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Halloween Reads @ your library

Caught up in what Dr. Seuss’ Grinch calls “the trimmings and trappings” of Halloween (how is it there’s no Grinch Who Stole Halloween out there)? There are certainly lots of resources both on the shelf and online for recipes and party planning ideas, craft and decoration ideas, and costume ideas  (hello, Pinterest).  But Halloween is also a holiday for celebrating the things that go bump in the night, and there is plenty of both fiction and nonfiction for all ages that either take advantage of or explain its origins and mythologies. Looking for a good Halloween read as the holiday approaches? These certainly aren’t all of the ones available, and there are many excellent titles that aren’t listed below, but here are thirteen (plus one) titles that celebrate the Halloween season.

 

   The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. This is a good choice for reading aloud with your school-aged children.

 

Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie. I know Agatha Christie’s books aren’t horror (mostly) but if you want to curl up with a mystery, you can’t go wrong with Hercule Poirot.

 

Halloween Man by Douglas Clegg. Douglas Clegg is a very talented horror novelist. I haven’t read his books, as his novels can be quite graphic, but this one has also been described as eerie and compelling.

 

The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief by Charles Day. This 2013 Bram Stoker nominee doesn’t appear to be easily available right now, so hopefully you already have it in your collection! It looks like a romance, but in actuality is more of a YA horror/mystery combination.Want a review? Find one here.

 

Hallowed by Bryant Delafosse. This is a YA paranormal/horror title, and I can’t claim to have read it, but I have heard good things about it. Yes, there are plenty of YA paranormal reads, but this one is set right around Halloween.

 

Halloween edited by Paula Guran. This anthology includes both reprints and original stories related to the holiday, including stories from such notables as Ray Bradbury, Peter Straub, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allan Poe. One reviewer on Amazon noted that the Bradbury story does not appear in the ebook version of this book, as Bradbury was very opposed to ebooks, although I know he did release a book in ebook format before his passing… so I don’t know if that is still the case. It is well worth looking up!

 

Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre edited by Paula Guran. This is NOT the same anthology as the one I listed just above– it is more recently published. While the first one had stories by many of the giants of the genre, this one has a different collection of authors, who cover a wider breadth of the genre.  These include such excellent writers as Maria V. Snyder and Carrie Vaughan as well as authors more solidly identified with adult horror such as Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and John Shirley.

 

Black and Orange by Benjamin Kane Ethridge. Black and Orange is also the recipient of a Stoker Award. We reviewed it here, and it got a fantastic review!

 

Halloween by Melanie Jackson. Not every book about Halloween is a scary one. This one tells of the adventures of four ten year olds out trick or treating for Halloween. Set in the 1960’s, this is a book that might be enjoyed more for its nostalgia value (if you were a kid at that time) or for reading with an older child.
Mischief Night by Paul Melnizcek. This is a novella from Bad Moon Books’ series of Halloween novellas, now also available on Kindle. It’s a nice little haunted house story. You can check out our review here.

 

A Hallowe’en Anthology: Literary and Historical Writers Over the Centuries edited by Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a Halloween expert who has published both fiction and nonfiction, and this collects some of both, with sources documenting Halloween from its origins to the early 20th century. Certainly, this is a unique collection that will be of interest to anyone who prefers to learn about the historical holiday rather than today’s trimmings, trappings, and trick-or-treating. In the interests of saving space, because Lisa has written extensively on Halloween, I’m going to just list a few of her other titles worth looking into this holiday season: The Halloween Encyclopedia (nonfiction), Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween (nonfiction), and The Samhanach (fiction– and a top pick for 2011 at Monster Librarian, reviewed independently by three different reviewers here).

 

Horrorween (Orangefield Series) by Al Sarrantonio.  Orangefield is a town inhabited by Samhain, Lord of Death.  Other books in the series include Orangefield, Hallows’ Eve,  and Halloweenland. We’re awfully close to the end of October to power through all of them, but maybe you can make a resolution to try them out next year…

 

Gods of the Nowhere by James Tipper. The protagonist here is a disabled teenager, which is pretty interesting, as you don’t find many disabled protagonists in horror fiction. And he has a Latina friend, also an unusual find in horror fiction. It’s been described as a creepy and original take on Halloween. This is not a children’s book– maybe an older teen would appreciate it, though.

 

Halloween Spirits: 11 Tales for the Darkest Night edited by Lisa Morton. I know I said I would only mention Lisa Morton once, but this is an interesting collection of short stories that (mostly) tie in to Halloween,  and are intended to get you into the Halloween spirit.  These are not (mostly) stories about trick-or-treating, which is what we normally associate with the holiday, but, especially if you’re short on time, this book is a nice way to give yourself small doses of holiday excitement throughout the month of October.  The authors include Kealan Patrick Burke, Scott Nicholson, John Palisano, Jeremy Shipp, and Nate Kenyon, to name just a few. It’s also an inexpensive way to get into the spirit– available only as an ebook, it’s just $2.99 at Amazon right now.

So there you have it… a list of all kinds of Halloween reads, for all kinds or readers. Check them out and see if one of them is a match for you! And a Happy Halloween to you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teen Read Week: Guest Blog by Jason Henderson– John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and the Haunted Summer

Jason Henderson is the author of the Alex van Helsing books, about a fourteen year old descendant of the vampire hunter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula living in a boarding school near Geneva, who just might be the supernatural world’s James Bond. The first book depends a lot on the events of the Haunted Summer at Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley, John Polidori, Lord Byron, and others decided to test their ability to write an original ghost story on a dark and stormy night.

       

I asked Jason if he would write a little about the Haunted Summer. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was not the only literary work to emerge from that party at the Villa Diodiati; John Polidori is largely unknown today.Except, apparently, in Texas, around Halloween, when you can go to a Polidori Pumpkin Party. Which would be a TOTALLY cool event for any library (or teen group) to hold. I know I want to go!

John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and the Haunted Summer

by Jason Henderson


My favorite Halloween Activity is something called Polidori’s Pumpkin Party, a major leaf-blown Autumn fiesta started in Texas of all places back in the 90s. We named it after a guy named Polidori; more on him later. But the idea of the party was this:

• Invite your friends to a Halloween Party

• Cost of admission: something creative. A story (keep it under ten minutes, guys), a painted mask, a cupcake if it’s creative

• Everyone has to sit at the hot seat and present without making a fuss about how their offering isn’t any good. If they start doing that, everyone should yell, DECLAIM! Until the person stops apologizing and reads.

• Repeat until everyone has presented.

 

The Polidori Party became a lifeblood of creativity for me and my friends both in school and after because it was an excuse to be creative, to have to be creative at least once in a year. “Are you ready for Polidori”? “I still have to write for Polidori”. Everyone spent time (often literally the day of the party, but that’s life) preparing. Hint: I really recommend making this part of your Halloween tradition.

Every Halloween I think of Polidori and his friends, who were generally considered the coolest kids in Europe, in the cold summer months of 1816. They were the original haunted story-slingers, brash and overconfiden,t and often brilliant.

I wrote about them in my first Alex Van Helsing book, and most of this recap in fact bears a strong resemblance to a talk given by Alex’s mentor, the motorcycle-riding super spy Mister Sangster. Mister Sangster has the benefit of teaching on the very lake where the group hung out—we can only imagine.

It is to me the perfect Halloween story, though it wasn’t actually Halloween. It was summer, and it was cold.

The party at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816—the Haunted Summer–consisted of five writers: Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were already quite famous; two young women writers, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to be Shelley) and her half-sister Claire (whom Mary disliked so much that she doesn’t even mention her in the introduction to Frankenstein); and Byron’s doctor friend, Polidori, who wrote short stories. They were bored out of their heads, because although it was summer, there had been a massive volcanic eruption in Asia that had clouded the sky and made the weather everywhere cold and rainy. So Lord Byron issued each of them a challenge: write the scariest, most terrifying story you can.

In her introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary says the famous guys each wrote some minor pieces, and that Dr. Polidori had—and this is kind of fun—“some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole — to see what I forget — something very shocking and wrong of course.’”

I mean, we had to base our party on him.

Remember: they were all very young.

Lord Byron, on the run from creditors, was 28, Shelley was 24, fleeing his marriage, with his new 18-year-old mistress Mary; John Polidori was 21;  and Claire was 18. After the summer which birthed The Vampyre, Childe Harold Canto IV, and Frankenstein, they didn’t last long, either. Polidori was dead in five years, Shelley a year later, and Byron two years after that. Within eight years, all but Mary and her sister Claire were dead. In between were tragedies no parent should ever endure, and they endured them again and again.

But in 1831, something about the record changed. When Mary was 34, she rewrote her masterpiece Frankenstein for a new edition. She promised her editor that the revisions would be minor, a few typo fixes here and there. But it wasn’t true—the 1831 Frankenstein was a clean-up job. It got rid of  the messy politics of the earlier version, and, best of all, added her introduction, which told the story of the Haunted Summer, but cleaned that up, too: it eliminated Claire, by whom she was embarrassed, and most of all, changed what the attendants were writing about.

When I wrote the first Alex Van Helsing book, the crux of the story was that something about the change Mary made to  when she was in her thirties was an attempt to hide something about what happened when she was a teenager. That there are secrets between the lines. I feel that way today, and it is true of my own books. So there are secrets inside secrets.

Here we are in October. Capture the spirit of that crew: Byron, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Claremont, Polidori. What are the secrets you can reveal?

__________________

Interested in learning more about John Polidori?

Find out how to host a Polidori Pumpkin Party by visiting the Polidori Society’s website.

Check out The Vampyre, the influential novella he wrote during the Haunted Summer.
Polidori also appears in Veronica Bennett’s teen title Angelmonster, which is very well written.

For a more substantial account of the evening at the Villa Diodiati and the people who were there try The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.

And, of course, there are Jason’s own books. In the spirit of the challenge at the Villa Diodiati during that Haunted Summer, take the time to celebrate your creativity this Halloween!

Teen Read Week Giveaway #4: Reckless and Fearless by Cornelia Funke

And it’s time for another Teen Read Week giveaway! This time we have the first two volumes in Cornelia Funke’s Mirrorworld series, Reckless (in paperback) and Fearless (in hardcover), both reviewed here. While Funke is widely known for her children’s books (and especially for Inkheart)he Mirrorworld books are dark fantasy and meant for older teens.  Jacob Reckless is able to travel back and forth between our world and an alternate, highly detailed fantasy world through a mirror he discovers in his father’s study. There is an incredible app based on these two books as well, also highly detailed and with truly amazing additional content written specifically for it (unfortunately, there’s no Android version). That, I can’t give away. But if you love fantasy or Dungeons and Dragons, you can easily get lost in Funke’s Mirrorworld. There’s a free preview of Reckless for Kindle, if you want to try it out and see if it’s for you. Leave a comment telling me what you’re going to be for Halloween this year and these could be yours!