The End of Halloween...Again? - Teri Thackston

While I'm stocking up on decorations for next year in the post-Halloween sales, Teri Thackston talks about communities *GASP* banning the best holiday EVER!

In some parts of the country, Halloween is becoming an endangered holiday. Trinity Church in New York City is cancelling its popular Halloween Fest due to Occupy Wall Street campers near the church. The police department in Knoxville, TN cancelled its Halloween in the City event because they can’t find a venue big enough to hold all the kids who want to attend. Calabash, NC cancelled its children’s mystery dinner on Halloween due to lack of funds. Several elementary schools are eliminating costume parties that have been popular for many years. Various reasons threaten the holiday at many locations around the country.

This isn’t the first time. Back in the early seventies, rumors—and accurate reports—of poisoned candy circulated, causing parents to keep their little goblins indoors or allowing them only to trick-or-treat to the homes of family members. Most such stories turned out to be hoaxes or isolated incidents, but Halloween suffered for a while many years.

But is Halloween really on the way out? Plenty of communities still plan to go all out to celebrate Halloween this year. Costumes, candy, parties and trick-or-treating…how about your community or neighborhood? Has Halloween been cancelled or is it still going strong?

Now my books don’t have much to do with Halloween (yet). But I do think I spin a good ghost story that’s perfect for the season. For example my EPPIE award winning novel Final Words has plenty of spirits and spooky scenes to have you looking over your shoulder as you read it.

A near-fatal hit-and-run leaves Medical Examiner Emma St. Clair able to talk to the spirits of people she autopsies. With his sister’s hit-and-run death unsolved, Detective Jason MacKenzie vows to bring this lethal driver to justice. When a serial killer throws them together, will her ability to talk to ghosts prove deadly…in love and life?

Here’s an excerpt:

A chill breathed over Emma’s skin as Skitch left. Looking down at this body as she had stood looking at so many others, she experienced a sense of unreality. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the woman had opened the one eye left to her and spoken.

This is exactly what Edgar hinted might happen. She closed her eyes as another wave of dizziness swept over her. She reached out to steady herself against the table and her gloved fingers brushed the arm of the dead woman.

“Here now.”

Emma’s eyes popped open. Feminine and faint, the voice shimmied up her spine.

“I wanted to watch that hospital show,” the voice went on. “I always watch that hospital show on Monday night.”

Looking up, Emma saw a woman standing in the shadows near the cooler room door. Her features were difficult to make out in the dimness, so Emma lifted her face shield. It didn’t help.

“Jaime wanted to watch that silly game. ‘Here now,’ I said to him, ‘I watch my hospital show on Monday night’.” The woman’s voice quivered with age. She sounded Hispanic.

Emma narrowed her eyes, taking in the woman’s white cotton housedress and slippers. This isn’t one of the new technicians, she realized.

The woman gestured toward the body. “Jaime did this.”

Shaking off her surprise, Emma moved forward. “Ma’am, you can’t be in here.”

“I had to tell you about Jaime. My brother. He shot me and ran out the back.”

Tiny hairs on Emma’s arms prickled beneath the sleeves of her lab coat. She stopped near the middle autopsy station and studied the other woman’s form again. Small and slight, the figure seemed almost a part of the shadows and, somehow, not quite right. Emma wished that Skitch would return.

“Ma’am, you really have to leave,” she said.

“Here now, young lady.” The woman’s voice shook again, as if she couldn’t quite catch her breath. “I had to tell you what my brother did.”

Emma’s gaze ran over the shadowed form. “You said your brother shot you. Are you hurt? Shall I have someone take you to a hospital?”
“I’m getting tired but I do not hurt, Dr. St. Clair.”

Emma caught her breath. “You know my name?”

The woman stepped forward at last, into the pale light.

Bile welled in the back of Emma’s throat. That face. The woman’s face, lined with age and as dry and pale as paper, stared at her with dark eyes.

Emma jerked around and looked at the body on the table.

“You’re…” Words wedged their way past the bile in Emma’s throat. “You’re her."

When Emma turned back, the space in front of the cooler room door was empty. The woman had vanished.


You can order Final Words by Teri Thackston for only $1.49 at the following:Ellora’s Cave
Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Isolation Can Be A Beautiful Thing

Please welcome back today's guest blogger, paranormal romance author Teri Thackston!

Some of the most suspenseful stories involve isolating the primary characters in some way. Shipwreck your hero and heroine on a desert island and they must interact, often in interesting—and sensual—ways. If that island is not so deserted (i.e., there are other folks with less-than benevolent intentions around), and they must also put aside their differences to work together for survival. Seclude them in an out-of-the-way airport during an ice storm, throw in an escaped murderer among the other passengers, and you’ll create a scenario that is ripe with suspense. Send a crew of miners to a newly discovered planet, sabotage their ride back to earth, then toss a man-eating alien into the mix. For writers, isolation is a very helpful plot device.

In my paranormal romance Wait Until Moonrise, I use magic to isolate my hero. The curse of a spurned sorceress traps Welshman Nicholas Pierce, Earl of Beaumarith, in his family castle in 1774. No one can see, hear or touch him, but he is far from dead. Trying everything he can think of to attract attention, he succeeds in only one thing: convincing subsequent inhabitants of the castle that it is haunted.

Fast-forward to today when American Bria Leighton visits the castle in search of her family roots. One night in the moonlit ballroom, she hears Nicholas’s voice then she sees him watching her. Stunned to be noticed, Nicholas quickly discovers that they can also touch each other. He remembers that the curse gave him one possible out: his true love can free him in the moonlight. Bria must be his true love and the key to his freedom.

But he must convince her that he’s more than a ghost. And when the sorceress returns, determined to have Nicholas for herself at last, he must protect Bria from becoming another victim of the witch’s magic.

Do any of you have a favorite situation in which to isolate characters? To what remote locations does your imagination take you? While you ponder that, here’s a short excerpt from Wait Until Moonrise:

“I must admit you dance almost as well as your mother.”
Startled, Bria whirled around. A man stood in the doorway leading onto the patio, arms folded over his chest, one shoulder resting against the door’s frame. Moonlight surrounded him like an aura, forming a halo about his black hair and shadowing his eyes. Then, he tilted his head, and silver light poured over his features like clear, sweet water.
Bria stared. Only in dreams had she seen such a beautiful masculine face. Dreams and one disturbing portrait…
“You look prettier, though, when your mouth isn’t hanging open,” he went on in a bored tone.
“Who…who are you?”
As her voice whispered across that hushed, moonlit room, the stranger fell still. Then, slowly, eyes black and wide, he lowered his arms. “You can see me?”
The query came to Bria as a hoarse, disbelieving whisper, words of doubt trembling on a precipice of mad hope. Frightened by the emotion in his voice—by the sudden, stark sensation burning in his black eyes—she backed away. He, in turn, moved toward her, away from the open patio door, into a patch of shadow…and promptly vanished.

Wait Until Moonrise, a winner of the Emily Award for Best Paranormal Romance, is available exclusively at Amazon.com for the next few weeks. Coming soon to Barnesandnoble.com.

Ghost Stories by Guest Blogger Teri Thackston

Teri watches BBC's Most Haunted and SyFy's Ghost Hunters religiously. I was so not surprised which book was her favorite. Wait! Did your that?

Bumps in the Night. A sense that you’re not alone in the house. Whispers on the Wind. Because it’s the Halloween season, it’s a great time to discuss scary stories. One of my favorite scary books is THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by Shirley Jackson. Although this novel was first published in 1959, this haunted house story still gives me chills today.

The most recent movie adaptation of the book (starring Liam Neeson and Lily Taylor) was terrifying, but it didn’t come close to the spookiness of the novel. One scene that stands out in my memory—and still makes my arms pimple up with chills—is the one where the presence in the house pounds on the doors down the hall from the bedroom in which Eleanor and Theo huddle together in terror.

“…they heard the crash against the door across the hall. It was louder, it was deafening, it struck against the door next to them (did it move back and forth across the hall? did it go on feet along the carpet? did it lift a hand to the door?), and Eleanor threw herself away from the bed and ran to hold her hands against the door. “Go away,” she shouted wildly. “Go away, go away!” There was complete silence, and Eleanor thought, standing with her face against the door, Now I’ve done it; it was looking for the room with someone inside.” (*Jackson, Shirley, The Haunting of Hill House (p. 129, Penguin Classic. Kindle Edition.))

I tried to put some of that heart pounding eeriness into my haunted house story SCENT OF LAVENDER. In my novel, a ghost haunts the house on Black Tree Creek. New tenant Rob Sheridan has seen her, but Lily Graham—who grew up in the house—believes he’s lying. This haunting tale of betrayal, possession and seduction in the Texas Hill Country brings together the lonely war veteran and the beauty from his past…and the ghost that could drive them apart. Here’s a short excerpt:

A sigh sounded again somewhere beyond the milky dimness of his bedroom.

Fine hairs prickled across Rob’s bare shoulders. Shaking off the sensation, he forced himself to push back the sheet and get up. Despite his willingness to believe in ghosts—maybe he was crazy—he knew he’d sleep better if he found a logical explanation for that noise. There was also the possibility that the artists he planned to host at the house wouldn’t find a ghost as acceptable as he did.

Oak planks chilled his bare soles, creaking gently as he neared his closed bedroom doorway. Cold seeped upward along his ankles and shinbones, soaking into his marrow. His pajama pants offered little protection as the chill continued up his body and he hugged his arms over his bare chest in a vain attempt to warm himself.
Opening the door, he paused. The air in the corridor wasn’t as warm as he’d expected. Nor was the darkness as black. He could make out the staircase railing and the pale oblongs of six other doorways that opened off the upper corridor.

As he stood there studying the dim hallway, he heard the sigh again, fainter, coming from the front of the house. It was a shuddery sort of sigh that raised the hair on the back of his neck.

Tiptoeing along the corridor, he looked into each empty bedroom until he reached the one that overlooked the front yard. Pausing in that doorway, he peered inside. Gloom clung to empty corners, driven there by the blue-gray of the dawn coming on just beyond the parted window drapes. The scarred wooden floor gave off a flat gleam and the off-white walls appeared dull and softened by time.

Rob stepped inside. The wood beneath his feet gave out a quiet creak and for an instant he caught a sense of presence. Feminine and sad, it was as fleeting as the soft floral scent that accompanied it, gone just as he became aware of it.

As he stood there wondering if he had imagined that odd sense of presence and the sighs that had preceded it, the light in the room took on a hint of yellow. The sun was rising and what lay before him now was nothing but an empty room.

He stood still, searching the room with his eyes. It was bare of furniture, of personality, and yet he wondered who had lived here over the decades. He wondered, too, if, once lived in, a room could ever become truly empty again.

Slowly, he backed out of it and closed the door.

SCENT OF LAVENDER is available in digital format (print coming soon, I hope). Amazon.com has it at a great price, but my publisher’s price might be lower. Check Ellora's Cave or Amazon.

Thanks, Suzan, for inviting me to talk about spooky books for Halloween.