Death will claim us all soon enough; it’s both foolish and counterproductive to waste one’s life trying to escape the inescapable, and to suck all the marrow out of its bones in a futile attempt to delay the inevitable. – “Halloween 2013”
My natal month is, of course, dominated by my natal day, and besides the directly Halloween-themed “Trick or Treat“, the tangentially-related “Total Perspective Vortex” and “Book Review: The Science of Fear“, and the strong influences on the harlotography (“Aileen Wuornos“) and fictional interlude (“Monopoly“), several of the titles of otherwise non-horror-oriented columns were horror-inspired (as were their illustrations). It’s not hard to pick them out of the list of Q&A columns (“Your Move“, “It Takes All Kinds“, “All Clean“, “Buried But Not Dead” and “Horns“) and Cliterati reprints (“Dark Corners“, “Imaginary Evils“, “Sex Rays” 
and “Everything Old is New Again“), and then of course there’s “Torture Chamber“. After the guest column (Sasha Castel on being a mistress), two stats columns (“Frequently Told Lies” and “Handy Figures Revisited“), and an extra news column (“Hysteria on Parade“), that leaves only two columns on prohibitionist tyranny: a look at Swanee Hunt’s “Vendetta” against whores, and a critique of the US government’s “Whimsical Notions” that men can be ordered to be asexual.
