AN IMPRINT IN TIME: Kevin G. Bufton

When I agreed to pen this guest post for Wendy, I had no idea what the topic was going to be. I made my pitch, showed her the sort of stuff I write, and waited for her to come back to me with a yes or no. She said “yes.” Then she said, “Do you believe in the paranormal or the supernatural?”

See, this is why you should always set the parameters before you offer to write a column. It’s a reasonable question to ask a guy like me, especially at this time of year. After all, I’m a writer – a horror writer, no less – and my work is filled with vampires and zombies, ghosts and ghouls, and things that go bump in the night. If you had to make a wild stab in the dark you’d probably guess that I was all about the paranormal.

And you’d be wrong.

The idea of the paranormal just doesn’t sit well with me. As far as I’m concerned, we have our time on this planet, and we’d best make the most of it, because once it’s gone, that’s it – we’re worm food, baby! No heaven, no hell, no reincarnation and definitely no wandering the earth in ghostly torment.

I’m an atheist. That means there is no afterlife, and that’s a very comforting thought for me. Certainly, it’s more comforting than the alternative – that there is some all powerful being, with the attention span and wilfully destructive personality of a five-year old kid strung out on an overdose of Halloween treats, judging me for my actions. Or, worse, that when I die, I’m going to walk the Earth, my spirit occasionally breaking through to some middle aged medium (well, probably a large, to be honest) to tell my loved ones where I buried the bodies money.

Think about that, for just one minute.

The tradition of the ghost story is a long and noble one, predicated on the fact that a regular guy or gal is being haunted by some ineffable being from another plane of reality; the soul of a long departed human being, doomed to trudge around somewhere he called home for the rest of eternity. In the stories, it’s always the living who are scared, by these encounters, but what of the ghost? If we are to believe that these are spirits, with an intelligence and a sentience to call their own, then surely theirs is the worst form of torment?

They are eternally trapped, without form or function. On the rare occasions that they manage to make contact – to reach out to another human being, for the first time in decades – all of a sudden they are treated like the bad guy. Hated and despised, and with no way to argue their case, ever since Waddington’s stopped mass producing ouija boards.

So, yeah, the idea of an afterlife is an affront to me.

That said, I have no problem in believing in the existence of ghosts – I just don’t think that they are trapped souls. Rather, I take the view that they are a recording of sorts; an imprint of someone or something, trapped in the fabric of their own surroundings. So many ghost sightings are tremendously dull, and remarkably repetitive. They always seem to involve the ghost doing the same thing, over and over, regular as clockwork – rather a dull way to spend an infinity, I’ve always thought. It makes perfect sense to me that a particular set of physical conditions can result in the shadow of a person being left behind in the atmosphere, absorbed into the wood or the stone of the place that they spent the majority of their life.

I have my own tale of this sort of thing. As well as my thoughts on the paranormal, Wendy asked me about the time in my life that I was most scared, and the two intersect very neatly. I’ve had a few scares in my life, mostly for perfectly rational reasons – I once slipped down between two massive bales of hay in my nan’s farm, and thought I was going to suffocate before my brother came and pulled me out, for instance – but I’m guessing that’s not the sort of scary moment that Wendy had in mind, this close to All Hallow’s Eve.

My great grandmother died at the ripe old age of ninety, blind and bedridden. She was a wonderful woman, and I used to love sitting next to her on the couch, holding her hand and listening to her talk. Sometimes, I’m not even sure if she knew I was there, or whether she knew who I was if she did, but that didn’t matter. I would cradle her wrinkled hands, with skin as thin as tissue paper, and just listen. Towards the end, she was confined to her bedroom, as she could no longer even make the journey downstairs, but that’s not how I choose to remember her.

I forget how old I was when she died, but I think about ten or eleven. She lived with my nan in an old farmhouse, just outside Chester. The house itself could be creepy at times, with its plethora of rooms, most of which were unoccupied, and twisting corridors and stairwells, in which a young lad could easily become lost. I remember we were visiting my nan, not long after my gran’s death, and I was wandering aimlessly around the house, for some reason or another. I passed the room that my gran had slept and died in, and I heard a distinct moan. This wasn’t the moan of a ghostly apparition, but the moan of my gran, as she lay in bed, her mind hazy and her body aching with the weight of years. The door was slightly ajar and I wanted to go in, to see what had made that noise, but I couldn’t draw up the nerve to do so. I didn’t need to. I knew what that sound was – it was Gran – I’d heard that same moan a dozen times or more, when she had still been alive.

I was eleven years old and a bright young thing, so I’m not saying it couldn’t have been my imagination playing tricks on me. What I am saying is that at the time, I knew that sound. It was real, a noise coming from a real throat, not from some trick of memory. I’d be prepared to swear that in any court in the land. To this day, I wonder what I might have seen if I’d have opened that door, or what else I might have heard if I’d have waited outside a little longer, but I didn’t. The door was open a crack or two and, even at that young age, I wasn’t fool enough to be tricked towards a part-opened door, no matter what might lie behind it.

I ran downstairs, and I think I got told off by my dad for running around the house like an elephant, but I didn’t care.

To this day, it remains my one and only brush with the paranormal – however you define the term – but once was enough.

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OCTOBER 29th GIVEAWAY: 

UPDATE: OCTOBER 29TH GIVEAWAY IS OFFICIALLY OVER!! CONGRATS TO OUR SIX WINNERS!!!  

Today We are giving away SIX ECOPIES of the awesomely terrifying SIX OF THE BEST: A HELLISH HALF-DOZEN. 

To win, simply visit the HALLOWEENPALOOZA OFFICIAL EVENT FACEBOOK PAGE and find today's post announcing this blog/giveaway. Comment in that post that "I WANT TO WIN." If you're one of the first six to do so, you've got A Hellish Half-Dozen thrills coming your way.  

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SIX OF THE BEST: A HELLISH HALF-DOZEN 

A baby's cry in the middle of the night...a family torn apart by a deadly force of nature...dark and ancient rites, performed in the dead of winter. Six of the Best: A Hellish Half-Dozen is the stunning debut collection from horror writer Kevin G. Bufton. Walk with him, through the twisted corridors of his mind, as he leads you into the dark places, where no soul is safe, nobody can be trusted, and nothing is as it seems. Within these pages, you will discover six tales of exquisite horror that will redefine the meaning of terror for you. "Kevin G. Bufton manages to evoke a sense of horror nostalgia and startling originality at the same time. Reader, read on. These six tales are worth your time." - Nathan Robinson, Snakebite Horror

THE EVIL IN THE VINYL: J.Joseph Wright

Whenever I conjure the many nightmare recollections of my Halloweens past, one singularly dreaded memory lurches monstrously to the forefront—that of my grandmother’s record player. More specifically, the timeworn 75rpm sound effects album she used to run on a constant loop for the neighborhood trick or treaters. At the time, I’m certain dear old grandma didn’t understand what she was doing. She didn’t comprehend the distorted fears coursing through my veins because of the darkly loathsome and unearthly strangeness seeping from those crackling old RCA speakers into my young and impressionable ears. I still have scars.

If you are not aware of the maddeningly fiendish LP of which I so tremblingly scribe, then let these words be your warning. Do not listen to the Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House (Disney 1963), unless you want hideous horrors lurking in your palpitant heart forevermore.

I know what you’re thinking: It’s Disney. How scary can it be? Let me tell you, it’s my belief this album wasn’t pressed like normal LPs. It was created in some demonic and accursed den of bad dreams. Also, it was made in the sixties. That was a different time. Things were more provocative. Even Disney sometimes had an edge. Never more was this edge evident than in this dastardly record.

The needle hits the vinyl, and the hissing and popping begins, a menacing portent of the maddening audio agony to follow. Then, as if from some cave of abysmal blackness, comes a voice. A woman’s voice. Ghostly and ghastly. She speaks with a witchy coolness redolent of some unseen world beyond the grave.

But before I disclose what shadowy and sacrilegious things the echoing voice has to say, let me explain one of the most genuinely frightening aspects about the album—its cover. A picture, yes. Only a picture. An artist’s depiction. At first glance it seems simple enough, even childishly innocuous. An old house, graying and antiquated, with a prodigiously disheveled yard suggestive of the open country. Tombstones, spread across the overgrown lawn in a blanket of death markers, elicit a deep sense of dread.

Cryptic epitaphs inscribed by a grave keeper’s unsteady hand, lamenting of the horrifying forthcoming experience: “Here lies a most terrific collection of recorded sounds.” The fearsome words summon images of a dire world.

Snaking, curling ribbons of static electricity emanate with a fierce intensity from the stormy, shadow-haunted sky. A sallow and gnarled tree, a sad relic of a forgotten and prehistoric past, twisted and bent by the prevailing winds. Shunned by the world of the living, now a permanent denizen of the graveyard’s perpetual dusk.

A beckoning gloom surrounding the giant house of horrors evokes a most disturbing trepidation. It’s balanced gruffly, cast in sinister silhouette, with baleful and warped unevenness on a deceptively small knoll. Spitefully scowling. Fiendish and spectral on the stormiest of nights. A threshold to unhallowed ground. A frightful gateway into a cryptic world. Dark decay spreads over the ancient structure. Strange gables and unusual windows, perversely tall and narrow, hint at a stately manor whose magnificence had been faded by the mists and storms of generations.

Finally, the most disturbing part of the album cover. The part that used to infect my fledgling mind with inexplicable perversity, ideas of witchcraft, and swinish revelry. Way up high, on the crooked old house’s third floor, in a one-room lookout tower, a single window is ablaze with the orange glow of numerous candles. Candles used in the administration of the most unspeakable of black and blasphemous rites. Images of terrible things inside that attic torture chamber would trouble me, torment me, and skulk incessantly in my imagination, frittering on the fringes of psychosis as I listened to the hissing, crackling turntable.

And so the ghostly voice of the aforementioned woman initiates the madness with a simple narrative…

“You are a bold and courageous person, afraid of nothing…high on a hilltop near your home there stands a dilapidated old mansion. Some say the place is haunted, but you don’t believe in such myths. One dark and stormy night, a light appears in the topmost window in the tower of the old house. You decide to investigate…and you never return.”

Immediately I’m transported into the picture on the album cover, shivering in a howling wind from some fathomless void. I hear the rattling of chains, the struggles of the undead trying to free themselves from the locked iron gates of their sepulchers.

A black cat crosses my path. It sees me and arches its scrofulous spine, spitting out a hellish howl and hissing in a fitful tantrum. But it’s not afraid of me. It’s the ghastly ghoul emerging furtively from an open grave, moaning in devilish anticipation of fresh human brains. My brains!

I start to run. The lightning strikes and the wind wails and the rain falls sideways in sheets. My frightful flight brings me to an old, decrepit door. I open the door and there’s another ghoul! My screams echo through the night.

The unearthly strangeness is just beginning. Next up to tingle my terror is the sizzling, slow burn of a bomb’s fuse. The suspense builds as the fuse blazes, and the witchy woman is teasingly nerve-wracking. Will the bomb blow or not? The tension is unendurable.

BOOM!

And the sinister sounds continue. Werewolves on the moors. Unfortunate logging accidents. A big black cat that turns rabid. A doomed cruise ship dashed against a rocky coast. Climbing across a suspension bridge above a black and bottomless cavern. The famously maddening Chinese water torture. Possessed birds directly out of a Hitchcock thriller. A rocket trip to a hungry Martian welcoming committee.

And that’s just side A.

On side B the loathsome audio storm rages on with a cruel and squawking cacophony of mixed and murderous sound effects that have mystified, terrorized, and brought generations of young ones to tears. Constant rain. Howling wildcats. Baying hounds. Macabre denizens of the underworld. Heavy footsteps and violent crashing. When will the torture ever end?

Happily, it does have an end. The LP is twenty-five excruciating minutes long, and my pounding pulse has a chance to wind down after that supremely traumatic drubbing of my senses. My chest heaves as I catch my breath, blissful to have survived the horrific audio ordeal. I am relieved and grateful, for my young life will continue. Because I would have a heart attack if forced to endure just one minute more.

Then, terror of terrors! Though the record is finished, the player seems to have a mind of its own!

The needle, as if guided by some unseen hand, lifts up and swings to the very edge of the record again—back to start. The grim static, surreal scratching, and primeval popping begins in maniacal earnest, and my eternal nightmare reigns supreme. I cannot escape the horror reverberating fiendishly through the dungeon that is now my mind. Forever will I be plagued by that disembodied voice, that witchy woman’s deep and disturbing tone, and her spinning disc of horrors.

And I don’t know exactly what it is about that house, that terribly ramshackle old palatial estate on the album cover. Wait. Yes I do. It bears a dreadful resemblance to my grandmother’s house! When the realization hits, I know it’s too late…I’m trapped inside that loathsome darkness, somewhere in an abyss of shrieking lunacy. Dragged up a flight of rickety and cobweb-infested stairs. A grisly ghoul is taking me to my final fate, to be endlessly trapped as a tormented voice in the recording. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear me, shrieking ceaselessly from that lone tower window.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. Joseph Wright penciled his first novel in the fourth grade, but, after failing to publish it, toiled away in obscurity until his freshman year in high school. Upon reading and, inexplicably, enjoying one of J.'s witless essays, his English Comp teacher, a man of questionable taste, recommended he write for the school newspaper. Soon J. was regaling the student body with a fantasy horror fiction column, gaining a robust early fan base, albeit from a captive school audience. After college, J. left a highly lucrative career in public television for an even more lucrative career as an independent author, and now writes Adult Horror, Sci-Fi, Children's Fantasy, and even some Paranormal Romance. His novel Jack James and the Tribe of the Teddy Bear was a Finalist in the Kindle Book Review 2013 Best Indie Book Awards.

Website - http://jjosephwright.com/
Twitter - @jjosephwright
Contact - jkwrightpublications@gmail.com

His latest work is entitled GHOST GUARD. Here's a bit about the #1 Paranormal bestseller: 

GHOST GUARD

An Amazon #1 Bestselling PARANORMAL ROMANTIC-COMEDY ACTION THRILLER ～ Hit #1 on September 30, 2013!

A new PARANORMAL ROMANTIC-COMEDY ACTION THRILLER from the Amazon bestselling J. Joseph Wright Collection.

In the spirit realm, only one force can protect the innocent souls of the dead...

Never before have living agents been teamed up with ghosts on such a level. Never before has a paranormal crew been equipped, trained, and specially assembled to hunt ghost hunters, face angry mobs bent on otherworldly revenge, or do battle against ancient immortals from the stars. Never before has the spirit realm seen anyone like Rever Ott and Abby Rhodes. Only problem is, Rev and Abby don't know whether to fight the enemies of the supernatural, or fight their love for each other.

The cloak and dagger intrigue of James Bond with the supernatural eccentricity of Ghostbusters and the primal darkness of Underworld.

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OCTOBER 25th GIVEAWAY: 

UPDATE: TODAY'S GIVEAWAY IS OFFICIALLY CLOSED! WE HAVE OUR TWO WINNERS! 

Today's giveaway is by bestselling author Susan J. McLeod. It's the first in her Lily Evans Mystery series and is entitled SOUL AND SHADOW. It mixes paranormal with mystery and the result is a book you'll fall in love with! Double dare you to put it down!

We're giving away two print copies of SOUL AND SHADOW! To win, please go to HALLOWEENPALOOZA'S OFFICIAL FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE. Find October 25th's post announcing today's blog and giveaway. Simply comment "I WANT TO WIN" in that post, and if you're one of the first two to do so, you'll WIN!!! 

So hurry! This is the perfect book to read on a cold frosty night! 

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ABOUT SUSAN J. MCLEOD

Susan J McLeod was born in Rochester, New York, on October 22, 1957. She began writing at a very early age, when she discovered that she could invent worlds that were much more fun than the one she lived in. Worlds where candy grew on trees and rivers of chocolate milk flowed. Where adventures were always waiting to happen and no one had to go to school.

Over the years, Susan visited ancient Rome, medieval England, and resided for a long spell on a starship orbiting Orion. A recent stay in Pharaonic Egypt resulted in her romantic suspense novel Soul and Shadow, which won a silver medal in the 2011 Reader's Favorites contest. It has been published by Imajin Books. Fire and Shadow, the second story in the Lily Evans series, was released in October 2012.
Susan also writes short stories and poetry, and has won awards in both mediums.

She works for a non-profit family foundation that supports Zara's Center, a haven for AIDS impacted orphans.

U2 sums up her philosophy in life when Bono sings "We're one, but we're not the same/we get to carry each other, carry each other."

Right now, Bewitching Book Tours is hosting a blog tour of the second in the Lily Evans Mystery Series. FIRE AND SHADOW will be featured all week at the following sites! It's Halloween-priced at only $1.99. That's half off its original price. Please stop in for excerpts, interviews, reviews and more! 

October 21
Dalene’s Book Reviews
http://dalenesbookreviews.blogspot.com

October 21 review
My Tangled Skeins Book Reviews
http://mytangledskeinsbookreviews.blogspot.com

October 22 Interview
The Simple Things in Life
Http://pwrspot.blogspot.com/

October 22 Spotlight
3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, & Sissy, Too! http://3partnersinshopping.blogspot.com

October 23 Guest blog
Reading in Twilight
http://readingintwilight.blogspot.com/

October 23 Spotlight
Pure Textuality
http://puretextuality.com

October 24 Interview
Pembroke Sinclair.
pembrokesinclair.blogspot.com

October 24 Spotlight
Books & Tales:
http://www.booksandtales.blogspot.co.uk/

October 24 Spotlight
Ramblings of a Book Lunatic
http://booklunaticramblings.blogspot.com

October 25 Spotlight
BookwormBridgette’s World
http://bookwormbridgette.blogspot.com/

October 25 Spotlight
Book2Buzz
http://www.book2buzz.blogspot.com

October 25 spotlight
Wicca Witch 4 Book Blog
http://wiccawitch4.blogspot.ca/

October 28 Spotlight
A Night’s Dream of Books
http://anightsdreamofbooks.blogspot.com/

October 28 Spotlight
Mila Ramos
http://www.jademystique.blogspot.com

October 28 review
adrienne woods books and reviews
http://woodsadrienne.wordpress.com

SOUL AND SHADOW

In ancient Egypt, a young priestess of the goddess Hathor is laid to rest in a beautiful tomb with everything she needs for her journey into the afterlife…

Three thousand years later, archaeologist Ursula Allingham discovers the mummy of Amisihathor and is confronted by a mystery. Is the man buried with the priestess really her husband? Or was she actually in love with a scribe called Kamenwati and separated from him in life as well as death?

To answer these questions, Dame Ursula turns to Egyptology student and artist Lily Evans, who reluctantly agrees to help. Lily learns that she is psychically linked to Amisihathor and experiences a strange, unsettling phenomenon—the memories and emotions of the Egyptian woman. Luckily, Lily has her beloved pet Cleocatra and her irrepressible friend Katy to keep her grounded in reality. Or so she hopes.

Dealing with the challenges of falling in love with Ursula’s grandson Kent, the reappearance of her ex-fiance Stephen and the demands of her mother and her boss Professor Briggs, Lily soon realizes she has taken on much more than she bargained for.