So! Halloween is fast approaching, and as some of you know, preparations are well underway. I'd like to try something new this year, though: let's have a spooky story contest. Folks will submit their stories — anonymously, if they'd like — and we'll all read and vote on them during the week leading up to Halloween (non-robotically, I hasten to add). The winner gets a $100 bar tab, or bottle of scotch, or, if you're one of those professional writer types that needs some sort of compensatory justification for wasting time writing about ghosts, a small green portrait of Benjamin Franklin.

Let's say that the deadline is the morning of Monday, October 27. That's a little more than a month — plenty of time to write, I think. It'll also give us all a few precious pre-Halloween days to read and vote on everyone else's work.

I realize the task may sound daunting — it does to me, too, at least a little bit. But I'm inspired by the example of the Salon d'Avent, which indicates to me me that you guys are capable of it. Plus I've already talked to a few folks who've said they'll come up with something.

Besides, it doesn't have to be a sprawling masterpiece. I've read terrifying stories that are less than 300 words. You could write a sonnet to a dead girl, or a business letter to that vampire who's been giving you trouble. Or, if you're Wolfson, you could write in some archaic form that leaves me feeling both terrified and dumb. It just needs to be made of words, spooky in nature, and able to appeal to your fellow blog reader. All you have to do is start thinking of scary things for the next couple of weeks, then take half an hour or so to write them down. It's easy money!

To serve as inspiration (and an occasional reminder), over the course of the next month I plan to post some spooky stories that I'm personally fond of, hopefully in a variety of media. Let's start off with an easy one: a comic. Don't worry, we'll get at least somewhat more literary later on.

This is a nine-page standalone story from BPRD vol. 6: The Universal Machine (BPRD is a Hellboy spinoff, and has become an excellent title in its own right — go buy it!).

This little story probably took no more than two pages of script, but it's one of my favorite things from the Hellboy universe. It's wry, and short, and sad. And of course it's spooky, too. Click the graphic below to open it up as a Flickr slideshow.