Boo!

I think I’ve felt estranged from Halloween for most of adulthood. The seasonal merchandise, the booziness, the ironically sexy costumes have felt kind of off putting in my middle age.

But lately, if I see any rubber bats or vials of fake blood or chomp-on vampire teeth, I feel a sort of Proustian dreaminess that takes me by surprise and almost makes me dissociate. A tangible object of the present can summon up the past. That was my favorite kind of stuff when I was a kid. I loved horror and the way it seemed ripe with possibility. Loved vampire stories. Loved the REAL uncensored Grimm’s fairy tales with all of their savagery. There was something about the forbidden, the occult, that was so frightening. And yet it transcended you straight out of the everyday, banal world, in a way that felt magical.

(I feel nostalgia also for the cheap plastic-ness of that era. The smell of the inside of a plastic mask held on with elastic! I also miss the glow-in-the-dark stuff that was all over the place in the late seventies and early eighties. Plastic that was white but that glowed luridly green when you turned out the lights. Still my favorite color.)

It is good to sometimes indulge nostalgia, without falling into the trap of never wanting to leave.

Anyway, the news is, I will have a new book out sometime between April and June of 2022, depending on the publisher’s schedule. It will be called “The Vesper Bell,” and I might even get to see the cover at the end of November. It’s been a couple of years since my last novel, so I’m eager to be back in the game again. I will keep people in the loop.

BTW from what I know the word “boo” comes from a Latin word that means “to alarm,” so when I say “boo!” it means literally “ I am alarming you!”