The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats.Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows’ Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked. Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree

It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. Stephen King, Pet Sematary

Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, woundeverything around you. Marisha Pessl, Night Film

Pictures … flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night. Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

I long for the daysOf pumpkins and ghosts;  When the dead use homes And people as hosts. E. Reyes, Devil’s Hill: An Anthology