There's Always October

Repressed Monsters Thrive in the Heat

The Central Texas heat hasn’t lifted, but on paper, fall is here.

We dug Ah-ooh, our 7-foot-tall animatronic werewolf, out of the garage and set him up in our dining room. This year, the kids helped me put him together. They were excited to have him out again. Our oldest even talked about keeping him out all year and gave us some ideas for doing so: having him wear a Santa hat around Christmas, hold a platter of turkey for Thanksgiving, sparklers for 4th of July, a heart-shaped box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day. I think it’s a splendid idea. Jean is on the fence about it. Our youngest is just happy her “best friend” is back.

It’s been a hard summer—hotter than usual, for longer than usual. We struggled to settle into a routine after the school year ended. Our oldest attended a few camps that he only somewhat enjoyed. Our youngest outgrew her daycare center. Jean got pushed out of her job. I stopped meeting up with a friend and his crew for weekly runs because I’m not built for running in extreme heat. I put out a book that was largely ignored, despite it containing some of my best prose.

The heat wasn’t just hard on the home front either.

Friends separated from spouses. One lost a parent. The horror writing community saw a huge dust-up around a popular event that happened this summer. There was political violence, the public’s reaction to said violence, and the weaponization of these reactions by powerful people who don’t give a fuck about any of us.

These are the burning times: the trauma season will give way to the dying season. The trees will shed their leaves, and we will shed our skin, but in the meantime, it’s still too damn hot.

You’ve felt it, haven’t you? It will get worse before it will get better, but it will get better. I believe that firmly, perhaps foolishly. But at the end of the day, I’d rather die an optimistic fool than a bitter hermit.

With Ah-ooh out of his box in the garage where he hibernates November-August, our house has been full of snarling and howling of the lupine variety. See, if you push Ah-ooh’s button, the big orange one that says, “try me,” he snarls and howls. The sounds are frighteningly realistic and enough to put this seasoned horror fan on edge, but the kids just run and laugh, daring each other to push the button.

Werewolves are one of my favorite monsters. In the right book or film, they still have the ability to freak me out if I get in my head too much. The idea of wandering the dark woods, stalked by something that’s neither fully beast nor fully human makes me deeply uncomfortable. Some of this undoubtedly stems from the subconscious memories of past lives lived as prey. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? There’s the notion of our fellow humans becoming beastly and preying on each other. And then what if we survive such an attack? The mainstream literature suggests that we may become one of these hybrid beasts ourselves, the very monsters which caused us such trauma to begin with. Maybe what we fear most of all is that underneath the toothy snouts, jagged claws, and bristly fur, we’ll find ourselves.

Why wolves? I’m not sure, honestly. They’re not the only predatory animal, nor are they even the most frightening or fierce. It works, though. That much is for sure.

So, why did I let one of these creatures into my home? The easy answer is that after our kids saw the display version in Costco, they weren’t about to let us leave unless we loaded one of these bad boys into our cart. And besides, werewolves aren’t real—this is merely an animatronic Halloween decoration, albeit an extremely detailed and imposing one.

Maybe he’s our way of symbolically integrating our shadow.

Maybe that’s exactly what Halloween (spooky season, if you will) is all about. And if this past summer is any indication, we need this.

Listen, I’m no gatekeeper. If how you engage with the macabre begins and ends at Tim Burton or Riley Sager, that’s cool. If that’s not enough, if you need to watch A Serbian Film or Landmine Goes Click, to fully grasp the spectrum of how dark things can get, go with God. The House of Horror has many rooms.

Just . . . don’t be a prick. If you like horror’s cozier side but wander into the basement where they’re watching Cannibal Holocaust or reading the newest Aron Beauregard book, don’t go on TikTok and call them a bunch of incels because you’re too much of a teenager to admit that you found your personal limits.

And it goes both ways: if the only public readings you attend are Grossout Contests or you’re someone who thinks Nekromantik is the ideal date movie, don’t be mean if you wander onto the room where they’re watching Ernest Scared Stupid. Don’t tell them they aren’t true horror fans because they can’t stomach Terrifier 2 or won’t read a book by Wrath James White. Most reasonable people gave up these attitudes after high school, and you’ll make more friends if you do the same.

I say this partly for selfish reasons. Over the course of my dozen-years-plus career, I’ve written everything from cozy horror to splatterpunk and everything in between. I have friends whose limits run the spectrum of horror’s numerous subgenres. Even though Jean enjoyed The Stuff, Night of the Living Dead, and An American Werewolf in London, she doesn’t actively seek out horror to watch or read. My oldest and my youngest both love Ah-ooh, but they’re clearly too young to watch or read most of the stuff I enjoy with my friends.

I also say this because this is the time to give serious thought to what integrating our shadow looks like. It’s time to put up some Halloween decorations early, maybe leave them out all year long. You can change their outfits or accessories to reflect other holidays, but most of all, meditate on them. What they mean to you. It’s a time for horror. We’re burning alive without it, and this fire’s been going for a lot longer than a single summer.

I left off with the above paragraph, knowing I would need to come back to this piece because it felt incomplete. Even nonfiction pieces have three acts, so here is the third act for this essay. . .

After dinner, we went to the neighborhood greenbelt to see the fort our oldest built with his friends earlier that day. It was 6:00 PM, and the heat was still stifling. Our youngest started melting down as soon as we hit the trail. I’d already seen the fort that afternoon, so I stayed behind with her while Jean and our oldest walked ahead. Her Elsa dress started dragging in the grass where a minefield of dried-up dog turds lay in front of us. A section of backbone from some large animal, detached and picked clean, sat in the grass beside one of the fences like a bad omen, and our presence kicked off a cacophony of barking dogs.

Nervously, I tried to get her to pick up the bottom of her dress so it wouldn’t drag in the dog shit. At the same time this happened, something must have bit her or scratched her because she flipped to pure meltdown mode. She said she hurt all over and would not stop screaming. I tried to calm her down by showing her that there were no marks on her legs, but she said she hurt on the inside. I was panicking and scared, so I raised my voice, which helped about as well as you can imagine.

Thankfully, when Jean got back, she was able to take over. We got home, got our youngest in the bath, and eventually, she (and I) calmed down. We hugged it out and said we loved each other.

I don’t know what that was all about, but I’m ready for the heat to end.

Later that night, I went with movie pal and fellow horror writer Michael Louis Dixon to see Him at the local theater. With comparisons to the work of Ken Russell and a divided response from audiences, I knew the film would at the very least be unique.

I fucking loved it. This is a movie and a half. Critic and filmmaker Scout Tafoya once told me that “the image matters,” and boy-oh-boy, Him is rife with resonant, meaningful imagery. Part fever dream, part modern American myth, this film looks at sports stardom, masculinity, hero worship, and the cult of it all through the experiences of a young athlete being groomed as “the next big thing.” Powerful performances abound, but Marlon Wayans outshines them all as the veteran quarterback who runs an increasingly bizarre and sadistic training camp at his compound in the middle of the desert. There is some clever misdirection, and some moments that truly put me on edge.

Although there are no werewolves on screen, the beast that lives inside men is a prevalent theme. I’ll say no more for fear of spoiling it for those interested in watching, except to say that in this film, beastliness has a lineage.

Something to think about. . .

The monsters in us thrive in extreme climates. The temperance of autumn cools the feverish frenzy of summer, and when it gets too cold, we await the first flowers of spring. I’m glad Ah-ooh is here. I’m grateful for the fall, for spooky season. For the nightmarish effigies that help us remember, that contain.

The air is still like a furnace in Central Texas, so things are moving slower than they should. The monsters we try to repress are feeling the heat and lashing out, but they’ll get the memo soon.

Put up those ghoulish decorations, my friends. Start the horror movie marathon. Crack open your favorite book of scary stories. Put on a record by The Cramps.

It’s long past time to give these monsters a place to play where they can’t hurt us.

Until then, there’s always October.