@Pied_Pfeffer I’m totally going to find a way to integrate Dr. Sheppard and maybe even Lake Erie.
@everyone, here is the first chapter I hammered out between asking this question and just now. Thank you all so much for the inspiration and the ideas (more are still welcome, of course!)
The blistering rays of the July sun clawed at the back of my neck as I feverishly hacked away at this week’s Jack-o-Lantern. Stopping to take a sip of my Yoo-Hoo, I leaned back to admire my handiwork. Two triangles stared back at me above a jagged mouth that glistened with oozing pumpkin juice in the sun. I heard the front door to my house open behind me.
“Howard, honey, how is the pumpkin coming?” my mother asked from behind her vampy makeup. I leaned out of the way to give her a clear view.
“Oh,” she sighed.
“What, Mom?” I asked indignantly.
“It’s just so… generic.”
Somewhere between being old enough for Dad to trust me with his prized pumpkin-carving knives and my current age of 17, I had run out of ideas about how to breathe creative life into plump orange vegetables. I’d done faces, pop culture references, even cutesy messages over the years, but when you carve a pumpkin every week, you’re bound to run out of ideas eventually.
“Just put it with the others, I guess. Geeze, it’s a real scorcher out here,” she said as she withdrew back inside. The screen door slammed behind her.
My knees ached from sitting cross legged in the heat with a pumpkin in my lap for the past hour, but I heaved myself to my feet and set my latest work next to a progressively-deflating series of carvings from the last 6 weeks or so that included Yosemite Sam, a clown face, and the word “Hello.”
I wiped the sweat from my eyes and asked the blazing sun if other high schoolers led lives as bizarre as mine.
My name is Howie King (no relation to Stephen, though my parents, through creative obfuscation and liberal use of hyperbole, continue to insist that we may be cousins). I live in Spookyville, Ohio, which is actually a suburb of Greater Cleveland. No, my neighborhood isn’t actually called Spookyville, but that’s what the orange and black hand-made banner that perpetually hangs over our official city-installed sign says. Our territory, I guess you could say, encompasses a few horror-themed restaurants and shops, as well as my subdivision, and covers a square mile or two of land to the south of downtown Cleveland. We hold the honor of having the highest per-capita consumption of pumpkins in the entire United States, most of which we import from Geauga County, and our monthly costume contests draw tourists from as far away as East Cheery, Tennessee. Nobody can say we aren’t unique.
Some people move to certain towns because they are in a good school district, or because US News and World Report ranks the town as particularly environmentally friendly. People move to Spookyville because they really love Halloween. You see, in Spookyville, every day might as well be Halloween. Our houses are perpetually covered in elaborate decorations that we rotate out as the weather changes, our lawns are always bedecked with foam tombstones and plastic skeletons, and we kids used to go to school in costume until the school board unilaterally decided on a new dress code (that our parents found to be woefully draconian).
Most people find our little neighborhood to be lovably quirky, at best, and outright weird, at worst. A lot of the kids get so jaded with Halloween by the time they are 18 that they just move out, but for the most part, people have always let us do our thing as they watched with curious, if not occasionally judgmental eyes.
…for the most part.
This is the story of how Spookyville declared war on Cleveland, or how Cleveland declared war on us, I should say, and the resulting series of events that nearly killed us all.
And to think it all started with a boisterous meeting at the local home owners’ association.
Composing members:
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