First of all, you should check out Pagan Prattle’s annual collection of loony Christian Halloween scare stories from the world’s media. I note in passing that black cats are probably in much more danger from Christians who mistake them for demons than from Satanists.

Still, if you do want a ripping yarn about Satanic sacrifice, try Mike Carey’s new Felix Castor novel, Vicious Circle. (And yes, it does have Juliet the succubus in it.)

For Halloween music, you might check out the classic neo-pagan acid folk album, First Utterance, by Comus, which is now available again as part of a band retrospective.

On the other hand, if you just want something strangely and amusingly horrible…

As I have probably said before, my good friend Marc Gascoigne is a connoisseur of bad Christmas records. But his knowledge of weird stuff extends well beyond Christmas. Recently he introduced me to Señor Coconut y su Conjunto. That’s actually German electronica maestro, Uwe Schmidt, and a bunch of his Chilean friends. These days they do some good Latino electronica, but they are also responsible for el baile aleman (the German album), a Latino version of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. Some parts of that are very listenable. I rather like their version of “Showroom Dummies”. But the mariachi band version of “Autobahn”, which manages to use Kraftwerk’s tunes to conjure images of a donkey cart lumbering along a dirt track, is one of those songs where you can’t quite tell if your reaction is collapsing with laughter, collapsing in hysterics, or having your mind reamed by arcane knowledge that man was never meant to know.

Happy Samhain everyone.