Happy Halloween!

You're sitting alone, the candy for giving long since expended, the neighborhood's little darlings all snugabed in diabetic comas with their loot bags stashed under their pillows for safekeeping. Oddly, this year, you find yourself vowing to stay awake through the witching hour, having the strangest feeling that you must cross that boundary with alertness, even vigilance. What will keep you sharp in the intervening, waiting hours?

If you haven't yet read it, blogpal Charles Gramlich has a terrific short up at Beat to a Pulp. It's a tricksy little sweetmeat called Hunter's Moon.

I see now where BTAP's got yet another thematic offering for us. This tidbit's got Bela Lugosi starring in his own, real-life Western. Read James Reasoner's One Night Near Hangtown.

For another genre-bender, here's a steampunk short mystery via Tor.com and written by GD Falksen called The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday. (If you're not aware, the definition of "steampunk" is roughly Victoriana with some selective historic or fantastic twist.) In this case, the setting is police work amid an ink-crazed world of overlapping pamphlets and chapbooks. There are also several-times daily printed broadsheets that publish tit-tat for tatters, which is to say, back-and-forth coded classifieds carrying abbreviated debates. In this world IIMOT stands for, "It is my opinion that..." and IHN for "In Heaven's Name..."

Fun stuff, until you see an impossibly-shaped shadow cross your threshold.