It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is about Halloween tropes:

If you could retell a Halloween story or trope from a fresh angle, what would you choose and why?

Hm, I don’t really know. I’m not much for spooky stories, really — not in my own writing, anyway (I think my October reading this year has given the lie to any claims I don’t read horror).

There’s a story of a “Green Lady” ghost at Caerphilly Castle, with a whole typical cheating/betrayal/comeuppance narrative — I guess it might be fun to write a story about that, and make sure to make it properly Welsh in detail and setting. I don’t think I know of anything that’s played with that particular iteration of the story, and setting it on Nos Galan Gaeaf makes as much sense as anything. I think there are probably plenty of Welsh traditions one could add in around Nos Galan Gaeaf that’d work to flesh it out.

Other than that, I think haunted house stuff can be interesting to play with: why might a haunting be dormant for one family and raging at the next? Does some member of the family being haunted just shrug it off, or come to a truce with the ghost/s? That kind of thing can be fun, and play on the creepiness that most people have felt at some point: an empty house just not feeling quite right, jumping at shadows, startling at the weird sounds a new-to-you house makes…

Mostly these days I’m not super interested in writing myself, but that’s an urge that comes and goes.