Halloweens I Have Known

What was the worst thing you've ever done?   
I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing . . .
                         Peter Straub, GHOST STORY

I love Halloween.  Just flat stinkin' love it.   I love the costumes and the customs, the scares and the storytelling, the sense that we're celebrating the dying of summer and facing death in a metaphorical sense.   It is hands down my favorite of holidays, coming in way ahead of Independence Day and Christmas.

Part of it because I love scary stories.    I think some of that comes from hating and dreading them as a kid.   I was the biggest ninny that ever walked the earth.   You never saw a more nervous,  more easily spooked kid than me.    Once, at one of the model airplane club meetings my father used to drag me to, I made the mistake of flipping through a Reader's Digest coffee table book on the paranormal and unexplained, and couldn't sleep for days.   Stigmata!  Alien abductions!  Bigfoot!   Cattle found bled dry!  Ghosts!   Holy freakin' frightfest, Batman!   I was, I kid thee not, petrified.  Because I believed all that crap.   Every last bit of it.   Alien vampire bigfoot ghosts stalking the heartland, preying on cows and virgins?   Oh yeah, I bought it.   I was, as a kid, the target demographic for The Weekly World News, only I had virtually no discretionary income.  ( And no, Fantastic Four comic books were not a discretionary item on young Mr. Wolf's budget.)

Slightly later on, I remember walking past the original New American Library paperback cover of Cujo and practically losing my mud on the spot.   I wasn't thinking 'rabid dog', I was thinking 'demon', and as far as I was concerned, demons could get you anywhere, man.   They didn't have pesky rules like werewolves and vampires, except maybe that they couldn't walk on sacred ground and anyway my mom went to a Science of Mind church, which I suspected did not exactly count.

I was such a weenie.  We're talking mondo super-weenie.

So how did I go from being such a Nervous Nellie to eating this junk up?  How did I go from being tormented by a convenience store paperback display to loving such mild and timid fare as Hellraiser, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Thing?

Probably poor parenting (hi, Mom!) but I also suspect it was that old psychobabble about conquering your fears by diving into them.  And boy, how I've dived in.


I quoted Peter Straub above for two reasons.   The first is that I love epigrams, can't pass 'em up, and those two sentences are among the best to ever open a horror novel.  The second is that he nails exactly the appeal of such a ghoulish holiday (and genre, really, since every day is Halloween for us scary writers): the playacting out of dreadful things brings its own comfort, as if when we imagine the very worst, we inoculate ourselves, in the barest degree, against the very worst.  It ain't true, of course, but the things that comfort us don't have to be true, we just have to think they are.   (See, for instance, practically every pop song ever written.)  Sharing the darkness helps to drive it back some.

And plus also, there's this: as the Bears sang, fear is never boring. 

Never.

Hope your Halloween wasn't.   But then I would hope that, huh?