Yes, you could say I studied the STEM curriculum.

SPOOKY

MONSTERS.

Recommended listening: It’s a dead man’s party but I’m just a plus-one.

“But I thought the doctor’s name was Victor!”

“It is! I’m just a carpet wholesaler who got into serial killing as a side hustle since I was already saddled with the surname.”

Recommended listening: Eh, “Build Me Up, Buttercup” got there first.

No other tabletop RPG experience could ever match the obsessive bliss of my junior high self flipping through the copy of Fiend Folio he’d found marked down to $3.95 at the local Kay*Bee Toys store. It didn’t matter than I was a neophyte Basic Set player who had no idea what most of the statlines meant, only that the book contained a host of weird and wicked creatures drawn in a lurid style befitting their roots as the products of British fandom.

Browsing the book felt like a transgressive act, and made both 1st Edition Monster Manuals — when I eventually acquired them — profoundly disappointing by comparison.

Recommended listening:

Sorry, I’m trying to wrap my head around the concept of stale candy corn.

Like, how could you even tell?

Recommended listening: Just amusing myself, here.

My love of Atom Age sci-fi horror — specifically, flicks where radiation makes shit turn BIG — comes from my late mother, who adored the stuff and would tune into Channel 56’s Creature Double Feature whenever those movies were aired.

The Deadly Mantis was her favorite, though she also gave high marks to The Amazing Colossal Man, Tarantula, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs. The Spider. I’m not sure why these movies caught her fancy, apart from being a somewhat geeky child of the 1950s who spent most of her early years living on military bases.

Apart from that personal nostalgic connection, I love these movies because they are so square and formulaic with the same bunch of archetypes (often played by the same set of actors) going through the motions against some oversized creature until SCIENCE and/or the U.S. military restores order…typically via some form of huge-ass explosion.

They’re the instant mac ‘n’ cheese of cinematic genres — nothing to set the world on fire, but make for fine belly filler.

Recommended listening: Something else my mom dug.

…and thus ended the short-lived feud between the Pussycats and the Groovie Goolies.

Recommended listening: It’s Spooky Season appropriate because, let’s face it, you are utterly horrified I posted it here.

From the letters page of The Witching Hour #53 (April 1975) comes a fascinating glimpse into the cinematic fantastic during the Gerald Ford era.

“You don’t understand what things were like before Star Wars” has become the stuff of cliche when oldsters (such as myself) deploy it in discussions about how utterly that film changed everything if you were into escapist fare, and the above blurb drives that home by showing how even the concept behind Star Wars was difficult for folks to comprehend before it manifested on theater screens.

That said, I would absolutely watch a re-staging of West Side Story in the world of Star Wars.

Recommended listening: One of the best bands to ever do it.

(from Billboard, 11/12/1977)

I was going to make a joke about Halloween 1977 being the special day when one could see King Kong snort lines off Darth Vader’s naked ass cheeks, but realized it probably happened on a nightly basis during the height of disco’s decadent phase.

Recommended listening: Until you can’t boogie oogie no more.

Miss Velvet was supposed to be my daughter’s cat, a graduation present acquired (along with a mustachioed tuxedo littermate dubbed Henri) from a friend of Maura’s sister-in-law.

She was stunningly adorable orange, black, and white calico kitten full of purrs and absurd antics, and I vowed I would not get attached to her because I didn’t want the heartbreak when the day came that my child left the nest and took her pets with her. It was not an easy task, because Miss Velvet excelled at love-bombing, appearing on my lap out of nowhere and purring loudly as she crawled up the front of my shirt to bonk my chin with her tiny skull.

And then shit happened.

When the awkwardness of early kittenhood didn’t subside for her as it did for her brother, we had her checked out and learned she had a feline form of Lou Gehrig’s disease which would rob her of her mobility and eventually kill her in a year or so.

We considered out options, but decided that as long as Miss Velvet continued to be Miss Velvet — a loving, high spirited creature who wasn’t suffering obvious pain and whose condition could be mitigated by our care — to let her make the best of her abbreviated lifespan.

Though that regiment started as a group effort, things took another turn six months ago when my wife had to undergo surgery with a prolonged recovery time which limited her activity. Up until then, we’d park Miss Velvet on a mat between us on our bed while we slept, but I decided that Maura needed some extra space and freedom from Velvet’s cries for attention during the wee hours.

So the stricken kitten and I decamped to the living room for the duration, where the plan was that I’d sleep on the sofa and she’d sleep on a pet bed on the floor beside me. I soon (as in “five minutes into the first night”) realized it was easier to park Velvet on my chest and secure her with a blanket because she’d sleep the entire night through with a look of pure contentment of her face.

Even after Maura recovered and I returned to the real bed, the arrangement persisted because Miss Velvet had become “Andrew’s cat.” I looked after her needs, kept her near me (often tucked into my flannel shirt-jack), and held conversations with her. Even as her mobility decreased, she still found ways to express herself via nips, cries, and (the my favorite) eye-smiles.

And that’s how things were up until a couple of days ago, when Miss Velvet entered the final phase of her affliction. It was sudden and she went peacefully and I was with her when it happened, which is how I’d hoped things would play out.

And now I feel numb, but also as if someone had severed one of my limbs.

Rest in peace my Little Halloween Cat. You deserved so much better.

Recommended listening:

From the days of old, when T’Pau was in the Top 10 charts and Games Workshop was a weirdly cool alternative to TSR’s stodginess instead of a punchline attached to its most profitably prominent IP comes White Dwarf #91 (July 1987), which featured the following house ad for its line of “Gothic Horror” miniatures.

Why “Gothic Horror?” Because GW couldn’t or wouldn’t get the licensing rights to brand them as Call of Cthulhu figures.

Putting aside the regrettable but hardly surprising problematic sour note aside, I genuinely miss the Games Workshop of this era, and it pains me that I lacked the spending money or foresight to scoop up more of its manifestations back when they were heaped high on Excalibur Hobbies’ clearance table in the early 1990s.

And check out those prices — 2.50 GPB for six figures came out to about five American dollars. In fact the first GW figures I bought were a half dozen Eldar Harlequins for exactly that. Even adjusted for inflation, that comes out to less than what a single figure will set you back today.

Of course that was almost forty years ago, which is where the real horror comes in.

Recommended listening: Nothing else to do but keep driving.