Readers,
Are you scared yet? No? How about this:
Ghosts. Clowns. Soggy pumpkins. Ripe pumpkins. Axe-murderers coming into your house at night. High-stress writerly environments. Loud surprising noises. Funerals. Sharp-teethed goblins. Poetry. Your friends becoming werewolves. Gunshots. Blood. Reality TV houses. New Jersey. Rats. Non-sexy vampires. Moldy oranges. J.D. Vance. Stephen Miller. Men on electric scooters. Sexual predators. Florida. Alzheimer’s. Suicide. God. The laundry room. Suicide. School shootings. Ghouls. Banshees, shrieking from the past. Venmo friend requests. Massive rats, dancing in God’s moonlight. Leaky boats. Make-up. Posers. Hair in the drain. Climate change. Bobby Portis. Your mother’s funeral. Being set on fire. Becoming the 8-bit version of yourself. Being buried alive. Betrayal. The Yale Board of Trustees. The death of democracy. The fact that democracy never existed. Massive rats dancing in God’s moonlight, feeling His wrath and His love, and morphing, against their will, into pixelated ash.
Are you scared now?
Halloween is a time transformation, but when we don a costume do our innermost selves recede or emerge? Rollicking in the moonlight of All Hallow’s Eve, relishing the unencumbered spirit of the night, do we sharpen our senses, or reduce them? Is performance an act of expression or of hiding?
Or is Halloween just damn fun? It’s the Heraldiest day of the year, chock-full of daring. Risky costumes, debauchery unleashed, escapades through fear itself. Only loosely tied to any actual religion, it’s a holiday celebrating nothing specific. But the saints and souls are coming just around the corner; real winter is about to start; Halloween is the working man’s Fat Tuesday, indulgence justified for an evening.
We at the Herald celebrate a little early, getting all our introspection out of the way before the fun begins. Join us. Follow Oscar Heller as he chases Pittsburgh’s ghost band in this week’s feature. Step quietly into Yale-New Haven’s psychiatric ward with Gaby Ewart. Embrace your fears with Kemper Rodi’s piece about cowering from Halloween makeup. Don your best frog costumes to fight fascism with Jaxon Havens, or your hand-made Spamton G. Spamton get-up and consider consumerism with Samuel Rosenberg. Hate on the every-day performativity of artsy aesthetes with Emma Singer and of The Life of a Showgirl with Zoe Frost. And so much more: like I said, this is the Herald’s shit. We’re pulling out all the stops.
Some might say that the act of writing about any of this is inherently reducing it to an 8-bit form. Others would say writing is the utmost act of expression, an opportunity to showcase a self otherwise unavailable. I’d call both of them pretentious dweebs, and just say: read the pieces, and enjoy.
Most daringly,
Oscar and Will
