Happy Halloween: Celebrate with Me in Your Ears and the History of Horror Fiction

This is a cross post with RA for All Horror in honor of Halloween and the conclusion of 31 Days of Horror.

Happy Halloween! It is finally here. [I lived through another horror blog-a-thon.]

Today I relax and rejoice in the holiday that makes you all want to give horror books and readers the attention they deserve. Now if only you did that all year long. [Hint, hint-- you should, and this blog is the place here I give you the tools to do that.]

But since I have your full attention for 1 more day I wanted to point you to 3 things you can do to celebrate the holiday and brush up on your horror RA skills all at the same time.

The first two involve your ears. I have recent appearances on 2 podcasts where I talk about horror and other library related things.

The first is a brand new podcast called Three Books produced by the Ela Area Public Library. Christen and Becca are bringing book people in to talk about their three favorite books and more. Since they were launching in October and because I've known Becca for years, they asked me to come in and be their first guest. You can click here to listen and subscribe. We talk about my current horror favorites, why the world NEEDS horror, and more.

The second is my 4th [!] appearance on Circulating Ideas:

Circulating Ideas facilitates conversations about the innovative people & ideas allowing libraries to thrive in the 21st century. Brought to you with support from the University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science and listeners like you.

In Episode 120, which dropped today,  Steve and I talk about the the current state of horror, but also about the importance of libraries including self published/small press titles in their collections and how to stay on top of genre trends easily, even if you don't like the genre yourself.

After a month of reading my words, I am giving you a chance to learn from me in a different way. If you listen to both of these podcasts, you will quickly get a general overview of what is MOST IMPORTANT about horror right now [at least from the library worker perspective].

I have also added these two new appearances to my podcast appearance archive which is always available on the general blog's About Me page and that blog's Recent Presentations page.

And now, the third thing you need to do to both celebrate Halloween AND brush up on your RA skills-- today also marks the launch of much larger scale project, one that beginning today will be published every month, for free. One that all of you have to read:

Click here for the first chapter

Brian Keene and Cemetery Dance are going on an adventure to produce a definitive history of horror from the beginning of humanity to the present and all of us get to read it for free.

In this first chapter, Keene clearly notes the people [including myself] who have done more academic work on this topic, but he also knows as one of the top horror writers of our time and as a life long fan himself, no one has ever given the genre the respect it deserves. He is going to write the definitive history of one of the oldest and most popular genres in literature and I implore you to follow along.

I promise you will learn about horror, obviously, but you will also learn about readers, why people are drawn to any story, You will learn about writers, why stories are told in a certain way. And, you will learn to put that information together in a way that allows you to connect with your patrons better, no matter what genres they prefer.

Plus, all of the semicolons will be in the correct places [read the chapter and you will get the joke.]

Now go forth and celebrate Halloween.