Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Seven — The Stone Tape

It is day seven of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Seven is considered to be a lucky number. Let’s hope that bit of folklore holds firm for us today. We’re gonna need it. Why? Well, because we are joining a group of engineers who are in search of brand new recording medium. Wouldn’t it be lucky for us if we were to get in on the ground floor of such a technological development? Sure, it would! And you know what that would mean...

On the other hand, Lady Luck can be a fickle mistress. We may discover that our brand new recording medium is not so brand new as we think it is. It may be something that’s been around for a long, long time, and it may have recorded some events that we wouldn’t want to revisit.

Intrigued? Well then it is time to hit “play” on...The Stone Tape.

The research team for Ryan Electric Products has moved into an old Victorian mansion in hopes that they can discover a new recording medium that will give the company an edge over their competitors. The real estate agent in charge of the house has told team lead Peter Brock (Michael Bryant) that everything at Taskerlands has been refurbished for his company’s needs — all except one room. This stone room is believed to be from the Saxon period. It is a remnant of the original building, with the rest of the house having been added to it over the centuries. Work was halted in this room because the builders refused to go inside. They claimed it was haunted.

Being curious at such a story, the research team investigates and in the midst of their explorations they hear the scream of a woman. Jill Greeley (Jane Asher), a computer programmer for the company, sees an image of a woman running up the stone stairs then falling to her death. Jill seems to be the most sensitive of the research team, as not everyone in the group witnessed the event.

After discovering records that tell of a maid falling to her death in the room in 1890, Brock thinks that the stone walls of the room acted as a sort of tape — the very thing the team is looking for. Jill, however, believes that whatever has been recorded in the stone of the room can only interact with  the nervous systems of certain, highly sensitive viewers. She believes that it is a form of telepathy.

Brock and his team try and try again to trigger the images in the stone, but to no avail. Jill believes that the stone tape has been erased. Having failed at developing the recording medium that Ryan Electric Products wanted, Brock is told to make room for a new team at Taskerlands — one that is coming up with a new washing machine.

Meanwhile, the local vicar has unearthed evidence of an exorcism that took place not in the 1890s when the maid died, but in the 1760s, before the house was constructed. Jill thinks that the stone walls of the room have been recording events much longer than just the 1890s. The stones act like magnetic tape — recording new events over older ones. The recording of the death of the maid, then, was masking a much, much older event — one even older than the 1760s. One that Jill believes may be thousands of years old.

What does Jill find when she returns to the stone room one last time? What is the recording beneath the maid’s death? What does Jill find recorded on. . .The Stone Tape?

The Stone Tape was originally broadcast on 25 December 1972 on BBC2 as their annual Christmas ghost story. Christopher Morahan (Head of Plays at BBC Television from 1972-1976) asked his old friend Kneale if he would be interested in doing a Christmas ghost story, but, “Only if we could do a ghost story which had an altogether different twist — such as going at a ghost with science.”

Could he have asked a more perfect person for such a story?

This was an assignment right up Kneale’s alley. As we’ve seen in the previous stories of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, our hero seems to be most at home in the space where science fiction and horror overlap. (And we shall see even more examples of this coming up!) The Stone Tape is a perfect blend of these two genres, and it’s always fun to watch these two worlds collide.

The Stone Tape is on DVD, so perhaps your friendly neighborhood public library has a copy you can check out. It may even be on one of the streaming platforms that your local library is associated with (Hoopla or Kanopy, for instance). For those of who can’t wait to see what it is that Jill experiences in that ancient room, you can watch the film here:

BBC Radio 4 broadcast an audio drama version the The Stone Tape on 31 October 2015. Directed by Peter Strickland, it is quite different from the filmed version, but just as creepy. You can find it here at the Internet Archive.

Let’s hit the stop button for today, Blog-o-weeners. Remember to be kind and rewind. We only have two days left in this year’s celebration, but I think they may be the best yet. Tomorrow, for day eight of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, we will be looking at Kneale’s most famous creation: Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group. Although the good professor’s adventures spawned four series over nearly thirty years, we will be looking at one in particular. Set in London, workers have unearthed something strange, something not of this world, something that carries with it the lost history of the human race. Come back tomorrow to find out what is buried in...Quatermass and the Pit.

As always, Blog-o-weeners, watch where you are going, watch the skies, and...

Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Four — “The Road”

Yesterday’s entry in The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale was all about voices from the past coming back to haunt those in the present. Which begs the question: has the reverse ever been the case? Can the future ever travel back in time to affect the present? And if the future from which these ghosts originated was far flung enough, would we even understand what we were seeing?

These are the questions that 18th century philosopher Gideon Cobb and scientist Sir Timothy Hassall must contend with on Day Four of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Hope you are wearing comfortable shoes, because we have some miles yet ahead of us. Don’t worry, I’ll share my trail mix as we walk down...“The Road”...

At the invitation of Sir Timothy Hassall’s wife Lavinia, Gideon Cobb has travelled far from the busy streets of London into the  lonely English countryside to lend his rationalism to a most irrational problem. A series of strange, inexplicable events has occurred in a clearing of the forest. Tetsy, the young daughter of a the local landlord, is this manifestation’s only witness.  The year previous — exactly one year ago, Sir Timothy points out, the 27th of October, 1768 — Tetsy says that she was in the woods walking alone when she heard the noises:

“Weren’t much at first. Like some sort of whistles or squeaks. I thought birds, but t’weren’t birds...then they started to burst out more. Very loud. And between whiles there was quiet. And then I was laid on the ground and I could feel it starting to shake and the noises came nearer. A roaring and a rattling like nor I ever did hear...There seemed to be voices, too...yelling and screeching, yelling for their lives by the sound of them. And footsteps running under the ground I was lying on...right under me where I lay...But the queer thing was they sounded like feet on cobbles...”

Sir Timothy believes that what Tetsy witnessed in the forest are the revenants of the army of Queen Boadicea, the queen of an ancient British tribe, who failed in ousting the Roman Empire from Britain in 60 or 61 BCE:

“Imagine that hereabouts in the far past there was some great catastrophic event...a massacre...Now is it not possible that an event of such spiritual force somehow imprinted itself on the very landscape?”

Cobb, ever the rationalist, will have none of it. He claims that what Tetsy heard in the forest were her own heartbeats beating upon the ground. He believes that the girl’s imagination was influenced by the ancient tales told to her by her mother of Boadicea marching her army through the woods:

“All those sad barbarians, sweating the blue woad off their bodies as they fled, tossing their spears away, yelling and screaming in their terror, and behind them the trumpets and the drums — the rolling drums — of the Roman army.”

And so, to either prove or disprove Tetsy’s tale, the party moves from the local hostelry to the woods. There, in the clearing that Sir Timothy has had roped off, Gideon Cobb comes face-to-face with his worst nightmare: the bright and shining future to be built by overly rational men such as himself is not at all what he imagines it to be.

“The Road” was originally written by Nigel Kneale for the 1963 BBC television series First Night. A year later, the script was enacted again for Australian television. Neither broadcast survives.

In 2018, BBC Radio 4 transmitted an audio drama based on Kneale’s original script. Adapted for radio by Toby Hadoke, the drama stars Mark Gatiss (of League of Gentlemen fame!) as “Gideon Cobb,” Adrian Sarborough as “Sir Timothy Hassall,” and as “Lavinia Hassall” Hattie Morahan, the daughter of the man who directed “The Road” in 1963. It is a wonderfully creepy adaptation. The sound design alone makes it perfect for the spooky season:

That’s it for day four of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. I hope all this walking hasn’t tuckered you out too much. Since we are already in the country, I thought we would head on over to Beeley’s farm tomorrow for Day Five. Mr. Beeley is having some trouble with his pigs. The local vet doesn’t seem to know what to make of it all, but Mr. Beeley and his men think they have it all sorted out. It has something to do with the old woman living next door...it has something to do with a...“Murrain.”

Gideon Cobb in today’s story was an insufferable horse's arse, was he not, Blog-o-weeners? But I would hope that even he in all his rationalist wisdom would take the following to heart as the absolute truth:

Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Three — “You Must Listen”

For those Blog-o-weeners out there of a certain age (I mean those of you who stare out into space trying to do the math in your head when someone younger than you refers to music from the Eighties as “oldies”), I have a question for you: how many phones numbers did you have memorized when you were growing up? Like as information straight-up stored away in your brain that could be accessed at a moment’s notice. Myself, I think I had close to two dozen phones numbers belonging to friends, family, and a pizza joint or two jammed away in my skull.

Follow-up question: how many do you have memorized now?

Me?

One.

And that’s only because my parents still live in the same house that I grew up in and have the same phone number — albeit with a different area code than we had then.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s awfully nice to have all that information stored on a pocket-sized device that allows me to get at it at the flick of a thumb. And for someone who moves around a lot, it’s great not having to have the phone company set me up with a new phone line and the number that goes with it every time I change my address. (My friends and family are happy about that, too.) Our phone numbers are no longer tied to specific phones in specific places which are also tied to other phones and phone numbers and their specific places by miles and miles of wires and cords and lines. We are just ones and zeroes zooming through the ether. Kinda like ghosts.

Kinda like today’s story. (See, kiddies, I’m not just waxing nostalgic for my health.) For day three of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale, we are concerned with a particular phone number and its connection to a particular place and a particular person. The present owners of the number are getting unwanted calls from a voice from the past, a voice that insists that...“You Must Listen”...

Frank Wilson (Toby Jones) works for a telephone exchange in a small English town. The company he works for is by his own admission not very modern, nor is the town it serves. There isn’t much new construction happening. Old buildings are usually retrofitted with modern conveniences and put on the market as new offices. The strange story that Frank has for the listener happened in one of those.

Mr. Paley (Reece Shearsmith), a family solicitor, has just opened his new offices in one of these refurbished buildings. His new phone line has just been set up, and wouldn’t you know it, but there seems to be a bad connection. Every time his secretary Miss Prentice tries to speak to a client, another party can be heard on the line. And, boy, can “Passion Fruit” (as the ardent voice on the line comes to be known) be heard!

What starts out as a simple inconvenience for Mr. Paley and Co. becomes an insoluble mystery for Mr. Wilson and the phone exchange. Lines are checked and double-checked, clues in the one-sided conversation are followed up, and what Mr. Wilson and his team soon come to believe is...well, you’ll have to hear that for yourself.

“You Must Listen” was originally broadcast on BBC radio in 1952.  As with much of the BBC’s radio and television programming, no recordings of this broadcast were ever kept. Seventy-one years later — almost to the day — BBC Radio 4 recreated the program using Kneale’s original script. You can find it here on the Internet Archive collected with other BBC dramatizations (including Alien and Moonraker!).

Having a direct line to the supernatural is a trope that has been used by many writers, and there are tons more great stories that feature telephones to enjoy, if you are so inclined.

Richard Matheson’s short story “Long Distance Call” was adapted by Jacques Tourneur (director of such classics as Cat People, The Leopard Man, and Night of the Demon) for The Twilight Zone in 1964. (It was broadcast as “Night Call.”) You can listen to a reading of Matheson’s original story here on The Twilight Zone Podcast.

The English writer Mary Treadgold wrote “The Telephone” in 1955. In it, an already married man begins an affair with an actress. He and his wife divorce, but soon after he and the actress marry, he is informed that his first wife has died. Of course, in the best ghost story tradition that doesn’t stop her from calling him on the telephone.

And, naturally, Stephen King has dipped his toe (or would that be his ear?) in the telephonic waters. He wrote “Sorry, Right Number” for George A. Romero’s horror anthology television series Tales from the Darkside. You can watch the show here on the Internet Archive (along with other episodes). That is if you can make it past the opening credits of the show — one of the scariest bits of television ever created! You can also read King’s teleplay in his 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes, which I am sure your friendly neighborhood public library has on its shelves.

It’s time to hang up the receiver for now, Blog-o-weeners. These long distance charges are gonna be murder when the bill comes in. Not to worry, however, because we’ve got more Nigel Kneale coming up tomorrow. Be sure to wear a comfortable pair of shoes, though, because we will be taking a nice long walk down...“The Road.”

Until tomorrow, Blog-o-weeners, watch out for yourselves, watch out for each other and…

Blog-O-Ween 2025: The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale: Day Two — “The Photograph”

Welcome back, Blog-o-weeners, for day two of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Yesterday, we had a brief introduction to the life and work of the Manx science fiction and horror writer, then we got down to brass tacks by visiting a lovely little home by the sea called “Minuke.” Today, let’s read another offering from Kneale’s 1949 short story collection, Tomato Cain and Other Stories. Today, let’s sit for “The Photograph.”

“When he stuck them sideways out of the bed, his legs felt as if they were doing a new thing, something they did not understand...”

Young Raymond has been ill lately. Very, very ill. But Mamma and Gladys, his sister, think he is well enough to get dressed in his best Sunday clothes — the nice green suit with the white curly collar — and take a ride in a horse-drawn cab into town to have a photograph made.

At the photographer’s studio, Raymond is fretted over by one and all. The photographer, a man in “black clothes…[with] no hair on his head, and…yellow eyes that moved in a sort of liquid,” poses Raymond on a chair, positions his arms, and tidies his clothes and hair. The man stands beneath the black cloth of his camera and insists that Raymond “keep-quite-quite-quite-still—” Then, with a click of the camera’s shutter, Raymond’s image is captured.

Raymond’s trip to the photographer has taken a toll on his health. That night, as he lies in bed suffering from pains in his arms and legs, his sister visits him with a surprise:

“She held something up, high above his chest. A reddish-brown picture. He knew the table in it, the huge chair, the book, the shiny plant, from some time in the past.

There, too, was that terrible face.

After a moment he turned to her, She smiled and nodded. ‘It’s the photograph, darling. Isn’t it nice?’

He twisted his head away, and his neck ached. Tears came out of his eyes. He felt angry and frightened; as if he had lost part of himself.”

Gladys sets the picture upon the mantelpiece of Raymond’s room so that he can see it all the time. She exits the room, leaving Raymond with the photograph, a burning candle, and his own thoughts.

Only it isn’t just his own thoughts that command him to “keep-quite-quite-quite-still.” There is something else in the room with him, speaking to him. Something wearing a green suit that is now colored reddish-brown, something with brown fingers with their nails split wide open, something with little bony teeth...

“The Photograph” is short and (bitter)sweet. It never lingers on its images for long, yet we see everything that Kneale desires us to see, and we see and feel them clearly. Through small details, we understand that Raymond is not just suffering from a brief illness, that his trip to the photographer’s studio isn’t a whim on his mother’s part. The way she and Raymond’s sister act around him — the deep lines that crease his mother’s face when she looks at him, the false jollity that his sister puts on, the way both of them hover around him — we realize that this photograph might be his last. It will be how the family remembers him.

That fear of being reduced to an image, of being replaced in the minds of one’s loved ones by a photograph, is what drives the final horror of Kneale’s story. In the space of a single page, Kneale gives us the uncanny appearance of the “picture-child.” Like the rest of the story, its form is outlined in short, sharp sentences with a scalpel’s precision.

Horror has a particular source in much of Kneale’s work: technology. The ways in which the supernatural finds an entry into our world via technology is a theme that Kneale will return to again and again. We will find that ancient beliefs and spirits coexist with new fangled contraptions in many of his stories — a new house, a camera, a telephone, recording equipment, the computer. Keep an eye out for this theme as we continue through The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale.

As mentioned earlier, “The Photograph” is one of the “other stories” included in Kneale’s 1949 collection Tomato Cain and Other Stories. Comma Press released a new edition of this book a few years ago, and you may be able to find it at your local library.

If you’d like to sit back and have someone read it to you — and who doesn’t love to have someone read a spooky story to them?! — then please visit Redbeard - Horror Books & Vinyl over on YouTube. There you will find a great selection of spooky books and music — reviews, book hauls, and more. You will also find a video of Mr. Redbeard reading “The Photograph”:

For you Doctor Who fans and lovers of old British television, there is also this episode of Late Night Story. LNS was a BBC show that featured Tom Baker reading macabre short stories directly to the camera. These episodes were bedtime stories usually shown at the end of the broadcast day. Seems like the perfect way to sign-off for the day, if you ask me! (All we got  when it was time for the TV to go night-night here in the United States was the lousy National Anthem.)

Tom Baker and Late Night Story is also the perfect way to sign off this second day of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Come back tomorrow, and we will talk about the ghost in another kind of machine. You won’t want this telephone call to go directly to voicemail. You’ll want to pick up on the first ring, because...well...“You Must Listen.”

And always, Blog-o-weeners, this holiday season, be sure to live by those immortal words spoken by a wise man:

Blog-o-ween 2023: Stephen King

We did it, Blog-o-weeners! We made it! Today is the day! October 31st. Halloween...or Hallowe’en if you’re into apostrophes...and if you’re into apostrophes, may I recommend a Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 132-134? Or maybe a Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, line 5? They’re quite fresh today. Okay, I see you’re a discerning customer. For you, a special — two MacBeths for the price of one —  I’ll give ya an Act 1, Scene 5, lines 30-31 and toss in an Act 2, Scene 1, lines 33-35 for nothing! I’m losing out on this deal! My kids are the ones going hungry, but anything to make you happy!

No matter what you call it — Allhalloween, All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Eve, or the Festival of Samhain (I see ya back there, Mr. Cochran) — it’s a special day, and you’ve probably got a lot going on. If you have kids, you’re getting them into their costumes and then taking them out trick-or-treating. And, please, keep a close eye on them, so they don’t go running out into traffic. We don’t want another Ben Tramer incident, do we? Not on my watch!

If you don’t have kids...well, then, you’re dressing yourself up and taking yourself out trick-or-treating and hoping to pass as an eight-year-old.

And you will have deserved that rock! Honestly, trying to take Charleston Chews and Mounds bars out of the mouths of needy children. You oughta be ashamed!

You’re busy. We here at LARPCo understand. So in the interest of time, let’s just jump right into today’s post. Now, after spending the previous thirty days reading all sorts of horror-flavored stories, how could the ultimate Blog-o-ween 2023 post top all that’s come before it? Well, it’s simple really. We gotta go with the King—

No, not Jack Skellington the Pumpkin King. The other King...

As welcome as King Paimon would be to today’s festivities, I’m actually thinking of Steph—

GAH! NO! Talk about your horrible monsters!

No, kiddies. We’re talking the reigning champeen of all things horror, the undisputed king of calamity, the prince of putrescence, the prime minister of all things sinister, the duke of oil (slicks that eat people while they try to go for a nice swim in a peaceful lake). Today, we’re talking about Maine’s favorite son, Stephen King.

Now, when an author has been as prolific as King has, how do you choose just one or two stories to discuss? I mean, the guy has published over eighty books of fiction and non-fiction, novels and short stories. Add to that nearly twenty screenplays and teleplays. Add to all THAT a yarn called "The Plant," an epistolary story that King wrote in lieu of Christmas cards in the early- to mid-Eighties. In short, the man has a mighty stack of stories to choose from. No matter what stories we here at LARPing Real Life pick, I’m sure that we will disappoint someone.

C’est la guerre!

For this last entry of Blog-o-ween 2023, I thought we would stick to a single collection of Stephen King short stories. It’s a book whose cover has haunted me nearly my entire life. Back in the 1970s and 80s, whenever I’d accompany my mother to the Northern Lights Shopping Center in Baden, Pennsylvania, I would always search out the newsstand in whatever store we happened to be in — Hills department store, Thrift Drug, Kroger’s, and my personal favorite, The Book End. I'd plant myself in front of the shelves and pore through all the issues of Mad, Cracked, and Crazy I could find. I think ol' Stevie would back me up on my reading choices.

Standing like sentinals next to the woodem magazine shelves were wire racks filled with mass market paperbacks of all genres — westerns, romance, sci-fi. However, anyone familiar with Grady Hendrix’s fond overview of that era, Paperbacks from Hell, knows that it was the covers to the horror books that always captured the eye. In more ways than one.

This is my copy of Stephen King’s 1978 short story collection Night Shift. Looks rather staid, no? Sure, that’s how it gets you! It looks all safe and nondescript until you pick it up and turn over the cover to reveal what’s hidden underneath.

It was covers like this that charmed readers back then...charmed ‘em like a cobra extending its hood and beginning to sway back and forth, back and forth. Those eyes in the folds of that hand...man, talk about nightmare fuel. I honestly feel bad for people whose first introduction to Night Shift was this cover:

C’mon, man...that’s just weak. I wouldn’t give that book another look on the wire rack. When it comes to horror, you gotta judge a book by its cover. I think publishing has forgotten that maxim.

Ah! Stop looking at me!

So now that we have that book in our grubby little hands, which of the twenty stories are we going to talk about today? We are spoiled for choice, I must admit. There’s “Jerusalem’s Lot,” the sorta related/not really related precursor to King’s 1975 vampires-in-America novel, ‘Salem’s Lot. (Which, if you know anything about me, you know that I read every year in October. I'll be finishing my umpteenth read of ‘Salem’s Lot  tonight. I've paced myself well and have saved the Fearless Vampire Killers' final battle with Barlow just for Halloween.) Or how about “Night Surf,” that creepy story that takes place in the same universe as The Stand? Maybe “Sometimes They Come Back” King’s tale of undead greasers from the Fifties come back for vengeance?

All winners, in my opinion. You couldn’t go wrong by reading any of them, but my picks for Halloween are on, shall we say, the gooier side of things. Oh, we shall, we shall! Put your hip waders on, kiddies, cuz we’re goin’ in!

“I Am the Doorway” was first published in the March 1971 issue of Cavalier, a magazine that was started in the early 1950s by Fawcett Publications to be a showcase for its Gold Medal authors like Henry Kuttner and Mickey Spillane. By the time King’s story showed up in its pages, Cavalier was a “gentlemen’s magazine” in the vein (pun intended...heh-heh-heh!) of Playboy. And like Playboy, the men who bought Cavalier did so solely for the articles and stories like the following...

“‘You are the doorway,’ Richard repeated thoughtfully. ‘You are sure you killed the boy — you didn’t just dream it?’

“‘I didn’t dream it. And I didn’t kill him, either — I told you that. They did. I am the doorway.’”

Our narrator, Arthur, and his buddy Richard are sitting on Arthur’s porch looking out at the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Arthur, a former astronaut, is telling his good friend a horrible story that began with his flight to Venus. While orbiting that planet, Arthur was exposed to an alien force. His ship crash lands back on earth, and his co-pilot is killed. Arthur is hospitalized, and his recuperation takes years. After his release, he begins to complain of horrible itching in his hands. Soon thereafter, the first eyes begin to sprout on his fingers...

What happened to the boy when he saw the eyes? What's gonna happen to Richard when he sees them? Whose eyes are they? Who sees through them, and what does Earth look like to them? And how are they using Arthur as a doorway?

Our next story, “Gray Matter,” was also published in the pages of Cavalier, fittingly back in October of 1973. Maybe you want to run to the kitchen and grab a cold one before we start in on this one? I’d hate for you to get a monstrous thirst you couldn’t quench in the middle of it...

“Now the door opened again, letting in a blast of the cold gray air outside, and a young kid came in, stamping snow off his boots. I placed him after a second. He as Richie Grenadine’s kid, and he looked like he’d just kissed the wrong end of the baby. His Adam’s apple was going up and down and his face was the color of an old oilcloth.

“‘Mr. Parmalee,” he says to Henry, his eyeballs rolling around in his head like ball bearings, ‘you got to come. You got to take him his beer and come. I can’t stand to go back there. I’m scared.’

“‘Now slow down,’ Henry says, taking off his white butcher’s apron and coming around the counter. ‘What’s the matter? Your dad been on a drunk?’

“...‘He’s been on a drunk,’ the boy was saying now, ‘but that ain’t the trouble. It’s...it’s...oh, Lord, it’s awful!’”

At a local convenience store in Bangor, Maine, during a heavy snowfall, a young boy enters looking scared for his life. The boy has been sent to pick up a case of beer for his dad. Only, he refuses to take the beer back with him. He tells one of the men in the store, Henry, his story. Henry comes out and picks up the beer and tells a few of the other men to follow him. He’s going back to the Grenadine’s home, and if what the boy told him is even partial true, then the gun he’s packing will come in handy.

On the way there, Henry tells the others what the boy told him.

“The kid said it must have been the beer — you know how you can get a bad can every now and again. Flat or smelly or green as the peestains in an Irishman’s underwear. A fella once told me that all it takes is a tiny hole to let in bacteria that’ll do some damn strange things. The hole can be so small that the beer won’t hardly dribble out, but the bacteria can get in. And beer’s good food for some of those bugs.”

Yes, beer is good food, but what if some of those little bugs grow up to be big bugs? Will beer be enough to satisfy it then? What was it that was in that can that Richie Grenadine drank? And what has become of Richie that is so bad that his own son won’t return to his house? Does it have to do with the dead, decaying cat that the son saw his father eat? Maybe...maybe...

Anyway, drink up! We’ve got one more story. Our final story for Blog-o-ween 2023. This one takes place not in the autumn of the year like a proper Halloween story should but in the spring. It’s a special spring, however, one that comes around every so often. It brings a thick fog when it returns...a real killer fog. Heh-heh-heh!

“Strawberry Spring” was first published in the Fall 1968 edition of the University of Maine’s literary journal, Ubris. Later, like so many of the other tales in Night Shift, it made its way to the pages of Cavalier in 1975.

It’s March 1976 and a ‘Strawberry Spring’ has moved into New England, covering the campus of New Sharon College in a thick, impenetrable fog. Much like an “Indian Summer” is a period of unseasonably warm weather in the fall, a strawberry spring is a cold snap at the beginning of spring, a brief return of winter. The weather outside, and the words “Springheel Jack” in the newspapers sends the memories of our unnamed narrator back eight years before. A time when another strawberry spring held sway and when the horrific killings of a murderer the media dubbed “Springheel Jack” held the college in the grips of a panic. The narrator recounts the sheer terror of those days as campus officials, police officers, and students were unable to stop the murders from happening. Springheel Jack was never caught, and now, eight years later, he’s returned with the fog.

Why is the narrator so unnerved by the news that the killer is back? What do his headaches and the gaps in his memory have to do with Springhell Jack?

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, in September of 1947. His father, Donald King, left the family, leaving King’s mother, Nellie, to raise Stephen and his older brother, David, by herself. They moved many times during King’s childhood: Illinois, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, Connecticut. When King was eleven, the family settled in Maine.

One day, King and his brother were playing when Stephen found an old box of paperback books in the attic. They were the remnants of his father’s belongings. The box was filled with old Avon paperbacks, one of which was a collection of H.P. Lovecraft tales called The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. King would always say that it wa that book that started him on the road of horror.

As a school boy, King wrote stories based on movies he’s seen and sold them to fellow students. In 1966, King started classes at the University of Maine at Orono. There he met his future wife, Tabitha Spruce. He graduated in 1970; his daughter was born later that year; he and Tabitha wed in 1971.

The story of King’s rise to become America’s (if not the world’s) premier horror writer is well documented. As was mentioned above, his list of credits is too long to go into here. Suffice it to say that if you want to read or listen to the stories that we’ve talked about today, then you can find them at your local library. If your local library doesn’t have any King on its shelves...RUN! Honestly, I think that is a sign from the universe that you have entered into The Twilight Zone or something.

“Strawberry Spring” was turned into an audio drama podcast back in 2021. Its eight episodes take place at the time of the story — 1960s and 1970s — but it greatly expands on the story’s action. It is very well acted by Syndey Sweeney, Garrett Hedlund, Milo Ventimiglia, Ken Marino, and Herizen F. Guardiola, and its sound design is exquisite. Check it out here!

Well...that’s it. That’s all she wrote. We’ve made it through another Blog-o-ween. This is our fourth annual month-long blogging slog through October, if you can believe it. (I can’t!) I think this year’s Blog-o-ween was the best one yet! Thank you to everyone who dropped by and read what I had to say. I hope it entertained you. I also hope that you found books and writers that could become new favorites. That’s really what all this is about for me: sharing my love of storytelling with folks. So, I hope you pick up a few of the books mentioned this month and read them and share them with others. That way it’s not just me...and it’s not just you...but it’s EVERYONE having...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Oh, one more thing...