Halloween Fiction: Have You Heard of Harrison Bergeron?
By Tamara Wilhite
Jensen walked into the speed dating event and flashed his cell phone to check in. The location based tracking system engaged. He knew this because the phone buzzed with that warning per his privacy settings. The matchmaking site said they needed this information to determine his true preferences based on distance and exposure to key people. He allowed it. He had to, if he wanted to be allowed to stay.
Which Is More Terrifying: The Haunting Vs. The Devil’s Advocate?
Evil from Within or Evil from Without?
By David Churchill Barrow
When I was in 3rd or 4th grade I considered myself a horror film aficionado – mostly watching old horror classics on Friday nights like the original Dracula, or more recent B-rated schlock, like Jack Nicholson in The Terror. Then one evening I began watching 1963’s The Haunting, and had to shut it off after the first few scenes. I didn’t finish the movie until years later. The fright was from pure atmospherics; there’s no monsters jumping out at you, no blood, flesh and gore flying about – but it’s was like walking into someone else’s black & white nightmare. Martin Scorsese ranked it the best horror film of all time.
Halloween Movie Picks: Pumpkinhead
By Fred Tribuzzo
Nature manifests its horror script through biology: old age, disease, and death. Camille Paglia is right to name biology the real fascist ruler of mankind. Added to nature’s brew are the conscious decisions made within the human heart—jealousy, revenge and murder.
Caribbean Halloween Killing: A True Story
By David Walls-Kaufman
We never knew some things about my gentle Grandmother Loyd. She kept those things secret. Darkly secret. Black secret.
Halloween stories are ridiculous. And I say that as a man who has had probably four run-ins with ghosts, not including this one. But this all happened.
My earliest memory of her was of her sweet, loving face beaming at me when I was three and leaving with my friends to Trick or Treat down my suburban street in Austin. She wore a 1950s pleated sleeveless, collared dress and waved goodbye to me and said, with music light as a wind-chime in her voice, “I’ll see you again after you go around.” Only years later, after the unlikely deaths in Puerto Rico around our vacation home, her old home, did the prescience in those words strike me.
New Fiction for Halloween: The New Boss
A Halloween Short Story
By Mark Ellis
Texas Governor George W. Bush has just touched down at Portland International Airport. The word is out on talk radio: Bush will hold a rally at Memorial Coliseum at 7 pm. Halloween in the year 2000 dawned with the eternal chance of showers that make a Portland fall forecast, and Kyle Waldenburg wonders why W is bothering. It’s common knowledge that the Rose City is the progressive capital of a state Bush has no chance of winning.
That doesn’t stop the Reagan Republican divorced father of two from rounding up his children, Lance and Lindsey, fifteen and nine respectively, after getting permission from ex-wife Kay to take them out of school early.
“You never want to miss a chance to see a president,” he’d told her.
“I’ll agree to this,” Kay had replied, “but God forbid that man should become the president.”
