Posts Tagged: Halloween

Writing Down the Shadows: Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror

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We get to devour our horror from the top of the head down to the tips of the toes.

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This Is What I Get for Wanting

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When I cried over the phone, asking him if he was dumping me, he said in his gentle voice, “Sweetheart, we weren’t really a thing yet.”

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden

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Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]

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This Week in Essays

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At The California Sunday Magazine, Brooke Jarvis has a devastating piece about missing persons and family members lost over the border. For VIDA, Jean Ho shares her discouraging experience at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. And here at The Rumpus, Chellis Ying writes about rock climbing in China, which turned out to be an opportunity for both thrills […]

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This October Sunday

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Here we are again, another one-run game, another last chance.

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This Week in Short Fiction

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Autumn is the season of change and, some say, death, as the leaves turn, the air cools, and the nights lengthen. Likewise, Halloween is not just a holiday for costumes and candy but also, at its untouched roots, a day for remembering loved ones passed. So, fittingly, the quarterly online literary magazine Psychopomp, named for […]

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Happy Butch Halloween

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When you are a queer kid, there are so many things people tell you are bad. In an autobiographical comic at Catapult, liz rosema tackles the topic of Halloween as it pertains to queer youth. Queer children, in particular, are often told many things are bad, but rosema proposes there is a specific value in Halloween for […]

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Literature Tricks or Political Threats?

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So familiar have the aesthetic conventions of horror become that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish “real” Halloween movies from parodies. Something similar has occurred in our political life. At the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey shares a brief history of collisions between humor and horror in Western literature (and American politics).

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New Scares

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Happy day after Halloween! For the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty reviews a variety of chilling fiction, and delves deep into why these are exceptional: The short story is the ideal form for horror because it can convey a quick, vivid impression of fear, without having to extend the action past the breaking point of the reader’s […]

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This Week in Short Fiction

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With Halloween a scant three days away, it’s the perfect time to curl up with some spooky fiction and get yourself delightfully creeped out. But this week’s story doesn’t rely on your standard witches and vampires and werewolves, all easily dismissed and cartoonish Halloween fare. No, this week’s story, “The Insurgent” by Nicholas Rombes, features ghosts […]

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Rumpus Original Fiction: How to Become a Tiger

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Tigers are bigger than my comprehension. That’s what I want. I want to be bigger than I am, so big I can’t even imagine it, so real I can’t ever be misinterpreted.

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The Perfect Eerie Piano Scale

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In honor of Halloween, Consequence of Sound has collected what they deem the “10 Essential Horror Movie Scores.” Following Scorsese’s argument that music and film are intrinsically tied, “[b]ecause there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they’re put together,” the piece celebrates how horror perhaps above all genres uses […]

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Tales from the Comment Crypt

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Halloween comes early with Jezebel’s annual Spooky Story Contest, where readers leave their terrifying tales in the comments (they can also be emailed to [email protected]). Other than that, the rules are are as follows: 1) The story must be true, and 2) The story must be scary. Fans of Creepypasta, Channel Zero, and all manner […]

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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #8: Dappled Things

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The small town where I have recently landed is ugly and beautiful. Walk down the main street: there are a few old gems like an ancient and glorious Masonic Hall, now home to evangelicals. Several boarded up stores, ugly as can be, and some small town cafes: one for Giants fans, specializing in breakfast, pancakes […]

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