The Spite House, Weston Ochse, and a Giveaway!

Every Day is Halloween #83: The Official Newsletter of Lisa Morton

Dec 01, 2023

Was your November as weird as mine?

From what I’ve seen of my friends on social media, it seems like a lot of us lost friends this month, and more than friends. I lost my beloved cat Seamus (although to be fair, we’d known his jaw cancer was terminal since the beginning of October) and my friend Weston Ochse (see below). Today I went to a funeral for a friend’s wife, who died very unexpectedly. And a gentleman named Richard Johnson, who I directed as an actor thirty years ago (in my play Radio Free Albemuth) and have stayed in touch with ever since died very unexpectedly (of a heart attack at home).

Balancing out November’s lows, though, were some good things. For the first time in years I’m caught up on all my deadlines. I finally finished the last item of settling my mom’s estate (she passed in January, and YES, it took ten months). And I started what I hope will be my fifth published novel.

Here’s hoping to a December with fewer…ummm, surprises.

Lisa

NEW STUFF I LIKE

Since I’m caught up with writing assignments for the first time in years and don’t have any pending big non-fiction projects, I’ve really enjoyed turning my time back to reading for pleasure. I had a stack of new books and authors I wanted to explore.

Near the top of that pile was The Spite House by Johnny Compton, which has gotten a fair amount of buzz…and deservedly so. This is a haunted house novel, but one with some really welcome twists that make it feel contemporary and relevant.

It centers on Eric, a single father of two girls; Eric, Dess, and Stacy are on the run (the reason for this is one of the novel’s big late reveals), so Eric’s taking odd jobs to survive. One of the jobs turns out to be surviving a haunted house, which is also a “spite house,” meaning a house built simply to spite a neighbor or city or whatever.

The hauntings at the heart of the story are genuinely terrifying, but no less so is the book’s look at racism both historical and modern. The house itself is fascinating - four very narrow stories, with one floor so compressed that it has a “floating” hallway that juts out of the side - and the characters are all compelling. The novel deftly builds layers of secrets that it pulls away in the final quarter like peeling the outer skin of an onion.

This is Johnny Compton’s debut novel, and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

THE HALLOWEEN SPIRIT

Halloween certainly mashes up remembrance of the dead in some of its history (see specifically All Souls’ Day on November 2, likely added to the November 1st celebration of All Saints’ Day to help the Catholic Church co-opt the Celtic New Year festival Samhain).

So, I think remembering our dead is well within the Halloween Spirit.

Here, then, are a few words about Weston Ochse, who died on November 18. While I didn’t know Weston (or his talented, wonderful wife Yvonne Navarro) as well as many others did, he was still a part of my life for many years. He and Von lived in Arizona - not that far, in other words, from me in L.A. - so we saw each other fairly often.

Writing-wise, we had not dissimilar paths. We both started writing and selling horror fiction in the ‘90s, we both won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel (Weston won in 2005 for Scarecrow Gods, I won in 2010 for The Castle of Los Angeles), we both went on to nominations for Short Fiction, Long Fiction, and Fiction Collection, we both appeared in anthologies edited by Stephen Jones, and we were both published on multiple occasions by Bad Moon Books. I even blurbed Weston’s last book, Red Unicorn.

In 2012, we both wound up at an isolated mansion just north of San Francisco for a four-day event called the Haunted Mansion Writers Retreat. This gathering of writers and paranormal investigators was held in a 1910 house that was supposedly very haunted, and during the course of the weekend I discovered that Weston - who was a career Army man - was a big believer in ghosts. He experienced a lot of weird stuff during that retreat, but the photo of him above is not one of those moments: the K-2 meter he’s holding was going crazy at the base of the stairs leading up to the third floor, and Weston was convinced he had proof of a haunting…until I pointed out to him that the old house’s original electrical panel was located just to the left of the stairs.

Here’s something that Wes (and Von) never knew about that weekend: I credit them with pretty much saving my life. On the third day of the four-day stay I came down with the worst flu of my life; this thing slammed into me with a 103-degree fever out of nowhere, and I could barely move. Now, when I say this house was isolated, I’m not kidding; getting from it to the airport involved everything from hiking to taxis to shuttle buses. I was so sick I had NO idea how I’d make it home…and Wes and Von got me into a rental car and made sure I made it to the airport. Feverish as I was, I barely remember that, but - thanks to their kindness - I made it home and was eternally grateful.

Weston was only 58 when he died. That’s way too young for a man as full of life and spirit and adventure as he was, and I can only imagine how Von must feel. I’ll miss seeing him around at horror events, and I’m sorry we won’t be going on any more paranormal investigations together. He was one of a kind.

STRANGE DOINGS

Y’know, I’ve been watching some ghost-hunting shows lately and seeing some equipment I didn’t recognize – I guess REM-pods are now so 2020. I thought it might be fun, then, to check out some of the newest tools in the paranormal investigation toolkit.

Let’s start with the Para4cd Polterscript. This is a souped-up version of an Ovilus, which is a device that turns environmental changes into words. The Polterscript reads the area around it and converts any changes into either words or letters, spitting them out in both voice and text forms.

The prettiest new piece is something called The Portal, also produced by Para4ce. This is essentially a portable mixer that takes input from spirit boxes and makes them much clearer, but what I love about this is that it’s housed in a hand-made wooden box with retro-style lettering, a leather carrying handle, and a distinct registration number. It’s also not cheap, but I guess you pay for beauty!

Music boxes have become popular. These are essentially tricked-out music boxes, like the ones you might find in a kid’s jewelry case except creepier; these are hooked up to motion sensors, so any motion occurring within the device’s range will trigger the spooky little tune, which will keep playing as long as stuff is moving around it.

You may have seen your favorite tv investigator using a paranormal tripwire. This is a string of LED lights housed in a tube that can be laid out on a floor or hung from the ceiling, and will fire off if anything moves near it. What I like about this is the price: Unlike the three-digit price tags on most of the stuff I’ve already talked about, you can find these around for about fifty bucks.

My personal favorite, though, has to be the Etsy seller who puts REM pods inside Canadian Club whiskey bottles, figuring some spirits out there might be attracted to…well, spirits. Of course that goes for some of us non-spirits, too.

BEHIND THE SCREAMS

Foreword from Remains to be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa

When editor Lee Murray asked me if I might consider writing the foreword to an anthology she was editing of New Zealand horror (by New Zealand writers), at first my brain kind of hiccuped - I’ve never even been to New Zealand! - but I think Lee’s work is fabulous so I said yes. That left me with the question of: how would I approach this?

First, I asked for a PDF of the book. I read it, and discovered that the stories were uniformly very good, and portrayed New Zealand (or, in the Māori- language, Aotearoa) in all of its varied glories. I decided to contrast what little I knew of New Zealand from friends (like the late Rocky Wood) and mass media with what these stories laid out.

Next, obviously, was to talk about how good these pieces were, and Remains to Be Told is, very simply, a fine anthology, albeit one that just happens to be set completely in New Zealand.

A book like this points out both how horror is universal, and, paradoxically, how it unearths certain truths of a culture. Once I thought more about that, the last of the foreword fell into place.

Thanks again to Lee Murray for the invitation, and obviously I highly recommend this fine and unique anthology.

THE WRITE STUFF

Writers develop a lot of useful tricks, and some of my favorites relate to editing. That final editing pass in particular - we’re talking after you’ve finished your first draft and probably your major rewrites - is where it can be easy to miss things. After all, you may have been reading these same words over and over for weeks, months, or even years, so how can you reconfigure your brain to catch things you might have missed?

The most obvious answer, of course, is to turn this all over to someone else’s brain - a beta reader or an actual honest-to-goodness editor.

But here are two other tricks that might work for you (and won’t involve you having to burden a friend or pay a pro!):

Put your manuscript into a different font. This is easy to do in Word (or any other word processing program, I’d guess): just “Select All” and choose a new font. Word’s default font is often Calibri, so put your manuscript into Times Roman. This is my method, and although it sounds goofy it sure works for me!
Read your manuscript aloud. A lot of my writer friends swear by this, and I’ve done enough readings to know that it’s a good method.

Happy editing!

NEWS & WORKS IN PROGRESS

I’m so pleased to announce that, after my successful three-session course on Halloween history, I’ll be teaching another Atlas Obscura course starting January 22, this time on the history of ghosts in the western world! This is going to be fun - I’m even going to go over the basics of DIY ghost-hunting!

I had a number of new releases come out recently, including:

Literally Dead: Tales of Holiday Hauntings is out and includes my story “The Grey Road.”
Fantasmagoriana Deluxe, the collection of ghost stories that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, is out and includes my introduction.
The anthology Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird includes my brief history of Weird Tales.
Remains to Be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa - anthology of New Zealand-based horror stories edited by Lee Murray. I provided the foreword.
Here’s my piece “On Being a Halloween Expert” for HWA’s annual “Halloween Haunts” blog series.

Coming up in early 2024: Placerita, the novella I co-wrote with John Palisano; a feature article for Rue Morgue on the spectacular (and revelatory!) new George Romero book Raising the Dead: The Work of George Romero, by Adam Hart; a virtual presentation on the folklore behind zombies; and short story appearances in Playlist of the Damned, Where the Silent Ones Watch, Black Cat Weekly, and Scaring and Daring.

And…I’ve made significant progress on my first new novel in ten years. Stay tuned…

UPCOMING APPEARANCES

December 2 - I’ll be reading one of my Spine Tingler short stories for Joseph Freeman’s “Winter Tales” reading series.
December 11 - I’ll be recording the Chinwag podcast with Paul Giamatti and Stephen Asma
March 17, 2024 - I’ll be signing at the Vintage Paperback Show in Glendale
May 30-June 2, 2024 - I’ll be at StokerCon 2024 in San Diego

WHERE YOU CAN BUY MY BOOKS

GIVEAWAY

This month’s giveaway is a paperback copy of the just-released Fantasmagoriana Deluxe, signed by me! Enter by leaving a comment (click the button below) and good luck! Sorry - this contest is only open to residents of the U.S.

Every Day is Halloween