"Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic" (2004) Dale Bailey
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 (2005) edited by Stephen Jones
Readers unfamiliar with "Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
[….] But a bloated yellow moon looms in the October sky, and the scent of change is in the air. Wolves walk among us always. The worst among them wear their fur on the inside of their skin.
(L is for Lycanthrope)
The word Halloween has nine letters. Dale Bailey provides us with nine prose incantations for the day of days, 31 October. Some pieces recall tarot images on cards we never handled, except in dreams. Others provide links between biblical troublemakers and earth geographies: deep oceans, Antarctic ice shelves, nighttime forests, and sentient fungoid kingdoms underground.
It's a tour de force.
Jay
