No lava enemas here; just good scary stories.

There’s still a little time for All Hallows’ Read! (Or a lot of time, if you include All Saints’ Day Month. Which we do.)

If you haven’t already read Eirik Gumeny’s “horror/comedy epic,” “The Gnome-pocalypse Is Upon Us,” frankly, you’re just embarrassing yourself. Remedy this by reading it immediately.

There’s also our October Issue and the Halloween Issue from 2012, as well as any of the following: Stephen King’s IT, The Shining or Salem’s Lot; Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book; Ray Bradbury’s October Country or Something Wicked This Way Comes; Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House; and anything by H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, obviously.

Don't mind me; I'm just here to watch you sleep.

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve recently picked up where Mike left off as the online editor after he took over for Eirik in 2011. I feel very lucky to be here, and, through collaboration with Sam, who is staying on as production editor (thanks, Sam!), I will strive to maintain the unparalleled balance of strangeness, beauty, and poop jokes that have defined the JDP aesthetic for the last four years.

At the moment, we’re looking for funny, adventurous, creepy, heartworming (not a typo; we’re actively seeking tales that burrow into our vital organs like emotional parasites), and crazy-banana-pants stories to close out the December issue and start filling the 2014 calendar, so submit ’em if you got ’em. And if you don’t got ’em, write ’em. Then submit ’em.

The November issue will be out in a few weeks, and—spoiler alert—it’s fucking awesome. In the meantime, we invite you to enjoy kick-ass stories from the four talented writers featured in (sniffle-snort-honk) Mike’s last issue: Lawrence Buentello, Caitlin Sinead Jennings, Dan Ress, and Ryan Werner. And you gotta love that cover art.

Quoth the raven, "Eat my shorts."

It might be an adorable preschooler wearing an Incredible Hulk mask with her tutu. Or three teenagers with empty pillowcases, no discernible costumes, and makeshift cudgels dangling from their hands. Or maybe it’s the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe, back to check if he left his iPhone at your place last night.

In any of these scenarios, you’d want to send your visitor(s) away happy, right?

To that end, in honor of Neil Gaiman’s All Hallow’s Read, we urge you to drop a spooky story into someone’s plastic pumpkin bucket this year, such as the terrifying tales by Caitlin Sinead Jennings or Dan Ress from our October issue. The stories from last season’s shiver-inducing Halloween Special Issue would also score big points with your friends, family members, casual acquaintances, and mortal enemies.

And if you’re worried about what to do with all those Snickers and Reese’s peanut butter cups you were planning to hand out, we’d gladly take them off your hands. (Editorial Staff, c/o The Jersey Devil, Pine Barrens, NJ, USA. Or just leave the basket under a tree; we’ll find it.)