At last another Hallowe'en is upon us, with its gusty winds ripping dead or dying leaves from the very branches of skeletal trees, howls and moans erupting from open graves and sepulchral cemeteries and our imaginations blooming and running rampant through the memories of our childhoods. It is now that we welcome suspension of disbelief and the possibility of supernatural chaos bubbling from that area of our hidden desires we ignore at our peril.

It’s time for mystery to take a front seat in our lives, once again.

No one can deny the allure of a baffling phenomenon impacting upon the staid and self-satisfied ‘accepted view.’ For many of us, it goes without saying that the world has it all wrong, and has had for most of history.

Those things that go bump in the night never fail to thrill us with delicious, shivery delight, or sheer terror, depending on your point of view, (or point of reference).

Daily life is a grind at times, even if it’s more fun than mundane, it leaves plenty of room for the imagination to stretch limits and break boundaries. Creative people require mystery to maintain a balance between the known and the perceived, the learned and the suspected. Writers thrive on it and all people love a good ghost story. And a ghost story is one of the biggest mysteries there can be.

This edition of Writer's Cramp celebrates its 18th year in publication, it is, in fact, our Anniversary Hallowe'en Issue. WC launched its first publication back in October of 1998, even before we owned the domain name. Yet it has never gone down or gone dark over all of these years.

So, we are proud of our longevity and of the pleasure and entertainment we have brought to thousands of readers over the years, and we are proud of the many writers who have made their debuts within our pages and of those who made their creative homes in the environs of Writer's Cramp.

We offer you three new stories, created especially for the season; Teri Lucia's, Cruentus, a tale that hearkens back to those masters of supernatural fiction that included MR James, and Arthur Machen, Frank Thayer, who is a master in his own right with, The Grand Order of Marbas, perhaps too close a look into ancient supernatural cults, and JB Pravda, with a work only he could have written with such imagination and panache.

 As always, Enjoy.

Sincerely,

Robert G Liberty
Editor,
Writer’s Cramp Online Magazine