Over the course of October 2017, Brian James Freeman and the folks at Hydra have gotten together to present a total of twenty-five Halloween tales of horror from twenty-five of the best genre writers working today. Every Tuesday during October there will be a new volume in the Halloween Carnival anthology series.
If the rest of the series is as strong as volume one, readers are in for a treat.
Strange Candy by Robert McCammon - Wow. What a wonderful way to open this anthology. A strange piece of candy from the Halloween "loot," eaten without thought, leads to a series of out of body experiences. Not dissimilar to Dickens' ghosts in A Christmas Carol. A charming story from start to finish. ...I didn't want to die, but...still...it was just a piece of candy, shaped like a hand. What was the big deal?
The Rage of Achilles or When Mockingbirds Sing by Kevin Lucia - One of Kevin's Clifton Heights stories. This one takes place on Halloween and features the customary twist. Horrifying. Tragic. Real. Gut-wrenching.
Demon Air by John R. Little - Mom never admitted it, but Halle always knew she was named after Halloween. Halle finds herself on a plane to Australia in search of her roots after learning she was adopted and taking one of those DNA Ancestry tests and finding out she was 60% Australian Aborigine. All of that takes a backseat when the Diamond Air flight she's on crosses the International Dateline. It's Halloween and suddenly she's in the middle of a nightmare where the flight crew is trying to get her to bob for apples... He brought the green bowl toward her, and she could see the water sloshing. When she looked down, she saw that the water was tan-colored and had patches of fuzz floating on it. The apples were rotten. Not just a little. They were mostly brown patches with worms squirming in and out. There were so many worms that she couldn't see any spot on any of the apples that was clear.
La Hacienda de los Muertos by Lisa Morton - The filming of a Mexican horror movie at the site of a real-life haunting. LaLlorona was once an earthly woman who fell in love with a man and had two children with him. The man betrayed her. So she killed the two children by drowning them, then herself in the Tecpan river...now her spirit supposedly wanders the banks of the river, looking for living human children she can claim as her own.
#MakeHalloweenScaryAgain by Mark Allen Gunnells - This set of stories wraps up with a novella about a small town that becomes gripped in fear after local horror writer, Dustin Davis, posts on his Facebook page about how Halloween is no longer the scary holiday he associated with his youth #Make HalloweenScaryAgain. When a serial killer takes Dustin up on his challenge, all hell breaks loose. The following flyers start appearing all over town. I WILL RESTORE ALL HALLOWS' EVE TO ITS RIGHTFUL SACRED POSITION WHEN I'M DONE PEOPLE WILL REVERE THE HOLIDAY AGAIN ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT I WILL PICK ONE HOUSE IN TOWN AMONG THOSE NOT DECORATED FOR THE SEASON AND EVERYONE INSIDE WILL BE KILLED THIS A PROMISE #MakeHalloweenScaryAgain
Every story delivers in his own way. I hope subsequent volumes in the series are just as creepy. If you love a good Halloween scare half as much as I do, start reading today.
Halloween Carnival Volume One is published by Hydra, a division of Random House, and is available as an ebook.
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