Halloween, Anyone? - Guest Post From Author Julianne Snow

Halloween, Anyone?

Let me preface this guest post by telling you all that I love Halloween! As a child, we were only intermittently allowed to dress up; it all hinged on how my mother was feeling about the holiday at that particular time. To say that I grew up in a religious home would be lying, but there were things that just didn’t fit within my mother’s belief systems. Halloween was one of them; at least some of the time… Confused? Try being a kid living and dealing with it!

When my mother did let us go out, for some reason she always dressed me as a gypsy. I was never allowed to choose my own costume and I guess the iconic scarf over the hair with the beauty mark was easiest. Come to think of it, I may have been a pirate without a visual impairment. My brothers always got to be cool things, like army men or hobos with shotguns, but that may have been because they wouldn’t let my mother dress them. I can however remember the day we were all gypsies…. Err, I mean pirates – Arrgg!

Once we were dressed it was the compulsory lecture on how the real Halloween was bad and evil; didn’t my mother already know that we were horror junkies? Heck, they’d turned me to the dark side at four with a fateful viewing of Alien. At six, I saw The Night of the Living Dead for the first time. I was reading Christopher Pike and Stephen King while still in grade school. These were not the normal activities of children my age and with that, Halloween took on a different slant to me.

Halloween was a time when all of the terrifying things that I had been reading, or watching could come alive. Not literally, but reading a horror novel on October 31st just made it feel more possible, it still does. Like the potential energy stored up in the pages has the chance to ignite into something truly terrifying. Have I ever scared myself out of my wits doing it? Absolutely!

Perhaps it’s just the building anticipation that overwhelms or the subtle encroaching darkness that sweeps over me as I read, cuddled into my favourite chair by the window. Or that the screams in my favourite holiday movies seem that much more real when they are played back on Halloween. Possibly it’s the feeling that I get when I answer the door to a new group of Trick ‘R Treaters, as if behind the oaken slab a true nightmare awaits. Do I dare to open it?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR - It was while watching Romero's Night of the Living Dead at the tender age of 6 that solidified Julianne’s respect of the Undead. Since that day, she has been preparing herself for the (inevitable) Zombie Apocalypse. While classically trained in all of the ways to defend herself, she took up writing in order to process the desire she now covets; to bestow a second and final death upon the Undead. As the only girl growing up in a family with four children in the Canadian countryside, Julianne needed some form of escape. Her choice was the imaginations of others which only fostered the vibrancy of her own.

Days with the Undead: Book One is her first full-length book, the basis of which can be found in her popular web serial of the same name. You can find Julianne’s The Living Dead of Penderghast Manor in the anthology Women of the Living Dead and stories in Sirens Call Publications anthologies Childhood Nightmares: Under the Bed along with Twisted Realities: Of Myth and Monstrosity. She has also published some of her short fiction in the online literary magazine The Sirens Call.

You can connect with Julianne via her blogs  Days with the Undead and The FlipSide of Julianne, via Facebook, or Twitter.