It acknowledges that transition a person makes from the physical plane to another, but it gives them a moment to return, or at least be close– to sit pressed against the other side of that skin that divides the cold and rational from the fantastic, from myth, from eternal love, and the grandeur of our greatest fictions… and secret hopes.

Some people mark the passing of time, of their lives even, at New Years. For me, it’s Halloween. The things I didn’t do this year fall with the leaves, they fade and rot in the gutters or get raked into a bag to be trundled out of sight by a hulking truck (I wish I lived somewhere you could still burn your leaves, mmmm).

So here we are, turning that page again and I look on the greying sky and acknowledge that I had the most feverishly un-festive season imaginable. I did leap wholeheartedly into a story, which I’ve done every Halloween for years, only to not finish editing it. There is an anthology, if only a thin one, to be dropped into Amazon and/or Kobo’s pumpkin-shaped bucket on an approaching October– but I am left to mourn again this year. The harvest season ends, a page turns, something feels lost.

I will drop a draft of a story from that collection here, To Be a Wolf. Last minute adjustments had to be made to accommodate the web (do people still say “web”? Webs are a canonical Halloween decoration). This story marks the beginning of this sorrowful tradition.

Other things I did, whilst wishing I could immerse myself in more:

• Watched the first of the new Scream movies– great start, but gets pretty tedious.
• I revisited All Hallow’s Eve. Art the Clown has kindled quite the fervor this spooky season, but the end of the movie rubbed me the wrong way this time around. It’s not a cerebral movie in the first place, but the end is tainted with an angsty misogyny that’s hard to separate from political reality. At least for me, I know it doesn’t reflect the creative teams world view.
• Have been picking at Lovecraft’s Monsters, compiled by Ellen Datlow. I’d stayed away because I couldn’t discern whether it was a volume of Lovecraft stories or inspired works. Glad that it is the latter, but have to approach it a couple stories at a time– I can only take so many ambiguous endings before my brain unravels. It is a microwaved ball of human yarn, after all.
• I’ve been going on walks and listening to We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer. I’ve loved it so far. Real chills. I walk on a dark road over a body of water at night and I rounded a corner to confront a couple with a dog, under a streetlight, and unleashed a startled yell in a poor woman’s face. Headphones go in and the nerves run hot. Good stuff.
• I continue to graze at House of Leaves. I’ll finish it after I publish this anthology…
• I’ve also been battling the wind to keep my Reaper haunting (see photo). He looks different every day. Sometimes he’s just a heap of fabric ripped from an M.R. James story.

Happy Halloween friends! Remember, this is the night when your dead cells are most alive. Anyone can reach beyond the chasm when the sun sets tomorrow.

Happy haunting,

RM