Guest Blog and Giveaway with John Everson

Fang-Tastic Readers can win an e-book copy of The Pumpkin Man and get entered into a contest to win autographed copies of either The Pumpkin Man trade paperback, or a GRAND PRIZE including ALL of John Everson's novels.

Just visit http://www.thepumpkinman-horror.com and fill out the Contest Form. Make sure you list Fang-Tastic in the referral site dropdown list.

You're Dead. But can you hear me?

By John Everson

Ouija Boards may be the scariest bits of wood ever carved. On the surface, they're innocuous -- just a little rectangular board, maybe with some added decoration, that has the alphabet and the words YES and NO emblazoned. But it's the use of that simple board that gives people the chills. What is creepier than being able to reach out across the void of death to actually speak to the dead? Especially since in doing so, you're literally giving a dead spirit access to move and use your body.

You're asking to be possessed! People can get really vehement on this point.

Yet, Ouija Boards have been popular not only in occult circles, but actually sold by Hasbro as quirky board games for well over 100 years.

It's a love-hate thing. We want to believe in the afterlife, and we want to be able to reach across the gulf of death to speak to the ones we loved. To have them tell us all the things we wished they would have said in life. Or to assuage our own consciences and say the things we neglected to say while they were alive. And yet, when we take that a little farther and really think about it, the very idea that the dead could actually use our fingers on a planchette to talk, scares the bejeezus out of us.

We're afraid if they're there AND afraid if they're not. We're especially afraid about opening the conversational door to the wrong spirit. We want all the mysteries answered... but not really.

The Ouija board is a spiritual Catch-22.

When I started writing The Pumpkin Man, the novel was going to be about an urban legend style killer, who carved the faces of his victims into pumpkin skins. His carvings were so true to the original subject, that when he left his jack-o-lanterns in place of the victims' heads... you could tell in an instant who the bodies belonged to. That seemed like a pretty creepy kind of killer to me -- in addition to the fact that the man who was originally fingered as "The Pumpkin Man" killer died over 20 years before the events of the novel.

The book IS about that urban legend style spook; Candyman with a pumpkin fetish.

But The Pumpkin Man is really the story of Jennica Murphy in the end. Jenn has lost her dad, her job and her apartment, and is routed to California, to take over her aunt's cottage that she's inherited. In losing everything, she ultimately finds herself -- in the darkest room once tenanted by The Pumpkin Man.

Oh... and she uses her aunt's Ouija board to help her do so.

Pumpkins, Ouija Boards, urban legends of a Halloween-time boogeyman... I wanted The Pumpkin Man to be a fun, creepy book for my favorite season. I hope you'll give it a read during this Halloween!

Stop by the book's website at http://www.thepumpkinman-horror.com and try out the online Ouija Board there... and enter the Contest for a complete collection of my signed novels.

Happy Halloween!