Haunted Halloween Readings

By Kim J. Harmon

...Matei took his place. He held a knife in his hand, a long Turkish dagger. Its sharp edge caught the light of a candle and twisted it all along its length. Matei stretched his hand out, holding the handle toward me. My hand was no longer trembling. I took the dagger from him modestly, with the respect due to one of his age and station. He nodded briefly and stepped back. They were all watching me. I turned to the bed and to the cowering figure of Liliana. She was shivering and could not stop shaking her head from side to side. I smiled and shook my head, once to the left and once to the right, and knelt and did my duty while my ancestors watched and sighed with satisfaction...

My, my, my – what a creepy tale that was. Jonathan Aycliffe has written some spooky stuff, but The Lost was the spookiest. Now I know if I ever inherit an ancient castle in the Transylvania Alps, I will most certainly have to say nu a multumi tu (or words to that effect).

Anyway, time to put this one back and grab another. But, alas, I don’t like going down into that basement. The stairs are rotting, the bare dirt has a thickening scent of something moldering, and the naked bulb that swings ever so slightly makes the shadows lunge off the wall at me.

I really should store my books upstairs.

Oh well, no use holding it off. It’s almost Halloween and therefore the perfect time to call forth the denizens of the night ... the vampires, zombies, witches, demons and other unearthly creatures like the strigoi and the rakoshi. Why don’t we take a walk downstairs.

Let’s see what we can dig up (heh-heh), shall we?

In The Basement

“Listen to them – the children of the night. What music they make!”

—Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker upon hearing wolves howling outside the castle.

Sometimes I imagine when I come down here that something is huddled in one of the darkened corners, maybe over by the fusebox, waiting for the lightbulb over the workbench to finally fizzle. If I listen real close, sometimes I imagine I hear it breathing.

Well, well – right here at my feet I find Phantoms by Dean R. Koontz, a terrifying story of an ancient monster oozing to the surface in a small California town. Severed hands, ringing church bells – there is a lot here to send shivers up your spine. Like this book here, Darkfall, a tale of a unusual hole and the things that bubble forth from it.

I loved both of those (one night I started reading Phantoms at 10 pm and didn’t stop until 4:30 am), but possibly the scariest book I have ever read is right here at the bottom of the box, covered with dust and small cobweb – The Keep, by F. Paul Wilson, in which the demon Rasalom is released from a centuries-old prison in a Romanian castle.

Oooh, here is The Tomb, also by F. Paul Wilson and the second novel in the Adversary Cycle, in which we get an awful glimpse of the evil rakoshi (truly frightening demons, believe me), who threaten a woman, her daughter, and a guy they call Repairman Jack.

Good – I found my stash of Bentley Little novels right behind the hot water heater. Once I wipe away this huge spider web I can see The Revelation, The Summoning, Dominion, University, The Ignored, The Town, The Mailman and The House. All very good, but my favorite is right here – The Store. Sinister is about the only way to describe it, I’m afraid, from the suspicious deaths when it was being built to the strange people who patrol the store at closing time.

Now, why is THIS book tucked all the way in the corner? My favorite horror novel of all time, read so many times I had to buy a new copy. Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King, is about a small town in Maine and haunted houses and vampires. Icily terrifying. Started reading this one while camping out in the backyard when I was 15 and heard a twig snap and – well, let’s just say I spent the rest of the night inside.

Oh, here is another great King book – Night Shift. His first short story collection (at least six stories have been turned into movies), it has three of the five scariest stories I have ever read – Graveyard Shift, The Boogeyman and One for the Road.

One of the others was The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs, but I don’t have a copy of that down here. The last is Nightcrawlers, by Robert McCammon, which is in his collection Blue World, which is around here somewhere. Wherever it is, there is also McCammon’s Night Boat, the best (only?) voodoo zombie Nazi submarine horror novel ever written.

Now that I’m behind the leaky oil tank I can see my box of James Herbert books. My, my – he was a fan of rats, wasn’t he? From The Rats to The Lair and Domain, he wrote the best lurid B movie stuff ever. His best, though, is The Dark, where the darkness is alive. Creeeeepy.

Aaah, up on the shelf, next to a bottle of pickled pig’s feet (at least I hope that’s a bottle of pickled pig’s feet!), I can see a couple of nasty books – Moonbane by Al Sarrantonio and The Manitou by Graham Masterton. If it’s werewolves crashlanding during a meteor shower that floats your boat, then it’s Moonbane, but if it’s ancient Indian demons and bizarre ways to possess a human body then you’ll want The Manitou.

There is plenty of other good stuff around here. I see The Relic and Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (an ancient African demon stalking the tunnels beneath New York) and The Light at the End by John Skipp and Craig Spector (an urban vampire tale).

Perhaps the best is right over there, under the steps, sitting in a rotted cardboard box that has some pulsating, cocoon-like thing stuck in one of the corners. I’ll try not to disturb it as I bring out Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell. A chilling, chilling ghost story. Talk about shivers – when you see the dead girl in the trees or see the trail of brackish river water leading into the house, don’t come screaming to me.

Hey, now that it’s almost Halloween, you might want to read one of these. No, you can’t come over to my house (besides, by then that cocoon-like might have hatched and God knows what’s going to happen then), but you can find most of these online or in a used bookstore. I saw a couple copies of Cold Moon Over Babylon in Monroe and I figured that one would be the hardest to find.

Now, no one has time to read all of them (except for the strigoi, who have centuries) but if you can only grab a couple, here are my top five scariest books of all time...

1. Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King;

2. Cold Moon Over Babylon, by Michael McDowell;

3. Phantoms, by Dean R. Koontz;

4. The Keep, by F. Paul Wilson; and

5. The Lost, by Jonathan Aycliffe.