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.

“Save the Last Dance for Me” and “Slippin’ Into Darkness”

In its illustrious 29*-year print run, Cemetery Dance magazine has published no less than 560 short stories and novel excerpts in 73** individual issues. As the super fan that I am, Exhumed is my humble attempt to read and review them all in monthly double reviews. 

*and counting!

**there were also two ‘double issues (#17/18 in 1993 and #74/75 in 2016), each of which squeezed twice as much content into a single magazine.

Last time I reviewed:

  • David A. Lindschmidt’s “The Hounds of Hell to Pay” from Cemetery Dance #1 (1988), and
  • Jonathan Lethem’s “Martyr and Pesty” from Cemetery Dance #36 (2001).

There was also an Exhumed-first BONUS review of the overall issue of Cemetery Dance #1. If for no other reason you should go check the article out for that.

This month is the ninth installment of Exhumed and, as promised, I present to you two Norman Partridge stories.

Let’s get to it…Continue Reading