"A Little Halloween Talk" by Joe R. Lansdale
Cemetery Dance's A Halloween Short Story ebook series
Readers unfamiliar with "A Little Halloween Talk" by Joe R. Lansdale may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
If you're a fan of E. C. Comics or the film "Asylum" or the story "Heading Home" by Ramsey Campbell, "A Little Halloween Talk" by Joe R. Lansdale will be appreciated.
Lansdale has used Halloween in a number of short stories. His finest, and a great piece of cosmic holiday horror, was "The Folding Man," which Matt Cowan of Horror Delve celebrated here.
"A Little Halloween Talk" (2002) is a less complex story, told in Texas vulgate: one character's eyewitness account of a couple of ax murders perpetrated by his best friend at a Halloween party.
....Stevie, let’s you and me talk about that temper of yours some. You always did have that temper, no matter how many times you’ve tried to hotly deny it. Once you denied it so hard you beat that old antique dinner table your ma left you flat. Remember that? And there was that time we was out at the old graveyard across the creek, one where them Indians is supposed to be buried, and you seen this little grey cat and called it over to pet, and that sucker had a backwoods relapse or something and scratched your face and hands all up, and you wrung that cat’s neck quicker than a papa rabbit makes baby rabbits and tossed it down the creek. I know you hated it after you’d done it, but hating it couldn’t twist that ole cat’s head back in place and give her an appetite.
Like Donald E. Westlake, Lansdale is a writer who takes infinite pains to make his prose appear effortless. That's one reason writers enjoy rereading him. Like learning to navigate an x-ray of a Rembrandt, there are many layers open to appreciation.
Jay
