The Fear County Chronicle #26
New paperback prices at RKHORROR, a special deal on my two Halloween collections, and a nostalgic essay about my last childhood Halloween!
October is a busy month for most horror writers and I’m certainly no exception. Between several anthology releases that I contributed stories to, working on Book Three of The Saga of Dead-Eye, and promoting new novel rereleases and some seasonal Southern-Fried Horror at special prices, I’ve had my hands full. So, let’s take a look at what’s going on in Ol’ Ron’s creative neck of the woods.
Mister Glow-Bones & The Halloween Store only 99 cents!
That’s right! For a limited time, both of my Halloween story collections, Mister Glow-Bones and Other Halloween Tales and The Halloween Store and Other Tales of All Hallows’ Eve, are available in ebook for only 99-cents! Each of these collections include seven to eight Halloween-themed stories and several nostalgic essays about my childhood Halloweens and my love for monsters and macabre in general. Also, Mister Glow-Bones features a full-color cover and eleven interior illustrations by Ol’ Ron himself. If you’re a Kindle reader, head over and get both of these spooky collections for less than two bucks!
Also, if you would like signed paperbacks of Mister Glow-Bones and The Halloween Store, I have plenty in stock at the RKHORROR online bookstore. I’ve also listed a special Halloween Horror Bundle with both books for a special low price. All books come with a personalized inscription and hand drawn RK artwork on the title page. Order now and I assure you that it’ll be in your mailbox well before the 31st. And, through the month of October, free Halloween stickers are included with every order!
RKHORROR Paperback Price Drop!
Recently, my main publisher, Crossroad Press, began lowering the retail prices of their paperbacks by several dollars, and accordingly I’ve done the same with my Crossroad/Macabre Ink editions at RKHORROR. Check out my inventory of Southern-Fried books for some October Halloween reading or for upcoming Christmas gifts. Or catch up on 2023 releases like Fear: Authors Preferred Edition, Tales From the Southern-Fried Crypt, The Essential Sick Stuff, Pitfall, The Shrouded Tome, and Hell Hollow. Also, after selling out my first big shipment of Twelve Gauge in less than a day’s time, it’s now back in stock. If you missed out the first time, you might want to grab a copy while it’s still available. I’ve also reduced the prices of my Zebra Books Alumni and Southern-Fried Horror t-shirts.
September & October Anthology appearances!
The past couple of months have been exciting with the release and upcoming releases of three new anthologies!
HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD/ This horror western anthology edited by Patrick R. McDonough was released by Dark Sky Publications around the end of September. It includes a forward by R.J. Joseph and stories by Joe R. Lansdale, Edward Lee, David J Schow, and others. It also includes my western werewolf tale “The Night of El Maldito”. Available in ebook and paperback.
HOUSE OF HAUNTS/ Yesterday was the official release date of House of Haunts, a ghost story anthology edited by Heather Daughrity. It features an introduction by Josh Malerman and tales by Clay McLeod Chapman, Mercedes Yardley, Justin Holley, and 22 more. My tale “Save Me a Spot on the Old Porch Swing” opens the collection. Available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover.
DEATHREALM: SPIRITS / On October 17th, Stephen Mark Rainey’s Deathrealm: Spirits will be released by Shortwave Media. This long-awaited anthology includes stories by Brian Keene, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth Massie, Eric Larocca, and more. The final story of this ghostly collection is my tale “Prayers from the Mouth of Hell”. Available in ebook and paperback.
The Last Halloween: A Nostalgic Essay
In this edition of the Chronicle, I’ve decided to feature my essay “The Last Halloween”. Many of you may have already read it in Cemetery Dance Publications’ 2015 anthology, October Dreams II, or my Halloween collection, The Halloween Store. For those who haven’t, here it is in its entirety.
The Last Halloween
In the little Tennessee town where I grew up, Halloween was for children. At the age of thirteen, you were pretty much expected to sit it out, hand out candy at the house with the old folks (your parents) or roll the principal’s yard with two-ply Charmin. Now days, you can pretty much trick-or-treat until you’re in your mid-twenties (freaky, but acceptable). Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, you would be considered a “juvenile delinquent” if you showed up on someone’s front porch with grease-painted face and one of your mother’s spare pillowcases. The neighbors would be ready to call Joe Friday to come and haul you off to Juvie Hall.
My last real Halloween was in 1972… at least the last one that held all the privileges and benefits of childhood. As it drew near, I knew the end of something special was approaching and it saddened me. For as long as I could remember, Halloween had always been my favorite holiday. The smell of wood smoke in the air, the crunch of autumn leaves beneath the soles of your Red Ball sneakers, and the sense of adolescent community that the sight of dozens of Batmans (or is it Batmen?), ballerinas, and Frankenstein’s Monsters roaming from house to house brought. That and the gradually increasing heaviness of your candy sack taking on loot at each lighted porch or concrete stoop. Yes, it was downright magical… but those who held the Power… the adults—the mayor, the school superintendent, the local churches—said it all ended after the big One-Two. The pleasures of trick-or-treating were off limits for those acne-ridden, voice-changing, awkward creatures known as the common teenager.
I knew, for quite some time, that this had been coming. All good things—at least good childhood things—must come to an end. First Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then your precious Mr. Potato Heads and G.I. Joes. I was a fighter, though. I wanted to cling to childhood with fingernails anchored to the quick and teeth bared… especially where All Hallows’ Eve was concerned. So, I decided I would do the last one up right. Pull out all the stops. Gather up enough candy to last me at least until I was twenty.
My brother Kevin and my cousin Donna also sensed my impending doom. Their beloved Ronald, the Lover of Monsters (and Dum-Dums and Bite-Size Snickers) was making a transition, albeit a forced one. At the beginning of October, we got together beneath the big magnolia tree in the back yard for a pow-wow.
“Won’t you ever get to go trick-or-treating again?” Kevin asked me with a pout.
“No,” I said grimly. “My time has come. Never again will I darken Old Lady Mangrum’s door and hear her say ‘Weren’t you here an hour ago?’ with her hair up in Coke can-sized curlers and a Marlboro Light dangling from her lower lip.”
My confederates, ages eight and ten, still in their youthful prime, hung their heads in sorrow. Then we broke out the cherry Kool-Aid and vanilla wafers and partook of our final Halloween communion… and planned that season’s festivities.
The following weekend we pooled our allowances and rode to town with our parents (for the entirety of our childhood, the city of Nashville was simply known as TOWN, at least to us rural rubes). We endured hair appointments and shoe shopping (a torture unto itself) and finally found ourselves in the hallowed halls of Grants Department Store. While our mothers went to the check the price of cake pans and foundation bras (‘unmentionables’, to young ears), we loudly invaded the Halloween section of the store.
Grants was the best place to do one’s Halloween shopping. The manager must surely have been a child at heart, because it was always decorated with plastic pumpkins, glow-in-the-dark skeletons, and cardboard cutouts of cackling witches and arch-backed black cats that looked as though they had stuck their claws in a light socket. The candy aisle with its three-pound bags of suckers, bubble gum, and candy bars was always fully stocked, enticing us with the sugary bootie to come. But the best thing about Grants’ Halloween section was the costumes. For the little kids there were costumes in colorful cardboard boxes with clear windows and the masks of monsters, astronauts, and hollow-eyed princesses staring blankly through. Folded underneath those disembodied faces were silk-screened body stockings of shimmering polyester; the type that would make an Eskimo sweat and were, thank God, patently FLAME-RETARDANT!
We weren’t interested in the baby stuff, though. We were interested in something else entirely. Grants had a large wooden bin that was perhaps six feet long by four feet wide… filled nearly two feet deep with rubber masks. Every sort of goblin or ghoul, werewolf or devil, could be found in that treasure trove of limp and garishly painted latex. They were substandard in workmanship by today’s standards, but back then they were wonderfully creepy works of art. With total abandon (and ignoring our mothers’ forewarnings of “Don’t you DARE try on those germy things!”), we picked through the heap of leering, grinning, fang-bearing rubber, trying on each and every one. Thinking back, I can still smell that powdery latex odor; feel the disorienting, but delicious, claustrophobia of staring through sagging eyeholes at the muted brilliance of Grants overhead fluorescent lights, and the sensation of the elastic string cutting into the back of my head. For a moment, you were transformed. No longer human but belonging to a time-honored fraternity of the grisly and ghoulish, hunted by torch-wielding mobs and cross-bearing Van Helsings in the mountainous wilds of Transylvania.
After the hunting was over, our choices were made. Mine was a pale-faced, widow-peaked vampire, fangs dripping with blood. My brother chose a leering, red-faced devil… then changed his mind and picked a werewolf when I convinced him that our conservative, Christian mom would never allow him to walk the length and breadth of Sunnyfield Drive bearing the unholy countenance of Satan. Cousin Donna opted for a different approach, shunning the latex and going with one of those bizarre transparent masks that showed a hint of your true face, while adding the benefit of bushy black eyebrows and mustache, or bee-stung lips the color of fire-engine paint. She chose the Marilyn Monroe look and was certain that her mother would be more than happy to dye her hair platinum blond to complete the ensemble. Personally, I was doubtful that that would take place. My aunt Hazel was a bit more free-spirited than my mother, but I couldn’t see her going down to the local Woolworths to buy a box of bleach-blond Clairol to fulfill a ten-year-old’s Halloween fantasy.
We left Grants satisfied, with masks and a couple of life-sized glow skeletons (if you can call five-foot-tall life-sized) in hand. The first step of the planning and execution of my Last Halloween had been completed. But there was work still to come.
Before I was a writer, I was known as an artist. Ever since I had scrawled my first Fred Flintstone and Touché Turtle on my stand-up blackboard at the age of four, family and friends honored me with distinction of being “the little boy who could draw”.
It was no exception that October. I was on fire with artistic inspiration. Many a sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper fell victim to pencil-drawn renderings of the Wolfman, the Mummy, and my favorite, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, as well as assorted bats, rats, cats, and spiders. Perhaps I saw this as my last-ditch effort to purge myself of every Halloween image imaginable and share them with my friends. After all, that time the following year, I would see no jolly jack-o’-lanterns or grinning skeletons upon my classroom wall. Instead, there would be boring charts of the food group pyramid, the American presidents (from Washington to Nixon), and the cryptic Table of Elements.
One drawing I was particularly fond of that year was a profile of a withered man with one bulging eye, a rat-gnawed ear, and a protruding chin sporting three ingrown hairs. The coup de grace was a large tenpenny nail that had been driven through the bridge of his crooked nose. I was particularly proud of that addition. I could imagine that the Lunch Lady had put it there with a ball-peen hammer for the crime of not finishing his green bean casserole… or that he had done the piercing himself—a sideshow geek who had mutilated his Durante-sized schnoz for the enjoyment of the paying crowd.
That drawing was the most popular of my Halloween gallery and, before long, every boy and girl in my seventh-grade class was requesting a copy to hang on their front door for Halloween night. Being the congenial and agreeable lad that I was, I readily agreed… but it was a daunting task. There were no office copiers in that day and age, only primitive mimeograph machines with royal-blue ink so toxic it would give a paper bag full of airplane model glue a solid run for its money. So, I set to work and hand-drew thirty-two of the one-eyed, nail-pierced geeks for my grinning classmates. Even the class bully wanted one. Inspired by his reign of terror, I added a word balloon hovering above the geek’s snaggle-toothed mouth that pleaded “Here’s my lunch money. Please don’t hurt me!” The elementary school equivalent of Josef Mengele thought this was absolutely hilarious and so I was spared a purple nurple or an Indian rope burn (of my choice) for the following week.
After school, I would go home and continue the planning of my final trick-or-treating campaign. Since I was going as Count Dracula, I wanted my outfit to be as authentic as possible. I had no flowing black cape—there was none to be bought back then, to my knowledge—but my father did have a long, navy-blue overcoat that hung loosely and dangled past my knees, giving me sort of a Dark Shadows/Barnabas Collins look. I convinced my mother to let me wear my white Sunday shirt and necktie, but there would be no slacks or patent-leather shoes to complete the illusion of undeadness. This was a definite setback. Who would ever believe the dreaded Nosferatu would terrorize the countryside wearing blue jeans from the boy’s department at Sears and ratty basketball high-tops?
Hours turned into days, days into weeks, and soon Halloween came to the picturesque town of Pegram (population 705). The weatherman had predicted rain, but our prayers apparently reached the Big Guy’s celestial ears, and the storm clouds held their bladders until well after nine o’clock. It was a chilly evening, blustery, sending dead leaves skittering across the streets like an exodus of withered, brown spiders. Kevin, Donna, and I donned our alter-egos and prepared for the “festival of groveling and begging”, as my curmudgeonly Grandpa Kelly called it. We had our costumes satisfactorily in place, Donna with a fancy silk scarf wrapped around her head rather than the hair-sprayed helmet of platinum-blond tresses she had formerly envisioned.
Mama was in the kitchen, preparing her largest mixing bowl and filling it with black and orange peanut butter kisses (the standard candy giveaway at the Kelly household). She mugged a mock expression of terror as we paraded past in our garb. We had no plastic pumpkins or Halloween-themed bags to carry with us, so we went to the cabinet beneath the sink where Mama kept her spare grocery bags. We found three good-sized Kroger bags and, appropriating scissors, cut oval handles in the opposing sides. There were no ‘Pubics’ grocery stores (as Aunt Wanda calls them) during that day and time, only Kroger, A&P, and good old reliable Piggly-Wiggly.
“Y’all be careful,” Mama called to us as we started for the front door. Daddy sat in the living room, listening to George Jones on the big console stereo. He threw up his hand and grinned. We waved back and headed into the October night, the nasal tones of The Possum crooning “He Stopped Loving Her Today” drifting lazily behind us.
Now, you must understand, this was a different time. It was 1972. There was none of the fear of abductions and child molesters like there is today. Parents didn’t follow their children around in cars and there was no such thing as trick-or-treating at the outlet mall or Trunk-or-Treat in the parking lot of the local church. Kids still had room to breathe and be kids, and one of the freedoms they enjoyed was venturing fearlessly into the night and trick-or-treating on their own.
I had secretly hoped for a full moon that evening, like any respectable vampire should, but if it was there, it was hidden behind a broad mat of dark clouds. We did our street first, going down one side, then back up the other. Although the temperature was hovering between the low 50s and high 60s, my rubber mask became sweltering. I began to sweat like a hog in a sauna and my frightening visage began to shift on me. I was leaving the McDowell house and heading across the yard, when the eyeholes of my vampire mask lost their alignment and, suddenly, I was as blind as a bat (no pun intended).
Suddenly, without warning, there was no ground beneath my feet. I took a spill and rolled into a drainage ditch. Fortunately, only my pride was hurt. I removed my mask and saw my brother and my cousin staring down at me.
“What are you doing in that ditch?” Kevin asked me.
“Remind me to pound you one when I get out!” I snapped.
There was one casualty to my fall in the ditch; my Kroger sack had split down the middle and the majority of the candy inside had scattered, like shrapnel from a detonated grenade. “Get your bottoms down in here and help me pick this stuff up,” I told them. We didn’t say ‘ass’ or even ‘butt’ back then; my mother said it was a ‘vulgarity’ and if she ever heard it cross our lips, we’d be walking the woods, picking our own switch.
Soon, we had the candy gathered and accounted for, bundled in the remains of the mangled bag. I couldn’t help but moan when I saw that the next stop was Old Lady Mangrum’s house. I slipped my mask back over my head, made sure the eyeholes were properly in place, and then we headed up the porch steps.
Old Lady Mangrum had no curlers in her hair that night, but the cigarette was there, as well as a suspicious look in her eyes. She examined my brother’s costume closely. “Didn’t I give you candy a half hour ago?” she asked. “I know I saw a dog like you come up here.”
He was muffled, but I could hear the disdain in his voice. “I’m a werewolf.”
When it was my turn, I held up my bag. “Do you have any Scotch tape?” I asked.
She told me to wait and then returned with a JCPenney shopping bag. It was big and roomy and would have held a bulldozer battery. “Thanks!” I said as I transferred my candy. Maybe my luck was turning for the better. This was, without a doubt, the Cadillac of Halloween bags.
We ended up trick-or-treating across the entire town of Pegram, which is no mean feat, since it is scarcely a half mile from entrance to exit. We had no watch to tell the time, but we knew it was getting late. My last Halloween was slowly winding down.
Before we headed home, we decided to visit one more place. It was pretty ordinary—a ranch-style house with white brick and a big picture window in the front. There was a jack-o’-lantern on the porch and black and orange crepe paper draped from the banisters. Thinking it was a safe bet, we mounted the porch and knocked on the door.
A lady appeared—tall, skinny, with a beehive hairdo that had gone out of style with the Johnson Administration. She seemed excited to see us. “Come in, come in!” she urged. “I have something to show you!” Her enthusiasm was a little disturbing, but we went in anyway. I don’t know why, but we did.
The living room was dimly lit and there were candles everywhere: on the end tables, the fireplace mantle, on the bar counter of the kitchenette nearby. “Come here!” the woman beckoned with a bony finger. “He wants to talk to you!”
Suddenly, a creepy feeling ran down my spine. He? Who is he?
Then we stepped farther into the living room, and we knew. It was a man—a pretty overweight man, perhaps 300 pounds or more—sitting in a reclining chair, dressed in a wife-beater undershirt, flannel pajama pants, and bedroom slippers. But that wasn’t the odd thing about him. His pudgy face was painted up like a clown and he wore a huge multi-colored wig on top of his head. He smiled lopsidedly at us and waved his hand. “Come here, kids!” he said, laughing sinisterly. “Come here… I have something to give you!”
Cautiously, we crept forward. We were scarcely four feet from the chair when I smelled the odor of beer and perspiration in the air. I saw a Budweiser can on an end table beside him. Looking around, I saw that there were several more sitting on the carpet beside his La-Z-Boy recliner.
“Open your bags!” he urged, still laughing. “Open ’em up and I’ll give it to you!”
My brother stared at me with frightened eyes. I’d never seen a lycanthrope look so scared before.
Then the drunken guy in the clown makeup and the rainbow afro dropped foil-wrapped popcorn balls in our treat bags and said, “Happy Halloween!”
A few minutes later, we were outside and back on the street. We looked at each other and began to giggle… but there was more relief to our mirth than humor.
“That was so weird!” Donna said.
“You’ve got that right,” I said. My heart was still pounding in my chest.
“What are we going to do with these?” Kevin asked, holding the crazy clown’s popcorn ball in his hand.
We looked at one another, then tossed them in the nearest ditch and started home.
Halfway there, my brother turned to me. “So… you’re not going trick-or-treating with us next year?”
“I can’t dress up,” I told him, “but I can walk with you.”
He nodded quietly, then rummaged through his bag for a Bit-O-Honey.
Thinking back, I’m not sure if I ever did. The last Halloween I remember as a child, was the one we shared together in the fall of 1972.
These days I have three kids of my own. One has outgrown the joys and thrills of Halloween (having traded it in for a boyfriend, an iPhone, and an Xbox), while two still indulge in the same autumnal rituals I enjoyed as a child.
Things have changed now. Small-town Halloweens are similar to the ones I enjoyed, but they have an edge to them now, and a constant awareness that things are not always right in our world. I’m always a few steps behind them, making sure they don’t step off the edge of a sidewalk, or that they don’t stray too close to a patch of darkness between trees or shrubs. I reckon a parent has a right to be overly cautious in this day and time. There are dangers out there—dangers that were probably there when I was a kid, but not quite so apparent and identifiable.
But they have fun and, through the eyes of their masks and their infectious laughter, I relive the spirit of Halloweens past. Not as carefree and innocent as I once had it, but fun, nonetheless.
And if we end up with popcorn balls given away by demented clowns, we simply toss them in the nearest ditch and go our merry way.
Well, that’s it for this edition of The Fear County Chronicle. If I’ll do my best to release edition #27 before October 31st, but if I don’t, here’s wishing you a fun and frightful Halloween and Many Happy Nightmares, y’all!
Good news!