It’s the happiest time of year for morbid ghouls like me! Halloween is an autumn celebration of horror movies, chilly weather, dying leaves, and Christian fundamentalists getting their tits in a knot over the pagan roots of the holiday – which is totally different from proper holidays like Christmas and Easter that have absolutely no pagan roots whatsoever *cough cough* Soli Invictus *cough cough* rabbits and eggs *cough*.

I always like to add what I think of as proper Halloween content to the website around this time of year. Past entries include Hot Pennies, my short story based on my own totally true childhood memories, and Monster, the Frankenstein comic story I wrote for an anthology years ago.

On the Twitter front, I’m 40 characters into my series of 140 Horrible Characters, timed to coincide with this time of year. All the related tweets are collected on Eyestrain as they currently stand with more to come. For the hell of it, I also contributed a few ideas to the fad thread #ScaryStoriesIn5Words, which may be taking minimalist fiction a step too far.

As far as something new and substantial (as opposed to merely new and trite), I’ve decided to dump my novelette, Raw, here for you to look at and be disgusted by. Lengthier than what usually qualifies as a short story, this is a crime fiction yarn that takes a slow slide into horror and features material that my long-suffering proofreader (also known as my long-suffering wife) found too horrific to read. No, seriously. She has to live with me and gets the Shane-Simmons experience unfiltered, but she still had to skip some paragraphs before resuming her duties as copy editor.

So, um, yeah. Enjoy that. If you can. I guess.

If you’re in the mood for something lighter, here’s a completely arbitrary Halloween-safety film from 1977 called, creatively enough, Halloween Safety.

I didn’t get to see this as a kid (neither did many of the kids who actually appeared in it), but I was the right age to be the target demographic in 1977. I certainly remember that era of costume-and-candy paranoia designed to strip all the fun out of trick-or-treating. Of course we ignored that crap and went back to running around in the dark in black costumes, getting hit by cars, and dodging hot pennies and other kid-maiming traps.

That film was spectacularly dated the same year it was released. I guess that’s why, only eight years later, a sequel was produced called, extra-creatively enough, Halloween Safety (Second Edition). It was geared for a whole new generation of trick-or-treaters (no doubt because all the kids in the earlier film had been wiped out, Final Destination-style, by a series of tragic Halloween mishaps), and addressed pressing current issues such as produce-bashing hate crimes, Quaaludes in the candy (it was 1985 after all), and, apparently, animated vomiting ghosts.

But we’re past all that. These safety films seem like quaint reminders of a bygone era now. Today, obviously, we’re living in such a nanny state that kids are barely allowed out of the house without an armed escort, and are frequently banned from having any fun whatsoever by municipalities and school boards alike because fun is dangerous. And culturally insensitive, as evidenced by the big kids who go to McGill University and must keep their costumes politically correct and inoffensive enough to be allowed into the party. Damn! And I was planning to strip my shirt off and go in full-body blackface as a Mandingo fighter. McGill, you’re no fun anymore! I expect this uber-lefty bullshit from Concordia, but not you. You’re where the people with money go to learn how to make more. You should know better than those assholes on the hippie campus!

On that note, I’ll sign off by wishing you all a very dangerous Halloween, filled with unfortunate accidents, Emergency Room visits, tainted candy, and wildly offensive and inappropriate costumes. Please get yourself kicked out of at least one party. For me.