Musing Mondays - literary Halloween costumes & horror novels! Happy Halloween!

Musing Mondays - October 31, 2016

Musing Mondays is a weekly meme that asks you to choose one of the following prompts to answer:

• I’m currently reading…

• Up next I think I’ll read…

• I bought the following book(s) in the past week…

• I’m super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…

• I’m really upset by (book/author/bookish-news)…

• I can’t wait to get a copy of…

• I wish I could read ___, but…

• I blogged about ____ this past week…

I’m super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…the literary group Halloween costume my coworkers and I did today...

I work an an academic library, which is probably not a place where you would expect the staff to come to work in costume on Halloween, but not only did a fair number of us come in costume today, a fair number of us got together and did a literary theme for a group costume. Eight of us showed up as DC Comics characters. The theme all started when my coworker Mel said she wanted to come as The Red Arrow (from The Arrow comics). After she decided that back in like late August, in early September a group of us were discussing Halloween costumes and my colleague Matt was telling us he was thinking about comings as Darth Vader and maybe doing Batman next year, at which point I had a light bulb moment and shouted out that no, he should come as Batman THIS year and we could all do a group costume as DC characters. That suggestion was enthusiastically accepted because as we all know, if you can be Batman, you always be Batman.

That led to me trying to figure out who on earth I was going to be because none of the female costumes were appealing to me, so finally I decided that maybe I could pull off Batgirl and while I was on the Hot Topic website looking for ready made pieces I could use for her look I saw that they had a Riddler jacket and was immediately struck with the idea that I would be the Riddler to Matt's Batman because every hero needs a villain. When I saw the jacket was going to cost $70 though I snorted and immediately started thinking of a cheaper way to put together my costume. I told Mel about my costume idea and her suggestion was that we keep my costume a secret so that we could surprise Matt with a bad guy, so for over a month that was exactly what we did and along the way we picked up a bunch of other people to join our group. In the end we ended up with, as you can see from the photo above, Batman, The Riddler, Catwoman, Katana (from the Suicide Squad comics), Lois Lane, The Red Arrow, and Supergirl. We also had a Superman who didn't make it to our lunch time pizza party for the international students (to teach them about Halloween traditions in Canada).

A few other coworkers joined us in the fun but not in the theme. The FANTASTIC Captain Kirk you see in that image is actually our Associate University Librarian, his phaser actually lit up and made sounds and his correctly styled communicator could actually be used to make cell phone calls! And also not pictured one of our colleagues was dressed as Marty the Pink Lady from Grease.

I was trying to think of a way that I could talk about this today since it's Halloween and also still do my Musing Monday post when I remembered that we were all comic book characters so of course it could be bookish-news I was excited about!

          THIS WEEK’S RANDOM QUESTION: What’s your favorite horror novel (if you read that genre)?

Sticking right with the Halloween theme, I like it! I think I watch more horror than I read, correction I know I do because I just looked at my horror shelf on Goodreads and it only has 11 books. But I know that's wrong because it's missing at a minimum 3 Christopher Pike books that I've read that I should probably class as horror one of which qualifies as the creepiest horror novel I have ever read because I read it back in 8th grade but I still remember it vividly and thinking about it to this day still gives mt the heebies. The name of that particular Christopher Pike novel? The Wicked Heart.

I could stick with Christopher Pike and say that my favourite horror novel that I've read is either Spellbound or Last Act (both of which were REALLY good) but I think I want to change it up and choose something by a different author since he's earned status for creepiest horror novel I've read. I went through a Christopher Pike phase in my early teen years but he's not the only horror author I've read I swear. Realistically though I think I do need to read more horror it's not one of my go to genres for books, but I really do enjoy horror movies and tv shows.

So after all that, what's my favourite horror novel out of the relatively small number of horror novels that I have read? The answer to that dear readers, is Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter which was also adapted into a pretty good moving in my opinion AND which has a sequel which I am eager to read and have had sitting on my TBR shelf since it came out last year, The Last American Vampire.