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Thursday, October 25, 2012

A Literary Halloween

Okay, I'm going to be honest. Normally, Halloween isn't my favorite holiday. But this Halloween is different! Special! Exciting! Frightening! Bloody! Gory! Ghastly! Ghostly! Ghouly! Literary!

Literary?

As any writer, reader, or English major knows, the best way to improve a holiday is to literar-ize it. I mean, look at Christmas. You have Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Look at Valentine's Day. You have stupid rhymes written on hearts posing as gifts. Look at Thanksgiving. Those lame paragraphs about a fantasy land of pilgrims and Indians loving each other (aka great fiction) that you had to read in grade school.

And out of all these wonderfully literarized holidays, you get Halloween, which, if you can believe it, is exponentially more literary.

Dracula. Frankenstein. Edgar Allen Poe. Wuthering Heights. Twilight.

(What? No--Twilight isn't on there because it's about vampires. It's on there because it's frightening how rich Stephenie Meyer is for such horrific writing.)

(Har, har. English major joke. If you like Twilight, no offense was meant.)

Anyway, I decided to "literarize" my Halloween by reading Frankenstein! I've heard so many great things about it, and I'm excited to read this classic piece of literature for the first time.

Also, even more fun, I have written two zombie haiku. Here they are, for your reading pleasure, so you can literarize your Halloween!

The invitation
said "Please bring finger foods." Guess
what the zombies brought. 

This one is dedicated to my fiance:

He likes me for my 
Brains, not my body. I knew
he was a zombie!

Happy Halloween!

5 comments:

  1. Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice, I like it all! Haha. Tell me how the book is! I still haven't read the original :/ But I have read the original Dracula, and that's pretty incredible...

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    1. Thanks! I'm enjoying it a lot so far. I wasn't super impressed with the black and white movie, which is why I haven't read it before now. But I heard that the book is wildly different from any film version (which seems to be the case so far). I'm planning on reading Dracula one of these days! Maybe next Halloween...

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  2. Love the zombie haiku! I laughed out loud (which is risky in a room with a sleeping baby)!

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    1. I'm glad you liked them! They were fun to write...I actually got started on them at an English Club party. Haha. (I hope Summer didn't wake up!)

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  3. They showed a short movie called Spookley the Square Pumpkin at Samuel's class Halloween party, and the three spiders were named Edgar, Allen, and Poe. I giggled and the kids nearest me gave me a strange look.

    P.S. I put photos of the kids dressed up for Halloween on my blog...if you have time to check it out.

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