dark, dark, love, love,

reak...
Crash...
BOO!

Shivering skeletons, ghostly pirates, chattering corpses, and haunted graveyards...all to chill your bones! Share these seven spine-tingling stories in a dark, dark room.

I'm 31 years old, and I still remember the day I found this book in my school library when I was seven. I was enamoured, and checked it out numerous times before another student lost it. I was a bookworm as a child, and this book still stands as one of the truly unforgettable books I read in my youth. I believe it is the powerful imagery of the book that has stuck with me all these years, and made it impossible for me to forget.

Granted, it is not for everyone, and some children might benefit from reading it at an older age. I remember being slightly perturbed by some of the ideas and nuances presented in the book. However, I doubt highly that it would truly disturb any child that was mature enough to approach the book thoughtfully.

   

books we love

A delightfully ghoulish array of specters and sorceresses, witches and ghosts, hags and apparitions haunt these pages–a literary parade of phantoms and shades to add to the revelry of All Hallow’s Eve.

From Homer to Horace, Pope to Poe, Randall Jarrell to James Merrill, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil channels Aeneas’s wife from the afterlife, Baudelaire lays bare the wiles of the incubus, and Emily Dickinson records two souls conversing in a crypt, in poems that call out to be read aloud, whether around the campfire or the Ouija board. From ballads and odes, to spells and chants, to dialogues and incantations, here is a veritable witches’ brew of poems from the spirit world.

books we love

Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, Andre Gide and Andre Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece.

Although MALDOROR's most immediate pleasure is its naked nastiness - rape, murder, torture, blasphemy etc. - the truly unsettling nature of the book is its textual instability, the violence of its language, the horrible, concrete, surgical beauty of its images, the haunting effect of its descriptions, its foregrounding and destabilising of slowly compelling narrative, its clashing of tones, moods, viewpoints, narrators, targets, sympathies. French literature produces a lot of books like this, wherein a madman shouts the reader out of his complacency (e.g. Rimbaud, Corbiere, the Gide of FRUITS OF THE EARTH). This is better than most because its disgust is funny and a thrill.

books we love

Can we please judge these books by their covers? Please? Just once? Oh my oh my how much I love these covers. What do they hold? What do they tell? I could gaze at these all day.

 

We here at OB do love us some spooky tales, but as designers, we also notice packaging and design even more. These books make our flesh crawl, in only the best of ways.

 

 

Oh what a library holds! A trove of wonderful fright!

The Hag

Robert Herrick (1648)

The Hag is astride,     This night for to ride; The Devill and shee together:     Through thick, and through thin,     Now out, and then in, Though ne’r so foule be the weather.     A Thorn or a Burr     She takes for a Spurre: With a lash of a Bramble she rides now,     Through Brakes and through Bryars,     O’re Ditches, and Mires, She followes the Spirit that guides now.     No Beast, for his food,     Dares now range the wood; But husht in his laire he lies lurking:     While mischiefs, by these,     On Land and on Seas, At noone of Night are working,     The storme will arise,     And trouble the skies; This night, and more for the wonder,     The ghost from the Tomb     Affrighted shall come, Cal’d out by the clap of the Thunder.

Hubknuckles

Here at October Boys, we love to collect old kid books on Halloween. This will begin a post series of kids books that we love- some known wide, some rarely read. 

The first book we want to highlight is called Hubknuckles.  Reading this as a boy, I was awestruck on how spooky it was. I recently picked this up again, and found that it was still very spooky for a kids book. I don’t know why, but you do see a lot of children’s books from the 60s-80s tackle more heavy spooks for a “kids” book. No complaints here though. 

Here is a description: 
Every Halloween, Hubknuckles pays a visit to Lee and her younger sisters and baby brother. The children watch the ghostly figure from the safety of their warm kitchen, experiencing delicious little tickles of fear.

But this year, Lee has decided that Hubknuckles isn’t real. “Hubknuckles is just a sheet and a flashlight,” she tells her sisters. “Either Ma or Pa makes him dance.” And she is determined to prove it. 

What Lee discovers after an eerie dance on the lawn with her silent, shadowy partner is sure to delight young readers, who will be enchanted by the softly glowing illustrations of this unusual Halloween happening.

buy it here 

Stingy Jack

The Legend of "Stingy Jack"

People have been making jack-o'-lanterns at Halloween for centuries. The practice originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed "Stingy Jack." According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn't want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the Devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack eventually freed the Devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul. The next year, Jack again tricked the Devil into climbing into a tree to pick a piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree's bark so that the Devil could not come down until the Devil promised Jack not to bother him for ten more years.

Soon after, Jack died. As the legend goes, God would not allow such an unsavory figure into heaven. The Devil, upset by the trick Jack had played on him and keeping his word not to claim his soul, would not allow Jack into hell. He sent Jack off into the dark night with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming the Earth with ever since. The Irish began to refer to this ghostly figure as "Jack of the Lantern," and then, simply "Jack O'Lantern."

In Ireland and Scotland, people began to make their own versions of Jack's lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits. In England, large beets are used. Immigrants from these countries brought the jack o'lantern tradition with them when they came to the United States. They soon found that pumpkins, a fruit native to America, make perfect jack-o'-lanterns.

Juxtapoz Magazine’s Halloween Issue, October 2012.

 

from the dust returned

(If you loved The Halloween Tree, then you MUST rush out and buy this book, you wont forget it, I promise to jack.)  

Ray Bradbury, fantasist extraordinaire, needs no introduction. His novels and short story collections count among the best remembered: Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, The October Country, Fahrenheit 451, and so on. From the Dust Returned, has been hailed as a return to his former stylistic pinnacle. It spans the length of Bradbury's illustrious career, stringing together stories about an unusual misfit "family" of Halloween creatures -- a book that Bradbury hoped would...

"become a sort of Christmas Carol idea, Halloween after Halloween people will buy the book, just as they buy the Carol, to read at the fireplace with light low. Halloween is the time of year for story-telling... I believe in this more than I have believed in anything in my writing career. I want you [Charles Addams, the illustrator] to be in it with me."

The overarching plot is fairly simple: a "family" -- or, rather, a group of societal misfits like loping werewolves, living gargoyles, ghosts who starve in a world without belief, the dead who must be unburied to live life backwards, the voice of a creepy creaky Theban door hinge, vampires and other winged creatures of the night who can no longer fly at night but must etch out a new meaningful existence, spirits that possess other bodies in search of the body that would love them, and Egyptian mummies who can bestow knowledge of the dead -- congregates every now and again at a haunted house and decides how to define who they are and what they should do, pausing to tell individual tales of the family members.
The strength of the narrative is the story of the rejected seeking out people with similar problems or powers to build their own family, catalogue and define it. Interestingly, as in real-life houses and churches and other places of congregation, the House becomes a symbol of the family itself that, when threatened by an outsider who wishes to expose and burn down the house, the family itself is threatened. One might view this as the story of the reading public in general, the genre in particular, or whatever group that feels isolated from the mainstream of society. The individual story sub-plots/sub-themes ask the mainstream: why not battle unbelief with the imagination of a child -- the life elixir of the undead? Why not accept death as another process of life? 

Like a Robert Frost poem of perfect rhyme and meter, the light tone in From the Dust Returned can hide darker dealings for a careless reader. Timothy, the young mortal and family cataloguer who wants to join the immortal folk one day, suggests:

"we have someone who could make distribution. She can search the country for souls, look for empty bodies and empty lives and when she finds great canisters that are not full, and little tiny glasses that are half empty, she can take these bodies and empty these souls and make room for those of us who want to travel."

The implications are tremendous. Who and what are empty lives? or half-lives? Are we living a half-life whose body might be better served for immortal souls to travel in? 


 Alfred Bester puts Bradbury's accomplishment best in his essay "The Perfect Composite Science Fiction Author" from Redomolished:

"Mr. Bradbury is for the simple life... [H]e seizes upon a very small point... and develops it with masterly style into a telling incident. Incident, not drama, is Mr. Bradbury's forte... [A] very little goes a long way... One becomes quickly surfeited with the subtle nuance, and begins to require more robust fare."

This is just to say that Bradbury's cool plum of prose, while delicious, should be savored one or two chapters per sitting. 

 

RIP Mr. B