The Sensation of Summerween
We may be in the midst of heatwaves, but you don’t have to wait for the nights to draw in to start getting your Halloween on – because at the moment, summerween is all the rage. We hear from two authors on this rising trend and why they decided to write about it… And they may just inspire you to get a little spooky this summer!
Joss Wood, author of Summerween (One More Chapter, 16 July) says: Summerween is having a moment, and how cool is that? Of all the things that could be trending—and man, there are some ghastly people and even ghastlier events yelling for our attention, both online and off—I’m pretty thrilled that a combo of Halloween and summer is getting people excited.
I mean, why choose between sunshine and being spooked when you can have both?
To me, Summerween is a fruity cocktail, a black cat in a floatie, cobwebs, bats, and the summer sun. Skeletons wearing Hawaiian shirts, pink flamingos, and watermelon jack-o’-lanterns. It’s laughter, hot nights, moonlight, and maybe a shiver or two when a ghost runs its fingers down your spine.
In my romcom, Summerween, I tried to capture that lovely absurdity. My fictional town of Solstice Springs is populated with nosy ghosts, a shrewd mayor who’s also the world’s worst witch, and residents who are gloriously Halloween-mad. While Wren and Dane fall in love, the rest of the town takes their Halloween obsession to new heights by staging a Summerween-on-steroids festival.
In Summerween, the lead-up to the Bonfire of the Bewitched is packed with gloriously ridiculous events. There’s Float & Fright Night, where horror films are projected onto a giant screen while the audience watches from canoes, rafts, and inflatables. The Ice Scream Spooktacular serves flavours like Caramel Cadaver, Cursed Cotton Candy, Black Cat Fudge Attack, and Death by Chocolate, while the Boos & Boat Bash sees costumed revellers cruising the lake aboard boats draped in fairy lights, and ghostly décor. My favourite is the Witches & Warlocks Paddle Parade, where witches and warlocks paddle across Lantern Lake beneath the moonlight.
The festival culminates in the Bonfire of the Bewitched, where anyone can write a wish—or a regret—on a bat-shaped piece of paper, toss it into the roaring flames, and hope the ghosts take care of the rest.
So whether you’re a True Believer in the paranormal or a Sceptic—both abound in the book—I leave you with this deeply philosophical thought: There could be a ghost breakdancing beside you right now… and you’d never know.
Heather Spellman, author of Cruel Summerween (Pan, 16 July) says: I always jokingly say that in our house, every day is Halloween. Perhaps it’s a holdover from my teenage goth years, but we can’t get enough of the lightly spooky – even my seven-year-old son is obsessed with things that go bump in the night!
I grew up in Australia, where Halloween wasn’t widely celebrated at the time – I remember trick-or-treating when I was about twelve, and people staring blankly at me and my friends in our costumes! That’s changed now, though, and every year my mum sends me photos of the neighbourhood decorations and the trick or treaters (big and small) who come to visit. I think we’re all looking for ways to build community together, and wandering around the neighbourhood chatting with people while collecting chocolate and lollies is a pretty good way to do it!
I currently live in the US, where Halloween is huge – there are massive pop-up shops dedicated to Halloween decorations and costumes! Those tend to open a few months ahead of Halloween, and I think are partly responsible for Halloween’s sneaking into the summer months. After all, if you spy a sparkly skeleton or pink zombie cat in July, are you really going to wait until October to put it out? Over here, there isn’t really a big holiday between the Fourth of July and Halloween, so it makes sense that once the red, white and blue decorations get packed away, the spooky stuff comes out! It’s always nice to have something to look forward to, after all.
That seasonal scope creep also offers up so many opportunities to add a summery twist to the holiday – if you have your 3.5m tall Home Depot skeleton out all year round (as some of my neighbours do), why not dress it up with some florals or give it a watermelon cocktail to sip on? Why not get all dolled up in your fancy costume before the weather turns? And how about a pool party with jack-o-melons and ghostly decor? We’re all about genre mashups these days, and Summerween is a great opportunity to meld the best of the sunshiney and the spooky into something fresh and fun…and I certainly had some fun with it in Cruel Summerween, where witchy meets whimsy on every page!
