Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  There is an image that many of us keep in our minds, of a child waiting for Santa Claus on the evening of December 24th.  Many of us can recall being that child, jumping up hopefully at every slight little sound, thinking it may be reindeer on the roof.  These memories and images represent our belief in magic in its truest form.  And for many people, this goes away after so many years. I no longer wait to see a sleigh flying past me, but for me, magic...anticipation...is still very much a part of my life.  On the evening of September 30th I look outside. I catch sight of a leaf with a tint of orange or yellow or red. I feel a chill in the air. A strange aura of spookiness. I see pumpkins on porches and can almost sense the excitement of the people that placed them there.  The greatest gifts of my year don't come from a man on a sleigh with a sack full of items.  I wake up on the morning of October first and run into the waiting arms of the time of ye...

 As an adult who lives a perpetually spooky lifestyle, and whose main hobby is collecting decor and the like, I sometimes forget that there are people out there who go Halloween shopping, solely to find themselves a costume. However, after a trip to Party City and Halloween City, the former of which is still exactly where it's always been since I was six, I started remembering the days when I was none other than that eager little costume shopper.  Party City was the Halloween go-to in my childhood, at least in my area. I can probably count on one hand how many of my costumes over the course of a decade and then some didn't come from there. Long before Spirit Halloween, even before the smaller scale pop-up shops like Halloween Express, Everything Halloween, and Halloween Adventure, Party City was the place to go for all things Halloween. I actually was once asked, if I could go back to any store I visited as a child and experience it exactly as it was, what I would choose, and ...

  Sometimes, the coming of autumn feels like a faraway dream. One that can never be truly realized, much like falling in love with a fictional world. It feels tangible, yet not, at the same time, when the world is blanketed in snow, or scorching with the heat of summer.  You remember autumn existing, but does it? You wonder. It feels so far away, like it happened, but didn’t. Like some fuzzy dream of something that could have happened, but seems too perfect to have been real. Summer does its best to destroy any hope of that beautiful dream existing again. The stifling heat overtakes the world like an ominous shadow, draining the life out of everything. Every task feels exhausting as the sun burns through another day, burning our energy, burning our eyes. It feels like a perpetual headache; this constant persistent heaviness over your day, your life, that feels like it will never break. You think of the pumpkins from your beloved dream of autumn, and how they wilt and wither at...

 I've always enjoyed tales of horror by the lake. Perhaps it's because I grew up near a lake community and found the history of it very interesting. Or maybe it's because sea monsters and the like never get quite as much love as the average vampire, slasher, or ghost.  Regardless, I was excited about this episode. And it premiered on my birthday! (I didn't watch it on that day, as I was off adventuring in Sleepy Hollow and then Halloween shopping, but still. It meant something to me that something AHS-related was happening on my birthday, and this episode really didn't disappoint! Lake introduces us to brother and sister Jake and Finn, hanging out with a group of other teens at their family lake house. Jake is apparently heavy into the history of this lake and wants to go diving to check out if the rumors and damming and the like are true...and also to impress a girl his sister doesn't approve of.  Straight off, I was skeptical about the fact that there was a ch...

 I've been having a hard time even remembering I have to write this review, as this episode left me feeling all sorts of "meh". This is going to be a tough one for me to write about, as I can't even pinpoint exactly what about it didn't work for me, I just know that something about it seemed really off somehow. It was a really good concept, very ambitious and unafraid to "go there", but it just missed a mark for me somehow. It could have been better but I'm sure how to explain how. Anyway, Necro brings us the story of a young mortician named Sam, who really seems to love what she does. The episode opens with a flashback of a toddler Sam watching her mother get murdered, so I'm guessing the obsession with death comes from some unprocessed trauma. Because no one can just find it cool, you know? (I actually thought about trying to get into it at one point in my life, but the big reason I didn't is my ommetaphobia. I'd be like Billy Wilkins f...