Blog-o-ween 2023: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Since we are heading into the weekend, I thought I would dead-icate (heh-heh-heh!) Fridays here at Blog-o-ween 2023 to longer form stories. We won’t be checking out anything that can’t be read (or listened to for you audiobook fans) in an evening or two. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you read The Naked and the Dead or anything. I mean, that sounds like an erotic thriller starring Andrew Stevens and Shannon Tweed...

...wait a minute...is The Naked and the Dead the basis for an erotic thriller with supernatural overtones about a high-profile security firm employee (played by Andrew Stevens) who sets up cameras in a swanky mansion in the Hollywood Hills and captures the ghost of a starlet who dances in the nude every night at midnight (Shannon Tweed, natch) and he has to solve her murder so she can find peace and move on but he’s fallen in love with her and can’t let her go? And all this happens against a backdrop of chiaroscuro lighting, neon, and a musical soundtrack made up of saxophone and synthesizers? Is that what The Naked and the Dead is about? Why aren’t we reading that?!

Sorry...got off the main road for a second there.

Anywho, today’s Blog-o-ween entry is a short novel by American writer Elizabeth Hand. It isn’t an erotic thriller set in 1990s Hollywood concerning itself with the surveillance of naked starlets, but it is a folk-horror set in 1970s England and involves a documentary film, a psychedelic folk-rock band, and the supernatural. All these factors come together at an ancient, crumbling house in the Hampshire countryside called...Wylding Hall.

Windhollow Faire, a 1970s acid-folk band with one record to their name and a tragedy in their past, retreats to the country to lay the ghost of the suicide of their lead singer Arianna and to put together enough tracks for their second album. Their manager suggests they take off and isolate themselves from the world at a place called Wylding Hall. Things don’t go to plan, however, when Julian Blake, songwriter, guitarist, and former boyfriend of the dead Arianna, begins acting weird (or is that “wyrd”?) He seems strangely familiar with Wylding Hall and its environs, history, and architecture, even though he tells the group that he’s never been there before.

Then, one day, Julian disappears.

And it’s Julian’s mysterious disappearance that draws a documentary film crew together forty years later to interview everyone involved — the surviving band members, their manager, etc. What happened to Julian? Where did he go? Did the mysterious woman who showed up at the local pub the band was playing in have anything to do with it? Why does every person who stayed at Wylding Hall have a strange story to tell?

The genius of Wylding Hall, I think, is in its construction as an epistolary novel made-up of single person interviews. It reminded me of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s book Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk. That book is a fascinating collection of remembrances, anecdotes, and yarns culled from hundreds of hours of interviews with scores of people who were there when it happened. These interviews are then presented to the reader in a seemingly unstructured way. There is very little in the way of scene-setting or context. McNeil and McCain remove themselves from the playing field, so to speak, and let their subjects speak for themselves.

I imagine the documentary film crew doing the same in Hand’s novel. They collected all their interviews, then pulled out the parts that they wanted, the snippets that made the best, most coherent story, and set it down for the reader to take in and make up their own minds about what happened. Hand does a wonderful job of giving each of the interviewees their own voice and point-of-view, so that it really feels like we are hearing from different people from different backgrounds with different desires and who have come to different conclusions. It is masterfully done.

This being a folk-horror story, there are plenty of unsettling occurrences that may or may not involve strange rituals, old folk tales, poems that might be spells, and sacrifice. Hand blends all of these together in a heady brew that is powerful, but not overwhelming. She never hits the reader over the head with anything. Everything is subtle, strange, unsettling, as if it were taking place just out of the corner of the eye.

Elizabeth Hand was born in 1957 and grew up in Westchester County, New York. She sold her first story, “Prince of Flowers,” to Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988. Two years later, her first novel, Winterlong, was published by Bantam Spectra. She has written movie tie-in novelizations for The X-Files, 12 Monkeys, and Star Wars. She is a columnist for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She also created and wrote the 1990s DC Comics series Anima.

Both the novel and its multi-narrator audiobook should be available electronically at your local library. If you’d like a soundtrack to go along with your reading, may I suggest listening to Pentangle? They are a band who would have traveled the same circles as Windhollow Faire, and their music is a beautiful and haunting accompaniment to Wylding Hall.

So, cue up the music, pick up your copy of Wylding Hall, settle into a comfy chair in front of a roaring fire...preferably located in a crumbling, rural manse...and...well...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Black Gondolier" by Fritz Leiber

I’ve lived in Los Angeles, CA, now for about six years. I still get a kick out of stumbling upon shooting locations from various television shows and movies in the city and the outlying towns. I’m the person who will turn to a traveling companion and ask, “Do you recognize this corner? Huh? Do ya? Huh?” When my friend admits that, no, in fact, they do not recognize where we are, I’ll painstakingly list all the shows that used that corner as second unit background material. You know, shows like The Rockford Files, Murder, She Wrote, Tucker’s Witch, Baywatch, and Stingray.

...well, that was until Stephen J. Cannell was talked into moving Stingray to Toronto, Canada, after the 8-episode first season because of the favorable exchange rate between the U.S. and Canadian dollars...but then, of course, so many productions were shooting in Toronto at that time, that they ended up moving west and shooting the 15-episode second season in Calgary and Vancouver, and...

Yeah, I’m a joy to be around.

Anyway, I’m a sucker for being able to walk the same streets as the characters in my favorite tv shows and films. The same goes for my favorite short stories and novels. Today’s short story by noted fantasy, horror, and science fiction writer Fritz Leiber takes place in Venice, CA, during the oil boom years of the mid-twentieth century. Leiber’s characters traverse the seaside town’s many canals.

...in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the canals Leiber describes was later used as the site of the home of Mitch Buchannon and his son Hobie in the first season of Baywatch, and later...

I digress...let’s instead talk about Fritz Leiber’s 1964 short story “The Black Gondolier.”

“Daloway lived alone in a broken-down trailer beside an oil well on the bank of a canal in Venice near the café La Gondola Negra on the Grand Canal not five blocks from St. Mark’s Plaza.

“I mean, he lived there until after the fashion of intellectual lone wolves he got the wander-urge and took himself off, abruptly and irresponsibly, to parts unknown. That is the theory of the police, who refuse to take seriously my story of Daloway’s strange dreads and my hints at the weird world-spanning power which was menacing him...”

So begins the tale of Daloway, spun by an unnamed narrator. As the story unfolds, the narrator recounts his time spent with Daloway in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. Daloway gives the narrator, as well as the reader, a lengthy history lesson of not only the city of Venice, CA, but of the dark, eldritch power residing beneath it:

“Daloway’s theory, based on his wide readings in world history, geology, and the occult, was that crude oil — petroleum — was more than figuratively the life-blood of industry and the modern world and modern lightning-war, that it truly had a dim life and will of its own, an inorganic consciousness or sub-consciousness, that we were all its puppets or creatures, and that its chemical mind had guided and even enforced the development of modern technological civilization...In brief, Daloways’s theory was that man hadn’t discovered oil, but that oil had found man. Venice hadn’t struck oil; oil had thrust up its vicious feelers like some vast blind monster, and finally made contact with Venice.”

Ridiculous, of course! Oil, a sentient creature, hellbent on using humanity for its own nefarious purposes? Pish-posh!

And yet...how to account for the strange occurrence that the narrator claims to have experienced on the night of Daloway’s disappearance? What to make of the sight of a gondola making its way up the Grand Canal piloted by a man in black with a passenger by his side? And what of the footprints leading away from Daloway’s trailer, “long narrow sharply pointed footprints, marked in blackest, thickest oil?”

Fritz Leiber, Jr., was born in 1910 to the actors Fritz Leiber, Sr. (natch), and Virginia Bronson Leiber. For a while, it seemed that Junior was destined to follow in his parents’ footsteps, but during the 1930s Leiber took up writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories in the vein (pun intended!) of H.P. Lovecraft. Indeed, thanks to the intervention of Leiber’s then wife, Jonquil Stephens, Leiber exchanged many letters with the New England fantasist the year before Lovecraft’s death in 1937. Lovecraft guided the young Leiber in his burgeoning writing career, helping him put together the material for his first professional sale, the story “Two Sought Adventure,” which introduced Leiber’s most famous creations to the world, the barbarian Fafhrd and the thief The Gray Mouser.

Leiber would later write novels such as Conjure Wife (about a college professor whose wife protects him from the dangers of office politics through the use of witchcraft) and Our Lady of Darkness (which introduced the occult science of “Megapolisomancy,” or the black magic of giant cities). Five years after his death in 1992, The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich, a lost Lovecraft-influenced short novel from the 1930s, would be discovered and published, causing Leiber friend and fan Harlan Ellison to exclaim, “For anyone who loves great literature, Fritz Leiber walked on water.”

“The Black Gondolier” was originally published in 1964 by Arkham House in an anthology edited by August Derleth called Over the Edge: New Stories of the Macabre. Later, the story would make it into Leiber’s own collections Night Monsters (1969) and The Black Gondolier and Other Stories (2000).

That’s all for today, kiddies. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another stop along the eldritch journey that is Blog-o-ween 2023. Meanwhile, don’t worry about those strange sounds you hear bubbling up from the ground or those eerie voices in your head telling you to go outside and dig a hole in the earth. It’s probably nothing. Just go to sleep and have...pleasant dreams...hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "Granny's Grinning" by Robert Shearman

For the first few days of this year’s Blog-o-ween, we’ve focused on stories featuring monstrous children. Today, it’s time to turn the tables on the adults in the room. Today, it’s time to see how truly monstrous the grown-ups of the family can be. Especially during the Christmas season, and especially when money’s tight. Hey, no one gets a free pass during Blog-o-ween!

Today’s story is by Robert Shearman, and it’s entitled “Granny’s Grinning.”

“Sarah didn’t want the zombie, and she didn’t know anyone else who did.”

“Granny’s Grinning” is set during the Christmas season, as all the best British horror stories seem to be. The toy that is on all the kids’ wish lists this year — Sarah and her four-year-old brother, Graham, included — is a costume. These just aren’t any old kind of costumes. These are costumes of monsters — vampires, werewolves, and, of course, zombies. The special thing about these costumes is that they actually turn you into the creature you are dressed as.

Sarah wants a vampire costume, because, as her friend Sharon Weekes tells her,

“it wasn’t just the obvious stuff like the teeth growing, but your lips swelled up, they got redder and richer and plump, and if you closed your eyes and rubbed them together it felt just the same as if a boy were kissing you.”

And that’s all Sarah really wants for Christmas — to know what it’s like to be kissed. If she’s not careful, kiddies, she just may find out…heh-heh-heh!

Sarah’s family is on the skids, financially speaking. Her father’s business is not doing as well as he’d hoped when he left a more stable position because he wanted to “go it alone.” Unfortunately, the credit crunch came along and put paid to those dreams. On top of the friction the lack of money is causing between her parents, Daddy’s recently widowed mother is spending Christmas with Sarah and her family. Mummy is not happy, but Daddy assures his wife that having Granny over may “work in our favor.” Sarah doesn’t hear the rest of that conversation, and more’s the pity.

Come Christmas, Granny has arrived and is unimpressed with all the work that Sarah’s family has done to make her visit special. That is, until Sarah opens her Christmas gift. Sarah didn’t get the vampire costume like she wanted. She received the zombie. But why does her costume resemble her dead grandfather so much? And why is her family insisting she sleep in Granny’s room that night?

Anything to help the family in times of trouble, amirite kiddies? Heh-heh-heh!

“Granny’s Grinning” is a gut punch of a story. Since we are seeing everything from Sarah’s perspective, the events unfold from a child’s limited understanding of what is really happening. There are clues throughout, however. When Graham wants to be allowed to wear his werewolf costume to the dinner table, Sarah’s mother says, “Fine...they can be monsters then, let’s all be monsters!” When Sarah, dressed as the zombie, sits next to Granny while they watch a James Bond film, Granny tells her the story of meeting Sarah’s grandfather. He was married to another woman, but Granny says, “I just looked at him, and said to myself, I’m having that.” Granny says that “[b]efore I met him, Arthur was a husband. And a father. For me, he became a nothing. A nothing.” As Granny holds Sarah’s hand on the couch, she tells her “You know what love is? It’s being prepared to let go of who you are. To change yourself entirely. Just for someone else’s pleasure.”

Uh-oh! That don’t sound good!

Robert Shearman has written for radio and the stage, as well as the page. He may best be known among fantasy-loving folks as the man who brought the Daleks back to the small screen on Doctor Who. “Granny’s Grinning” was first published in 2009 in an anthology from Ulysses Press entitled The Dead That Walk. Later in 2019, Shearman included it in his own collection of works called Remember Why You Fear Me.

I discovered this story in an anthology edited by Stephen Jones, Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night: 10 Scary Stories to Give You Nightmares! I assumed that this collection was in the vein (pun intended!) of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series or the Nickelodeon television series Are You Afraid of the Dark? You know — good, clean, spooky fun. The book is aimed, after all, at young readers 8-12 years in age.

How wrong can you get?!

This collection is pretty strong stuff for young kids. Heck, it was pretty strong stuff for me! And I loved it!

Another aspect of the book that may make the reader think that he/she/they is reader “kid’s stuff” is the illustrations on the cover and included throughout. One look at the cover, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this book is just trying to be a clone of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its unsettling artwork by Stephen Gammell. The art of illustrator Randy Broecker sneaks up on you in the best way possible. What seems simple at first becomes intricate, beautiful, and creepy as all get out the more you look at it. When I was a kid, I used to HATE touching scary pictures in books for fear that they’d come to life and bite me. Broecker’s illustrations for Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night pushed me right back into that old childhood fear. And for that I say, “Thank you!”

There’s no audio version of “Granny’s Grinning” that I could find, but please, if you look for it at your local library, do try to get the version that is in Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night. You won’t be disappointed. Besides, I have more stories — and more illustrations! — from this collection on the docket for this month.

Meanwhile...happy reading and...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "Raymond" by Nancy A. Collins

Yesterday’s Blog-o-ween entry was a terrific example of the “creepy kid” sub-genre in horror. In Robert Bloch’s hands, the story of Irma and her revenge against her father had an almost comic effect. That “snap ending” that Stephen King talked about certainly acted as a punchline, did it not? You might even say that the humor in “Sweets to the Sweet” was rather...biting...heh-heh-heh! Irma’s dad certainly laughed his head off. Heh-heh-heh!

Today’s story is a somewhat more sober and somber examination of the cruelties of childhood. All kidding aside, children can be vicious towards one another. The playground pecking order is a closely guarded and scrutinized hierarchy. Anyone who doesn’t fit into the established order quickly finds themselves banished to the end of the line to become the punching bag for everyone above them. Such is the fate of the title character of Nancy A. Collins’s short story “Raymond.”

“I remember the first time I saw Raymond Fleuris...”

Darryl Sweetman is your average seventh-grade kid in small-town Arkansas. He and his best friend, Rafe Mercer, are interested in the same girl, Kitty Killigrew. Both Darryl and Rafe wonder if this year’s county fair will feature a kootchie tent and, more importantly, if they’ll be able to sneak in and see the ladies in the undies.

Into this mundane world of normal desires and daydreams, Raymond Fleuris is dropped. Raymond’s dirt-poor social status along with his hillbilly bib overalls would be more than enough to seal any kid’s fate as the schoolyard’s scapegoat. Unfortunately for Raymond, he also comes to his first day at school with his head wound with gauze and gloves secured to his hands with string at the wrists. He doesn’t exactly blend in.

Raymond is also what Darryl refers to as “simple.” While he sits in the back of Darryl’s class, Raymond “never handed in homework and was excused from taking tests. All he did was sit and scribble in his notebook with one of those big kindergarten pencils.” Later, on the playground, the local bully, Chucky Donothan, decides to make sure that Raymond understands his place in schoolyard society. He pushes Raymond to the ground, but Raymond doesn’t fight back. He verbally abuses Raymond, accusing the new boy of wearing gloves to hide the hair that grows on his palms through masturbating too much, but Raymond says nothing. It isn’t until Chucky attempts to remove those gloves from Raymond’s hands that Raymond defends himself. And, boy, does he ever! Raymond becomes like a wild animal:

“One second Raymond was your basic slack-jawed moron, the next he was shrieking and clawing at Chucky like the Tasmanian Devil in those old Bugs Bunny cartoons. His face seemed to flex, like the muscles were being jerked every-which-way.”

During the scuffle, Raymond bites Chucky on the upper arm, drawing blood and screams from the bully. One of Raymond’s gloves comes off, giving Darryl a look at his bare hand. Raymond’s ring finger, Darryl notices, is longer than the other fingers. And that, Dear Reader, is our clue as to what sort of story this is. An elongated third finger is a sure sign of lycanthropy.

I said an elongated THIRD finger!

Poor Raymond, it seems, is a werewolf or shapeshifter. Collins doesn’t treat his affliction in the usual way, however. In her hands, Raymond’s condition is not monstrous. What is monstrous is what’s been done to him by his family and the doctors at the State Hospital in the name of normality and fitting in. Raymond’s fate at the end of the story is as much a snap ending as the end of Robert Bloch’s story, but instead of leaving the reader chuckling at the black humor, Collins’s last line is a sad reminder of what can happen to those misunderstood souls that “normal” society doesn’t know how to handle.

Nancy A. Collins was born in rural Arkansas. During her life, she has moved around the country, living in New Orleans, Atlanta, New York City, as well as coastal North Carolina and Virginia. She is best known for creating the character “Sonja Blue,” a woman with demonic powers who hunts and kills vampires. Sonja Blue appears in a number of books. Collins has also written for the comics, taking over the writing reins on Swamp thing, Vampirella, and Red Sonja.

“Raymond” was published in an anthology called The Ultimate Werewolf. Later, it was included in Collins’s own collection Knuckles and Tales. I first encountered the story in Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell’s Best New Horror 3, published in 1992. I’ll be featuring more from this collection in the coming weeks.

Sadly, there isn’t an audio version of the story that I could find, but I think “Raymond” would sound great dramatized, especially those scenes that take place at the carnival. The carnival is a great trope in horror, and one that isn’t taken advantage of as much as it should be.

So, track down this story at your local library, curl up with it late at night...and...pleasant dreams...hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "Sweets to the Sweet" by Robert Bloch

“As a matter of fact, I am really a very lovable person, as my friends tell me — or they would, if I had any friends. Deep down underneath it all, I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar, on my desk.”

— Robert Bloch

Kids are weird. There’s just no getting around the fact. They’re weird, and they are dangerous. I wouldn’t trust a one of them for all the money in Fort Knox. Not for a second. Sure, the more highfalutin members of the PMRC, the local PTA, and various other parents groups wan’cha to believe that little Johnny and Jenny are innocent angels who need to be protected from the big, bad world. BAH! Little Johnny would stick a knife in yer back before you could say “Jack Robinson.” And little Jenny? Well, I think today’s story by Robert Bloch perfectly illustrates what she’s capable of.

“Irma didn’t look like a witch. She had small, regular features, a peaches-and-cream complexion, blue eyes, and fair, almost ash-blonde hair. Besides, she was only eight years old.”

Thus begins Bloch’s 1947 short story “Sweets to the Sweet.” In it, little Irma Steever, eight years old and sweet as pie, is a motherless child whose father, John Steever, blames for the death of his wife during childbirth. He constantly refers to her as an “unnatural little witch” and tells her nanny that all the child really needs is a “good thrashing.” Irma is a preternaturally intelligent child who reads voraciously — things like the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on “Witchcraft.” That’s not the only craft she’s interested in. She likes making little dolls out of modeling clay. Why, just recently, she made one that looks exactly like her father! She takes it with her wherever she goes. And speaking of father, the poor man, he doesn’t seem to be feeling very well at the moment. Seems as though he’s been having pains in his arm, in his back, and in his chest. Sharp, jabbing pain...like a needle being plunged into the flesh...

“Sweets to the Sweet” first appeared in the March 1947 issue of Weird Tales magazine. Over the next fifty years, the story would be included in many of the author’s “Best of” collections, as well as countless anthologies. I first encountered the story in the 2007 edition of Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology My Favorite Horror Story, where it was chosen for inclusion by none other than Stephen King, who claimed it to have “one of the most chilling snap endings I had ever read.”

Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1917 and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Robert Bloch had a long and storied (pun intended!) career. He wrote horror, science-fiction, thrillers, short stories, novels, screenplays, and an “unauthorized autobiography” called Once Around the Bloch. He exchanged letters with H. P. Lovecraft and his circle of friends, including August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, and Frank Belknap Long. He was presented with the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention in 1975 and the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement from the Horror Writers Association in 1989. Robert Bloch died of cancer in 1994.

All that aside, what we remember Bloch for most is writing a story about another misunderstood child with (dead) mommy issues. A child who grew up to be a man who ran the cutest little motel just off the old highway. A man who went a little mad sometimes...but that’s okay...we all go a little mad sometimes...don’t we?

If you find it a little hard to track down a printed copy of “Sweets to the Sweet,” don’t worry, we gotcha covered. The good folks over at HorrorBabble, the internet’s premier source for audio horror in its many forms, recorded a rendition of Ian Gordon and Jennifer Gill reading Bloch’s tale a few years ago in August of 2021. You can find that recording here on YouTube.

Pleasant listening and...pleasant dreams...hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Hook"

Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome to LARPing Real Life’s Blog-o-ween 2023! Glad you could make it, even after listening to yesterday’s prologue —— BBC Four’s adaptation of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot. It was pretty good, right? Pretty scary, too, huh? Well for Blog-o-ween’s first official entry, you should probably double-knot the laces of your shoes, because this one is going to knock your socks off! Let’s begin this year’s Blog-o-ween by celebrating one of the simplest, most direct, most effective horror stories ever told: “The Tale of the Hook.”

“The Hook,” or “The Hookman” is an urban legend, one of those stories passed from person to person, usually beginning with the words “What I’m about to tell you really happened, and it happened not far from here...” You know, the kind of story whose details slightly shift depending on who is telling it. A story that is told around a campfire or in a darkened bedroom during a sleepover, preferably with a lit flashlight held below the chin. Stephen King, in his 1981 history of horror Danse Macabre, called this tale “the most basic horror story I know,” and my rendition of it goes something like this:

This guy and girl are out on a date. They drive out to Lover’s Lane and start to cuddle and kiss. The guy has the radio on so’s they can listen to romantic music while they make-out. Suddenly, the radio announcer breaks into the broadcast and says that an insane killer has escaped from the local sanitarium and was last seen heading south. Towards the Lover’s Lane area, natch. The announcer says to be on the look-out for a man who stands well over six feet, weighs over 250 pounds, and has a sharpened hook instead of a right hand.

The girl gets scared, but the guy says not to worry. They go back to necking, but the girl hears something outside. Something like the branches of the underbrush being moved around. She wants to leave. There’s nothing out there, the guy says, and they start smooching again. The girl breaks it off. This time she says she hears the sound of sticks snapping under foot. Can’t we go, she asks the guy. The guy says it was nothing, and besides, if it was anything, he’d protect her, wouldn’t he? So they start kissing again. And then the girl stops again, because this time she says she’s heard something scratching against her door. She demands to be taken home.

The guy is fed up by this point. He starts the car, slams it into reverse, and then peels out, driving off like a drag racer. They get to the girl’s house. The guy goes around the car to open her door. He turns white as a sheet and faints dead away. The girl gets out of the car to see if the guy is all right. When she closes her door, she hears something thud against the side of the car. When she looks back, she sees hanging there on the handle of the door a bloody hook!

That’s just sheer perfection, is it not? I told that story just off the top of my head. I think I hit all the necessary plot points. Maybe you’ve heard the story, too? Heard it in a different way, perhaps, with different details, but essentially the same in its shape. As King says,

“The story of The Hook is a simple, brutal classic of horror. It offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit...No, the story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down.”

What other reason do you need, really?

Jan Harold Brunvand collected “The Tale of the Hook” in his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. One of the sources of the urban legend, Brunvand discovered, was a letter published on Tuesday, November 8, 1960, in a nationally syndicated newspaper column by Abigail Van Buren, better known as Dear Abby.

In said letter, a young woman tells an even more abbreviated version of the story. The young woman starts her tale by saying “I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it doesn’t matter because it served its purpose for me.” and ends it with “I don’t think I will ever park to make out as long as I live. I hope this does the same for other kids.” Brunvand goes on to trace the story back further, into the 1950s, to the post-war years when the Baby Boomers were just hitting adolescence, as well as the road. With their newfound mobility and freedom, kids headed off to out of the way places like their local Lover’s Lane and the local drive-in movie theater in their cars. “The Tale of the Hook,” then, as the young woman points out in her letter to Dear Abby, served as a way to scare those kids straight. You want go off alone and make whoopee in the back seat of your car? Fine, go right ahead, but be warned there’s an escaped maniac out there just look for an easy kill!

Also in 1981 (What is it with that year? Why so many discussions about spooky stories?), folklorist Alvin Schwartz included the story in his groundbreaking collection of oral tales for kids, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Accompanied by some of the most disturbing illustrations ever set down on paper by Stephen Gammell, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark helped take the “sleep” out of sleepovers for an entire generation of kids.

(We will be coming back to Schwartz and his collection of oral tales and legends later in the month. Be on the lookout for stories like “The White Satin Evening Gown” and that classic “The Babysitter.”)

One of my favorite renditions of “The Hook” is from the 1979 summer camp film Meatballs. In it, Bill Murray plays head counselor Tripper who has a gaggle of wet-behind-the-ears CITs (Counselors-In-Training) out on a weekend camping trip. Around the campfire, Tripper shares the story of “The Hook,” and you gotta admit...it's a doozy:

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at a short story by Robert Bloch. Until then...pleasant dreams...hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: First Things First...

Well, well, well...if it isn’t that time o’ the year again. Time when the air becomes cooler, the days shorter, the nights longer, and the pumpkin spice flavoring more ubiquitous.

You people are sick.

That’s right, kiddies, tomorrow is the first of October, which means it’s time to prepare yourselves for another month-long blog slog through a gauntlet of ghosts, ghoulies, mummies, bats, basement dwellers, attic inhabitants, crypt keepers, bloodsuckers, braineaters, geeks, freaks, and other creepy-crawlies that stalk the moors at night and go “AH-OOO!” at the moon.

Which, of course, means it’s Halloween and, of course, time for LARPing Real Life’s Blog-o-ween 2023!

For the past few years, we here at LARPCO have dedicated ourselves to bringing you the very best of the spooky season. We’ve watched scary movies together and huddled around the Philco to listen to old-time radio’s greatest thrills and chills. This year, we are bringing a touch of class to the proceedings. This year, LARPing Real Life’s Blog-o-ween will be of a decidedly literary bent. This October, we are focusing on some of our favorite horror short stories. There will be favorites, old and new. There will be the occasional radio adaptation, as well as well-known classics mixed with a few new additions to the canon.

For the most part, these stories will be found on-line in their entirety, thanks to sites like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. There will be links to the texts in each post so that you can read along with everyone else.

For newer stories that have not yet entered the light and crossed over to the “other side” of the public domain, we urge you to try your local library. In this time of book bans, book burnings, and other real life horrors, your local library needs a lot of love and support. I can’t think of a better way than by checking out some scary stories! Many libraries allow their patrons to check out e-books via platforms like Hoopla and Libby. If you have an up-to-date library card and access to a computer, a tablet, or even your phone, then you can enjoy thousands of books, comics, audiobooks, music, and movies.

As a little taste of what is coming your way over the next thirty-one days, let me share a little something with you. Every year for at least the past decade, I have read Stephen King’s novel ’Salem’s Lot. I think it is the perfect book to take with you into the October Country. This year is no different. Tomorrow, I’ll be cracking open my paperback once again and joining Ben Mears, Mark Petrie, and their fellow Fearless Vampire Hunters as they go head to head against the despicable bloodsucker Barlow and his henchman, Straker. If you’d like to join me, grab your own copy of ’Salem’s Lot and read along.

If you don’t have the time to dedicate to a novel, maybe I can interest you in a BBC Four radio adaptation? In 1995, writer Gregory Evans adapted King’s novel into a seven-part radio drama complete with a large cast of actors and excellent use of sound design. You can find all seven parts here on the Internet Archive.

While you while away the hours following the adventures of vampires in small-town America, I hope you are prepared for what lies in wait for you during the rest of the month. See you back here tomorrow...and in the words of Raymond, the host of radio’s Inner Sanctum...

Wings, S02E04, "Sports and Leisure"

It’s a case of “good news/bad news” for Sandpiper Air. The bad news is that Sandpiper’s lone plane is grounded because of a broken nose wheel strut. A new part to fix the problem won’t be available for a few days, meaning Sandpiper’s passengers have to be transferred to their competitor, AeroMass. What could possibly be the silver lining to this gray cloud? Why, everyone gets to go fishing on Lowell’s boat, that’s what!

Said silver lining becomes a tad tarnished, however, when Roy invites himself along for the ride. After the fishing trip becomes an impromptu morning swim thanks to Roy’s practical joking, the gang want nothing further to do with him. Faye, unfortunately, has already invited Roy to their Trivial Pursuit game night at Helen’s on Friday.

Will everyone accept Roy for who he is and make him feel at home? Can Roy change his entire personality for the good of the group? Will Roy bring his famed pasta salad? What does Ann-Margaret have to do with all this?

This episode has the feel of — dare I say it? — filler. All the scenes occur on only two sets, the terminal at Tom Nevers Field and Helen’s living room. The only characters are our familiar core group of players. We don’t have any outsiders imposing themselves on the action. In fact, we don’t really learn anything new about our characters, although Roy’s desire to be as well-liked as Joe is a new wrinkle. Even that, however, is ironed out by the end of the episode, leaving us exactly where we started.

Written by show creator David Angell, “Sports and Leisure” feels like the result of an early brainstorming session. I can imagine Angell sitting around with fellow show creators Peter Casey and David Lee and throwing out the idea for the heck of it: “What if Roy joined the rest of the gang on an outing?” It’s a good concept, but not a great one. It is something you could probably knock out quickly and keep in your backpocket on a “just in case” basis. Not every swing of the bat brings forth a home run. Sometimes you gotta make due with an infield dribbler that just gets you to first base.

That being said, there are a few highlights to...well...highlight. As usual, when he’s on screen, Thomas Haden Church as “Lowell” steals the show. Early on, the group tries to convince Joe to play hooky with them on Lowell’s boat. Joe is sure that Lowell is doing his best to fix the plane so Sandpiper doesn’t have to shut down for the day. Lowell walks out of the hanger with a fishing rod in his hand and the back of his shirt hooked at the end of the line.

Lowell: Can somebody give me a hand over here? I was practicing casting and—

Brian: Lowell, Lowell, please, I think we can piece together the rest of this perplexing mystery.

Joe [helping Lowell untangle himself]: What about that strut, Lowell?

Lowell: Ah, a nose wheel strut is a very tricky piece of equipment, Joe.

Joe: Yeah, you said that an hour ago.

Lowell: I don’t think I said ‘very.’

Later, at Helen’s, as the gang prepares for Roy’s visit, Joe regales them with the story of how Roy opened up to him emotionally:

Joe: I’m telling you, if you guys could have seen Roy in the hangar the other day, he was like a little boy.

Lowell: Did he still have the mustache?

Now there’s a visual for you: a little Roy with a big mustache. Good times!

Lowell is also at the center of the comedic whirlwind that is the Trivial Pursuit game. Teamed up with Roy for the night, Lowell proceeds to drive poor Roy up a tree by blurting out the answer to every question without conferring with his partner. Worse, his every answer is wrong. Worse still, his every answer is Ann-Margaret. What lovable redhead and her Cuban husband starred in their own television series in the Fifties? Ann-Margaret! Who is the largest user of silver in the world? Ann-Margaret! And my favorite:

Joe: What does Simon Wiesenthal hunt?

Lowell: Ann-Margaret!

Joe [makes buzzer sound]: Fugitive Nazis.

Roy: Simon Wiesenthal hunts Ann-Margaret?

Lowell: Well, I thought he might be one of those crazed fans, Roy.

Do I need to add that Ann-Margaret ends up being the correct answer to one of the questions? Do I also need to add that neither Roy nor Lowell say Ann-Margaret? No, I didn’t think so...

In the “Do modern viewers still know who this person is?” department, we have two references. The first is when everyone gets together very early in the morning for the fishing trip. Helen says, “I can’t believe I’m up before Willard Scott.”

During his lifetime, Willard Scott was an actor, a comedian, and an author. He was, at one point, Bozo the Clown, and also created the role of Ronald McDonald. But he is best known as the weatherman on NBC’s weekday morning show, TODAY. From 1980 to 1996, Scott was the man who many Americans turned to for their weather forecasts. Scott was a born showman, sometimes donning a costume for his weather spots. Once he dressed as Boy George, another time he was Carmen Miranda. He was also famous for his birthday segments where he celebrated the birthday of centenarians across the country. After 1996, Scott went into semi-retirement, handing the weather prognosticating reins over to Al Roker. Scott filled in from time to time until his full retirement in 2015. All in all, Willard Scott spent 65 years at NBC, a remarkable run.

During the same scene, Roy shows up to everyone’s surprise and consternation. As they leave for their fishing trip, Roy slaps a cassette into his boom box and says, “I hope you guys like Slim Whitman. I’ve got 75 of his greatest hits. They’re not available in stores, you know.”

Oh, they know, Roy. They know.

I for one would love to track down every instance in pop culture where Slim Whitman rears his thin-mustache-sporting, Brylecreemed-hairdo-styling, voice-of-an-angel-yodeling head. Poor Slim. For a good long while, the guy was a falsetto-voiced punching bag, an easy target for every lazy comedian or writer who wanted a straw man to feel superior to. For a time there on TV and in the movies, if you had a character that you wanted to paint as a total dweeb and all-around uncool cat, you only had to slip their preference for the music of Slim Whitman in somewhere, and audiences got the message.

Born in 1923, Whitman was a country music singer known for kicking his voice into the upper registers from time to time. His career spanned over 70 years, and during that time he pumped out over 100 albums and over 500 songs, from country-and-western to gospel to show tunes to standards. Heck, Slim even opened for the King, Elvis Presley in the 1950s.

What made Whitman ripe for the jokesters, however, was his television commercials. Beginning in 1979, Whitman began marketing his music via TV ads that claimed he was “number one in England longer than Elvis and The Beatles.” Over the next decade or so, Whitman released five albums of tunes over the air, all of which were huge sellers and helped resuscitate his career.

So who’s the joke on now, huh?

We’re coming up to the final boarding call, but there’s one more little thing I want to talk about. Maybe it says more about me and my personal quirks, but I found it interesting. As they are getting ready to leave, Joe notices that Helen is maybe not properly dressed for the weather:

Joe: Helen, it’s going to be hot today. Why didn’t you wear shorts?

Helen: I didn’t have time to shave my legs.

Brian [disgusted]: Oh, whoa! Check, please!

Joe [equally disgusted]: Really? Couldn’t you have made something up?

Really, fellas? A little hair on a woman’s legs is going to send you into paroxysms of revulsion and nausea? Sheesh! Get over yourselves, will ya? I’ve never understood the aversion to hair on the female body. As someone who tries to shave his face as seldom as possible, I cannot fathom being pressured by society’s expectations into making sure my body is completely hairless before leaving the house. Everyday. So weird.

On that note, folks, if you look out the cabin windows, you’ll see that the weather is getting a little hairy. We probably should have taken Willard Scott’s weather forecast to heart. Nevertheless, we will try to make our final descent as smooth as possible. Please do your part by helping our crew tidy up. Make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright positions. Place your carry-on luggage beneath the seat in front of you or in the overhead bins, then securely fasten your seat belts. And, no, that high-pitched whine you hear is not our nose wheel strut threatening to fall off. It’s just your pilot’s 8-track tape of Slim Whitman’s Greatest Hits. A little blast of “Indian Love Call” does wonders to focus the mind, you know.

Our next flight is season two's fifth episode, “A Standup Kind of Guy.” Until next time...