Today at Haute Macabre, some deep thoughts, keen insights, and incisive takeaways from my 31 Days Of Horror last month. Haha! Just kidding! You came to the wrong person for that sort of thing. Also I maybe failed at the whole “31 days” aspect of the challenge.
At any rate, I *did* watch a lot of horror, I discovered some hidden gems (and swept the duds back under the dirt), and as always, had fun! Maybe no more movies for a while, though. Read more at Haute Macabre, today!
Spoilers! My two favorites this year were Murder Party and Satan’s Slaves, both pictured above.
Next up in our reviews of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s archetypal adventure and tarot-inspired collection: The Emperor, at Haute Macabre today. It’s a bit of a last call, as well, for The Emperor’s stern countenance is only gracing the lab until 11/26/18 before he and his beard and the rams he rode in on rides off into the sunset!
November’s Ten Things is brought to us by Sarah E. Jahier (another Sarah Elizabeth, just like me!) of The Spooky Vegan, where she shares vegan eats and treats, her love of horror, Halloween, and all things spooky! I’ve been following her blog for many years now and I always love peeking in on her scary movie reviews, her thoughts on the newest and tastiest vegan snacks, and the fun and fascinating glimpses of her lovely home!
Today, Sarah shares with us 10 things that are getting her through the post-Halloween blues (an issue that I know many of us can relate to and will be dealing with for the next 353 days!)
Read more below!
1. Cozy clothes – After all the excitement and events of the Halloween season, all I want to do in November is curl up on the couch in some cozy clothes. I have a drawer full of Halloween socks and love wearing them as soon as the weather gets cool enough (current faves are my “Everyday is Halloween” socks by Cavity Colors.) A slouchy sweatshirt or one of my well-loved oversized t-shirts and some soft Halloween leggings (I love the super-soft ones by LuLaRoe) round out my lazy, couch-ready look.
2. Autumn perfumes – I love evoking the feeling of fall with the perfumes I wear. Right now I’m favoring Séance Perfumes’ All Hallows’ Eve scent (it was a limited Halloween 2018 release, along with the candle and room spray shown in the photo above, and unfortunately it is no longer available) as well as Bath Sabbath’s November Coming Fire, which smells like burning autumn leaves, and Hexcider, which smells like caramel apples.
3. Thanksgiving food – Mmmmm, give me all the vegan roasts, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pies this time of year! I have been looking forward to the Thanksgiving holiday, where I cook up an all-vegan feast before binging on horror movies. This year I picked up a turkey-less roast from Trader Joe’s, lots of cranberry sauce, peas, sweet potatoes, and plan on roasting veggies and making mashed potatoes, along with a few other sides for Mister Spooky and myself. I’ll probably pick up a pre-made vegan pumpkin pie from Whole Foods, along with some So Delicious Coco Whip to top it with!
4. Longer nights and cooler temperatures – I adore this time of year when darkness creeps in earlier and earlier every day. For some reason longer nights make me feel cozier and much more comfortable. I think it helps that it getting darker sooner also means that the temperatures are starting to cool off which makes it finally feel like fall here in Southern California.
5. Shudder – I finally signed up for this horror streaming service (think Netflix, if it was just horror movies/series) a few months back, and its extensive selection of horror movies, series, and specials has been getting me through this November. I’m currently re-watching Channel Zero (such a good, underrated series) and recently enjoyed the Shudder-exclusive Terrified, which is an Argentinian horror film that was a total mindfuck!
6. Black Moon Cosmetics Liquid to Matte Lipsticks – I adore all the products I’ve tried from Black Moon Cosmetics (they also have some divine highlighters, a few shown in the photo above), but my favorite product from them is their liquid to matte lipsticks. These lipsticks are the only ones I have found that work with my skin color, have real staying power, are comfortable to wear, come in stunningly unique colors, and are cruelty-free and vegan. My favorite for autumn has been their Eternal shade, which is a blackened rose gold and reminds me of the golden glow of fall.
7. Califia Farms’ Peppermint Mocha Cold Brew – The rest of the year I only drink black coffee, but something happens to me during the holidays (gasp – is it holiday spirit?!) and I am all about festive flavors! I am usually more of a pumpkin spice fiend, but this dairy-free Peppermint Mocha Cold Brew from Califia Farms is becoming my fave!
8. Candles and incense – I am obsessed with the fall-scented candles from A to Z Candles. I loved their unique Halloween collection (shown above), but recently I have been burning their Apple Cider Donuts and Caramel Apple candles, which are both incredible at evoking autumn scents. The company is woman-owned and operated, and their candles burn clean and long and fill my home with their spectacular scents. I also love Cellar Door Bath Supply Co.’s candles (Lavender Pumpkin is a favorite) and Burke and Hare Co.’s candles (their whole goth line is incredible). When I’m not burning candles, I’m burning Bloodbath Products’ incense – my fave scent from this company is Absinthe and Sugar, which reminds me of Dia de Los Muertos altars and sugar skulls.
9. Horror Podcasts – I love listening to podcasts year-round, but my post-Halloween blues have been soothed by some of my favorite horror podcasts. Mind you, I’m not talking about the ones that tell spooky stories, though I love those, too, but rather podcasts that cover current news in the genre along with discussions, interviews, and film reviews. My favorite horror podcasts in this vein include Shock Waves, Women in Caskets , Nightmare on Film Street, Queens of the Damned, Sirens of Scream, and Boys and Ghouls, and Faculty of Horror. Female voices in horror are of utmost importance to me, and these are all co-hosted or entirely hosted by women horror fans.
10. Planning next year’s Halloween season – I already am dreaming of next year’s Halloween festivities, which will include attending all my favorite Halloween/horror conventions, haunts and events here in Southern California, but I’m also hoping to squeeze in some travel, hopefully to the East Coast – my number one bucket list destination is Haunted Overload in New Hampshire.
As much as I love the art of fashion and and finery of fancy duds and the avant garde absurdity of runway couture, I don’t now, nor have I ever subscribed to any fashion magazines. Fashions are fleeting, after all, and magazines are just so many piles of paper taking up too much space.
“@harpersbazaarus asked me to write about witchy fashion so of course I said yes. “Modern witchiness reveals itself through fashion in clothes that articulate joy and express a healthy relationship with mortality while also being difficult for the male gaze. It’s not about dressing to please an amorphous other but yourself: Grey Gardens meets Wednesday Addams meets Stevie Nicks meets nuns. Luxe meets feeling yourself meets fuck off.”
Much of the photo shoot can be found online, though it looks as if the article is not up yet (and I am not entirely certain that it will be.) I can’t remember the last time I bought a magazine, but I’m definitely going to seek a copy of this one out–I devoured Machado’s Her Body And Other Parties and I am eager to delve into more of her eerie, feminist perspectives and narratives.
I will note that I (and many people, no doubt) would have appreciated more diversity in the shoot. Witches –and people who love fashion–come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Come on, Harper’s Bazaar…this would have been such a great opportunity to be inclusive! Do better!
“Witchcraft is the New Black”
Harper’s Bazaar US November 2018
model: McKenna Hellam
photographer: Pari Dukovic
stylist: Cassie Anderson
A gathering of death related links that I have encountered in the past month or so. From somber to hilarious, from informative to creepy, here’s a snippet of things that have been reported on or journaled about in or related to the Death Industry recently.
It’s the most WEENderful time of the year! Yes, here I am with my corny weenie jokes, again. I’m not going anywhere with this comedy gold–and neither should you! Because aside from my dumb wit, I’ve got a massive review post for you today for a vast selection of the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab 2018 annual autumn/Halloween scents.
Once again, the skies have darkened, and summer’s last bright green leaf has turned, and the folks at The Lab this year have truly outdone themselves by exploring strange new depths in diablerie, as well as perfumerie. In addition to many classic treats, they’ve got a spooky Chaos Theory, a timely Edgar Allan Poe tale storyboarded in scent, and a ribald new series of blends inspired by goats in classical art.
I have dripped, and I have dabbled; I have splashed, and I have smeared–and now that I am a dead leaf, maple ghost, pumpkin blood, hag-scented nightmare, I am ready to share my thoughts with you on the stand-out scents from this year’s autumnal BPAL autumn lineup!
Samhainophobia (menacing Haitian vetiver, patchouli, and clove with a shock of bourbon geranium, grim oakmoss, and dread-inspiring balsams pierce the innocuous scent of autumn leaves) Does this smell like a diagnosable condition, an unrelenting escalation of anxiety and even terror, about things related to Halloween? No, it smells like grinding against David S. Pumpkins under black lights in a stranger’s basement while listening to Peter Steele during a sexy murder party, and I am INTO IT.
Pumpkin Musk and Black Oudh A “strangely romantic, disturbingly erotic” perfume; If you’re intrigued by Samhainophobia’s sex appeal but you’re feeling a little trepidation because you’re just “not that kind of pumpkin”, you could consider Pumpkin Musk and Black Oud to be its shy wingman of sorts: a rich oudh buffed and rounded by gentle musks–its attentions softer, sweeter, and utterly sincere. This is a scent that just wants to retreat to a quiet corner and hold your hand and learn all your deepest secrets and take you out for pumpkin pancakes in the morning.
Midnight Bonfire (night-blooming jasmine, smoldering maple leaves, a cluster of patchouli and blackened ti leaf, black sage, and pinewood smoke) Lighting the path between worlds, the beacon at the threshold; leathery autumn leaves and smoke-tinged hair, an unsettling souvenir of the embers and ashes from a towering blaze in what you believed to be a dream, encircled by shadowy celebrants of the midnight hour.
Ghost Music (sheets of white musk and lavender curling around a melancholy song of violet root, iris, neroli, and honeysuckle) One of the eeriest things I have ever smelled, and, ghostly indeed–in the sense that is a nebulous manifestation: there one moment, gone the next. A visitation by something that was never there. A tremulous puff of ozone, laced with the spirit of lavender and the memory of violets.
Yipe (sweet bloody black cherry cream and crushed dried blackberries) This is one of those scents that most definitely pushes me out of my comfort zone, but I am happy to report that this smells exactly like one of those delicious cherry danishes that are shrink wrapped in crinkly plastic and stacked in a basket at your morning meeting, where all of these C-level corporate dildos are spouting gibberish about holistically evolving vortals, and robust synergies in the cloudification of benchmarks, or how to objectively synthesize high-payoff human capital. You just bite into your pre-packaged cherry danish, discreetly lick the glaze from your fingers, suck the crumbs from your hair, and think to yourself, “wow, this danish is the best thing that will happen to me all day.”
Inside the Golden Amber of Her Eyeballs (sleek black fur and gleaming amber shining in the shadows, a rumble of myrrh, and claws as sharp as ti leaf.) A massively fruity amber. I wanted to love this one more than all of the Weenies put together (if solely because of the marvelous label art, and the accompanying poem), but alas, on me, this smells less of sweet, furry feline companions, and more like the mixed berry yogurt/gummy bear-scented version of them.
Pumpkin Dust (shavings of white pumpkin rind and honey powder) Desiccated dumplings flavored with pumpkin puree and autumn wildflower honey, crumbled to dust and scattered to the October winds.
Feeding the Dead (a barrel of beer, a pyramid of cakes, and three sticks of incense.) This is an awfully lovely chocolate scent for a fragrance that contains no chocolate notes. It’s not necessarily boozy, but definitely malty, with nuances of popcorn and darkness. Incidentally, “Popcorn and Darkness” is also my Midwestern death metal/campy horror movie parody band.
The Hag (black musk, bay leaves, galangal, bourbon vetiver, blackcurrant, and rum) is a wonderfully aromatic scent, that of dust-darkened, woodsy bramble berries, and the zing of black pepper and pine needles.
Scarecrow Turned Philosopher (corn husks waving on an autumn breeze, beams of amber sunlight, hay bales, and late summer wildflowers) A peppery, honied flurry of dried blossoms whirling across your path like so many fiery autumn leaves. A stray petal, smelling of the dream of nectar and summer’s golden pollen, briefly tickles your nostrils before it lightly lands on the surface of a drying puddle and, floats undisturbed, alongside the sodden remnants of a waxen candy wrapper.
Huesos de Santo (orange-glazed cake, dotted with anise seed, and filled with custard, set beside a bouquet of celebratory funeral flowers) A wonderfully rich, but perfectly balanced pound cake–not too buttery, not too sweet–with a dense vanilla crumb, packed with a creamy custard center and anointed with the barest drizzle of orange syrup. The florals are sheer, anonymous blooms and the anise (for those with concerns re: its medicinal bite) is, at least for me, baked so well into this cake as to be nonexistent.
Jupiter Nourished by the Goat Amalthea (goat’s milk, nectar, ambrosia, and honey) Imagine the perfumed components of this scent burnt as a sacrificial offering, and you will glean an understanding of how this opens, initially. Goat’s milk and honey, purified by fire, with only a scant scattering of ashes to indicate it ever existed. Pause. Rewind. See how it began its life as a milky cold foam latte, whipped to a frothy fluff, drizzled with golden bee butt-juice (how many different ways can you say honey, anyway? I’m giving “bee butt juice” a go to see if it catches on.)
Beloved combinations from the Pomegranate Grove: Promegranate Grove: Snake Oil Is a scent that I know lots of folks are dying to hear about, and I wish I had more insight for you, but it’s a very subtle fragrance (which is weird because Pomegranate is always so loud on me, and Snake Oil can be very intense!) The pomegranate is fleeting, sort of like a beaded curtain made of sweet-tart candies, through which the sugared vanilla of Snake Oil surreptitiously peeks its head and disappears. It’s okay, Snake Oil, we love you! Come hang out for a while! I might almost recommend this to someone in search of “Snake Oil lite”. Though I love Snake Oil, I think Pomegranate Grove: Embalming Fluid is more my speed; the dark fruit mingles with the green tea, aloe, and lemon to create a lightly musky spritzer that is wonderfully wearable and absolutely divine. As in, were I serving cocktails to goddesses, I might base them on this scent. Maybe not Persephone. That would be a little gauche. If you are a sweet + fruity scent lover, then Pomegranate Grove: Alice may be your jam, so to speak. To be specific, a dollop of ripe, jammy preserves spooned over a bowl of honey-sweetened cream and sprinkled with a generous handful of red rose petals.
Dead Leaves And Maple Sap Opens with a brief blast of those dead leaves, that damp, slightly sour and musty vegetal scent, but is quickly engulfed by the most glorious treacly, sticky ooze of dark amber maple syrup. After a moment, it’s apparent that the leaves are quietly rustling in the background, calming that maple sap screechy sweetness and providing a wonderful earthy balance to what otherwise might be too cloying, and not nearly as huff-able as it truly is. This is a perfect Dead Leaves scent.
Dead Leaves, Green Cognac, Iris, and White Leather This is a cool, powdery, rooty incense; unlit, and nestled on a small metal dish, it gives the impression of linens dampened with a spritz of violet water.
Dead Leaves, Sweet Myrrh, Leather, Green Pomelo, and Red Currant zooms right out of the gate with zingy, almost effervescent, bittersweet citrus peel, and softly dries to a light, lemony resin. Hours later it’s slightly reminiscent of a classic eau de cologne…but created from a base of sunshiney shards of crushed lemon candies.
Dead Leaves, Apricot, Ambergris And Tobacco I was expecting an overripe fruit bowl of a scent, but this is a lightly sweet/sour, apricot/lychee scent, ginger-tinged, with a core of salty musk. It’s very pretty, and don’t get any manky, dead leaves from this at all!
Dead Leaves and Warm Sugar Cookies I thought Dead Leaves And Maple Sap was my favorite until I tried this variant. Every leaf tells a story, and this is the story of the time you sat on that park bench in the center of town on a drizzly October evening, half-drowned leaves at your feet, dripping foliage just overhead, and you in between them both, desperately trying to keep your oversized, fresh-from-the- oven, vanilla bean-flecked, caramel-edged browned butter and brown sugar cookie warm. There’s probably more to this story, but do you care? You’ve got an amazing cookie. The End.
If you’ve never read the story, now is the time to slip on a pair of headphones, darken your chambers, dream of delirious fancies, and, “much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.”
Should you require voluptuous olfactory companions (yes, you should!) for this magnificent auditory hallucination, I have shared fleeting impressions of several favorite fragrances from The Masque Of The Red Death collection, below.
A Multitude of Dreams is the wanton, bizarre lavender + licorice pairing you never knew you needed; All Is Silent Save The Voice Of The Clock gorgeously swells and swaggers with merrily burbling pink pepper, writhing, sultry jasmine and velvety red musk; The Scarlet Horror, listing only notes of blood musk and vetiver is a chilling, yet utterly intoxicating blend that conjures visions of nag champa-saturated grave wrappings; The Tastes Of The Duke Were Peculiar, a lustrous, luminous intoxicant, an exquisitely wicked delicacy, all bitter wormwood, glittering lime-soaked sugar cubes, and a barbarous spike of mandarin; Illimitable Dominion Over All is an addictive cypress/birch/tobacco hybrid– a dangerous draught, a toxic tonic, a sharply herbaceous/coniferous pill of the most bitter variety, stirred into a leathery, swampy tar. It sounds miserable but it’s strangely habit-forming. A Certain Nameless Awe is a soft jasmine snuggie of a scent and The Red Death is a study in gorgeousness, all smoky, dusky woods and a bruised violet heart. And lastly, here’s a secret about me. When I die, I want you to prop up my corpse with a jumbo-sized margarita clutched in my dead fist because margaritas are the best cocktails and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Lime is basically the best flavor. Neon green squeezy popsicles and green sour patch kids forever, is what I’m saying here! I had highest hopes for A Group of Pale Courtiers because of that lime note, and though its a shy one, and you might have to wait through a powdery musk, and a bit of spectral cologne, I promise your patience will pay off. It is the softest, glowing ghost of a lime, it is a little lime-y, close-kept secret, and it is all mine.
The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Halloween 2018 collection is currently live and available for purchase in 5ml bottles for $26 each. As this is a limited edition series, sample sizes imps are not available for Weenie 2018.
Are you new to one of our very favorite indie perfumers, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab? See my three part primer here, here, and here. Curious about our thoughts on last years weenies? Peep here! How about a mini-review of the 2016 weenies? We’ve got that covered, too
…tfw you are found guilty of premeditated dumbness in the extreme and your punishment is knowing that you were so close to being done with your project but now you must account for the crime of having obliterated a pair of knitpicks needles and dropping over 300 stitches in the process, derailing weeks and weeks worth of progress on the most complicated shawl you have ever attempted…
“If I may direct you to exhibit A., an artist’s rendering of the diabolical perpetrator involved in the events of last night.”
*Addresses jury of peers*
“Yes, I can swear to it! This vampire bat ring totally came to life and ate my knitting needles. You can even see the bite marks from his pointy fangs! I absolutely did NOT have over one thousand stitches jammed on a flimsy 8-inch circular needle with known defects. No, ladies and gentleman of the jury, only a madwoman would have attempted such incredibly stupid and dangerous folly.”
If the mention of Valancourt Books sounds familiar to you, well no doubt that’s because you’ve an excellent memory and you’ve seen an interview with them on this blog before! (With many thanks to my ghostly blogging partner of yore…!)
As the mornings grow chilled, and the days shorter; when the nights are impossibly dark and very possibly haunted–we must acknowledge that the time has come to pack away our blithe, breezy summer beach reads in favor of material more in keeping with the pall of gloom that has been cast by the season’s brittle, dying days. I know that none of us are particularly unhappy about this.
We yearn for those books whose spines hint at an eerie atmosphere of mystery, and titles encompassing all the metonymy of melancholy and strangeness and horror! Pages upon pages encrypted with ancient prophecies, ominous portents, infernal curses! Ghosts, phantoms, and strange sinister spirits! Abandoned monasteries, isolated castles, unquiet graves! Dreams, illusions, obsessions, and murders! And if the book’s cover art features ridiculously over-the-top visions of fiendishly cavorting ghouls and disembodied eyeballs glowing with hellfire and horror…all the better.
The good news for us is that we can find all of these tales and more at within the cobwebbed, crumbling vaults of Valancourt Books. An independent small press located in Richmond, VA, Valancourt specializes in the rediscovery of rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction, and I am over the (skull-faced, grinning maniacally, and dripping with blood) moon to share our interview with publisher, general editor, and co-founder James D. Jenkins of Valancourt Books. See below for a glimpse into what makes a title worthy of the Valancourt catalog, our enthusiasms regarding favorite authors and crazy book cover art, and to learn more about their current collaboration with the publishers of PAPERBACKS FROM HELL!
Unquiet Things: Valancourt’s beginnings focused on bringing forgotten, neglected, and overlooked 18th and 19th century gothic fiction back into the light, in a cost effective sort of way… which eventually led to unearthing the titles from the Victorian era — penny dreadfuls and the like, before moving onto excavating works of 20th century fiction. Most of these titles are works of horror or weird fiction, but other than classifications of genre, what is that special something a work must possess to capture your attention and cause you to exclaim, “ah, this is one for our catalog!” And is there any sort of common thread that you feel runs through the crusty titles that you exhume and bring to life again?
James: One common thread that runs through most of the books we republish is that they were once either very highly regarded by critics or else very popular with readers but nevertheless somehow mysteriously fell out of print at some point over the years. These days, we’re focusing mostly on horror/supernatural/weird fiction, although we also have a secondary focus on LGBT-interest literature, and we also reprint a small number of great books that don’t fit in either of those categories.
In terms of more recent authors, I think we share some beloved favorites! I adore both the strange, disquieting writings of Robert Aickman, as well as Michael McDowell’s unpretentious but thoroughly imaginative and sharply-crafted stories. What is it about these author’s works that resonates with you? And if one admires the works of Aickman/McDowell, what else from Valancourt’s catalogue might you suggest along those lines?
Aickman and McDowell are obviously very different sorts of writers, but one thing they have in common is that their reputations have been kept alive over the decades by a group of devoted fans, even when their books were long out of print or, in Aickman’s case, only available as expensive collector’s editions. I think you put it well: Aickman’s works are strange and disquieting, oddly unsettling even if sometimes their precise “meaning” seems to elude us. McDowell, on the other hand, said he never aspired to posthumous fame or to be considered a “literary” writer: his only aim was to entertain and frighten readers, and judging from the responses we’ve gotten to our reissues, it’s pretty clear he succeeded!
Those who enjoy Aickman’s more literary style might want to give our reissues of Forrest Reid’s subtle supernatural fiction a try, or possibly David Case’s books, which are not as subtle as Aickman’s but are written in a traditional, more literary style with vocabulary that will have you frequently reaching for a dictionary. And, obviously, you’ll want to read the Victorian-era horror fiction we’ve published by Richard Marsh, who was Aickman’s grandfather! Fans of McDowell’s fiction should find our reissues of Ken Greenhall, Bernard Taylor, Michael Talbot, and Alan Ryan — all of them (like McDowell) neglected masters of ’80s paperback horror fiction — to their liking.
You recently signed a deal with the publishers of PAPERBACKS FROM HELL, [reviewed in our September 2017 installment of Stacked!] to publish a PFH series of reissues of titles featured in the book, which I believe will be edited by Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson? You guys + those guys is the dreamiest dream team I could ever imagine! Can you share how this came about? How did you go about selecting the titles you’ll be reissuing? And I have to ask…what are you going to do about the cover art? Because some of those covers are bananas!
That’s definitely a project we are really excited about! Grady has written introductions to a couple of our books (HELL HOUND, THE AUCTIONEER), and we’re longtime followers of Will’s TOO MUCH HORROR FICTION blog, where we’ve discovered a few books that we went on to republish, so it was sort of natural that we’d team up. As far as how the series came about, I think we here at Valancourt, like everybody else who bought PAPERBACKS FROM HELL, were flipping through the book and thinking how great some of those out-of-print horror novels looked and what a shame it was some of them were unavailable!
When we teased the series on social media, the response was huge, and as far as the cover art goes it was unanimous: people want the original covers! So we’re going to do everything we can to use the original cover paintings. For the first book in the series, Elizabeth Engstrom’s WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US, the original cover painter, Jill Bauman, has kindly allowed us to reuse the art, and we’re hoping to be able to get permission to reuse others. There may be some cases where we can’t locate the original artist or otherwise can’t get the rights (and at least one of the titles we’re planning for the series didn’t have an interesting cover the first time around), so in those cases we’ll be coming up with something new that hopefully retains an ’80s feel.
What can you tell us about our giveaway title, Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Volume Three?
We’re giving away a copy of our new Valancourt Book of Horror Stories because the series has been one of the most popular things we’ve done over the past few years. The mix of rare and seldom-reprinted older stories with some new and unpublished material has gotten a great response from readers, and, above all, the books are a great introduction to Valancourt and what we publish. For readers who are just discovering us and wondering where to start with the 400+ books in our catalogue, our Valancourt Books of Horror Stories are the perfect place to start: Volume 3, for example, includes contributions by 16 different Valancourt authors, so you can sample a lot of different writers to see whose works you might like to read more of. One thing that’s great about our Horror Stories books is that many of the authors featured aren’t typically thought of as horror authors and aren’t often featured in horror anthologies, so you’ll find tales by literary and mainstream authors like Christopher Priest, Isabel Colegate, and Nevil Shute alongside contributions by well-known horror writers like Michael McDowell and Bernard Taylor.
Thanks very much to James and Valancourt Books, and please be certain to leave a comment below in order to be entered into the giveaway! A winner will be chosen in one week’s time. This giveaway is open to our U.S. readers
These two fabulous creatures are the only thing that is making American Horror Story watchable for me this season. Also: Madison Montgomery in ugly black leather shorts, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette whilst examining a skull is A LOOK and I am here for it.
1. Cozy clothes – After all the excitement and events of the Halloween season, all I want to do in November is curl up on the couch in some cozy clothes. I have a drawer full of Halloween socks and love wearing them as soon as the weather gets cool enough (current faves are my “Everyday is Halloween” socks by 
2. Autumn perfumes – I love evoking the feeling of fall with the perfumes I wear. Right now I’m favoring 
3. Thanksgiving food – Mmmmm, give me all the vegan roasts, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pies this time of year! I have been looking forward to the Thanksgiving holiday, where I cook up an all-vegan feast before binging on horror movies. This year I picked up a turkey-less roast from Trader Joe’s, lots of cranberry sauce, peas, sweet potatoes, and plan on roasting veggies and making mashed potatoes, along with a few other sides for Mister Spooky and myself. I’ll probably pick up a pre-made vegan pumpkin pie from Whole Foods, along with some So Delicious Coco Whip to top it with!
4. Longer nights and cooler temperatures – I adore this time of year when darkness creeps in earlier and earlier every day. For some reason longer nights make me feel cozier and much more comfortable. I think it helps that it getting darker sooner also means that the temperatures are starting to cool off which makes it finally feel like fall here in Southern California.
5. 
6. Black Moon Cosmetics Liquid to Matte Lipsticks – I adore all the products I’ve tried from 
7. Califia Farms’ Peppermint Mocha Cold Brew – The rest of the year I only drink black coffee, but something happens to me during the holidays (gasp – is it holiday spirit?!) and I am all about festive flavors! I am usually more of a pumpkin spice fiend, but this dairy-free Peppermint Mocha Cold Brew from 
8. Candles and incense – I am obsessed with the fall-scented candles from 
9. Horror Podcasts – I love listening to podcasts year-round, but my post-Halloween blues have been soothed by some of my favorite horror podcasts. Mind you, I’m not talking about the ones that tell spooky stories, though I love those, too, but rather podcasts that cover current news in the genre along with discussions, interviews, and film reviews. My favorite horror podcasts in this vein include 
10. Planning next year’s Halloween season – I already am dreaming of next year’s Halloween festivities, which will include attending all my favorite Halloween/horror conventions, haunts and events here in Southern California, but I’m also hoping to squeeze in some travel, hopefully to the East Coast – my number one bucket list destination is 
