Samhain Screams will be released on the 17th of October—but the Kindle version is available for pre-order today at just $1.99 instead of $3.99. You can also add the anthology to your Goodreads list. Our aim is quite simply to make Halloween 2025 the spookiest ever with this anthology featuring twenty scary tales handpicked by Greg Chapman and Cameron Trost. Do you dare peek into the troubled minds of our contributing authors?
Hi Darren,
What does Halloween mean to you and how do you celebrate it?
Halloween is my second favorite holiday; Christmas still wins out but not by much. The whole month of October means a few things related to horror: more conventions, a good lineup of horror in books and cinema, and finally a time to break out the hoodies.
I have a teenage son, so I have a ready-made excuse to work on costumes, to prep some cosplay for horror conventions, and – of course – to plot where he and his friends will go trick or treating.
Will you be donning a scary costume this Halloween?
I certainly feel the license to. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how trick or treating has grown more age inclusive. By my son’s age, I would have gotten some looks and probably been outright asked whether I thought I was too old to go out. Thus, I ventured forth alongside friends, armed with toilet paper instead of a costume. Now, though, dressing up is for any age, perhaps thanks in no small part to cosplay. If a Halloween block party manifests, I would 100% dress up.
Without giving too much away, is there a story behind your contribution to this anthology?
Most definitely. Other than the supernatural elements, it’s autobiographical. So was the setting, though the actual story is a transplant: the latter half happened at summer camp, not in my suburban neighborhood. I actually wrote it as a camp story originally, and – as stories sometimes do – it failed to come together, so I was glad to have the chance to reimagine and rewrite it from scratch as a Halloween tale.
Do you have a favourite Halloween tale?I hate to reference a film instead of the written word, but – in a novel – Halloween is likely to be a scene and not the entire story. But, in film, Night of the Demons. I watched it way too young, which is really the only way to watch scary movies. It still holds up pretty well, especially in terms of practical FX and make-up, which still beat out CGI by a wide margin, in my opinion.
Would you share something about yourself that your readers don’t know yet?
I’ve been writing a long time, and I also play video games, which means my understanding of how things work is grossly distorted. So when I picked up tinkering with electronics as a hobby, it grew quickly apparent just how sped up and simplified such work is when portrayed in media. I’m humbled almost daily by this hobby, the mastery of which is usually just a passing character quirk in fiction.
What are you working on at the moment? What are you writing?
I have a second short story collection coming out this Halloween. The titular story, in fact, is a Halloween tale. It’s entitled Cul-de-Sacrifice and Other Stories, and will be available on Amazon and Audible. That’s taking most of my time at the moment, though I’m always kicking around a novel-length work. I’ve been crafting short stories for decades, so it’ll be a difficult but hopefully fulfilling task.
Where can we find you online?
I try to keep up my Amazon author page as well as my profile on Goodreads.
Thanks for playing along!
