It’s October, and like many–I love Halloween.

This year I’m working on celebrating it a different way: less candy, more reading. I’ve been immersed in the horror classics, with some Edgar Allan Poe short stories, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. I hope to circle back to more Poe, but if it runs into November, that’s okay.

I followed up my reading of Frankenstein by watching the movie that was made in the 90’s with Robert DeNiro as the monster. Not quite true to the book, but it was still a good movie. My favorite line from the book is: “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?”

Poor monster! He is horrid and wretched and pitiful.

Reading horror stories makes me grateful for the warmth and safety of home–and for being human.