HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: When Is the Seed Planted? by Danielle McPhail

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: When Is the Seed Planted? by Danielle McPhail   I was never a fan of horror growing up. Blame it on my siblings. Five years or more older than I was, they delighted in scaring the shit out of me. Singing “Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!” into the heart of a thunderstorm instead of taking me inside when I was three… Watching Carrie without bothering to put me to bed when I was six… Telling me ghost stories in a tent facing the graveyard when I was ten… Oh, did I forget to mention? Not only…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: DEMS DA RULES BY MARK MATTHEWS

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: Dems Da Rules By Mark Matthews   True Story—Cross my heart and swear to Zeus: I used to, as a child, go to my neighbors’ houses and ask for candy. No, not on Halloween. I’d go at random times, any day of the week, but mostly in summer. I’d jump up on their porch, knock on the door, and if someone answered, I’d muster the sweetest voice I could and ask; “Do you have any candy?” They usually delivered.   True story—I tried this a few times naked. I have no memory of this, but apparently, at five…

Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: M.M. Olivas

  In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are posting previously published interviews and articles with members throughout the community. This interview with M.M. Olivas was originally published on October 2, 2024.   What inspired you to start writing? I started writing fiction around my junior year of high school. Unlike many of my writing peers, I hadn’t grown up doing it, nor was I much of a reader. I was dyslexic and gravitated more toward visual media: comics, shows, and movies. Oh, so many movies. I didn’t have a ton of adult supervision growing up, so I saw Alien…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: A Little Yard to Work In by Rami Ungar

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: A Little Yard to Work In by Rami Ungar   October third is sunny and warm as I step out onto my front porch, but with my neighbor’s condo abutting my tiny yard, I’m covered in shade. I start piling plastic skeletons and felt spiders with posable limbs on my porch, then grab poles from the garage and attic. Then, over the next hour, I pose the skeletons in my yard and wrap the spiders’ limbs around the skeletons. By the end, there’s a tableau in my yard, one with several skeletons being attacked by giant spiders, and…

Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: Gerardo Sámano Córdova

  In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are posting previously published interviews and articles with members throughout the community. This interview with Gerardo Sámano Córdova was originally published on September 27th, 2024.   What inspired you to start writing? Reading books I loved. Tell us about your work in 25 words or less. My work is queer, monstrous, and playful. What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it? The raw emotion it elicits. I think horror invites readers to let their guard down in order to have an emotional journey (fright, usually) and with this…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: A Nightmare on Russell Street by Robia Tiemstra

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: A Nightmare on Russell Street by Robia Tiemstra   Horror Fanatics love talking about their own personal ‘Gateway Horror’. i.e. What was the first nugget of spooky that grew into a lifelong interest in terror? Goosebumps is a popular one. Coraline, Scooby-Doo, Over the Garden Wall, Tales from the Crypt, Are You Afraid of the Dark? Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, maybe a Halloween special from any number of kids TV shows... The list is endless. I learned very recently that my gateway to the world of horror was a literal gateway. It was the late-90s, a decade that…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: The Perils of Taking Your Family to Spirit Halloween by KC Grifant

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: The Perils of Taking Your Family to Spirit Halloween by KC Grifant The hoisting of the Spirit Halloween sign is an annual landmark for my family—as soon as we see the logo go up, we immediately plan the first of many visits to the store. From rows and rows of devilish and overpriced costumes, wacky accessories and deliciously frightful animatronics, we relish our time in the store. However, not everyone in our family feels that way. Our daughter used to not mind scary sights (she had even been to Midsummer Scream one year, peering out from her stroller…

Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: Valentina Cano

  In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are posting previously published interviews and articles with members throughout the community. This interview with Valentina Cano was originally published on October 6, 2024.   What inspired you to start writing? I’ve always been a voracious reader, and I dabbled a bit in high school with a creative writing class, but I never really considered tackling anything substantial until I went through a bout of major depression that left me grasping for anything that could bring a bit of relief. Writing did that for me. I began with free writing, choosing a…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: A Tribute To Shocktober by Michael Subjack

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: A Tribute To Shocktober by Michael Subjack   “Shocktober…on New York’s Movie Station!” Nothing signaled the arrival of the Halloween season for me more than those immortal words. These days, Spirit Halloween stores act as the unofficial start of the season when they open on August 1st. In the early nineties, however, it was Shocktober on WPIX, when the sky above Western New York was gray and ominous, and the colorful leaves had fallen, peppering the sidewalk like oversized confetti. The Shocktober commercial lives rent-free in my head. I watch it whenever I need a quick nostalgia fix,…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: Unsolved and Endless ~ Or How My Body and My Bicycle Became Cursed by Sumiko Saulson

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: Unsolved and Endless ~ Or How My Body and My Bicycle Became Cursed by Sumiko Saulson   In horror, death is dust and rot, but ancestor spirits live and breathe, a part of nature. Our DNA, the building blocks that create us, carries them. Surrounded by magic, we skip and dance through little puddles of it as we wander down the street, forgetting, or never knowing, what clings to our feet. The blood in my veins declared me pre-diabetic with an A1C of 6.0, while that in my poop demanded a colonoscopy. A mysterious shadow haunted my mammogram.…
Nuts & Bolts: Author Robert Ottone on Networking, Tabling at Events

Nuts & Bolts: Author Robert Ottone on Networking, Tabling at Events

By Tom Joyce -- For many beginning horror writers, working a room at a conference or “tabling” at a convention are nightmarish prospects. And not in a good way. Fortunately, author Robert P. Ottone is here to offer advice on making friends and contacts, selling books, and managing to have fun at conferences and conventions. ON MINGLING If you see a celebrity guest whose work you admire, by all means approach them and tell them so. But take note if they’re in the middle of a conversation or taking a break from the crowd. You might have to give them…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: The Carnival by Sarah Faxon

Halloween Haunts: The Carnival by Sarah Faxon   As a child, I would count down the days until the Bay Park Elementary School Halloween Carnival. Christmas aside, the Saturday before Halloween was the most magical day of the year. Over the course of one weekend, my entire elementary school transformed. The dark skeletal hand of Halloween would stretch over the beige-toned single story halls, casting a magical shadow upon the lands. The PTO, teachers, staff, and parental volunteers stormed the halls with rolls of shimmering black garbage bags, concealing any hint of classrooms hiding behind the crinkled plastic walls. White…

Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: Victor H. Rodriguez

  In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are posting previously published interviews and articles with members throughout the community. This interview with Victor H. Rodriguez was originally published on October 7th, 2024.   What inspired you to start writing? It was a combination of two things: reading, and my day job. After I started working full-time, I developed the terrible habit of not reading anything longer than a magazine article. Then, per my mother’s recommendation – which is odd, considering how not into horror she is – I picked up The Books of Blood, short story collections by Clive…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: The Beauty of Blood by M. Brandon Robbins

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: The Beauty of Blood by M. Brandon Robbins   Blood is a universally revered symbol, representing life (when in the body) and death (when outside of the body) as well as passion and anger. Localized increased blood pressure (such as a throbbing in the head) can be the symbol of distress or sickness. It can the source of powerful magic, such a tome with text written in blood or as the catalyst in a sorcerer’s spell. Blood can repulse or shock. Think about a zombie crusted in dried gore, its yellowed teeth protruding from a jagged mouth, blood…
NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Itch! By Gemma Amor

NOTABLE WORKS REVIEW: Itch! By Gemma Amor

Reviewed by Twilight Sage Moon Released: October 9, 2025 Content Warnings: Sexual assault, suicidal ideation, self-harm, physical and emotional abuse, homicide. The use of bugs in horror has been used as a gross-out factor for so long, but more authors are twisting the use of them. Gemma Amor is one who did something truly spectacular with the use of ants in Itch! It had some atrocious moments, but the bugs were strategic and an essential aspect of the trauma portrayed in the book. Grounded in folk-horror, Itch! follows Josie, a woman who has suffered emotional abuse at the hands of…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: An Excerpt from the Novel Servant by Patrick R. Field

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: An Excerpt from the Novel Servant by Patrick R. Field   Gladys greets me in her usual loud, delightful soprano shrill, “Hello, Mitch! Happy Samhain!” “What is Sahween?” I ask. “Samhain is the original name for October thirty-first in the Gaelic calendar, the festival celebrating the end of the harvest. and the beginning of the darker days of the winter. Halloween is a combination of the pagan word Samhain and the Christian observance of All Hallow’s Eve. The pagans believed that this night was when the veil between the world of the dead and the living was the…

Hispanic Heritage Month 2026: Ananda Lima

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are posting previously published interviews and articles with members throughout the community. This interview with Ananda Lima was originally published on September 22nd, 2024.   What inspired you to start writing? I am often inspired by trippy things, the uncanny, and stories involving divergent perspectives. For my latest book, I was inspired by a lot of different things that came together in strange and fun ways. One big one was the history of the future of the Devil and its many cool manifestations in fiction. Another was storytelling in general and the way…

The Seers’ Table October 2026

October 2026 Kari J. Wolfe, Member of the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee The sole purpose of The Seers' Table monthly column is to introduce HWA members to the work of underrepresented demographic writers and editors whose work might not otherwise be viewed, using the broadest definition of the word underrepresented to include, but not limited to, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabled and neurodiverse.   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".   Nicole D. Sconiers…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: There Was a Hand in the Darkness by Sharon Wagner

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: There Was a Hand in the Darkness by Sharon Wagner   “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” ~ Neil Gaiman   My hand grazed the doorframe, sliding over the smooth stubble of the painted wall as I reached for the light switch, finding it and flipping it on. Only darkness greeted me. I stepped into the room with an outstretched hand, fingering the air. Moonlight filtered through the curtains above the kitchen sink, glinting over the dishes piled high like a spoiled child’s toy box. Shame washed over me, but I didn’t…

Call for Submissions Speculative Poetry Month “Chills of Winter” Poetry Blog Series

Ends on Sun, Nov 1, 2026 11:59 PM OPEN TO HWA MEMBERS AT ALL LEVELS Winter can be dark, lonely, and consuming. In some places, frost sets in, cloaking the land in ghostly white. Trees drop their leaves, branches and twigs extending like eerie, skeletal fingers and arms. Urban legends and wintertime ghost stories such as A Christmas Carol abound, along with terrifying holiday lore such as the demon Krampus, who punishes naughty children. Find your inspiration! This series is open to current members of the HWA at any membership level. The HWA has a strict No AI policy. Please…