Jolene Haley is hosting a horror writer and illustrator showcase on her website to celebrate the spookiest of months. My story, "Food and Drink Man" is featured today. The Thornewood Hotel has seven stories and 666 rooms. Sometimes it has grand elevators and a ballroom. The staff mostly keep out of site, but they are watching. … Continue reading The Rooms the Guests Never See – 13 Days until Halloween
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen my posts about #SpookyEmpireRefugees. It was heart-breaking, then heart-warming, and overall an incredible event for Central Florida's horror community. I had spooky plans for the first weekend in October. Somehow, The Addams Family musical, Halloween Horror Nights, and Spooky Empire all came together at the … Continue reading Spooky Empire Refugees – 20 Days until Halloween
We've weathered Hurricane Matthew, and the past weekend was more and less spooky than planned before the storms rolled through Florida. I have stories and photos to share. If you want to help out, there are many, many people within the United States and the Caribbean who were devastated by Hurricane Matthew. The American Red … Continue reading #HurricaneHorrorNights – 21 Days until Halloween
There is Halloween in the woods. Limbs and leaves fall. Decomposers invade. The trees take on a different beauty in death, with fungi threading through its tissue, splitting its bark open. Beautiful rot, as it becomes part of the forest floor. Orange fungi. Black muck.
A taxidermied Bufo marinus that’s been made into a change purse is a permanent resident of my office at my day job. Animals skulls and insects preserved in jars keep it company. My coworkers have different bones and dead things at their desks. So it is with field biologists: we love critters so much, we bring them back … Continue reading Halloween at Work – 25 Days until Halloween
October is my birthday month, and my family celebrates it with me by filling the month with spooky goodies. We started the month off by going to The Addams Family musical. I've loved The Addams Family since watching re-runs of the television show as a kid and discovering the cartoons by Charles Addams as a teen. The … Continue reading Addams Family Night Out – 27 Days until Halloween
Happy, happy Halloween! It's the finale of my celebration of October and the spooky things that emerge at this time of year. My Halloween morning was perfect: I spent it running through the woods from zombies and a swamp monster. The MudWalk is a tradition for elementary school kids in our area. They visit the Environmental Studies Center and … Continue reading Running Through The Swamp – Halloween At Last
The Halloween shelves are shrinking with the last of the cackling skeleton brides and tombstones. There are some turkeys overlapping them, but Christmas and winter holidays are coming on strong. I see you, giant nutcrackers and elves, just on the other side of the shelf. Halloween is almost here, our last revelry of this spooky season, … Continue reading Christmas Is Creeping Up Behind You – 1 Day Until Halloween
There were heavy trunks full of old records in the work shop, the oldest from the 1930's. They were stored in newspapers that tracked with their eras, or the eras that my parents collected the albums. Amongst them, I found an old Halloween ad for the Harvest House Cafeteria. Details on Harvest House Cafeteria are … Continue reading Throwback Thursday from 1963 – 2 Days Until Halloween
In the movie Crimson Peak, Lucille Sharpe (the dark sister who holds the keys to the family manse) tells the gothic heroine, "It is a monstrous love. And it makes monsters of us all." Her version of love is menacing and possibly mad, as the best monsters are. My favorite monsters pursue their victims with a … Continue reading A Monstrous Love – 4 Days Until Halloween
Victoria Nations 