Of all my cherished spooky season stand-bys, nothing comes remotely close to the November 1982 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Despite the cover date, the issue was magazine’s second annual Halloween special, and special it certainly. It’s pages sport an embarrassment of riches to remind readers what a singular moment it truly was. There’s Stephen […]

But first, on earth as vampire sent, Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent, Then ghastly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race. There from thy daughter, sister, wife, At midnight drain the stream of life, Yet loathe the banquet which perforce Must feed thy livid living corse. Thy […]

…and we’re back, just in time for the closing stretch. The Kid is doing fine, though things took a bit longer than expected. The same goes for getting back into my regular routine after eleven days of holding down the home front by myself while the ladies were at the hospital. At least my car […]

The weekend following the arrival of my unique treasure, I experienced a particularly violent sneeze which dislodged a small fragment of tissue in my left eye, causing a half-moon shaped blind spot right in the center of my vision. It wasn’t anything serious, but just another one of the little nightmares that become the norm […]

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place your sight can knock on, echoing; but here within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze will be absorbed and utterly disappear: just as a raving madman, when nothing else can ease him, charges into his dark night howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels […]

“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of […]

I’m not what form the Halloween Countdown will take this year. A deadly plague is sweeping a world already pushed to the brink of hysteria. Meanwhile, your humble narrator has spent the last six months walled up in his ancient New England manse, surrounded by dusty artifacts of bygone ages. His body still suffers the […]

One of the perks of taking an extended hiatus is having actually new developments to talk about upon returning — — things such as the above object of beauty. The collection is not a hoax or imaginary story. Nor, I regret to inform you, is it the product of DC’s trade collections department coming to […]

We’re down to the last couple of bolts in this particular quiver, so let’s start wrapping things up with a look at the literature that shaped the most formative year of my childhood. The top of that particular heap was Twilight Zone Magazine, purchased with scrounged pocket change at the convenience store across from Ferullo […]

I didn’t set foot into a proper movie theater until I was eight years old, when my aunt took my brother and I to see The Black Stallion at the multiplex across the highway from the North Woburn shopping plaza. Up until (and even for a few years after) then, the entirety of my big […]