For those of you bemoaning this late-November holiday and dreading having to suffer the company of your relatives, just remember: it could always be a lot worse. Dante furnished unnerving reminder of this seven centuries ago in his classic compendium of severe yet suitable punishments. As a Thanksgiving Day special Dispatch from the Macabre Republic, here are my choices for the seven worst, most cursed fates in the Inferno–ones I’d be forever thankful to avoid.   7.Torment of the Barrators (Canto XXI) The Fifth Pouch of the Malebolge combines the worst that the underworld has to offer: p ..read more

Sunday night brought the latest (lamentably post-October) edition of The Simpsons‘ annual Halloween special. Granted, after thirty-four years, the “Treehouse of Horror” shows signs of serious aging, but there is enough in the episode to convince fans that all the wicked fun isn’t exhausted just yet. TofHXXXIV opens with “Wild Barts Can’t Be Token,” easily the weakest of the episode’s three segments. A lame satire on the NFT craze, the short is long on unfunny cameos (by the likes of Kylie Jenner, Rob Gronkowski, and Jimmy Fallon) and forced pop cultural references (e.g. Snowpiercer). Dig ..read more

For those refusing to make the turn toward the Season to Be Jolly just yet, here is some October overflow to immerse in:   The Pumpkinrot blog keeps keepin’ Halloween alive with a heap of holiday-related eye candy   The Lineup examines tricky treats: Halloween Candy Tampering: Fact or Urban Legend?   Pumpkin-carver extraordinaire Adam Bierton creates a tentacular spectacle in the New York Botanical Garden   Tor.com assembles a cast of the best out-casters: It’s an Excellent Day to Rank Our Favorite Fictional Exorcists   Crime Reads probes the phobias of ..read more

Here’s a brand new poem–an impish take on impersonal systems of Halloween candy handout.   Just Take One By Joe Nazare   Beneath the porchlight’s warm harvest moon glow, A cauldron of a candy bowl sits brimming, Luring nocturnal beggars from the thoroughfare. The arrangement is annotated by a weathered plank With dripping red letters, spatter accented, Imploring the costumed to remain honorable. That sign I read as invitation, not limitation, So now I crouch down low, chocolate-cloaked, My musk masked by the saccharine reek. All awful hunger this All Hallows Eve, I await the unwittin ..read more

On the night before Halloween, here’s “The Day After Halloween”–a short story that was first published in the 2011 anthology Jack-o’-Spec: Tales of Halloween and Fantasy.   The Day After Halloween By Joe Nazare   Night, like no other. October’s closing ceremony. Drew McCormack stands gazing out from his front porch, joined only by the uncarved pumpkin propped on the gray wooden ledge. Curling his forearm to read his wristwatch, he sees that just two minutes have passed since last check. 9:48—which he once again translates to LATE. “Dammit, Robbie,” he grumbles, but really he’s cursi ..read more

Here on the home front of the Macabre Republic, this is what constitutes a bedroom nightlight. A former Halloween costume repurposed, this scraggly scarecrow (draped onto a floor-lamp stake) has given me fine nightmares all October long ..read more

“Wild Chase”: 1889 painting by Franz Ritter von Stuck   The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions, stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols. –“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Washington Irving’s classic ghost story brought a certain “galloping Hessian” lasting fame (I track the cropped figure’s long legacy in my essay “Eerie Rider: The Headless Horseman’s Forays into Pop Culture”), but this eq ..read more

The Last Haunt by Max Booth III (Cemetery Gates Media, 2023) In this new novella, author Max Booth III offers a thinly-veiled version of notorious extreme-haunt operator Russ McKamey (here dubbed Gus McKinley). Subtitled “An Oral History of the McKinley House Massacre,” The Last Haunt is structured as a sequence of dramatic monologues–as a juxtaposition of the testimony (by a neighbor, a responding officer, Gus’s father, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, a haunt actor, former haunt participants, and a fellow haunt operator [wittily christened “Miguel Myers”]) provided to an anonymous writer w ..read more

Edgar Allan Poe’s classic Gothic poem “The Raven” is a pop culture fixture, permeating the realms of film and TV, literature and music, professional football and professional wrestling alike. But little did I know (until I stumbled upon this webpage a few days ago) that the poem has also been transformed into a glorious pop-up book by David Pelham and Christopher Wormell. First published in 2016, The Raven: A Pop-Up Book is now a pricey collector’s item, but this quaint tome can still be pondered on a midnight dreary by watching the video below ..read more

  All the lessons I learned from those series [The Haunting of Hill House; The Haunting of Bly Manor] came to a head as I told Netflix I wanted to tackle some of the most important and iconic horror fiction ever written: I wanted to do a series based on the collected works of Poe, and I didn’t want to pull any punches. I wanted to tap into that feeling I had as a child reading his work for the first time; I wanted the show to fly without a safety net. I wanted to make something dark, beautiful, mad, and dangerous. –Mike Flanagan, Foreword (The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Storie ..read more