If anyone out there knows Lady Gaga, tell her to read Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, okay? I mean a woman who embraces the weird as well as she does, is usually dressed in wonderful “disguise”, and calls her fans “monsters” has got to be on the right wavelength. So, although only slightly Halloween-related, Gaga’s released the cover of her new single “Marry the Night”. Looks seasonal to me…although I doubt if that is a Guy Fawkes bonfire…

Around the turn of the 20th century and into the 1920s, Halloween postcards were popular. I’ve used some with our online version of the introduction to Halloween, but here are a few more.

In that era, Halloween parties were often an excuse for young adults to get together. (I also included a 1923 story, “The Vow On Halloween” by Lyllian Huntley Harris, in the anthology that gives us a brief glimpse of a such a party…before things get creepy.) Popular games often involved excuses for mingling with the opposite sex (apple bobbing, for instance) or, mostly for females, fortunetelling about one’s true love.

Here’s one, for instance, encouraging the boy to blow out a candle before the girl bites an apple…

And this one shows a young lady whose future mate in seen in her mirror…

Toss an apple peel over your shoulder on Halloween resulting in seeing the initial of your true love in it’s shape…

Did a podcast interview last night about Halloween and and about Halloween (more on that later) and I gave some recommendations for seasonal reading that I thought I’d pass on here. Naturally, we have plenty of Prime Books we want you to read, but outside of Prime…

First, you really can’t beat Edgar Allan Poe. He still is a great scary read (try reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” aloud to the kiddies). And then there are the old masters like Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, M.R. James, and Oliver Onions. (We’ll still be offering up some free reads from those gents.) The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is another past master.

For young (ages 12 and up) and old alike, try Shirley Jackson’s We have Always Lived in the Castle. Roald Dahl’s The Witches is perfect for ages 7 -13 and you can read aloud to children age five to eight.

Of course Ray Bradbury is still Mr. Halloween: Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Halloween Tree, and The October Country deserve special places on your Halloween bookself.

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel is one of my all-time favorite horror novels, and ANYTHING by Peter Straub. Two newer must-read Halloween “classics” are The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan and Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge.

Here’s another classic ghost story in PDF to download: “The Body-Snatcher” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

This is the original cover from its first publication in the Pall Mall Christmas “Extra”, in December 1884. The story is based on characters employed by Robert Knox, around the time of the Burke and Hare murders (November 1827 to October 31, 1828). Knox, a private anatomy lecturer for Edinburgh Medical College students. At the time the only legal supply of cadavers was the bodies of executed criminals. Due to new laws, the execution rate had dropped and finding legal bodies for anatomy students was a challenge. Grave-robbing became a way to illegally obtain bodies. Mssrs. Burke and Hare found it convenient to simply murder people and deliver their bodies to Knox.

The interview mentions our January release — his new novel, EVERYTHING IS BROKEN…which is, considering it is about a tsunami hitting the west coast and politics and how inhumane people can be (as well as humane), pretty scary.