A bonus Halloween post for you all. This is the October 1984 issue of Cricket, a children’s lit magazine. It was the first issue of Cricket I got and let me tell you, that cover, “The Witching Hour,” by Fritz Wegner, was surely an important factor in warping my six-year-old brain. I remember staring at this thing for hours and drawing crude reproductions of it. My original copy vanished and for many years I forgot all about it. Once I remembered, it took quite a few years to track down a copy. Turns out I still love that cover just as much.

Inside, Wegner also contributed the illustration for the table of contents, which includes an evil Mickey Mouse? That’s a delightfully odd choice. The rest of the magazine is, well, a friendly children’s lit magazine. The only other outright spookfest is Linda Allen’s silly “The Humpbacked Gorrible with a Hole in Its Head,” which features delightful illustrations by John Vernon Lord. The Gorrible kind of reminds me the Crawler in Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, which is a weird sort of potential connection!