The fate of Lambeth Polly on Waltbox

Image: Pixabay

 

It’s almost that time of year again.

Time to polish your pitchforks, buff up your cauldrons and coax spiders away from your skirting boards and into your hair to spin decorative webs – may I suggest a skull motif or a pair of hanged man earrings? 

Yes, it’s nearly Halloween and during these gloomy, chilling, rain drenched days what better way to pass the time than to read gloomy, chilling, blood drenched fiction? It’s what October was made for.

At this time of year, the terrifically talented Walt Walker over on Waltbox generously opens his blogging doors to incomers with a twisted imagination. For this October is renamed Waltoween and today he has very kindly published a story I’ve written especially for the event,

The Fate of Lambeth Polly.

So, if you’d like to feel a chill or several creep up your spine and hammer prongs of terrror into your brain, then please do pop over to Waltbox and read the tale. And while your there, you’ll find some other truly wonderful Halloween stories by other writers to get your pulse racing.

And if you haven’t read any of Walt’s own fiction before, then I’m delighted to be able to make the introductions – you will not be disappointed.

Just don’t have nightmares.*

 

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*Though I’d take it as a huge compliment if you did.

Tis the season … to be scared witless

Image: Pixabay

Walt Walker of Waltbox fame has very kindly posted my story Through wooden bone and slate skin today as part of his Halloween fiction spectacular.

In honour of the season, Walt has spent this month sharing his own and other writers’ short fiction and all on the theme of

So creepy you won’t want to turn the light off or sleep alone ever again.

So, if you haven’t found Waltbox yet … Well, why not? Drop everything and dash over there now.

Halloween trailer: Season of plastic fangs and pumpkin gloop

Image: Pixabay

Oh, my loves, it’s nearly that time of year again. You know the one I mean.

The supermarket shelves are heaving with enough black polyester lace to bring a gang of Girl Guides out in hives (What’s the collective noun for Girl Guides anyway? A pod? A shriek? A toadstool?). Plastic fangs and tridents litter the aisles. Pumpkins, cobwebs, false fingernails, automated skeletons … Every shop looks like a garage sale at that nice Mr and Mrs Dracula’s house.

In truth, the most terrifying thing is the amount of sugar on sale. Honestly, how can dentists be amongst the most depressed folk on the planet, when we keep eating this crap and throwing money at them to fix the ensuing problems?

All of this adds up to? No, not a Tory Party Conference, but

HALLOWEEN

However, everything I’ve mentioned above, the commercial, tacky side of Halloween isn’t the best bit.

No, the best bits are the scary stories, the myths, the legends, the feeling that at this time of year, the web between our world and the next might be a tiny bit thinner, that we really should be staying home and hiding under the covers.

To celebrate, all my posts between the 25th and 31st of October will bring you stories, music, film, TV and anything else I spot that might give you the creeps and stop you from sleeping soundly in your beds.

You have been warned. Mwoo-hah-hah-hah! 

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This season of events is inspired by the wonderful work of Walt Walker at Waltbox, whose inspiring October posts have made me so envious, I want to get in on the terrifying action. Here’s to you, maestro.

Speak the speech, I pray you

‘What? Right, let’s have another look… No, it definitely says. But… Ah, I see now. Oh, yes, if I press that, that button thingy does that and… Gotcha!’

That’s what a house mouse would’ve heard, if there’d been one hiding behind my wainscoting yesterday afternoon. Ah, wainscoting… what a beautiful, beguiling word that is- file it beside flibbertigibbet and splodge. But I digress.

My muttering was prompted by yesterday’s WordPress Blogging 101 challenge- ‘Meet the neighbours.’ T