As a kid, I looked forward to nothing in school quite as much as the newsprint Weekly Reader Book Club catalogs that would get passed around the class (never weekly, strangely enough, but on a monthly or bi-monthly basis). In those pages were dozens of books and posters and post card sets you could order and have delivered right to the classroom. A few of my favorite treasures from those years included a monster joke book … a poster featuring a menacing robot and the tagline “The Future is Now!” … a whole bunch of Heathcliff and Garfield collections …

And this much-loved gem that may have set me on my storytelling course:

Movie Monsters: Monster Make-up and Monster Shows to Put On by Alan Ormsby.

I must have read that book a million times, studying the recipes for “ghoul hands,” learning how to create the transformation from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde using a little makeup and colored lights, and memorizing the lines for a monster play I just knew I’d one day perform before a terrified audience. The plays were silly and fun, featuring Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula and the Wolf Man. Soon enough, I started writing my own plays, filling up composition books with line after line of corny dialogue … and casting (in my head) the friends who would play the monsters (I, by the way, would play the voice of the Invisible Man while using fishing line to move a pipe back and forth across the stage. Genius!)

I’ve always liked monsters and ghosts and things that went bump in the night, and there have been countless books and magazines and movies and comics that have inspired me over the years. But — as I trace my origins as a writer — I think it might have been Mr. Ormsby’s book of monster make-up that gave me the itch to tell my own stories, horror or otherwise.