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Hi Gang!
Woohoo, it's my favorite month! Normally this issue would be packed with Halloween goodness, but with the pressure of those two November book deadlines bearing down, I'm afraid this'll be a little light.
I do want to mention the brand new reissue of my Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween (winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the Halloween Book Festival Grand Prize), now available in a smaller, more affordable paperback edition.
Also, if you happen to be in the Southern California area, on October 13 I'll be part of a fabulous event called "L.A.'s Most Haunted", beginning at 5 p.m. at the Valley Relics Museum. I'll be there with the "Ghost Magnet" herself Bridget Marquardt, and an incredible line-up of other ghost experts. Tickets are on sale now!
Have a great Halloween, and wish me luck with my deadlines <groan>.
Lisa
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Still Life
In which I rhapsodize about favorite movie photos from my collection
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I've watched a lot of old seance movies lately for my seance book.
A lot of 'em are pretty creaky nowadays; the old, "Somebody was murdered at the seance and it's all fake" storyline shows up waaaaay too often.
But occasionally there's a stand-out gem, like the 1940 horror-comedy-musical You'll Find Out.
Here's the basic plot: some lovely and naive young people get stuck in an isolated mansion full of a lot of suspicious characters, and musical numbers mixed with spooky goings-on ensue. Sounds like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, right? Well, this one might not be quite as...um...decadent, but it's a tremendous amount of fun, and stars Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre, along with the delightful band leader and comic Kay Kyser.
Lugosi is delicious as the campy medium, Karloff is menacing as the shady lawyer, but Lorre absolutely steals the movie as the sneaky psychic investigator.
You'll Find Out can be viewed on YouTube, and is well worth the (free!) price of admission.
About the Still: I confess I don't actually own this lobby card, although I wish I did!
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The Halloween Spirit
Tips for keeping it going all year 'round
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Halloween trends.
Every year I think it's interesting to see what's hot in this year's Halloween retailing. A few years ago everything was glitter. Last year, farm-related stuff was big (think hay bales and pitchforks).
The two most interesting trends in Halloween retailing this year:
1) The Pirate/Aquatic Theme - WTF? Srsly, where did this come from? All the retailers that do big outdoor decorations are featuring animatronic pirates and ships, while the stores selling smaller material are featuring a lot of mermaids and skeletal fish. Had there recently been a major pirate-themed movie/tv series/book/game, this would make sense. As it is, I can only ponder the possibility that perhaps it's a response to Spirit Halloween's farm theme from last year, as in moving from the middle of the country to the coasts.
2) Increased Dia de los Muertos Representation - I've predicted this for over a decade now, and this was the first year that some retailers - like Target - had specific Dia de los Muertos displays right next to the Halloween aisles (along with Dia de los Muertos items mixed in with Halloween).
Ahoy there, matey!
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Strange Fruit
The weirdest thing I've recently uncovered in my research
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Cagliostro.
You've probably heard that name at some point or other, maybe in an anime, where for some reason it shows up a lot, or maybe in a novel by Alexander Dumas, or maybe in some folklore or history book.
But who was the real Cagliostro?
Well, first off, there was no "real" Count di Cagliostro; there was, however, a guy named Giuseppe Balsamo who is one of history's great frauds. Born in Palermo in 1746, Balsamo spent his life traveling Europe, claiming to be a master alchemist and a Freemason. He would arrive in a town, stage a number of fake seances and alchemy demonstrations, and rake in the money until he got caught and kicked out, then it was on to the next town.
Balsamo/Cagliostro had his good points, too: he was very kind to the poor, giving them free medical advice and medicines; and he always traveled in style, with a retinue that included 8 uniformed "Beefeaters".
But he was first and foremost a "humbug" (the 19th century term for a conman), who got kicked out of nearly every major city in Europe. His "career" came to an end in 1789, when he wound up in Rome and was arrested by the Inquisition. Cagliostro was caught with occult paraphernalia (in his case, literally tricks of the trade) and books, and was convicted. Originally sentenced to death, his sentence was commuted by the Pope, and he lived out the rest of his life in prison, where he died in 1795.
Cagliostro is one of the most interesting characters I've come across for my seance book.
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The Samhanach
(Originally published as a novella by Bad Moon Books, later reissued as the title story in my Halloween-themed collection The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats, published by JournalStone.)
I decided to write the novella The Samhanach after I'd published my first novella, The Lucid Dreaming. The Lucid Dreaming had won the Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction, and my publisher wanted a new novella from me. I wanted to write some fiction about Halloween, and for some reason the bit that stuck in my head from all of my Halloween research was a single mention in a single folklore book from the 19th century about a legendary Scottish Halloween demon called a Samhanach.
I liked the idea of making the demon a shapeshifter that has placed a curse on a family; that would allow me to explore Halloween through different time periods and different characters. The novella would serve as a fictionalized mini-history of the holiday.
But because that wasn't ambitious enough (!), I also wanted it to end in the universal human subconscious - the Jungian archetype, if you will - that I think Halloween derives from. That would be a place of deep, dark woods, lakes of unknown depths, and things that watch us from the shadows with glowing eyes.
I guess it turned out okay, because it garnered superb reviews and a Bram Stoker Award nomination for Long Fiction. When it came time to put together my Halloween-themed collection with JournalStone, it became the title of that as well.
And I still don't know how to pronounce it.
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Two research tricks have served me well with the seance book, so I thought I'd share them in case they might help others...Both involve free e-books, so stop here if you don't do e-books.
Tip #1: Public library systems have a great selection of free e-books that can be checked out (at least the L.A. county system does, so I'm assuming most do). They have a lot of pop science, metaphysics, and psychology releases from the last two decades which can be found at their main website. I'm doing Kindle, so when I find an e-book I want, I click the button and it takes me to my Amazon account, where I can choose the device I want it sent to. It shows up on my Kindle within seconds. At the end of my reading, I can either go back into my Amazon account and return the book there, or just let it be automatically deleted from my device.
Tip #2: I've been using archive.org for a while to research public domain (pre-1924) books, but I've only recently discovered that they also carry a lot of copyrighted books that can be borrowed for 14 days, including university press/academic titles that can be very expensive to buy in the secondhand market. You need a free archive.org account, and you need a little experience with getting these things to show up on your Kindle - the downloads often hide in the "documents" area. Also, the downloads can look a little clunky - sometimes they include graphics of the original pages interspersed with the text, but they're still quite readable.
One of the great advantages with theses Kindle e-books is that you can highlight areas to refer back to, make notes within the e-book, and even see what other people have highlighted.
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WIP It
My current works-in-progress
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I was really hoping to be able to announce both of my current works-in-progress this time around, but I need to stay mum for a bit longer. Hopefully next time around!
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Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense
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Co-edited with acclaimed anthologist and genre expert Leslie Klinger, this anthology gathers classic ghost stories from Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, M. R. James, and more!
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Includes my historical dark fantasy story "Etain and the Unholy Ghosts".
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Includes my story “The Gorgon".
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Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night
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Includes my story “The Chemistry of Ghosts".
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Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween
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My award-winning history of Halloween has just been re-issued in a new less-expensive paperback format!
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Has my story "What Ever Happened to Lorna Winters?"
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A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods
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Includes my story "Holding Back".
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Weird Tales is reborn! The first issue in this new run features my story "A Housekeeper's Revenge".
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The 5x5 Anthology project is a co-op between five of the horror genre's finest, award-winning authors: Eric J. Guignard, Kate Jonez, Rena Mason, John Palisano, and me. We each traded stories to create five themed mini-anthologies (each branded as part of the Strange Tales of the Macabre series), and all available in affordable e-book format. Stormy Weather, Post-Apocalyptic, and Gothic are available now (click on the covers to order); Ghosts and Haunted Journeys are coming soon.
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It's a copy of the new issue of the rebooted Weird Tales magazine, featuring my story "A Housekeeper's Revenge". Just click the blue button below to enter, and good luck!
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