Happy Halloween

It’s Halloween once again, and now that my kids won’t be seen with me in my Spider-Man costume in public, I’m going to enjoy a traditional Los Angeles Halloween: running the A/C full blast, handing out full-size candy bars, and watching the World Series. (Although I may switch to Young Frankenstein if the game turns into a nightmare.)

But if you’re looking for something to read between trick-or treaters, I’ve got you covered.

The End of the World (Again)

My friend and teacher John Rember had a pretty good view from the Sawtooth Mountains when we were all hunkered down during the Covid pandemic. Nobody likes to talk about it now, but for a while, none of us knew if this was really the end of everything. So he wrote an essay a week when he wasn’t sure if anyone would be around to read them in another decade, or even another year. He’s now collected these thoughtful, prescient pieces into a three-volume collection: Journal of the Plague Years. There are no zombies or post-nuclear mutants or most of the other things we talk a lot about when we imagine the End of the World. Instead, John writes about what it really means. Sometimes it’s worth asking what’s ending, and what’s beginning. Look at these books as a survival kit for your sanity for the next time the Apocalypse rolls around.

Other Scary Stuff

I wrote a few books about a vampire who works for the president, which means I’ve got a long shelf of books filled with terrors. Some of them even claim to be real.

• The Mothman Prophecies — John A. Keel’s classic book about what happened when a small town in Virginia started seeing a flying creature everywhere. Mothman has supposedly turned up in other places since then, but it’s never been as weird or real as Keel paints it here. This was the beginning of Keel’s belief that there is something older than humanity in the world, and it really loves to mess with us. I believe Mothman was probably a sandhill crane, but I still love the book as a tale of a town rapidly losing its mind.

• Absolute Batman — For me, Halloween was always more about dressing up as a super-hero until my friends and classmates found it too embarrassing. (About sixth grade, as I recall.) But I still remember the scratchy feeling of the vinyl poncho that said BATMAN on it and suffocating under that plastic mask with the little hole that always managed to catch my tongue. So, in the spirit of the season, I offer Absolute Batman, a new and scarier take on the caped crusader. There have been a lot of those, but what sets this one apart is its setting. Batman has been moved to a world where the good guys don’t always win; a world of mass shootings, corrupt politicians, and psychopathic social-media influencers. In short, a world a lot more like ours, where the good guys don’t always win. And while I usually hate that, I find myself rooting for Batman in this dystopian hellscape. He’s still fighting for what’s right, even if everyone else around him barely recognizes the concept. Might be a moral for us in there.

• The Gates (Samuel Johnson Book 1) — I am absolutely in the tank for John Connolly, one of the great prose stylists of our time and a creative and intelligent writer across multiple genres. But for Halloween, I recommend his books about Samuel Johnson, a small boy and his dachshund who find themselves the only ones in a position to save the world from pure evil. I felt real love for Samuel as he teeters on the brink of a world that is cruel and dark, which is what we all face growing up, and yet still manages to find unexpected strength in the face of the Devil himself.

• A Haunting on the Hill — You cannot go wrong with anything by Elizabeth Hand. She is another one of those authors I believe can do no wrong. But if you’re looking for a classic, then I suggest starting with A Haunting on the Hill, a return to Shirley Jackson’s haunted house. Then maybe go over to Wylding Hall, a crumbling English mansion where a rock band on the brink of stardom discovers there are worse things than ghosts. And then you can check out her Cass Neary books, about a former punk photographer who has a habit of running into crimes tinged with the occult despite her best efforts to stay away from them.

That’s it for me for now. If you don’t want to receive these emails anymore, you can unsubscribe below.

Happy Halloween. Drive carefully out there. Lots of little people in costumes. Let’s go Dodgers. And as always, thank you for reading.