HALLOWEEN BACK IN THE U.S.A....
I missed Halloween!
Let me just get that off my
chest… I MISSED HALLOWEEN, lol.
I also missed Christmas, Easter,
Thanksgiving… Talk Like A Pirate Day.
But Halloween has always been one
of my favorite holidays.
I just moved back to the United
States in July. This was after spending almost five years living in Thailand,
with another few years in India prior to that.
Halloween is one holiday that
just doesn’t translate, even if, like in Thailand, they like to celebrate it,
at least in the big cities where a lot of foreigners live.
Since I lived in Bangkok, which
is pretty much the epitome of that, they had Halloween-themed movie nights,
Halloween decorations in the malls (there are a LOT of malls in Bangkok),
Halloween-themed bar nights (a LOT of Halloween-themed bar nights… Bangkok
likes its bars), costume parties thrown by foreigners living there and some of
the consulates… Halloween music in the coffee shops.
It’s not the same.
Sorry, it’s not even close to the
same.
The weather doesn’t help.
It’s pretty much 90 degrees
Fahrenheit year-round in Bangkok, with roughly 80-90 percent humidity. That
doesn’t flex all that much, although there are seasons in Bangkok. There’s the
super-duper, crazy hot season that runs roughly from April to June, where it
goes up to the high nineties, and even into the one-hundreds. There’s the
wetter seasons, the “hot” and “cold” monsoons, where it rains a lot and the
city floods. But it never really cools down. “Cold” Monsoon is just slightly
cooler than the one at the end of the hot dry season.
Winter, which is around late
November to February, is heavenly if you live there – but it’s still like high
eighties to low nineties, which is, yeah, still hot.
So wearing a costume in that, for
the average Westerner, isn’t much fun. A lot of living in Thailand is hopping
from one air-conditioned enclave to another. I’m a big walker / outdoorsy
person, and even I needed a lot of breaks from being outside.
Also, while Halloween is a
novelty for Thais, and fun for them, it’s really not a part of their culture,
so it’s not celebrated by most families. Thai kids don’t trick or treat… it’s
not a thing there (although I did give out candy in my building). Horror movies
are huge in Thailand, especially for teens, but that’s kind of a year-round
thing, and even teenagers don’t care all that much about Halloween as a
separate thing.
There’re no carved pumpkins on
doorsteps, no scarecrows or other weird, macabre decorations on front porches
or in yards, no dads making dorky attempts to scare kids, no haunted houses, no
leaves changing colors, no big street parties like there were in San Francisco
when I lived there. And yeah, because there’s no trick or treating, there’s
also no roving bands of kids in crazy-cute costumes, jacked out of their minds
on intense sugar and chocolate rushes.
Because of all that, this will be
my first REAL Halloween since 2013.
I’m kind of overwhelmed by the
possibilities, now that I’m living in Los Angeles. Part of me is tempted to go
all-out and do a Disneyland Halloween, or one at one of the other nearby
amusement parks, since all of them seem to have big, fun Halloween blowouts.
Whatever I end up doing though,
whatever costume I pull out at the last minute, whichever friends of mine I
drag out for a night of fun, I’m here for it! There’s nothing like a few years
in a foreign country to make you miss the little things of home.
Hope everyone else has a fun,
spooky, dorky, sugary, costume-y, autumn-y, pumpkin-y, and haunted-house-filled
Halloween, as well! :)
Vampire
Detective Midnight
Book
One
JC
Andrijeski
Genre: Paranormal Mystery /
Science Fiction
Publisher: White Sun Press
Date of Publication: June 25th,
2019
ISBN: 9781074675288
ASIN: B07TJ2T9DG
Number of pages: 386
Word Count: 101,821
Cover Artist: Damonza
Tagline: It’s hard being a cop in
the future. It’s even harder when you’re a vampire.
Book Description:
Nick
frowned, staring around at the alley floor.
It
hit him again.
There
was something wrong with this blood.
It
smelled too good.
It smelled way,
way too good…
Vampire with a past and homicide
detective, Naoko “Nick” Tanaka just got transferred to the NYPD, where he works
as a “Midnight,” or vampire in the employ of the human police. Like all
state-reg’d vamps, he gets his food delivered to his door, lives in government
housing, and basically can’t sneeze without the U.S. government knowing about
it.
More than anything, he just wants
to be left alone, to endure his immortality in peace, but he’s barely in New
York two weeks when things start to go sideways.
It all starts with his new
case––a case involving dead hybrids, graffiti that tells the future, a kid who
shouldn’t exist at all, and a possible conspiracy involving the richest humans
in New York.
That doesn’t even get into the
school principal, a woman with secrets of her own, who has a deeply unsettling
effect on him.
Nick finds he can’t get personally
uninvolved with any of it. Instead, he gets sucked in even deeper, until he’s
pretty sure he’ll end up forcibly reprogrammed by his human owners––assuming
they don’t just rip his heart out of his chest and be done with it.
He needed to feed.
It was putting him in a foul mood.
That, and all this fucking blood…
Nick frowned, staring around at the alley floor.
It hit him again.
There was something wrong with this blood.
It smelled too fucking good.
It smelled way too fucking good.
That couldn’t all be Nick’s hunger.
“Anyway, that’s what I can tell you so far,” he said, making his voice deliberately casual. “Without knowing who the victims are, or what brought them to this alley, it’s pretty hard to speculate on motive, but…”
Nick hesitated then, realizing something.
Frowning, he stepped closer to the pools of blood.
Nose wrinkling, he crouched down so he could smell it from closer, even though the scent was overpowering, even from a lot further away. Taking a few full whiffs, he felt his fangs begin to extend in earnest.
That time, he couldn’t pull it back.
A flush of heat hit his gut and chest, burning in his throat. It was intense enough, he almost got hard, but he’d gotten pretty good at squelching that reaction, too.
He stood up at once.
Really, he lurched back.
It happened so fast, that smell and his reaction to it, Nick forgot to modulate his body’s natural reflexes to accommodate the people around him. He was up and moving in a heartbeat, darting back in pure instinct, without slowing his movements at all.
He moved fast enough to make the humans around him freeze.
Instantly, they turned into prey.
Ignoring them, and ignoring their deer-in-headlights reactions to how he’d just moved, Nick backed away from the pool of blood with a scowl.
He backed away from the human detectives and tech team, too.
“They’re hybrids,” he said, emotion reaching his voice.
He turned around, staring at the humans sharing the alley with him.
The stared back at him, faces blank, eyes holding flickers of fear.
Frustrated, wanting to smash through that frozen prey look, Nick let his voice turn into a harder growl.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nick said. “Did you hear me? They’re all fucking hybrids.”
When they still didn’t speak, he averted his gaze with a scowl. His eyes returned to the alley. Staring around at all of that blood, it sank in what it really represented.
Once it had, he couldn’t help but feel sick.
About
the Author:
JC Andrijeski is a USA TODAY and
WALL STREET JOURNAL bestselling author who writes paranormal mysteries and
apocalyptic fiction, often with a sexy, romantic and metaphysical bent. JC has
a background in journalism, history and politics, and loves martial arts, yoga,
meditation, hiking, swimming, horseback riding, painting… and of course reading
and writing. She grew up in the Bay Area of California, but travels extensively
and has lived abroad in Europe, Australia and Asia, and from coast to coast in
the continental United States. She currently lives and writes full-time in
Bangkok, Thailand.
Current series include: Vampire
Detective Midnight, the Bridge & Sword series, the Quentin Black Mystery
series, The Morph series, and the Alien Apocalypse series. She’s also written a
number of standalone novels, novellas and short stories, as well as nonfiction
articles and essays.
To learn more about JC and her
writing, please visit
