That High Holiday, HALLOWEEN!

This month is traditionally the busiest for horror writers. While we are year round celebrators of all spooky, it seems that other spaces open to us, libraries, readings, bookstores. On top of that other usual fall business crops up and here we are just over one week to Halloween and I haven’t yet written my newsletter!

Village Well Books in Culver City hosted a reading with me and horror colleagues, Eric J. Guignard, and Lisa Morton, whose new beautiful book The Art of the Zombie Movie is out this month. I read from my novellas Bleak Houses out now from Raw Dog Screaming Press. This gorgeous volume has hundreds of posters, photos, and tidbits for fans of the genre everywhere. Lisa read from the introduction, which definitely filled me in things I didn’t understand about the genre, which, it seems, while similar to some folklore, was invented for the movies. And writer and editor Eric J. Guignard read from his Shirley Jackson Award, Bram Stoker Award winning anthology, Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the most Haunted (Fictional) Buildings in the Weird, Wild, World. The holidays are coming up, and I do have to say, either of these books would make excellent gifts. They are both beautifully produced, the former with glossy photos and heft that makes it a solid coffee table book for lovers of horror and horror art, and the latter, rich with illustrations and stories that will thrill anyone who loves ghosts.

Me, Lisa Morton, and Eric J. Guignard at Village Well Books & Coffee

Then just this week, we got the band back together for WeHo Reads. Cody Sisco runs events through BookSwell and we reassembled a group of brilliant Scifi writers, to talk around Creating Hope in Times of Trouble. Cecil Castellucci, Sherri L Smith, Matt Kressel, PJ Manney, and Nisi Shawl got into it from points of humanity, storytelling, anthropology, and cultural trends. Even if you don’t read science fiction, you will learn a great deal about the role of storytelling in humanity and world events, and walk away from this conversation feeling hopeful, even in this rough period of human history.

Check it out here:

This is a conversation available on YouTube, but as it’s a conversation you can hook it up to some earphones and treat it like a podcast!

And to round out the week, I celebrated my friend Xochitl Julisa Bermejo’s brand new beautiful book of poems Incantation, and then rushed over to Pasadena City College to see Toni Ann Johnson hold an audience of over 300 captive with her beautiful words on her book Light Skin Gone To Waste. It is a rich literary life here in LA and friends and support are everything. Hang out long enough and eventually your friends become rock stars! I am a lucky writer to know them.

This month, I’m sharing a book that I absolutely gobbled up and while it has haunting qualities, it is not a horror novel. But I do think you all will love it as much as I do. To counterbalance the non Halloween Book, I will be sharing a pumpkin muffin recipe. Pumpkin spice flavors seem to be a love/hate thing with people so I always ask before baking them for guests. I’ll also share a banana muffin recipe for those who don’t do pumpkin. As to writing, my students really enjoyed this month’s prompt, and each had a different approach so play with it however you like. It can be applied to fiction or nonfiction.

This Halloween I will be hanging out at Miguel Rosales’s house to experience the most Halloweeny Halloween. Miguel was the model for Don Roberto the King of Halloween in Halloween Beyond: A Gentleman’s Suit. At my book launch party in August, those familiar with A Gentleman’s Suit were excited to meet him! Below is a pic of his magical flaming pumpkin that many who read the book did not believe was possible in Southern California. It is indeed. That’s Miguel standing next to it.

Read.

I have always loved Edan Lepucki’s writing. California had just the right mix of character, tension, and texture to make it a glorious read. So I was looking forward to her new book, Time’s Mouth which has elements of time travel in it layering a paranormal undertone to the realist story. It’s a family story that with richly layered characters and time periods, takes on generational trauma. The careful layers, the pacing, the way the story unfolds and it is thick with sensory immersion in nature in Los Angeles and the Santa Cruz area. The story is told through a few points of view, but each of them is rich in voice, and each works counter to the other, adding a richness to what it was we just read and propelling us forward. An unlikely cult formed in the 1960s has repercussions for decades and generations afterward.

The way Lepucki handles generational trauma is artful and each surprise that rounds a curve resonates not only for the surprise or revelation, but resonates back through the entire story. A piano wire THRUM that makes the book ripple like its beautiful cover. The audiobook is a solid read also if you, like I, find yourself in the car a lot.

Write.

Short and simple. This can be applied to yourself or a character.

Write your life (or a character’s life) as a series of headlines.

My students in my nonfiction class at Cal State LA had a lot of fun with this one, and took on different kinds of headlines in each of their approaches. Not only did they form solid pieces of flash that stood on their own, they created writing prompts for future work.

Cook

Again, pumpkin spice is a personal thing. I know folks who cringe every time the season comes around. I do have to say I’m not a fan of it in candle scents or lotions, nor of pumpkin spice in coffee but I do like pumpkin bread, muffins and a solid pumpkin pancake.

Below are my recipes for pumpkin muffins and banana muffins. The photos look different as I made the pumpkin muffins gluten free and made the banana ones with good old wheat. Gluten is really marvelous for baking and GF banana muffins sometimes come out funny in texture. But pumpkin creates such a fluffy texture and crumb that it works for GF. I make both recipes variable for you. I don’t use clove in my baking because of a bad experience with an abscess tooth

Also just a weird aside. My mom never made cupcakes. I have no idea why, but when I was growing up, I thought muffin papers or cupcake papers and tins were something rich people had at home—kids get funny notions—cupcakes and fancy houses went together in my head. I was probably 35 before I thought to buy some and found that they are quite affordable and they make getting muffins and cupcakes out of pans much easier and washing them less of a pain. I get them at Smart & Final, a local restaurant supply store where you can buy 200 and use them for years.

My husband bought a minimuffin tin when he was baking for work and I love those for GF muffins as they tend to be less wet inside. I made both kinds of pumpkin and mini only of banana.

The best thing about muffin recipes is, unlike cookies which involve wet and dry ingredients, you can put all the ingredients together at once and just mix.

Pumpkin Muffins

3 cups flour (GF or regular)

1 cup sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp dried ginger

1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger (I keep a knob of ginger root in the freezer to grate for baking and curries so it doesn’t go off)

1 tsp allspice

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 cups pumpkin

2 or 3 eggs (2 for regular wheat, 3 for gluten free)

1 cup canola oil

1/2 cup water (more or less, I add slowly until the mixture looks like this:

Put all the ingredients in a bowl, mix. you may need to add water. the resulting batter will be light and fluffy if GF, more like the photo of banana muffins below if wheat.

Spoon into muffin tins, mini or otherwise and bake at 350 for about 20 mins minimuffin, 25-30 full size, until they are crisp on the outside and don’t mush when you press the top down.

Gluten free pumpkin muffins, both sizes.

Banana Muffins

This recipe is great when you have a few bananas going a bit too mushy to eat.

2 cups flour (wheat or gluten free)

2tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp allspice

2 or 3 eggs (2 eggs wheat, 3 gluten free)

2/3 cup canola oil (you can use butter instead if you like)

2 overripe bananas mashed with a fork

1/4-1/2 cup water (if needed)

Lemon or orange zest if you have any around, I didn’t and it was quite tasty without but those brighten up a muffin mightily.

Put all the ingredients in a bowl. I found it handy to mash banana with the sugar in first but it’s not necessary as long as you mix well. Spoon into muffin papers, same baking instructions as above.

Gotta give it to gluten, it makes a pretty muffin!

Have a marvelous Halloween all, however you celebrate!

—Kate