Ever since I was a kid, autumn has been my favorite time of year. Halloween is a huge part of that, but there are other reasons for my love of the season.

Fall is New England’s finest moment, those few weeks between the sweltering summers and the brutal winters, when the treeline erupts in a panorama of vibrant tones and the air smells of apples and wood smoke.

Even though it represents the last hurrah before the descending chill, it has always felt like a beginning to me rather that the prelude to the year’s ending. My pulse quickens and my spirits lift with the sense that something new is about to unfold.

It’s a reaction cultivated by an entire lifetime lived under the timetable of academic calendars — first as a student, and then as a professional working in higher education. My year begins in September, ends in May, and has a surreal interregnum during the summer months.

October is the jewel in autumn’s crown, the high water mark of the season. Traditionally, my Octobers have been a month-long festival, culminating in Maura’s birthday, our wedding anniversary, and Halloween all with the space a few days. We dig out our favorite spooky playlists, movies, and books spend the month getting into the mood for the big celebration.

It’s not that I won’t read “Whisperer in the Darkness” or watch An American Werewolf in London or listen to gloomy postpunk at other times of the year, but the Halloween season’s atmosphere adds a delicious extra level of enjoyment to the experience. (Some of that can also be tied back to a life lived in Studentville, where nostalgic memories of bumming around the city during the fall months abound.)

Yet, truth be told, I’m just not feeling it this year. Not like I used to, at least.

Maybe it’s because I’ve grown past that sort of thing. Maybe it’s because there’s a Big Work Deadline on the horizon that has poisoned the well. Maybe it’s because the past few Octobers have been times of stress and personal trauma.

I just don’t know, but so many of these familiar beloved rituals have felt like going through the motions. The enjoyment is there, but that extra level of thrill is gone.

I’m hoping this will change before the month is over, that the vague sense of dread I’m feeling will recede and be replaced by that old black magic.

Until then, there’s nothing to do but keep on keeping on. This house isn’t going to haunt itself.

Recommended listening: A Popular History of Signs – October Already (from Comrades, 1984)

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Revisiting some all too familiar territory, musically and psychically.

In 1982, Fangoria did a feature article about a horror-themed pro wrestler.

The magazine’s gorehound readers were not happy about it.

Like most examples of vintage geek tribalism, it’s pretty hilarious stuff in hindsight.

We’re talking about, what? Three or four pages out of a single issue of sixty page magazine?

Yet these enthusiasts of faked gore and cinematic violence acted like a bunch of barbarians had taken a dump in their oasis of rarified culture.

The wrestling defenders, on the other hand, were no less hilarious.

Recommended listening: bis – Dead Wrestlers (from Music for a Stranger World, 2001)

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You might not consider this particularly spooky, but you probably never listened to it while midnight driving through a Nor’easter in a rusted out ’90 Olds Cutlass with semi-bald tires.

(from “The Specter of the Iron Duchess” by Leo Dorfman and Jerry Grandenetti in Ghosts #28, July 1974)

A March 1975 wedding is planned for Jan Rasek of Cedar Falls, Iowa and the Iron Dutchess of the Stygian Abyss. The couple recently announced their engagement while at the One-Eyed Snake Bar & Grille, Fontana, CA.

The Iron Dutchess is the daughter of the late Duke Charles the Eviscerator of Thuringia and his thirteenth wife. She currently works luring unsuspecting souls to their unfortunate deaths for Beazzle & Bub, LLC.

The groom-to-be is the son of Karl Rasek and the late Irene Wexler, and a native of Cedar Falls. He is currently a contract driver for King Brothers Trucking.

The couple met in on a lonely stretch of New Mexico highway, and plan to maintain their residences in both Iowa and the Stygian Abyss. The wedding will take place at the Holiday Inn lounge in Ontario, California. The couple plans to honeymoon in Fort Lauderdale later this year.

Recommended listening: Hal Blaine & The Young Cougars – The Phantom Driver (from Deuces, “T’s”, Roadsters & Drums, 1963)

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Let the spirit move you.

(from “Fangs of the Wolf” by Author Unknown and Bill Everett in Menace #9, October 1954)

Signed, Totally Not A Guy Who Got Turned Into a Dog after a Lifetime of Hating and Abusing Dogs

P.P.S Sorry about the carpet.

Recommended listening: Curve – Die Like a Dog (from Pubic Fruit, 1991)

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More snarl than whimper.

This morning I saw one of the most horrifying sights in recent memory. I’m going to share it with you, but a little context is required before I do so.

A couple of years ago, one of the women in Maura’s network of feline rescue folks asked us if would take in a “difficult” cat that was having issues at her current foster home.

The cat was named Becky and had previously been living as a stray on Intervale Street, which folks familiar with the area may recognize as one of Boston’s rougher neighborhoods.

Becky was a roly-poly gray shorthair with a smooshed face and giant saucer-like eyes. If we didn’t take her, she probably would’ve had to be put down. It was borderline emotional blackmail, but it worked.

The original plan was for Becky — now called Bekkacat, Beks, Bekkaboo, and Psycho — to live in our garage, but it soon became apparent that would not be an option.

I don’t know if feline autism is thing, but Bekkacat would certainly qualify as the poster child for such a condition. She possesses the usual set of feline behaviors, but her means of manifesting them are bizarre in the extreme.

She cannot meow and chirp, so her vocalizations take the form of squeaks, growls, and yips which have no obvious correlation to her present mood. She loves her people (especially Maura, who has been lured into a co-dependent relationship with her) but expresses it through awkward headbutts and claw swipes.

She also refuses to eat directly from her bowl, instead preferring to use her paw.

Bekka’s behavioral quirks would been reason enough to keep her indoors, but they were compounded by the discovery that she has chronic urinary problems. They’re nothing life-threatening, but do require keeping her on a restricted (and expensive) diet.

Bekka being Bekka, she stubbornly insists on trying to snarf down the forbidden fare we serve to our other cats. Despite being a blobby, graceless squeeze toy, she has proven to be pretty damn devious when it comes to snarfing the stuff up on the sly.

We typically only discover she’s broken her diet when we start to notice small pools of bloody urine in semi-random locations. When we do find them, we put down paper in the most likely spots until we can get Bekka back on her routine.

We’ve found that old copies of the National Enquirer (which Maura loves to read, for some inexplicable reason) work best for the job.

With that explanation out of the way, I can now reveal what I discovered at the top of the second floor landing today…

…the cadaverous face of a cancer-ravaged Michael Douglas retouched by a gout of bloody cat piss.

It’s probably the most disturbing thing I’ll see this entire spooky season, barring the release of a sex tape featuring Mike Pence and Donald Trump.

Recommended listening: Heart Throbs – Blood from a Stone (from Cleopatra Grip, 1990)

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There’s no romancing this one away.

Play-Doh’s “Fuzzy Pumper” Monster Barbershop was one of the toy industry’s many attempts to channel children’s fixation with familiar horror archetypes into a non-threatening plaything.

The playset’s real horrors were reserved for the parents who gazed upon the sanity-blasting state of the living room carpet and the phantasmagoric nightmares which emerged from the family dog’s hindquarters following a vigorous session of extruded hijinks.

Recommended listening: Echo & The Bunnymen – Clay (from Porcupine, 1983)

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When you no longer care about doing it clean.

As much flak as geekdom gets for its obsession with dubious “collectable” crap, it still has a little ways to go before it catches up to the true masters of the kitschy craft.

I was utterly traumatized by both the book and movie versions of The Amityville Horror as a kid, but that was over thirty-five years ago and evaporated following a thorough debunking of the tale on — of all places — That’s Incredible.

The notion of dropping sixty bucks for a seasonal dust collector based on the franchise is beyond bizarre, especially because it looks cut from the same sweatshop plaster mold that produces those “Halloween Village” diorama sets for strip mall craft stores.

Even weirder, this is supposed to be the initial offering in an entire line of “famous American haunted houses.” What’s the criteria for inclusion there? A mass murder followed by a load of easily debunked nonsense pushed by bullshit artists with an agenda?

If so, expect to see Sharon Tate’s Benedict Canyon home and the Sandy Hook Elementary School as future ready-to-display installments.

Recommended listening: Glen Gray & The Casa Loma Orchestra – This House Is Haunted (from The Complete Okeh And Brunswick Hits, 2001)

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The scratches you here are coming from INSIDE THE GROOVES.

While I was going to shelve Role-Playing with the Changes for the duration of the Halloween Countdown, the next item on the feature’s chronological to-do list just so happened to dovetail quite nicely with the spooky season theme.

I got into Dungeons & Dragons at the extreme tail end of the game’s faddish high-water mark of the early-to-mid Eighties. All my classmates who’d dabbled with the game had moved on to other hobbies, while toy stores the local mall chain hobby shop had undertaken a steep retrenchment of their RPG inventories. There was a flood of material available at fire-sale prices, and yet I flying blind when it came to sifting through it all. I knew there was a difference between plain ol’ D&D and the “Advanced” rules, but remained ignorant of the specifics apart from the fact that once came in box sets and one came in a series of expensive hardcover sourcebooks.

In the face of such a confusing array of options, I did what I typically do in these situations — I impulse-bought anything that looked cool and wouldn’t break my budget. The first and most noteworthy of those purchases was the AD&D 1st Edition Fiend Folio.

The book was a hardbound encyclopedia of fan-created creatures submitted to White Dwarf back when TSR and Games Workshop had a strategic alliance. These amateur monstrosities shared space with a small contingent of entries pulled from official TSR modules, such as the popular and problematic Drow.

The stat listings and entries contained ample mention of mechanics and spells that were utterly alien to kid whose familiarity with D&D was limited to the Basic Set, but there was enough shared DNA between the systems that I was able to justify dropping four bucks (at the Burlington Mall Kay-Bee) for a hardcover tome full of new things to pit against my gaming group.

What I didn’t understand, I was able to shoehorn in through some really bizarre rules contortions. For example, my ignorance about “hit dice” meant that I treated the stat as the creature’s hit point total — meaning that a high-level death knight was on par with a second level fighter, health-wise.

The first thing I did when I brought the Fiend Folio home was to sketch out a supermassive dungeon into which I attempted to cram as many of the sourcebook’s coolest (from the perspective of a fourteen year old boy) monsters as possible. There were Crypt Things living next door to Slaad Knights living next door to carbuncles living next door to Xvarts, all without any regard to narrative logic or fantasy ecology. It was a complete and utter mess, but Lil Bro and my cousin didn’t seem to mind as the slew their way to easy windfalls of treasure and experience.

I understand the diminishing returns of fun and satisfaction that come with beginner lootfests, but there’s something beautifully pure in their sloppy enthusiastic abandon. There’s no minimaxing or metagaming, just a whole lot of joyous absurdity that tends to get bled out of more conscientiously formal RPG runs.

The acquisition of Fiend Folio coincided with the peak of my artistic aspirations, and its gritty-Brity illustrative style (especially the Russ Nicholson stuff) loomed large over my own illustrative efforts. It was a constant companion at the private work table I was granted for being one of the “serious” students in my 9th grade art class. I spend hour after classroom hour re-interpreting (or just plain copying) the illustrations in pencil, tempera, pen-and-ink, and terra cotta.

I was absolutely enraptured by Fiend Folio‘s sizable contingent of undead creatures, who weren’t afraid to express their desiccated or putrid majesty in starkly skritchy monochrome. The masterpiece was a clay sculpture of a maggot-riddled (via repurposed garlic press) Son of Kyuss that my teacher submitted to the Boston Globe Scholastic Art contest.

It didn’t win, because critics are afraid of true visionaries. It got smashed to bits after I accidentally dropped in on the sidewalk trying to cart it home on the last day of class.

My original Fiend Folio was stolen by someone (most likely the gorehound metalhead who was the other “serious” student) in my art class. I replaced it a couple months later with an identically priced copy picked up at a Kay-Bee in Nashua during a family day trip.

Of all the monstrous compendiums released for the various RPGs I’ve played over the decades, the Fiend Folio remains my all-time favorite. The creatures are so strange and off-beat compared to the ones in the two original Monster Manuals, and I’ve never used a Gelatinous Cube or Rust Monster in a dungeon when I could throw in an Adherer to similar effect.

When I eventually abandoned D&D in favor of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, I made a serious attempt to import some of my favorite fiends into the latter system. Fragmentary evidence of that unfinished and ill-advised effort can be found on bits of loose-leaf paper wedged between certain pages of my replacement folio.

Recommended Listening: Bound & Gagged – Personal Monsters (from the A Wicked Good Time compilation, 1981)

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This is Boston, not No Wave.

(from “The Corpse Wore Shoes” by Carl Wessler and E.R. Cruz in The Witching Hour #59, October 1975)

“Check it out, you happening cats! The Vault Keeper got hung up by a real bad trip, so he asked me — the Macabre Youth Minister — to lay this far out prairie gothic tale on you with-it kids! Stick around afterwards, and we’ll have some groovy snacks and rap about the things have been bumming you out!”

Recommended listening: Out On Blue Six – Party Mood (from a 1981 single)

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If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your postpunk odes to emotional alienation.

(To be fair, that hasn’t been much of a problem so far.)

Can you feel it, my groovy ghoulies? The crispness in the air and whispers of unquiet spirits that herald the start of another Halloween Countdown?

This will be the eleventh year I’ve done this, so expect to see a few repeats of past musical annotations. My ability to keep track of everything I’ve posted since 2006 is a ghost of what it used to be.

(See what I did there? Pretty spooky, right?)

Otherwise, expect the usual grab bag of tricks and treats pulled from the Armagideon Time archives, starting with this topical slice of mid-Eighties Britgoth.

Recommended listening: Skeletal Family – This Time (from Futile Combat, 1985)

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