On of my favorite display ideas is to spend the last week or so of April reminding people that it is also "Halfway to Halloween." In the third edition of my book, I go hard on encouraging all libraries to celebrate this "second Halloween" and one of my biggest arguments to do so is because the film industry has been doing this for the last 10 years. Think about it. How many Horror movies now come out in April? There are a lot out right now, and they are dominating the box office.
People love Horror all year long, but even the casual fans start to crave more of it the further we get away from Halloween and the marketing machine that pushes it for 31 days. They often don't know where to look though. The "halfway" mark, is a great time to reuse your displays and content from the most previous October to promote it again. And calling it "Halfway to Halloween," is fun and attention grabbing.
Even some bookstores are celebrating this weekend. See, I have been talking about this since 2010 and others are finally catching on.
Today to highlight Halfway to Halloween I want to direct you to the work I do all year long to help you help your patrons find Horror over on RA for All: Horror. It is a one stop shop for all of your Horror for Libraries needs. But in particular there are 2 long running series that I am promoting today.
The first is my weekly giveaway of Horror titles, which today features 2 finished copied of Ink Vine by Elizabeth Broadbent. My goal with this series is series is three fold. First, I am giving away the physical ARCs of the books I have formally reviewed in Booklist or Library Journal. Often these are many of the "big name" authors. Once I have read them, I do not need them anymore. I am paying it forward and passing them on. Second, I offer smaller press titles and/or authors who cannot get me their books in time for a more traditional review the chance to get some space to promote their work for my library audience through a giveaway. I only include titles I believe are good for a general public library audience. They are not reviewed simply because I did not have the time (I cannot formally review every book) or more often because they could not get their book to me in time for our far in advance journal deadlines.
When people enter the weekly giveaway, they stay entered until they win. There is no need to reenter.
Third, the giveaways overtime then further as a resource to learn about new and upcoming titles that are worth your attention, even if you do not win. And, because they are all tagged "giveaway," you can pull up 4 years worth of titles in reverse chronological order. That tag alone serves as a repository of backlist titles you could be suggesting to your patrons-- with comments from me on who the best reader for each book is-- all from the last 4 years.
If you are interested in being part of the weekly #HorrorForLibraries giveaway this week and going forward, visit the post with this week's giveaway to see how you can enter.
The other series I am proud to offer on RA for All: Horror is my Why I Love Horror guest essays featuring authors answering that prompt, sharing why they are fans and practitioners of the genre. It offers authors a chance to speak directly to readers, sharing their adoration for the genre. This showcases a variety of reasons why someone would love horror themselves. As a resource it gives you a peek into the mind of an author whose books you should carry and offers you an example of a reader (that author) who likes Horror as well.
I have authors from household names to up and comers all indexed with the tag "Why I Love Horror" over on the Horror blog.
To celebrate Halfway to Halloween, I invited the author of today's giveaway book, Elizabeth Broadbent, to join the Why I love Horror family. Please see her essay below. But first, remember Horror is a great choice all year long, but especially now as we are Halfway to Halloween.
I was nine years old when I read Firestarter. I remember this for two reasons: It was my first Stephen King book, and I was only a few months older than Charlie. I can still picture the battered paperback, a movie tie-in and garage sale find. In the horror community, especially among older Millennials, you’ll often hear of kids reading brutally violent Stephen King, but nine is precocious even among that crowd. More focused on Charlie than Andy, I certainly skipped some of the more adult-leaning parts; despite that, I found the book more compelling than the standard Anne of Green Gables fare which passed as children’s lit in those days. Once we outgrew Beverly Cleary and tore through Judy Bloom, there was precious little left, especially for a kid who bought her books with quarters scrounged from the living room couch.
Years later, of course I’m appalled. Where were my parents? Who lets their nine-year-old read Stephen King? The answers to those questions explain why I found King so riveting in the first place. I was a lonely child, scapegoated by a narcissistic mother, alternately terrorized and ignored by an alcoholic father; my neurodivergence only exacerbated the abuse. Against that singular bleakness, Firestarter, Carrie, and even The Eyes of the Dragon felt more authentic than Pollyanna. Other books sugarcoated the world, but horror told the truth. I believed it as an all-too-young reader. Decades later, I believe it as a writer.
By mixing the speculative with the all-too-human monsters, horror shows us people at both their most depraved and most beautiful. I read The Prince of Tides when I was eleven—though it’s not generally considered such, I’d mark it a crucial entry point to the Southern Gothic genre. Tragic knight-in-shining armor Luke Wingo saves his brother, mother, and sister; the twin obsessions of Callanwolde for Lila and Lila for acceptance define the novel’s sickest villainy. There’s a full sweep of human experience there; I loved the book for that, but I also loved it for the prose. My house had no Shakespeare, no poetry. Until I found Conroy, I was unaware that people put words together that way. When I read him, I knew I wanted to do it myself.
I stayed in love with “acceptable” horror despite the academy’s insistence on devaluing it. I found horror that sang, from Jane Eyre to Moby-Dick, Flannery O’Connor to William Faulkner. In particular, the gothic caught me, that wicked mixture of creeping fear, constant threat, and intrusion of the past. Horror, but especially gothic horror, seemed to see the world in a way that felt authentic but safe, realistic but distant.
As I turned more and more to writing, I found my models there. Faulkner exhorts us to “tell about the South,” impossible without its tangle of racism and history, patriarchy and prejudice. Most great Southern literature is horror—how could it be anything but? An old South Carolina story alleges that when the Dalai Lama flew over the state, he was silent for a long time. “So much blood on the land,” he said finally. When we confront the truth, we Southern writers confront that blood, that systemic oppression, be it racial or sexual or classist, and often all three. My master’s thesis was Southern Gothic. We write what we know.
When I turned again to fiction after a career in journalism, horror snagged me once more. South Carolina lives and breathes high gothic drama; witness the Murdaugh clan, one of my final and favorite nonfiction subjects. Anyone shocked by their story never lived there; to understand the Murdaughs, you have to understand their eighty-five-year, unbroken legacy of racism, privilege, and oppression. In South Carolina, our past constantly intrudes upon the present.
That’s true for Southern literature, but it’s also the reality of adults who suffered through abusive childhoods. Like William Faulkner says, our pasts are never dead. They’re not even really past. Therapy can teach us to live with them, even help us heal, but the past never disappears, not entirely; it crowds into the present, insisting upon itself: You will never be enough. The world will hurt you. People will hurt you. I learned to see the world through horror. I see it that way still, both the best and worst of us.
The speculative element clears that lens rather than blurs it—when we keep horror at a safe distance, we can examine it more closely. That’s important for both Southerners and once-traumatized children; both groups grapple with pasts easier to see through a dark glass than a clear pane. In Ink Vine, making Emmy’s love interest otherworldly turns a microscope on the brutal spectrum of oppression, both classist and sexual. In Blood Cypress, coming in 2025 with Raw Dog Screaming Press, losing Beau Carson to a possibly supernatural force reveals both the Carson family’s dysfunction and Lila Carson’s love for her brother. When the truth is too terrible to examine, when people would refuse to engage with real-life horror, we can use the speculative to make them look long. It lets us tell the truth by telling it slant; long-hidden, trauma rises, and we can bear it.
Horror is real. It helps us answer the ultimate question—turning one last time to William Faulkner—both of the South and the hurt child. Why do they live at all? Despite our pasts, we limp on, enduring; confronting our pasts, we become whole. Horror offers truth in a world that would turn away. Couched in the gothic, we can wrestle our demons. And sometimes, if only for the moment, we can beat them.
