Halloween Hearts

Note on signed books: Personalized inscriptions from the author are only possible with preorders. Artist/designer Dan Sauer is available to personalize any order. If you are ordering a signed copy, please indicate in the notes section if you would like a personalized inscription.

Adele Gardner’s Halloween Hearts is a welcome celebration of all things Halloween, whether they take place on October 31st or not. Disciples of All Hallows’ Eve, enter of your own free will . . . haunted houses, trick-or-treaters, vampires, demonic foxes, witches and their familiars, revanants both longed-for and uninvited, and the creeping mists of autumn all have their place in these pages.

Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe—icons of the American imagination, pilgrims of the nightside territories of the mind—have a special place in Gardner’s works. The poetry in this volume is inspired by much of what makes each of these authors special to so many readers: Poe’s sensitivity to loss and melancholia, and to horror and terror, and Bradbury’s enthusiastic embrace of Halloween and other dark aspects of Americana, along with his refusal to allow death to be the final word in our relationship with our loved ones. With “Eureka,” “Nevermore,” “Poe’s Prophets,” and other poems, Gardner explores Poe’s hallowed place in our haunted hearts. And in the title poem, which opens the book, Gardner lovingly celebrates Ray Bradbury and his unique alchemy of nostalgia, dread, and Halloween eternal.

“. . . this book has been a long time coming, with its black cats and witches, ghosts and the grave, vampires and writers that haunt the night. Whether their subjects are traditional to Halloween or on tangential themes, all these poems are Halloween to me—that season so melancholy and elegiac, yet also fierce, with shining teeth, pointy grins, and a cat’s fang-filled mischief.” —Adele Gardner, from the introduction

With a foreword by S. T. Joshi and an introduction by the author
Illustrated • Featuring art by Gustave Doré and Dan Sauer

Trade paperback - 6 x 9 - 140 pages

“Adele Gardner’s Halloween Hearts presents a kaleidoscopic pageant of delightful October imagery. Haunted by the wistful ghost of childhood past, and paraded through by a midnight processional of witches and black cats, these pages provide a fine evening of autumnal entertainment. Like the many twinkling branches of Bradbury’s Halloween Tree, every pumpkin here has a smile, and every page has a grin—yours.” —K. A. Opperman, author of Past the Glad and Sunlit Season: Poems for Halloween

CONTENTS

Foreword by S. T. Joshi
Introduction: Halloween in Our Hearts

Halloween Hearts
The Witch Girl
Haunt Me
Home Inspection
Witch Habiliments
Black Cat Spare
The Chant of the Black Cats
Midnight Posture
My Little Vampire
Pandemic Food Delivery
Gone the Sun
Our Last Halloween
Seven Steps to Reach Your Father across the Great Divide
Home
Eureka
A Keepsake Box for Poe
Poe’s Prophets
Nevermore
Lenore to Her Tragic Muse, Edgar Allan Poe
To Hear You Speak
Late
I Wander in the Mists
Golden Eye
The Cost
Reynardine
The Catty Hours
A Tasty Treat
Our Lady of Darkness
The Perfect Match
Throat
Passing
Homecoming
The Halloween Mask
Calling All Witches
Black Cat Halloween
House 5
View of an Evening Sun
Salvaging the Monitor
Four Halloween Haiku
Ghost Fleet
Rildix Falls
Morning
Ghost
Waking Beauty
Godolin’s Remains
Starkness
Halloween’s Expiration
Witches We
Many Haunted Returns
Die Alone, the Demon Said

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