With the Eve of All Hallows breathing down our collective necks, today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit tantalizes the terror buds with a dose of ship-to-shore shivers, a walk-through spookhouse spelunk and a Trick or Treat drop-in from a somewhat unlikely exemplar of Halloween tradition.
That would be pop culture writer and “trends journalist” Alix Strauss (right), whose books include The Joy of Funerals and Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous and the Notorious. The self-styled “Death Lady” comes to Brookdale Community College this Thursday as a special guest attraction during opening night of this year’s Haunted Theater event on BCC’s Lincroft campus. We’ll have the particulars on the drama department’s sixth annual offering, where madness and The Method go hand in claw. We’ve also got an exclusive interview with the author, in which she expounds upon sucide, a topic of sometimes forbidden fascination (and graces us with her own prime pick for the celeb suicide-watch pool).
From there it’s down to Paranormal Books in Asbury, that parlour of arcane lore that also makes a dandy little theatre for the one-man performances of actor Greg Oliver Bodine. The guy who previously brought some of Poe‘s greatest hits to walking-dead life (and who also spins a killer Christmas Carol) returns Shoreside tomorrow evening with Dark Soundings, a double-bill of antique chillers (by the under-appreciated Francis Marion Crawford) in a salt-water vein.
It’s all here, in that most sincere of virtual pumpkin patches Red Bank oRBit.