October Favorites: 31 Days of Horror

 We had the spookiest October ever! All my favorite things about my second-favorite holiday were back this year: kids DIYing Halloween costumes--

--our Monstrous Family Movie Night, with our traditional monstrous menu accompanying Nightmare Before Christmas--

--and even trick-or-treating with friends--

--resulting in the traditional non-problem of Too Much Candy:

I decided that I was only consuming horror-based media this October, which I low-key thought would be a mistake for my mental health, tbh, but in actually, it. Was. AWESOME!!! Horror is already one of my absolute favorite genres, so it was very fun to take a deep dive into it for a full month.

I'd really wanted to listen to The Haunting of Hill House with the kids, but I'm always five minutes behind the pack and so library copies were unobtainable. I realized during my catalogue search that I'd never read this Shirley Jackson classic--

--and so I remedied that for myself, instead. It's very Grey Gardens Gothic, isn't it? 

This book was a good take on the zombie subgenre:

It's heavily informed by our better understanding of the actual clusterfuck chaos that a pandemic will cause, and takes place in a world in which you can't actually, in perfect conscience, hack away willy-nilly at your zombie attackers... on account of they aren't actually dead.

I've been looking forward to reading the sequel to Scary Stories for Young Foxes, and it just happened to come in from my library holds queue in time for Scary Stories Month!

I was VERY late to the game figuring out what the recurring pandemic is supposed to be, and now I like the books even better for the way that the author combines the supernatural with the real, and gives the foxes the same type of mythmaking tradition that people have.

Kill Creek, about four horror novelists in a haunted house, didn't move me, but I SUPER loved this book:

This Amazon review does a much better job than I could in encapsulating my absolute delight with it:

Seriously, the concept of taking a "non-scary" imaginary creature and making it SUPER scary?

Delightful!

I thought the author's name sounded familiar, and when I looked her up I saw that she also wrote another of my favorites, Parasite, and its sequels... and she's written a ton more, all of which are now in my library holds queue. 

It's been kind of hard to stop only consuming horror media now that it's November, actually. Last night, for completely non-Halloween reasons, I was searching Spotify for Vampire Weekend when I came across a user-created vampire-themed playlist.

I HAD to check it out, right?!?

Twenty minutes in, though, as I was happily vibing along to it and reading the HONY book that had been waiting for me on my library shelves all month, Syd suddenly looked up and was all, "You're listening to another Halloween playlist, aren't you? It's NOVEMBER!!!"

She then reminded me that it was 365 days until Halloween, the brat.