A Spooky Interview with C.E. O'Conaing

Samhain Screams will be released on the 17th of October—but the Kindle version is available for pre-order today at just $1.99 instead of $3.99. You can also add the anthology to your Goodreads list. Our aim is quite simply to make Halloween 2025 the spookiest ever with this anthology featuring twenty scary tales handpicked by Greg Chapman and Cameron Trost. Do you dare peek into the troubled minds of our contributing authors?

Hi C.E.,

What does Halloween mean to you and how do you celebrate it?

Halloween’s always been a big holiday for me, as I was surprisingly sensitive to scares as a kid. I remember being terrified of an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, so Halloween was a fun way to get introduced to horror tropes and themes in a way that was more fun than overwhelming—even for a bona fide scaredy cat like my childhood self. Thank God for The Treehouse of Horror!

Without giving too much away, is there a story behind your contribution to this anthology?

The final image from this story, and actually, the entire climax, came to me in a nightmare just as I was falling to sleep. Without spoiling anything, all I’ll say is that I woke up to a notepad where I’d jotted down a description of that last image and, devoid of context, it creeped the shit out of me!

What are you working on at the moment? What are you writing?

I’m currently working on a handful of other short stories, some horror and some in the sci-fi/fantasy vein. One of these, Sentimental Value, is forthcoming in Crystal Lake Publishing’s Memento Mori: Book One, so look out for that in the near future!

Thanks for playing along!