Here it is.
October 31 is the next book in the There Be Monsters series, and it goes live tomorrow morning. Thirty-one stories. Every one of them takes place on the same date.
That was the rule I wrote under. No story could happen on October 30 or November 1. Every account had to start on the last night of October, in whatever century and whatever country the story belonged to. Some are set on nights that nobody at the time would have called Halloween: a plague-year London parish, a medieval French cathedral town, a Puritan village where the word would have gotten you questioned. The date is the same. The people keeping it are not.
What’s inside
Each story opens with a dateline, the way a field report would. A few of them:
- October 31st, 1897. A farmhouse in the Carpathian foothills. A country doctor is fetched in the dark for a bride who will not wake right.
- October 31st, 1653. A village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The meetinghouse bell is ringing, and it isn’t the Sabbath ring.
- October 31st, 1918. A trapline north of Hearst, Ontario. The first storm came early, and the man who knew the rules of the bush is gone.
- October 31st, 1996. A ranch in South Texas. The third goat turned up dead on the tank dam, and that one got the sheriff’s office to send a deputy.
- October 31st, present day. A diner in a small town. Hoofbeats cross an empty intersection after closing.
There are banshees and changelings, a golem in a Prague attic, a house-spirit behind a German hearthstone who keeps careful count of what he is owed. There’s a carnival that only runs once. There’s a clock that someone has wound every Wednesday for longer than most marriages last.
What it’s like to read
This isn’t a gore book. If you’ve read Then and Now or Deep Down, you know what to expect: slow dread, real history, and people making practical decisions after the impossible has already walked in. The monsters come from the folklore our great-grandparents took seriously. Each one has rules. Most of the horror comes from someone deciding whether to follow them.
The book closes with a Note on Sources that says where each tradition comes from and what I invented. Some of these beliefs belong to living cultures, and I’d rather be honest about the line between the record and the story than pretend there isn’t one.
Why thirty-one
One for every night in October. Read one before bed and you finish the book on Halloween. The last story is the title story, and it’s the one where every warning in the book starts sounding at once. Save it.
I’ll be posting a companion piece here for every story through October: the real legend or piece of history behind it, without spoilers. The first few go up this week. Start with the jack-o’-lantern on Thursday. It was never about pumpkins.
Where this sits in the series
If you’re new here: There Be Monsters is an anthology series built on one line, every warning was true once. Each book follows ordinary people far enough past certainty to find out why a rule, a superstition, or a story existed in the first place.
Then and Now paired horrors across time, the old version and the modern echo. Deep Down went below the water and under the ground. Among the Dead was about the dead who refuse to stay where the living put them. October 31 turns the series toward the night itself.
You don’t need to have read the others. Every book, and every story, stands alone. But if you’ve been reading since the first one, you’ll recognize the voice, the datelines, and the kind of person who ends up alone in the dark trying to remember what their grandmother said.
Why the datelines
Every story opens the same way: October 31st, a year, a place. It’s the heading on a field report, and it does a job. Before the first sentence you already know where you’re standing, what century it is, and what the people around you are likely to believe. The dateline puts you in the room. The story makes you want to leave it.
Tomorrow
October 31 releases tomorrow in ebook, with print to follow. I’ll post the link here at 10 AM, along with the opening of the first story.
If you want to read along with other people, the 31 Nights challenge starts October 1: one story a night, with a free printable calendar that tracks each night’s dateline. Get the calendar →
Every warning was true once.
T. P. Grimbard
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Also in the series: Then and Now · Deep Down · Among the Dead