Nuts & Bolts: George Anastasia of Netflix’s “Mob War”

Nuts & Bolts: George Anastasia of Netflix’s “Mob War”

By Tom Joyce -- Mobsters have a long history with horror. No, this is not an exposé. Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Laird Barron have written about them. They’ve prowled the shadowy underworlds of John Constantine and Felix Castor, and taken center stage in everything from survival horror to Twilight Zone episodes. If your horror fiction includes mobbed-up characters and you’d like them to ring true, legendary crime writer George Anastasia offers some advice in this month’s edition of Nuts & Bolts. Nearly 50 years ago, George started covering the local Mafia for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and did such a…
HWA Scholarship Recipients Announced

HWA Scholarship Recipients Announced

  The HWA Scholarship Committee is pleased to announce the following recipients for this year’s scholarship selections. The committee would like to thank those who applied and the volunteers who reviewed the many applications we received. Congratulations to all those selected!   Diversity Grant Recipient: Stephanie Malia Morris     Stephanie Malia Morris earned an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. She has received fellowships from Kimbilio, Periplus, and Voodoonauts, and is a graduate of the 2017 Clarion West writers workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in FIYAH, Nightmare, Apex Magazine, Lightspeed,…
NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Little White Flowers by Amber Hathaway

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Little White Flowers by Amber Hathaway

Reviewed by Sage Moon ... Little White Flowers by Amber Hathaway is one of those rare horror novels that gets mental illness and mental health concerns strikingly right.  This is certainly due to the author’s experience living with some of the conditions she incorporates into her story. While she highlights mental illness (extreme anxiety, panic attacks, and substance abuse), she also highlights autism and neurodivergence.  It is a book that will resonate with those of us living with these conditions – some of which I live with myself.  But she does something that so many other authors struggle with.  She portrays…

The Seers’ Table November 2025

The Seer’s Table, NOVEMBER 2025   Linda D. Addison, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee You can see any of The Seers' Table posts since inception (March 2016) by going to the HWA main page and selecting the menu item “HWA Publications / Blogs / Seers’ Table”. Geneve Flynn recommends: Joanne Anderton is an Australian author of speculative fiction, creative nonfiction, and children’s books. Her speculative fiction includes Pixerina, a haunted house novella set in the Australian suburbs (coming in 2026 from Bad Hand Books), the novels in the Veiled Worlds series – Debris, Suited and Guardian – and the short story collections The Art of Broken Things, Inanimates:…
Nuts & Bolts: Novelist, Poet, and Playwright Quan Barry

Nuts & Bolts: Novelist, Poet, and Playwright Quan Barry

By Tom Joyce -- Quan Barry’s Black literary horror novel, “The Unveiling,” is set in a subgenre where a punishing landscape can drive the unwary to madness. According to Quan, that also serves as an apt description of the publishing business. The award-winning novelist, poet, playwright, and professor recently gave an interview for the HWA, where she talked about avoiding some of those hazards, discussed her writing technique, and shared career advice for younger and BIPOC writers. MAKING THE LANDSCAPE A CHARACTER In “The Unveiling,” a group of stranded travelers psychologically unravel against an Antarctic landscape almost sentient in its…

Halloween Haunts Postscript: 364 Days to Go Until Halloween by Kevin Wetmore, Halloween Haunts Curator

Halloween Haunts Postscript: 364 Days to Go Until Halloween By Kevin Wetmore, Halloween Haunts Curator   Chicagoland artist, actor and poet Tony Fitzpatrick, who sadly passed away on October 11 of this year, once said, “Few memories evoke as much giddy joy for me as Halloween. For myself and the collection of miscreants, juvenile delinquents and future felons that comprised my peer group, Halloween meant that we owed our community some smashed pumpkins, obscene renderings, trees full of toilet paper and of course the odd flaming bag of dog shit  on the front stoop. Halloween untethered us. It was the…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween People Forever & FTW! by Angela Yuriko Smith

Halloween Haunts: Halloween People Forever & FTW! by Angela Yuriko Smith I’ve always loved the name Halloween People, the title Kevin Wetmore’s wife gave us a few years ago. It somehow fits better than any academic label or literary genre ever could. It speaks to something beyond horror or fantasy, beyond books or films. It speaks to us: the people who live for the magic between the shadows, the ones who find beauty in what others fear. To me, the Halloween People represent the kindest genre of them all. We recognize that in Halloween Town there is room for everyone no matter…

Halloween Haunts: HALLOWEEN, MY PAL MERV, AND THE SHADOW BEHIND THE WHEEL By Cullen Bunn

Halloween Haunts: HALLOWEEN, MY PAL MERV, AND THE SHADOW BEHIND THE WHEEL By Cullen Bunn   Damn it, Merv. You nearly got us all killed. On Halloween night, 1980. As ya do. Back in those days, my friend Vardell threw these awesome Halloween parties. Vardell was the son of a reverend, and he lived in this sprawling old house with far too many rooms, some of which were secret. He would invite dozens of kids, all dressed in homegrown costumes or Ben Cooper masks or sometimes a clever combination of the two, to celebrate the spookiest of nights. Some years,…

Halloween Haunts: A Pre-Halloween Tradition Thankfully Extinct: Moving Night By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Halloween Haunts: A Pre-Halloween Tradition Thankfully Extinct:  Moving Night By Ray Van Horn, Jr.   Commonly, it was known as Mischief Night.  Detroit hellraisers called it Devil’s Night.  In Michigan, New York and the Dakotas, it was referred to as Gate’s Night.  All around the American northeast, you heard it riotously called “Goosey Night” or “Cabbage Night. In my native area of Baltimore, Maryland, two words during the Halloween season struck palpable fear amongst adults and teenagers who’d sacrificed their summers working long hours to buy their first wheels. Moving Night. Pranks, sabotage and vandalism abound the night before Halloween. …

Halloween Haunts: Celebrating Halloween when “Every Day is Halloween” By Raven Belasco

Halloween Haunts: Celebrating Halloween when “Every Day is Halloween” By Raven Belasco   I’m not just a goth girl, I’m a vampire author. This means that by two “lifestyle choices” I’ve made, the lyrics to “Every Day is Halloween”—that Ministry song from -1987 that all “children of the night” have danced to at the goth night at their local nightclub—are doubly true for me. What then to do on Halloween itself? For me this is a strangely vital question, every year. On the goth identity level, Halloween can be seen as “amateur night.” When you dress up in a way…

Halloween Haunts: From Trick or Treater to being THAT HOUSE for Trick or Treaters, a Horror Author’s Growth Arc By Brooklyn Ann

Halloween Haunts: From Trick or Treater to being THAT HOUSE for Trick or Treaters, a Horror Author’s Growth Arc By Brooklyn Ann   Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. Spooky decorations, dressing up as anything you wanted to be, and roaming the streets at night collecting candy and scares, I love it all. And because I’m short and have a babyface, I was able to trick or treat much longer than many. My best friend and I were diehards who’d be out until curfew, patrolled the richest neighborhoods across TWO towns, and came back with pillowcases almost overflowing with…

Terrors of Today – Denise Dumars

The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised, and Neither Is the Effect of the Hurricane on Cuba by Denise Dumars Auctober Apocalypto   The blossoms are red and the cat is white but ashes darken his fur (what do they say of cats after dark?)  A deep grey-purple has boiled the sky It’s a time of pumpkin spice death a gas mask and a hazmat suit    My mother wakes and cannot breathe the EMT truck is as red as hibiscus Have you any pumpkin spice pan de muertos? Do the teeth of the dead still gnash?   (Will the white…

Halloween Haunts: A DREAM OF VIOLENCE & BLOOD Rosemary Thorne

Halloween Haunts: A DREAM OF VIOLENCE & BLOOD  Rosemary Thorne The first night Lucy slept in the independent town of Cazalia, (Toledo, Spain), she dreamt of a blue bird. Cazalia, my birthplace, is seldom found on maps; its ancient buildings and narrow passageways sit regally on a desolate plain where it guards a dam and a mind-blowing portion of cloudless sky. Lucy’s dream was not surprising, as many birds fly over Cazalia. “What a wondrous jewel!” Lucy exclaimed on her first morning, having mounted the garden ladder. “The horizon is so wide I can cover the whole northern hemisphere with…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: KINDNESS ABOVE ALL By Naching T. Kassa

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: KINDNESS ABOVE ALL By Naching T. Kassa   Just before my mother passed in June of 1998, she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. At the time, I didn’t understand the importance of the question. I had no way of knowing she wouldn’t be there to see my life unfold. When I told her I wanted to be a writer, it was more dream than reality. After my mom’s death, I told my father of our exchange. My dad understood the value of words and often advised me to keep mine. It was then…

Terrors of Today: Jamal Hodge

Dinner for One Reddened spoons. Napkins of aging skin. A table for none where once pumped a hopeful heart. Foolish from the start the refreshing glass of toil-laden piss, ripened to this- Vacant meal of me, mournful dish,  served raw, upon mirrored plates. -- From Jamal Hodge's upcoming book, I'm Not A Good Person, I'm A New Yorker.  Author's Statement: My poem Dinner For One takes the symbolic activity of togetherness (A dinner at a table) and turns it into a place of loneliness and horror. The grim end result of preparing a meal of yourself within your selfish choices, that…

Halloween Haunts: Three Generations of Halloween and Horror Love By Arin Ruhl

Halloween Haunts: Three Generations of Halloween and Horror Love By Arin Ruhl   A love of horror is my inheritance on my mother’s side, and Halloween is a family extravaganza. We own more Halloween than Christmas decorations, and perhaps the first time I learned what a vampire was came from an old Dracula movie poster that has hung proudly in our dining room every October for as long as I can remember. Since I was eight years old, we’ve hosted an annual costume party for friends and relatives we don’t often see otherwise. As a kid, I got to chase…

Halloween Haunts: How Scary Movies Went Mainstream, and How They Got Sutured to Halloween By Stacie Herrington

Halloween Haunts: How Scary Movies Went Mainstream, and How They Got Sutured to Halloween By Stacie Herrington Halloween and horror movies go together like peanut butter and chocolate. But it wasn’t always that way. Reese’s commercial (1986) Once upon a time, before you were born, horror movies were weird little experiments involving things like cardboard bats and borrowed pipe organs and nonsparkling vampires. They were smoky European imports, trick films, or midnight stage-show extensions of gothic novels—creepy, sure, but about as mainstream as a séance in your great-great aunt’s parlor. Still, for a certain facet of the filmgoing public, they…

Halloween Haunts: When Dreams Turn Prophetic: What My Nightmares Taught Me By KC Grifant

Halloween Haunts: When Dreams Turn Prophetic: What My Nightmares Taught Me By KC Grifant   Throughout my life, my dreams have been vivid, inspiring and, even fairly recently, borderline prophetic. Dreams becomes more culturally significant during the Halloween season. Samhain suggests that dreams occurring around Oct 31 are intensified and hold more meaning, as the “veil” between the real world and spirit world is thinned. Those who celebrate Dia de los Muertos hope to commune with passed loved ones during dreams. And the history of Halloween often references visions influenced by spirits. In other words, now is an ideal time…

Halloween Haunts: DON’T SELL SHORT HORROR STORIES SHORT by Paul Lonardo

Halloween Haunts: DON’T SELL SHORT HORROR STORIES SHORT by Paul Lonardo   For me, short stories are a lot like appetizers. They are bite-size, delicious and fulfilling. You can even make a meal out of them. Have you ever gone out to eat with a group of people where each diner would order a different appetizer, and everyone at the table would sample from all the plates to experience an array of savory flavors and tastes? This is exactly what it’s like when I find myself reading either a good collection of tales written by a single author or an…

Halloween Haunts: A Modest Defense of “Trick or Treating” by Darius Jones

Halloween Haunts: A Modest Defense of “Trick or Treating” by Darius Jones By now, my Fellow Americans, I’m certain that many of you are aware of a fast-moving pestilence sweeping the land. A corrupting tendency, most un-American, among many of our fellow citizens. An unhallowed abomination slowly lurching across the land… Trunk or Treat. The concept that, instead of going to a stranger’s home and asking them for candy, our children should instead meet at sterile, pre-arranged tailgates (usually featuring extremely weak Halloween signage) to politely request candy from a pre-approved, vetted group of adults. Now normally, I have no…