WARNING: This is a special Halloween edition of my “weekend reading links”. If the Halloween season keeps you cowering safe inside your home, away from the dark and the scary, then it’s probably best to read no more of this page and please come back next week. You have been warned.

We don’t really need to travel far to find the horrible and the scary. Just one step from my front door, the morning after a storm that brought drenching rains and even a nearby tornado, I found a gangly and harmless Grandaddy Longlegs having breakfast on the head of a wasp.

Even more horrifying–when Mr. Granddaddy Longlegs got startled, probably by me shoving a camera in his face, he didn’t just run for cover. No, he picked up the body of the wasp, like some mechanical robot crane with eight legs, and scuttled away with the wasp into the shadows.

War of the Worlds, indeed!

If that doesn’t exemplify Halloween’s reminder of the sometimes thinness of the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead, I don’t know what does.

So, in honor of Halloween, I’ve a series of weekend reading links, ordered by degree of mundanity. This means that the first links are totally harmless, and they proceed in topic by measure of depression, depravity, horror, and/or insanity. So, you should start reading with the first, then stop when you feel the edges of reality slipping from your grasp. But note that the last link is extra special.

Cheers!