Haunted Halloween Surprises
"I'm a big fan of the werewolf," says thriller writer, Jonathan Maberry, whose Dead Man's Song, the second in a trilogy, is set in a fictional town of Pine Deep, Pennsylvania.
Pine Deep has the reputation of being the most haunted town in America, says Maberry. Because of this, the town has built its entire tourism industry around Halloween. Every year it produces a huge Halloween festival, which includes the nation's largest haunted hayride attraction, horror movie marathons, and a parade.
It's also the town where one man believes a serial killer-the one who nearly destroyed the town thirty years ago-is a werewolf.
Dead Man's Song takes place in early October and ends on Friday 13th-and in Pine Deep, says Maberry, whenever a Friday 13th occurs in October they celebrate that as 'Little Halloween'.
Maberry grew up listening to his grandmother tell stories of vampires, werewolves and witches. His grandmother, born in Europe in the 1800's, had beliefs of another time and era. The stories she told differed from the stereotypical tales one hears about these creatures today. For example, facing a vampire with holy water or exposing a vampire to sunlight was never part of original vampire folklore, says Maberry. In Poland, if a werewolf is killed it comes back to life as a vampire-also not what you'd expect to see in today's fiction.
To keep his hero and his readers guessing, Maberry builds his stories on these older, original folktales.
"Pine Deep is a place where supernatural beings lunge out of the shadows," Maberry says. "But humans are among the most horrific beings in my books. I do a lot with human evil."
Jonathan Maberry is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Ghost Road Blues, the book that precedes Dead Man's Song. Since 1979 he has sold more than 1000 articles, seventeen nonfiction books, three novels, as well as short stories, poetry, song lyrics, video scripts, and two plays. His nonfiction works include Vampire Universe: The Dark World of Supernatural Beings That Hunt Us, Haunt Us and Hunger For Us, and The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange and Downright Bizarre. In 2004 Jonathan was inducted into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame.
