HAPPY HALLOWEEN.  Here’s some new audio goodies to celebrate this crazy annual affair we call Halloween.

To start, here’s a great link to the Halloween Poetry Readings that the Science Fiction Poetry Association has collected.  They’ve posted “Halloween Costumes I Wish I Would Have Seen” — a clip from my reading event at Penn Highlands Community College (Johnstown, PA) earlier this week.  On the SFPA site, you get there are a handful of great poems there for you to trick or treat your ears with. 

Update, 2009: It’s no longer on the SFPA page, but you can listen to it here on gorelets.com:

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I’ve also uploaded a bonus audio clip from the event – my short-short story, “How to Grow a Man Eating Plant” — to myspace for a limited time.  Listen to it on the Arnzen profile page.

I found these zombies arresting, at Zombiefest 2008.

Zombiefest 2008 — held at the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh this weekend — has so far been both fun and disturbingly surreal.  I’ve posted some photos from the first day of the dead in the gorelets.com gallery – mostly of friends in publishing, but also a few freaky shots like the one above.  Aside from crawling the mall, hanging out at my publisher‘s table and saying “Brainnns!” over and over again, yesterday I performed a fiction reading along with Ryan Mecum (author of Zombie Haiku) and Steve North (author of Dead Tide) — which you should be able to hear a podcast of soon on Library of the Living Dead – and I was also videorecorded doing another reading of weird excerpts from my “dream journal” for FearZone.com, appearing soon.  This morning portends a record-breaking “mall crawl” for World Zombie Day.

Some folks have been asking when I’m reading at Zombiefest this weekend, so I thought I should post a reminder here.

I’m hitting the mic today (Sat. 10/25) at 4pm, in a storefront beside the main stage (the readings will take place in a defunct Men’s Warehouse store on the first floor of the mall, right in front of Boscov’s) for the convention in the Mall.

The folks at FearZone provide a full weekend schedule.

Some Imaginary Anatomies and Astonishing Somatic Illustrations:

• Cartoon Characters
• Kaiju
• Balloon Animals

The October issue (#30) of The Dream People magazine features a zippy little “flash interview” with myself and also one with Donna Lynch. There are also articles and stories by folks like Matt Warner and Jeremy Shipp. Recommended surrealism!

Oct 11, 1:30-4:30pm | PARSEC Meeting | Squirrel Hill Library (5801 Forbes), Pittsburgh, PA

“What is Horror?”: Join Lawrence C. Connolly (author of Veins), Scott Johnson (author of Cane River) and I in a discussion of the genre and the state it’s in today today with PARSEC: the Pittsburgh Area Science Fiction Enthusiast Club. Meeting held at the Carnegie Library in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh. Attendees must join PARSEC ($15).

Oct 25th 4-5pm | Zombiefest 2008 | Monroeville Mall, Pittsburgh, PA

Zombiefest is a two-day zombie-themed convention held at the Monroeville Mall, site of the Romero zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, featuring vendor exhibits, film screenings, author discussion panels, live bands, games and other fun activities for zombie fans (like a masquerade ball). The con culminates in a record-breaking “zombie walk” by attendees. This year, it’s FREE admission!

You’ll find me at the Raw Dog Screaming Press table in the mall from time to time all weekend, and I’ll be appearing on the 25th at 4pm on a panel (held in a storefront beside the main stage) along with Ryan Mecum, Steve North. A complete list of celebrity guests and writers has just been posted. Special thanks to Weird Tales magazine and Raw Dog Screaming Press for sponsoring my participation in the event!

Oct 27th, 7pm | Pennsylvania Highlands Community College | Johnstown, PA

Arnzen reads creepy fiction and poetry at this literary event. More details to follow.

Halloween approacheth. Look for the “Writer’s Talk” series on WCBE (Ohio’s NPR station), which will be airing interviews with Michael Arnzen, Gary Braunbeck, Lucy Snyder, and Lawrence Connolly each Wednesday in October.

The topic is “The Business & Life of Writing Horror” and all of us had a blast together answering questions about this crazy genre of dread and terror. The Arnzen session airs tonight on WCBE (10/8/08) at 8pm, and I think it turned out really well. If you miss it, don’t worry:  you should be able to hear the podcast online, provided by Doug Dangler and the Ohio Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing. In fact, you can stream a copy of it on your computer right now here:

The full interview will all four horror writers will soon be available on OSU’s CSTW website — which you can also subscribe to on iTunes .