And may you have a good All Hallow's Eve, however you care to celebrate!
My night will include a large feast of autumn treats (you are so not surprised by this, are you?) and some good reading. I finished re-reading "Rebecca" by Daphne de Maurier, and liked it just as much as I did the first time. "Gone Girl" was an excellent book, but it has nothing on "Rebecca" as far as I'm concerned. So wanting to finish the season with something a little more supernatural, I picked up "Something Wicked This Way Comes," by Ray Bradbury. His prose in this short novel is superb, full of eloquent phrasing that flies in the face of grammar, but captures human (and particularly childhood) experience with exquisite accuracy. Here's a quote from the prologue:
"But you take October, now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy-ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smokey-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft clap of bedsheets around corners.
"But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early.
"One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight."
And if that doesn't make you want to read the book, then there's something wrong with you.
So now I have tastes and smells and stories - and of course my decorations have been up for weeks - so that just leaves the sounds--or more specifically, the soundtrack. There are few things in this world as inspiring as music. We use it to set the mood in dozens of ways, from spiritual ritual to casual parties, from the hip restaurant down the street to formal celebrations. A lot of writers will tell you they also use music to set the mood when composing their tales (some famously so, such as Stephanie Meyer's unabashed adoration of the band "Muse"). I have been one of these from my earliest typing days: I remember sitting down at the Macintosh LC in my parent's office, slipping an Enya CD into the stereo, and furiously typing away on my fantasy novel with all the enthusiasm of raw Middle School naïveté. (I'm pretty certain if I went back and read that old manuscript, I would find that that the lulls and action scenes follow the sequence of songs on "Watermark" perfectly.)
These days I usually find individual songs that set a certain feel for me. I like to play these just as I sit down to write, rather than keeping them on in the background. For my zombie novel, it's been "Come With Me Now" by The Kongos. For my gas-lamp fantasy novel, it was the "Danse Macabre" by Camille Saint-Saëns. And it was also this classical piece that also inspired me to start my Ultimate Halloween Play List.
On previous Halloweens I've tried Pandora and the albums you can buy in the party supply stores, but there's only so many renditions of "Monster Mash" I can take. There are too many good, eerie songs from too many different genres to be captured in those mass-appeal compilations. So I've started my own playlist and I'm always open to new suggestions! Here's what I've got so far:
"Danse Macabre" by Camille Saint-Saëns
"Possum Kingdom" by The Toadies
"Goodnight Moon" by Shivaree
"Enter Sandman" by Metallica
"Baby's Got An Atom Bomb" by Fluke
"Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky (oh, go on and click on the link--you know you want to watch that bit from Disney's "Fantasia!")
"The Real Man" by Yoko Kanno, from the soundtrack to "Cowboy Bebop"
And I will be adding Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto, not because it sounds particularly scary, but because apparently it was lost, and then found again due to a ghostly message sent from beyond the grave! I heard about it yesterday on NPR, and if nobody's written a novel based on this story, someone should, and fast! It's one of those real-life situations that puts fiction to shame: a tortured artist is banished to an insane asylum, his unfaithful wife buries his last work, and then a descendent is prompted to find and perform the piece in a seance...wow.
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| Every day is Hallowe'en with my Fuzzy Princess around, but the Jack-O-Lantern adds to her spooky qualities! |