On an unmarked road somewhere in the Appalachians, a midnight blue Cadillac rolled to a stop, gravel popping under tires, headlights peering out into the discord of dusk. Outside the car, in the shadowy thicket, cicadas and crickets hollered.

My mother sits at the kitchen table in the moonlight, gazing at her folded hands. “Has your father returned with Lilah?” “You know he hasn’t.” The tremor she had before she died is gone. A tube runs from the oxygen unit, through her laced fingers, and up into her nostrils.

I have no doubt that if you’re reading this editorial, you are one of us Halloween People. Well, congratulations. You’ve made it through summer and now October shines ahead of you with only the sweet-smelling barrier of school supply sales separating you from all things dark and pumpkin-y.

Looking for a different kind of slasher flick? Adam-Troy Castro recommends Shudder’s In a Violent Nature.

This one is a ghost poem whose subject was only ever alive on film: Johnny Ryan, played stone cold and queer to the bone by Wendell Corey in the deliriously Technicolor noir Desert Fury (1947). He haunts the end of the film and kept on haunting me past it.