Hail Traveller!

Be careful traveller for tonight’s the night,

Mischief, fun and the time for fright.

When strange things raise their head,

When the gross and rotten seem less than dead.

The night when ghouls and ghosts roam the moor,

And bring their friends knocking at your front-door.

The skein of the world’s gone all thin,

Full of enough holes to let things in.

So come inside and lock the door,

There’s horror and so much more in store.

Just be aware that you cannot leave,

For out there tonight, it’s All Hallows Eve.

I hope you’re suitably horrified. Not by Hallowe’en, but by the fact that I wrote a poem. I know I am. It was an accident I swear. It just sort of, happened. Clearly ghosts, spirits and foul daemons abroad in the world turned their fell influence upon me and made me do something so utterly evil. Stupid spooky poets. I felt I had to make at least a token effort for today. Last year I was offering you all a selection of stories in a distinctly horror vein. But this October I picked something a little less obviously spooky.

Although my wordascope for this month would certainly fall into the category of “weird.” It’s one of those stories which, if you boil it all down, makes no sense, has no real plot, its sole characteristic is its profound weirdness. It got away from me a bit too, so it now sits at over 1,800 words. Dangerously close to challenging for the tittle of my longest wordascope ever. It got away from me a bit. It was an interesting thing to write if nothing else, and there’s little more a writer can really hope for. I want to say that I get a faintly “American Gods” vibe from it, but I fear that might be dreadfully presumptuous. Or failing that a bit like the a modern-day Odyssey, but the hero’s drunk and the story’s a little bit shit. I can only hope that I haven’t done the actual man in the photograph a massive disservice.

The Rogue Verbumancer – A man recounts a night’s veritable weirditude

James Clayton – An experiment in language

Remember to check back tomorrow for the start of November’s Pictonaut Challenge.