Everything Halloween, Samhain, Dia de los Muertos, any and all autumnal celebrations of the dark and mysterious. Ghouls, banshees, the time you played Bloody Mary in your grade school bathroom, and we guess like David S Pumpkins if he’s still a thing for you
BY E. B. SCHNEPP
there once was a girl who forgot everything,
who named herself Gretel.
An Interview with CHASE BERGGRUN
"I’ve always loved vampires: they fascinate and arouse and compel me in a personal and visceral way.
BY STEPHEN LANGLOIS & BUD SMITH
WANTED: Hell Hunter: slayer of demons, killer of psycho clowns, fearless destroyer of creatures born from utter blackness/bleakness of bottomless pit nightmares
BY CHRISTOPHER LOCKE
The woods are quiet, Daria said. Yeah, what do you mean? I mean they’re quiet. No sound. No movement. Nothing. It’s weird.
BY DAVE HOUSLEY
Oh you're all back now, huh. Cool. Cool cool cool. There's room enough for everybody so come on in, stretch out, make yourself at home.
BY LILAH KATCHER
In windows behind the night glass
of my second story bedroom, I see
your one green eye as bright as a dying star.
BY JESSICA BERGER
So, Kelsey had this ghost boyfriend, see, and it was weird because, well, for one reason, she’d met him through her younger sister, who was really like a little sister, like Kelsey’s sister was young, but before you go thinking, you know, this is the kind of fucked up story where kids are hanging out with much older people, you should remember that Bradley wasn’t, like, an actual person. He was a ghost.
BY SEAN GILL
Freddy Vs. Jason is a quintessential tale of a clash between titans, the unstoppable force pitted against the immovable object, a crude powerhouse reckoning with a vulgar wit. In this way, Voorhees and Krueger echo some of the great 20th Century feuds: Mailer and Vidal, Hemingway and Faulkner, Hearst and Welles, Leno and Letterman.
BY HOLLY KARAPETKOVA
My son is afraid of zombies. He runs into my room at night. They're going to eat my brains! They’ll come in through the windows while we’re sleeping and eat our brains!
BY SHANE KOWALSKI
My mom says not to fall in love with a car. She coughs up into a tissue wrinkled in her hand. There’s blood in it. It’s dark and I’ve committed myself to going to bed at the drop of the hat of darkness. But I want to finish watching the movie with my mom. The red car, full of sex, runs over a greaser. We don’t see it but it’s implied.
BY DENNIS W SMITH
As I sit here at my computer writing this story, I don’t see any fiery sunrises or dark clouds looming, or sense some aura about me, and I didn’t wake up trembling when the alarm went off or any of that nonsense. I am up early, as usual, after one of “those” dreams, of which I’ve had so many over the years. The same dream.
BY MARY HEATHER NOBLE
Even now in the dawn of the seventh grade, you know that you’re taking a risk. But this is Hannah Jordan’s Halloween sleepover, and she’s popular and lives in one of those neighborhoods with its very own sign: Chestnut Ridge.
BY ANDREW R. MITCHELL
The three of us—me and Cassie and our ten-year-old daughter, Luanne—were carving pumpkins at the kitchen table when Lu announced that her favorite movie of all time was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
BY MICHELLE BETTERS
When you died everyone came home
to fill up the church. We spilled over
into the parking lot. After the service
we went to Whataburger because it was Sunday.
BY CHAD FRAME
I walk into the confessional booth.
I haven’t been in at least a decade,
and, between you and me, I should confess
I’m not entirely sure how this whole
thing goes anymore. But I hope it’s like
riding a bike...
BY AARON BURCH
Saw kept his eyes closed but imagined opening them, seeing night. The sun would have set, everything gone dark. The clouds would be gone, the sky a dome of deep blue, and shining through the darkness, the full moon, a flashlight on their diorama of a world.
BY COLETTE ARRAND
One of the things Peter liked most about nights when the moon was full was that under its light he turned into a woman. For twenty-eight, twenty-nine days of the lunar cycle he was something boring, just another insurance agent in Downers Grove with a wife and three kids, a certified pre-owned vehicle, an MBA, and a manageable amount of student loan debt. Normal, in a way. Like how people who lived like Peter lived defined normal. Better Homes & Gardens normal, had Better Homes & Gardens not been supplanted by HGTV, which was also about normal homes and gardens for the less moderate of Peter’s peers in the upper-middle class.
BY P.E. GARCIA
the ghost is a presence defined by negative space, a nothingness gripping your leg, your waist, your lungs, your throat, your tongue, creating a silence surrounded by static.
BY HUGO DOS SANTOS
His flawless routine. The tea pot whistle: the slow pour: the towel draped over his head: his face over the bowl: the steam emanating. A home-remedy to soothe the pain.
BY CHRISTINA BEASLEY
It was the day of the dead. We pitched
our discreet rows of canvas mausoleums;
bodies tightly wrapped, so static and colorful.
Little pyres blinking and shuddering beyond.
BY JEANNINE HALL GAILEY
It will happen on a sunny day when other things
are happening that are more important –
the lilacs will bloom, or the moon will stand out full and lovely.
It will be an incidental finding on a scan they did “just to be safe.”
BY JOSH LEFKOWITZ
That was the year
I dressed up as confident
I loved my best friend
but candy more
we rang the doorbells
of the whole subdivision
BY PATRICK BERRY
Maguire, a hatchet-faced Irishwoman who was Baron Arthur Quartermain’s head gardener in the early 1800s, took her own life in 1819 when the prize vegetables she was growing for the annual village competition all came out shaped like schlongs.
BY ALEYNA RENTZ
My first crush killed a man in Ohio. His name was Taylor;
the crush, not the man, whose name I do not know.
One Halloween, my mom laid out a buffet of body parts,
bowls covered by sheets like dead men on gurneys:
BY JACK PENDARVIS
At night I double check to make sure the… front and back doors are locked. The kitchen is dark and I shine a flashlight on the… doorknob. And then I shine it out the back door window to see if any of the feral cats are roosting there for the evening. They like to use this as a flophouse, our back porch.
BY MEGHAN PHILLIPS
We don’t braid each other’s hair. Can’t stand the yank tug of the brush, the drag of bristles over scalp. Warm breath on the backs of our necks. We sit knee-to-knee. Rub each other’s scars with cocoa butter. Pink arms pink thighs pink cheeks seamed through like C- home ec. projects.
BY WILLIAM HOFFACKER
These stories are the three spookiest entries in a series inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. Each piece's word count is exactly 210 (the sum of the numbers 1 through 20).
