Yeah, yeah, it’s been a minute. I know.
Our last reading list post was in June, and with this being the last week of October we barely made it this month. Truth be told, we were recently interviewed by @slowheavymetalmusicplaying on a new app called Famera. It was a great time, a lot of fun. During the conversation, he suggested we write out a list of books and movies every month. And I thought, “shit, we were doing that back in June.” Anyway, here’s our list for October filled with Halloween themed Horror Pulps and other creepy weird tales.
We’re gonna come back with a vengeance in November. I promise.
Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King
Really any Stephen King short story collection you can get your hands on is a good choice for some light Halloween reading. We’ve written about Night Shift before. And if we haven’t written about Skeleton Crew, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, or The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, we should have. But for me, Everything’s Eventual has some solid creepy short stories from the King. Particularly, The Man in the Black Suit, Riding the Bullet, and That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French. There are other great stories in this collection but those three have stuck with me years after having read them.
Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus
Like clockwork, every October you can count on a news piece about checking your kids’ Halloween candy for razor blades or drugs. Well, Daniel Kraus wrote about some guy who planned to do just that, in this Hard Case Crime story written from a kid’s point of view).
It’s not your typical book, the narrator, Jody is a kid who, along with two other misfits is led by Robbie. Robbie the ringleader isn’t exactly a criminal mastermind, and the young kids who look up to him—his only friends—aren’t the brightest bulbs in the batch either. But these modern-day Dickensian characters have a rough past, and you can’t help but feel sorry for them as you learn more about their backstory.
It’s a bleak book. In fact, it’s a great book to prime you for Noirvember. Which is right around the corner. But it also has some pretty funny moments. If you’re into A Clockwork Orange, this one’s for you.
The October Country by Ray Bradbury
Another short story collection by an amazing writer. The collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury mostly appeared in Weird Tales magazine in the 1940s and 50s writing Horror Pulps and his own blend of fantasy fiction. If you’ve never read the great Ray Bradbury, this is a solid primer. All of the stories are classic pulps, but some of my favorites: The Man Upstairs, Skeleton, The Lake, Homecoming, and The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse.
