The yearly Halloween tradition. Click below to access the full 2023 playlist along with all those from years past.

It feels surreal to say this: The End of Summer: Thirteen Tales of Halloween was released exactly ten years ago today. Ten years—that’s bonkers. I mean, that must be witchcraft or something mystical to explain how quickly a full decade has flown by. That’s three whole Halloween sequels ago! That’s two whole Child’s Play sequels, a remake, and two TV show seasons ago! That’s zero whole Friday the 13th anythings ago! What the hell is happening!

A lot can happen over ten years, even if they pass by with barely a whisper. Ten years ago, I was in another city, working at another (awful) job, living in another home—the kinds of changes that can occur many times over the course of a life. Mostly, I became an uncle twice over, and ever since each of my awesome, bad-ass nieces were born, I’ve encouraged them to grow up with the same love and appreciation for Halloween that I did, and which I still have today. Before my eldest niece was born, my expecting sister-in-law issued a request: to buy the soon-arrival just one book and inscribe it to her. I chose Jerry Seinfeld’s kids book, appropriately entitled Halloween, and on one of its pages I wrote, “I can’t wait to meet you…and take you trick-or-treating!” Five years later, I did just that, and ever since then, and to this day, October 31, 2020 remains one of my favorite Halloweens ever; in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and even in defiance of it, we took those girls out trick-or-treating (safely, of course) and we all had a blast. Collectively, many of us sacrificed a lot during those 2-3 years as the pandemic raged outside our doors—during which I had the dishonor of celebrating my first and hopefully last Christmas away from my family—but we weren’t going to give up our Halloween without a fight. For coming up on ten years, sending Halloween care packages to my girls has become a tradition. Every October, I pack them a pumpkin-sized box of Halloween goodies that I hope will keep them entertained and enthralled for those 31 spook-filled days.

And all of this happened so quickly, so suddenly, that it feels like a trickster god snuck those last ten years into the timeline of the world behind my back.

The End of Summer doesn’t take up much, if any, brain capacity during my daily being anymore. In that regard, it does feel like ten years ago. Since then I’ve written an awful lot, mostly film-related retrospectives or reviews for various online peddlers. I’ve also written a couple of unpublished novels, the first of which was roundly rejected, and the second which has barely entered the submission process and is well on its way to also being roundly rejected. (Optimism!) Every new thing I’ve written, for whatever intended destination, has felt like a new layer, like the hidden rings in a tree, that’s packed on pockets of time and taken me further and further away from that little Halloween anthology. Yet, every so often, when someone asks me if I’ll ever write The End of Summer 2, I’ll admit it’s something I’ve thought about from time to time. The thirteen stories in my book cover only thirteen Halloween myths (or “tropes,” a word I’ve come to despise) and there are many, many more legends, especially those lesser known, that could make for fun stories. I’ve never given this any serious thought, but I do have a folder on my desktop with half-formed stories that could be finished and a document of ideas that could be fleshed out. What seems unlikely today could very well become reality tomorrow, so who knows?

Thank you to everyone who read the book, whether you liked it or not; thank you to everyone who took the time to write a nice review or blog post or comment somewhere; and thank you, especially, to everyone who contacted me directly through this website to share your kind words about it, the ways in which it made you yearn for Halloween, and why the spooky season means so much to you. It’s been beyond humbling and gratifying to not only receive these messages, but to remain in semi-regular contact with the people who sent them. There is a consistent smattering of people I hear from every autumn season with whom I swap Halloween tips, memories, anecdotes, and suggestions for movies, TV shows, and music. It’s been an unexpected but truly lovely Halloween tradition, and a nice reminder that The End of Summer has staked out a tiny place for itself in this huge pumpkin patch of a world and may continue to do so until long after I’ve become one of those ghosts I’ve written about.

It’s only the first of October, but you and I both know that people like us celebrate Halloween all year anyway, so, Happy Halloween.

P.S. If you’ve got any Halloween tips, memories, and anecdotes, or suggestions for movies, TV shows, and music, I’d love to hear them!

Meet Eddie. He’s one of many warm-bodied meat sacks from the cinematic opus Friday the 13^th Part VII – The New Blood, and up until he meets the rusty blade of our favorite, furious, New Jerseyan hockey player, he’s a struggling and unpublished science-fiction writer of such adventures as Starlicon and Star Mummy. Eddie isn’t taken very seriously by his friends, who are much more interested in having sex in a van, or having sex in a filthy lake, or tiptoeing into a creepy-ass barn to potentially have sex in it than humoring Eddie by playing audience to his latest batch of loose-leaf writing that he adorably carries with him seemingly at all times. And before he gets his throat cut in half after playing with a Personal Penis Enlarger, he rattles off one of the best inadvertently self-defeating owns of all time following his inability to get laid by Crystal Lake’s meanest girl: “Rejection. Okay, fine. I can take it. I’ve been rejected by some of the finest science fiction magazines in the continental United States!”

In a spiritual quasi-follow up to Purging the Bad Mojo; or, How I Learned To Avoid Committing Suicide Over Bad Reviews, I want to talk about another pitfall when it comes to writing: rejection. If you’re going to write, you’re going to be rejected. By agents, by publishers, by your readers, and by yourself. Every time I submit a story or a manuscript for consideration and it gets rejected, Eddie’s immortal words float through my brain, offering strength, determination, spirit, and just the right amount of harmless delusion: “I can take it.”

I firmly believe that if you choose to write fiction, you have a propensity for self-loathing. Not necessarily an overwhelming propensity, but…it’s there. We writers are masochists hiding from the world while at the same time positioning ourselves as artists (ugh) with something to say and share. Within us dwells a conflict between two worlds that are entirely at odds with each other: as writers, we want to create, but we don’t want to be live on stage when we do it. We feel compelled to share an intimate part of ourselves, but we want people to read our words with their voice and bring our story to life with their imagination. We want readers to be involved in the process of creation instead of allowing them to sit back like passive bystanders and listen to a song that’s going to sound identical from person to person, or watch a movie that dictates through sight and sound what they should be feeling. We write what we have to say and then we set those words sailing in hopes they’ll find the eyes or ears they were meant to…and once those words are finally polished, published, and shipped to our readers’ homes or beamed to their various digital devices, we become removed from our latest work because it has to speak for itself now, and we’re probably already thinking about the next thing. I’ve written four books to date, and regardless of whatever positive or negative reaction they’ve received, I never want to think or talk about them ever again – they are like exes I never should’ve dated whose contacts I long ago deleted. Glad to have met you, onward and upward, etc.

As of this writing, I’ve submitted my unpublished novel to nineteen independent publishers, and as of this writing, I’ve received five formal rejections and an assumed eleven more, as we have now surpassed the anticipated turnaround time from submission to decision by several months with no official decision dispatched from said publishers. (I could easily write another rant about the treatment of authors by indie publishers, but that’s for another time). Such a reaction to something I’ve written, which has seen both my unabashed enthusiasm and my total dismissal, inevitably validates that latter self-evaluation – translation: if the nameless publisher that releases books with truly hideous cover art and has content errors all over their website doesn’t want my book, then jeepers, it has to suck..

And if my book sucks that bad…

…why the hell didn’t I see it coming?

Personally, when rejection occurs, it can generate a lot of questions. What is it that sucks? Is it the story I’ve chosen to write, the way I’ve chosen to write it, or is it me in general? Do I suck? Sure, some or all of those rejection letters are quick to assuage your fragile ego by reminding you that “these things are subjective” and “another publisher may feel differently,” but all of those paranoid internal questions about you and all the sucking are still relevant, too. How many writers continue to write and suck while believing they’re good because no one close to them has the guts to tell them the truth? How many writers are so in love with themselves that they believe their every new string of words is greater than their previous? Ideally, rejection should make you take a hard look at your writing and force you to ask yourself the question that haunts every struggling writer: Is this something you should keep trying to pursue professionally? How fine is that line between dreams and delusion? Should you keep writing book after book until something clicks? And as for the books that publishers don’t want to touch, do you dare (gasp) self-publish? Or, finally, do you assume it’s just as bad as you sometimes believe it to be and upload a free PDF to be done with it?

Whether or not you suck is the hardest thing to know. We’ve all heard the stories about how many rejections the likes of Stephen King and J.K. Rowling received before they finally found the right person or place to give their creations a home, and that should give us hope…but also make us despair. The chasm between admitting maybe we’re not a total failure and maybe we’re just as good as those two juggernauts is the size of the entire universe. One thing I can say with confidence is if you love writing, you should keep doing it, whether or not you’ve got a future planned for your creations beyond their resting comfortably forever on your laptop.

I genuinely, without conflict, sidestepping the look of false modesty, believe that I suck…but I know I’m not going to stop. And heck knows, if I’m not going to stop, you shouldn’t either, regardless of how many rejections come your way. Because you can take it.

Do it for Eddie. 

Haha, yes, this is a real book. HellBound Books Publishing accepted one of my short stories, “Dear Diary,” for their “flush fiction” series, a sequel book to their previous collection of short fiction designed to be read while yer ridin’ the ol’ porcelain pony. The Toilet Zone: Number Two is now available on all the things. (More details on the publisher’s website.)

Imagine, if you will, you’re traveling through the unknown, hellbound, with no roadmap or stars to guide you. The light fades as you descend into a shadow realm where supernatural terrors make their lair and evil lurks at every turn. Here, dead things don’t always stay dead, for this is a world where things that shouldn’t be… are, and things that should be are not.

In this world, it takes between 2,500 and 4,000 reading words to pay a visit to the smallest, but terrifyingly necessary, room, and stories are written precisely to chill the bones as you wait for nature to make its call.

You open up the book, and one of the 32 tales skulking within its hellish pages chooses you…

It’s too late to turn back now. You are about to set foot into another dimension, so best watch out for that signpost up ahead…

You’ve just crossed over into… The Toilet Zone.

Traces of the afterlife exist all around us. We are haunted by entities that linger and refuse to let go. Is it a need for relevance, revenge, or bittersweet regret which bind these pitiful spirits? Can they find peace? Do they deserve it? The ghost stories held within explore what happens when the unsettled reach out from Beyond the Levee.

This collection, now available from Amazon, features three stories by yours truly. This tidy anthology features a plethora of authors with different sensibilities, so there’s definitely a little something for everyone.  Check it out this coming Halloween season.

In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t update this site very often. Unless I have a new book coming out (and I currently have one in second-draft phase), I don’t have a lot of news to share. To sidestep that, I figured I’d share a link to my personal blog — one that shares the name of my first collection, The End of Summer, but one that also predates said book by a couple years. The blog started off as a way for me to start writing with more “discipline,” and force me to commit to writing at least one thing a week, because I’d stepped away from writing for a long time and knew I needed to re-embrace it. It even directly led to the book once I realized how much I’d missed it.

The blog is basically a collection of all the movie reviews and retrospectives I’ve written for other film websites over the years. I’m slowly working to compile them all in one place for future generations of Internetters to peruse long after I’m sucking dirt.

Stop by and bookmark The End of Summer. I try to post daily, even if it’s just a picture or some random and very weird news story. I’ve been dismantling, deleting, and retiring most of my social media accounts because they are used for evil and it’s depressing to see how hive-minded and cultish people are becoming, so if you want a glimpse into my non-life, this’ll have to do. Besides, it’ll keep you company until my first novel is finally ready to infect the masses.

My cockles. They are warmed. Thank you, Halloween Kween (and to Courtney for sending this my way).

Featuring twenty-one different voices hailing from five different countries and eleven states, Ghosts, Goblins, Murder, and Madness is certain to strike a chord with every horror aficionado.

Devil’s Night, Day of the Dead, and Halloween has been celebrated around the world in one form or another, beginning with the Ancient Celts over two-thousand years ago. For some revelers, it’s a time for guising, or dressing up in elaborate costume; for others, it’s a time for practical jokes and mischief, and for some, it’s a reverent occasion to acknowledge the thin line between earth and the spirit world.

In this same vein, the stories here provide a wide-angle lens at what comprises the unique expanse of horror fiction today. From hobgoblins and apparitions, to haunted dwellings and cursed possessions, to good intentions gone awry and evil ones turned on the perpetrator, these twenty tales will unsettle, frighten, tickle, and caution, and in the end, readers may take heed before ever again accompanying their children trick-or-treating, striking up conversations in anonymous chat rooms, or fortifying their homes in an attempt to prevent Halloween vandalism.

Release Date: August 17, 2018

Ghosts, Goblins, Murder, & Madness: Twenty Tales of Halloween has a cover! Its release date is still unconfirmed, though it’s tentatively targeted for a late August release. The collection was curated and is being published by Dark Ink, previous publisher of Kane Hodder’s official biography Unmasked: The True Life Story of the World’s Most Prolific, Cinematic Killer, and Grande Illusions: The Art and Technique of Special Make-Up Effects from the Films of Tom Savini. (They previously published my book too, and it still wows me I share the same home as these horror titans.) I’m expecting the official synopsis for the anthology to appear any day now; when it does, naturally I’ll be sharing it here.

I know. It’s been quiet around here for a while. But I’ve finally got some news.

A new Halloween anthology is coming out this coming autumn season from Dark Ink, the publisher who released my collection The End of Summer: Thirteen Tales of Halloween, and it will feature a new story by yours truly. This was a story I kicked around for a few years — something I’d originally written for a book of short horror stories geared toward younger readers that has yet to come to fruition and probably never will. Something about this particular story had me coming back to it more and more to gussy it up, and soon the themes within it became more mature. Once that happened, the gore quotient was upped a little bit as well. I love me a good story or flick where someone’s head falls off, but that’s not something I normally prefer to write. However, for this one, I wanted to push the envelope it a little. By the end, I realized I’d inadvertently written an homage to films like Phantasm, Dead & Buried, and Stephen King’s IT (but no fear all you coulrophobics — the story is clownless.) It also made me realize that I like to write stories about people telling stories, which was an interesting development and it’s left me wondering why.

The title of this new collection is Ghosts, Goblins, Murder, and Madness: Twenty Tales of Halloween. There’s no firm release date as of yet, but it’s tentatively planned for late summer/early fall.

Naturally, there will be updates to this as they are available.