Okay! It’s time! Belly up to bar for a glass of hot cider. And let’s hear it. What’s on your nightstand for the month of October?

Me, it’s somewhat of a cliché, I know, but I’ll be reacquainting myself with the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe – hardly a curious volume of forgotten lore – as I’ll be in Richmond at a point, and I’ll want to visit The Poe Museum. (Seemingly, every town has one.) My copy is still a cherished one, put out by Philadelphia’s Running Press back in the 1980s. You may remember the cover. All the cool high school kids had one.

This I will supplement with “Poe Pictures,” a lavishly illustrated hardback from Tomahawk Press that pays tribute to Poe’s film legacy. Bruce G. Hallenbeck is the author, with a foreword provided by none other than Roger Corman (who was responsible for American International Pictures’ Edgar Allan Poe cycle starring Vincent Price). I figured this would be a good book to flip through over my afternoon coffee.

I’ve also been able to secure a copy of “A Night in the Lonesome October” by sci-fi/fantasy writer Roger Zelazny. This is one I have not read, but it appears Jack the Ripper meets Dr. Frankenstein, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and Rasputin, among others. And it’s narrated by Jack’s dog? There are 31 chapters to coincide with the 31 days of the month. This was recommended to me for the past two years by Bill Montgomery, who follows this page, so when I was able to locate an affordable copy, I figured I’d give it a shot. Mass market science fiction paperbacks of this era used to be much easier to find in used bookstores. Where did they all go? I came across a copy in a secondhand book shop in upstate New York, mylar-bagged, for $50! This is NOT the copy I purchased. Thank you, eBay.

I’m thinking this is also a good time for me to finally read Rosemary Brown’s non-fiction(?) account “Unfinished Symphonies.” I know I’ve written about Brown here a couple of times before. Brown was the English spiritualist who claimed that the great composers were still very much active and dictating posthumous works to her. If you missed my most recent post on the subject, from October 2022, with links to some fascinating related info, you’ll find it here:

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For variety’s sake, I may also extract a story or two from a collection of Richard Matheson’s short stories a friend gifted me for my birthday. Many of Matheson’s tales have been adapted for film and television. I’m sure you’ve encountered his work, even if you don’t recognize his name. He was responsible for some of the most memorable “Twilight Zone” episodes (including the one with the gremlin that taunts an airborne William Shatner), as well as the stories for what became “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” “The Legend of Hell House,” and “Trilogy of Terror,” among many, many others.

I read his novel “I am Legend,” back in the 1990s – well before the Will Smith movie, but with two traumatizing adaptations starring Vincent Price (“The Last Man on Earth”) and Charlton Heston (“The Omega Man”) marring my childhood. Some of you may recall that my father took me to see “The Omega Man” at the drive-in when I was 5! Anyway, for me, the book was a pretty good ride for most of the way, until it crossed over from horror, with admittedly sci-fi underpinnings (plague-induced vampires), to a purely sci-fi ending, if memory serves, that didn’t quite satisfy. I’ll give a few of the shorter tales a whirl. Hopefully they’ll have enough meat on their bones so that I don’t feel like I’m floating away after all the heady atmosphere and rich vocabulary of Poe!

It’s amazing to me that I used to have to pound the pavement in every town I ever visited in the hopes of discovering a used bookstore with even a single copy of anything by any of these cult horror writers I craved (Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft) from having encountered a few stories in cheap anthologies, usually offered on remainder tables of the big chains, and now many of them are available as Penguin paperbacks. Of course, the paper is nowhere of the quality of most of the books I purchased 40 years ago. But at least they’re available.

How about you? Any grimoires you’ll be poring over by flickering taper? If so, sound off below. It’s our month to howl!