How I Spend My Halloween: Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo

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photo of author Cynthia "Cina" Pelayo
Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo

If you know anything about Cemetery Dance, you know that the arrival of October…The Spooky Season…is a very special time of year for us. To celebrate, we’ve invited some of our favorite spinners of spooky tales to share their favorite Halloween traditions and memories with us.

Today we’re joined by Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo, the Chicago-based, award-winning author and poet. Apple cider donuts and The Rocky Horror Picture Show are just some of her Halloween traditions — read on to learn more!
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Review: Messengers of the Macabre by LindaAnn LoSchiavo and David Davies

cover of Messengers of the MacabreMessengers of the Macabre by LindaAnn LoSchiavo and David Davies
Audience Askew (October 2022)
54 pages; $9.99 paperback; $2.99 ebook
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

LindaAnn LoSchiavo is a dramatist, writer, and poet. A native New Yorker, LoSchiavo has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, Best of the Net, and Dwarf Stars. She is a member of Science Fiction Poetry Assoc., The British Fantasy Society, and The Dramatists Guild. David Davies left Wales under baleful circumstances for The Lone Star State. “Have sonnets, will travel,” announces his business card. His Pushcart- and Bram Stoker-nominated poems and stories have been known to appear in: Granfalloon, Green Lantern Press, MacroMicroCosm, Moon Shadow Sanctuary, Ripples in Space. Together, LoSchiavo and Davies have written the Halloween-themed collection Messengers of the MacabreContinue Reading

How I Spend My Halloween: Josh Malerman

banner reading How I Spend My Halloween

If you know anything about Cemetery Dance, you know that the arrival of October…The Spooky Season…is a very special time of year for us. To celebrate, we’ve invited some of our favorite spinners of spooky tales to share their favorite Halloween traditions and memories with us.

Today we’re joined by Josh Malerman, author of numerous short stories and novels such as Bird Box and its sequel, Malorie, Unbury Carol, Daphne, and many more. He is also the singer/songwriter of the Detroit rock band The High Strung.
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Review: Close to Midnight edited by Mark Morris

cover of Close to MidnightClose to Midnight edited by Mark Morris
Flame Tree Press (October 2022)
304 pages; $26.95 hardcover; $16.95 paperback; $6.99 e-book
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

Opening an anthology of horror stories is like opening your candy bag after a long night of trick-or-treating: you hope the chocolate treats and peanut butter cups outweigh the licorice and Circus Peanuts.

With Close to Midnight, out this month from Flame Tree Press, editor Mark Morris fills up readers’ bags with king-sized candy bars, proving his is the house to go to on Halloween night.Continue Reading

WIN a $20 Gift Certificate from Cemetery Dance!

cover of Widow's PointTo celebrate the Spooky Season, the Kindle version of Widow’s Point by Richard Chizmar & Billy Chizmar is on sale for a limited time for only 99 cents! If you’ll help spread the word, you could win a $20 Cemetery Dance Gift Certificate.

All you have to do is use the widget below to tweet about the 99 cent sale. The more you tweet it through this widget, they more points you earn, and the better your chances to win! This special promotion runs until October 28th. Thanks, and good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Video Visions: 32 Bigfoot Movies that Scratch that Squatchy Itch

Black background with spooky lettering that says Hunter Shea Video Visions and the Cemetery Dance logo

So, yeah, I have a bigfoot costume in my attic. And I may have donned it during a multi-author book signing at a New Jersey brewery and run amok, startling every day drinker in my path. On Halloween, I quite possibly made some small children cry as I offered them treats from my hairy hand (see the author in his glory below). For shits and giggles, wearing the squatch mask at random doesn’t seem all that strange to me, even as I sit in my belfry and write this column. 

Hunter Shea in a Bigfoot costume
Hunter “Sasquatch” Shea

I know, I have a problem. Continue Reading

Review: Splatterpunk #13 (10th Anniversary Issue) edited by Jack Bantry

Splatterpunk #13 (10th Anniversary Issue) edited by Jack Bantry
Reviewed by David Niall Wilson

When I received this for review, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I’d never seen an issue, but I’d seen author’s names associated with it that I was familiar. When it arrived, and I pulled it out, it felt as if I’d stepped into a time capsule.

splatterpunk 13Continue Reading

How I Spend My Halloween: V. Castro

banner reading How I Spend My Halloween

If you know anything about Cemetery Dance, you know that the arrival of October…The Spooky Season…is a very special time of year for us. To celebrate, we’ve invited some of our favorite spinners of spooky tales to share their favorite Halloween traditions and memories with us.

Today we’re joined by V. Castro, Mexican American author, full-time mother, Latinx literary advocate, and co-founder of Fright Girl Summer, a platform to amplify marginalized voices. Continue Reading

“The Long and Winding Road (with apologies to Sir Paul McCartney)” by Thomas Smith

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cemetery Dance published Thomas Smith’s Something Stirs on October 13, 2022. In this special guest essay, Smith shares his journey back to the world of horror fiction. (See his previous essay, “Don’t Panic, I’m Not Gonna Preach.”)

cover of Something Stirs

Kevin Lucia asked me to say a word or three about my odd road back to writing horror since it has been somewhat “interesting,” so, let’s jump right in. 

John Denver once asked the musical question, “Ain’t it good to be back home again?” And I have to answer with a resounding Yes it is

I got my start writing horror, way back in the Dark Ages when computers ran on kerosene and if you typed too fast, the pilot light went out. Back in the day when you mailed every manuscript in a manila envelope and included a similar envelope with enough postage to bring the manuscript back to you (lovingly called an SASE: Stamped Self Addressed Envelope). Or at the very least, a regular business sized SASE that would hold the first page of your manuscript on which you had typed Disposable Manuscript, all the while, hoping it would actually contain a contract and a check.

Ah, those were the days.Continue Reading

Dead Trees: Bite by Richard Laymon

banner reading Dead Trees by Mark Sieber

cover of The BiteRichard Laymon is one of the most controversial authors in the horror genre. I don’t see him discussed so much anymore, but at one time his work was hotly debated.

Many called Laymon one of the greatest writers we had. Others derided him as a hack and a sexist. Me, I think it’s just as ludicrous to cite Richard Laymon as one of the best as it is to claim he was a bad writer. He knew how to pace a novel, and his plots are always complicated and surprising. Laymon spent time developing his characters before he threw them into the maelstrom.Continue Reading

Halloween eBook Sale!

Hi Folks!

We wanted to let you know about our Halloween eBook sale! The following three titles are on a Kindle Countdown Sale which ends October 20th! We plan to make these eBook sales a quarterly event, to highlight our impressive eBook backlist, and raise more awareness for these fine works of horror and dark fiction!

Four Octobers by Rick Hautala

cover of Four OctobersThe days are getting shorter, and the wind blows cold from the north. After the maple and oak leaves turn from green to bright reds, golds, and oranges, they wither, fall, and die, clattering like old bones as they blow down the street in the twilight. The sun isn’t as bright as it used to be, and the nights are dark and cold and long. This is the time of the harvest the time of Hallowe’en and a time for reminiscences of the summer just past  and of other summers, now long gone. This is a time of mystery and expectation as the earth prepares for the frigid onslaught of winter.

Four Octobers collects for the first time four loosely interconnected novellas from the vivid imagination of best-selling author Rick Hautala. Each story is set in October, the month of pumpkins and trick or treat, of skeletons and haunted graveyards, and each story is filled with nostalgia for times past for summers and youth now gone for chances not taken for opportunities now lost forever.


The Celebration by Paul Melniczek

cover of The CelebrationHalloween is approaching and the small town of Shington is excited to begin their annual festivities, which they call The Celebration. But something is different this year… Something is wrong…

Seven years ago, Nick carried out a series of vicious pranks and mischief. The trouble only stopped after Nick and his beloved blue Nova crashed into the town’s river during a high speed police chase and he died of his injuries.

Now, seven years later, the pranks have started up again. Halloween decorations destroyed, pumpkins smashed, animals gone missing. Worse yet, people are claiming to have seen Nick and his blue Nova…

The Celebration is rapidly approaching and this year something evil is coming along for the ride…

Johnny Halloween by Norman Partridge

cover of Johnny HalloweenNorman Partridge’s Halloween novel, Dark Harvest, was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly‘s 100 Best Books of 2006. A Bram Stoker Award winner and World Fantasy nominee, Partridge’s rapid-fire tale of a small town trapped by its own shadows welcomed a wholly original creation, the October Boy, earning the author comparisons to Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Shirley Jackson.

Now Partridge revisits Halloween with a collection featuring a half-dozen stories celebrating frights both past and present. In “The Jack o’ Lantern,” a brand new Dark Harvest novelette, the October Boy races against a remorseless döppelganger bent on carving a deadly path through the town’s annual ritual of death and rebirth. “Johnny Halloween” features a sheriff battling both a walking ghost and his own haunted conscience. In “Three Doors,” a scarred war hero hunts his past with the help of a magic prosthetic hand, while “Satan’s Army” is a real Partridge rarity previously available only in a long sold-out lettered edition from another press.

But there’s more to this holiday celebration besides fiction. “The Man Who Killed Halloween” is an extensive essay about growing up during the late sixties in the town where the Zodiac Killer began his murderous spree. In an introduction that explores monsters both fictional and real, Partridge recalls what it was like to live in a community menaced by a serial killer and examines how the Zodiac’s reign of terror shaped him as a writer.

Halloween night awaits. Join a master storyteller as he explores the layers of darkness that separate all-too-human evil from the supernatural. Let Norman Partridge lead you on seven journeys through the most dangerous night of the year, where no one is safe…and everyone is suspect.

Book Trailer: Something Stirs by Thomas Smith

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cemetery Dance will publish Thomas Smith’s Something Stirs on October 13, 2022. Check out the trailer below, and visit Cemetery Dance for more information!

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ben Chalmers is a successful novelist. His wife, Rachel, is a fledgling artist with a promising career, and their daughter, Stacy, is the joy of their lives. Ben’s novels have made enough money for him to provide a dream home for his family. But there is a force at work-a dark, chilling, ruthless force that has become part of the very fabric of their new home.

A malevolent entity becomes trapped in the wood and stone of the house and it will do whatever it takes to find a way to complete its bloody transference to our world.

Local sheriff, Elizabeth Cantrell, and former pastor-turned-cabinetmaker, Jim Perry, are drawn into the family’s life as the entity manipulates the house with devastating results. And it won’t stop until it gets what it wants. Even if it costs them their faith, their sanity, and their lives.

Review: Daphne by Josh Malerman

cover of DaphneDaphne by Josh Malerman
Del Rey (September 2022) 
272 pages; $24.99 hardcover; $13.99 ebook
Reviewed by Haley Newlin

The small town of Samhattan has a secret. A thing everyone knows but nobody questions.

That is until high school baller Kit and her friends play a game of “Ask the Rim.” The rules are simple: ask the rim a question, you shoot the basketball, a swish is a yes, a miss a no.

And the rim never lies.

What was Kit thinking when she asked the rim about the local legend of a “freak” named Daphne?Continue Reading

How I Spend My Halloween: Stephen Graham Jones

banner reading How I Spend My Halloween

If you know anything about Cemetery Dance, you know that the arrival of October…The Spooky Season…is a very special time of year for us. To celebrate, we’ve invited some of our favorite spinners of spooky tales to share their favorite Halloween traditions and memories with us.

Today we’re joined by Stephen Graham Jones, whose novel My Heart is a Chainsaw took the horror genre by storm last year and will, in true slasher tradition, be followed by at least two sequels.
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“Don’t Panic, I’m Not Gonna Preach” by Thomas Smith

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cemetery Dance will publish Thomas Smith’s Something Stirs on October 13, 2022. In this special guest essay, the author shares a behind-the-scenes look at the journey the novel took from its original publisher to its new home at Cemetery Dance.

cover of Something StirsIn October, Cemetery Dance will re-release my book, Something Stirs. And while it’s a big deal for me, the fact that they are releasing it is, in itself, not news. That’s their job. 

Their passion. 

They create books.

But this particular book is something a little different for them. Something Stirs was one of the first (if not THE first) haunted house novels written for the Christian market. The original publisher (I won’t name them because they did their best) loved the idea, bought the book, then didn’t know what to do with it. They even hired a company to make what was probably the first book trailer of its kind. It was literally a mini movie. So, they had the right idea. Continue Reading