Well, whatever that no-talent anti-Semite TS Eliot said, for me October is the cruelest month, being the anniversary month of the worst day of my life. So in a probably fruitless attempt to stave off the October blues, I'm gonna spend this month celebrating the weird, the demented, and the horrifying--all the stuff that accompanies my favorite holiday, Halloween.
The walking dead, the severed heads, the buckets o' blood--it all brings me joy. This is because I am a bit sick and twisted, of course, but also it's because horror is, as I've probably said, the only genre that consistently tells the truth about life: sometimes awful things happen unexpectedly without explanation; some people survive, some people don't. And yeah, you can see that in a doleful movie like, say, Before and After and walk out ready to cry, or you can see it in a kick-ass festival of gore like, say, Dawn of the Dead (1978, if you please), and walk out grinning.
I guess for me, art should not just reflect reality; it should transform it into something more interesting, something more fun, something that allows us to see reality from a different perspective. And yeah, it should, if possible, have flesheating ghouls.
So, anyway, day one of my 31 days of Halloween begins in seventh grade. Yes, middle school is a house of horrors, but I'm actually talking about a comic book I purchased at the beginning of the seventh grade: Mystery in Space #112. 
Now, I've read tons of horror comics in my day--Weird War was a particular favorite, but I also had Marvel's Aargh! #2 and re-read that for years, and I picked up the odd copy of House of Secrets or the other DC horror comic whose name escapes me right now, and this one is probably the only story I can remember that really sticks with me.
From what I remember, "Howl," which appeared in this issue, is a story that owes a fair amount to Alien--the crew of a starship picks up the stranded survivor of an apparent starship disaster, and she turns out to be a (foxy) vampire who dispatches the crew one by one, until she's finally alone in her moment of triumph aboard another empty starship...except she didn't know that the ship is made of silver! Somehow the ship's construction means that the (foxy) vampire will not be able to roam the galaxy in search of fresh victims. Instead, she'll be entombed forever in a silver casket floating through space! Ha! The titular Howl is the (foxy) vampire's howl of existential horror as she realizes she's unintentionally booked herself into an eternity of solitary confinement and starvation without the relief of death.
It's quality stuff, and though I no longer own it, it's my pick for day one of the thirty-one days of Halloween.
