halloween stories

This Sunday, Catherine Lundoff will be teaching a class that’s particularly apropos for this Halloween-laden month, on one of my favorite flavors of horror: gothic fiction. She talks about some of the influences that have brought her to gothic fiction, and what she loves about it.

Edward Gorey was one of the guiding lights of my teenage years. I saw his sets for “Dracula” on Broadway when I was about twelve and it was like coming home, aesthetically, at least. I loved his black and white drawings, his weird stories, his obsessions with cats and opera singers. I still do. I like to think of him as my posthumous Fairy Gothmother, who opened the door to a marvelous dark universe where I could wear black all the time and didn’t need to pretend to be happy if I wasn’t.

I read Dracula, of course, and “Carmilla” and Poe and Wilde and Northanger Abbey. Austen turned me on to Ann Radcliffe, but I found Byron on my own. I discovered fashion, the kind where you rim your eyes with liner and wear multiple black on black outfits that have, perhaps, a hint of lace or silk, if you are lucky. And when I got to college, it was 1981 and there I found Adam Ant and Prince and Siouxsie Sioux, along with glorious morbid folk rock bands like Steeleye Span. So many murder ballads! So much gender play and glorious costumes! All of it became a part of me long before I thought of myself as a writer or a teacher or as Goth.

I devoured Gothic romances by the likes of Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart, Gothic horror in its multimedia splendor, even more murder ballads, artwork, outfits with all the black lace my teenage heart could imagine. Starting to write ghost stories and tales of haunted mansions could not be far behind, though in my case it started with vampire stories and editing the first (to the best of my knowledge) anthology of lesbian ghost stories. From there, I moved on to writing ghost stories myself as well as monster tales, media tie-ins, psychological horror, each story shaped and honed by my earlier reading and watching.

These days, I’m a huge fan of Gothic horror and romance films and shows like Crimson Peak, Penny Dreadful and The Addams Family. I’ve written horror tales for publications like Respectable Horror, Fireside Fiction and one of the Vampire the Gathering 20th Anniversary tie-in anthologies, as well as my own collection, Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic. A childhood enthusiasm has morphed into a lifelong affinity for ghosts, haunted mansions and various interpretations of the monstrous.

I love watching authors and other creators turn their eye to new interpretations of female and queer monsters and different kinds of outsider survivors. The Gothic Heroine doesn’t have to be a cisgendered white Final Girl or married under dubious circumstances to a love interest who is, perhaps, not to be trusted. I want to read more of these stories, as well as classics like The Woman in Black and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Let me help you bring your dark fiction into the light and help it come alive, no pun intended. Crimson Peaks and Menacing Mansions is an online class that I’m teaching on 10/13 from 9:30-11:30 PST at Cat Rambo’s Academy for Wayward Writers.. It will include a mix of lecture, discussion and writing exercises, as well as the opportunity to ask questions. I hope you’ll be intrigued enough to check it out!

This is a fantasy story I wrote a while back for a Halloween story contest. It’s reprinted in fantasy collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight.

The Silent Familiar

The Wizard Niccolo was not happy. At the age of 183 — youthful for a wizard, but improbable for an ordinary human — he had thought certain things well out of his life. Sudden changes in his daily routine were one. And romance was another ““ even if it was his familiar’s romance, and not his own.

“Could make an omelet with it, I suppose,” he grumbled to his familiar, the tiny dragon Olivia. She sat on the cluttered mantle, wrapped around her egg, still marveling at its production and entirely too pleased with herself. A pair of alabaster candelabra sheltered her in a thicket of gilt spirals, and a stuffed salmon, labeled “First Prize ““ Thornstone Village Centennial Celebration,” regarded her with a sour gaze.

“Master,” she said, blinking luminous eyes. “Have I not served you well?”

“For the most part,” he admitted.

She stayed silent and after a pause, he said, “Yes, invariably, Olivia. But who will hold your loyalty, that egg or I?”

“Both,” she said and stoked her scaled cheek along the egg’s smooth surface. “But I will never value it higher than my service to you.”

Well, the first of the mini-books is out, HALLOWEEN QUARTET. (Non-Kindlers, don’t despair. I’m working on the Smashwords version today.)

The description: A quartet of short horror stories by fabulist Cat Rambo. Follow the mystery of “Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know,” weep with “Niobe in the Rain,” enjoy a spoof on reality TV with “So Glad We Had This Time Together,” and fear the ancient forces exposed in “Pumpkin Knight.”

If you check out the Amazon listing, feel free to click that Like button or agree with some tags…

Some thoughts and observations:

• Because some of the content is available online, Amazon flagged it and made me write in to clarify that I had the right to publish it. It also meant I couldn’t enroll the book in the Select program. This is something I may want to take into consideration in future books, since that program has some advantages. If I want to be able to use the KDP Program, though, I’ll need to either only use stuff that isn’t available on the web or ask some sites to take stuff down (which I doubt I would do, that goes against the grain, somehow.)
• The biggest pain in the butt? The cover. I’m going to look for someone who wants to swap cover design for story crits, because as you can tell, I’m not so hot at it. But it’s adequate.
• I did the document in Word. Things like installing jumps from the ToC was pretty easy. In the future, I may indent less, since it ended up looking a little weird.

And, serendipitously, another e-book is out today. A SEED ON THE WIND is the first part of a two-part series set in the world of the Fathomless Abyss.