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Posts Tagged ‘Halloween’

Get in the (adult) Halloween Spirit with 5 Spooky Books and Paired Wines

Tuesday, October 31st, 2023

Happy Halloween everyone!

Kim Beaussible reporting in on the spookiest day of the year! Wherever you are, I hope that your candy bowl is full for tonight and that your costume will keep you warm and toasty this evening. Here on the west coast, costumes are covered with coats or bolstered by several layers underneath, making my four-year-old nephew’s Spiderman costume look suspiciously buff this year. But this time of year is my favorite. As the summer burns away and the ghosts come out to play, I sink into my books, my spooky movies, and my wine that will eventually spill onto the page when I jump out of my skin. Even spies get scared sometimes.

This Halloween I’ve chosen a few books, paired with a bottle of wine, with something for every reader, from those who like a cozy mystery or a whimsical witchy tale to those who want to be looking over their shoulder after they put the book down. 

 The Thursday Murder Club

This season is the one for book clubs if you ask me. My mother and her friends always seemed to revamp their club in the fall, each leaf on the ground like another page they would burn through. The Thursday Murder Club, from British TV personality Richard Osman, would be my pick for them this spooky season. Set in a retirement home with a diverse cast of characters, this cozy follows a group of retirees who have created a club to solve mysteries in their remaining free time, only to be embroiled a murder case on their doorstep. With humor and mystery, this offbeat cozy is perfect for anyone who’s looking for a spooky read that will make you think but won’t give you nightmares. 

  • I’ve paired this cozy mystery with the Phantom Chardonnay. White wines scream cozy to me, they’re easy to sip and not too heavy, and Phantom wine bottles always catch my eye.

Witch of Wild Things

Now, readers, what would Halloween look like without witches, or books about them for that matter? Practical Magic will always be on my spooky season watchlist or TBR list, with its romantic, whimsical interpretation of witches. Looking for something that fit into my obsession with the Owens witches’ greenhouse, I chose a Witch of Wild Things by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, a romantic fantasy about Sage and her sisters that are figuring out their own unique magical powers. With family, romance, and a little bit of a Poison Ivy killer botany desires mixed in, this book will take you on an emotional, magical rollercoaster. 

  • If it’s romance, it’s got to be rosé. Our Halloween inspired pick, Banshee Rose, had to make the list. With notes of berry, light baking spice and dried herbs, this wine would be any witch’s pick.  

The Lost Apothecary 

If witches and magic haven’t always struck a chord for you because of the fantastical elements, The Lost Apothecary is a great alternative, as a female driven, historical fantasy. A haunted woman runs an apothecary for women in late 1700s London, doling out remedies and poisons for the ladies of the city, when she’s caught up in a scheme from one such lady and her maid. 200 years later, a woman facing the crossroads of her failing marriage finds a vial that once belonged to the apothecary, taking her on a wild goose chase to find out where it came from and to find what she’s been missing in her life. Light and dark all at the same time, this book balances apothecary magic with the real world feminine experience, where a woman’s magic might just set her free. 

  • With the misty fog of London as the backdrop and the ghosts following each character, Ghost Pines Pinot Noir seemed a fitting pair for this book. The label itself reminded me of the apothecary, Nella, making her trips across the Thames to collect supplies for her potions, and the mixture of blackberry and black pepper are perfect for the fall weather.

Ladies of the Lake

If you’re looking for a thriller that sounds like a soap opera drama to drink up with your wine, look no further than Ladies of the Lake from Beaufort Books. After a fight and then a horrific accident in an affluent neighborhood leaves a man dead, his second wife lives her life as if she can finally breathe but other wives start getting jealous and then other husbands start dying and the LAPD and their children turn suspicious. Filled with mystery, suspense, drama, and a little romance this book is the perfect mix for those who like reality TV this Halloween. This is another lighter read for those who aren’t looking to be too scared but rather spookily entertained. 

  • A wine that looks sweet and light but is much darker than it seems, just like this book, my pairing is the Willamette Valley Vineyards White Pinot Noir. While this wine looks like a rosé, it expresses both red and white wine characteristics — creaminess, rich mid-palate, bright aromas and flavors with balanced acidity. 

 A Flicker in the Dark 

This end of the spooky spectrum is where I like to read and live. Thrillers and Horror books are some of my favorites, purely because of their ability to surprise me. A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham is one of my favorite thrillers I’ve read this year; I couldn’t get to the end fast enough, reading the last 100 pages in one sitting. Chloe is afraid of the dark, and rightfully so after learning at 12 that her father was a serial killer. Now 20 years later, she downs her wine with a Xanax just to sleep at night, and when someone appears to become a copycat of her father’s crimes, she takes it upon herself to find the killer despite her fears. 

  • A dark red wine for a dark book, the Prayers of Sinners Red Blend is my favorite on this list as well, with the title sounding just like Chloe’s attempt at atonement for the sins of her father. With notes of coffee, fruit, and gunsmoke, the wine has a bold, elegant finish just like Chloe. 

4 Thrillers to Read to Get Your Halloween Fix

Tuesday, October 29th, 2019

Cozy sweaters and cooling weather make autumn the perfect time to dive into a few spooky stories. Before you rewatch Hocus Pocus for the fifth time this month, why not pick up a written thriller instead? We put together a list of four of our favorite Beaufort thrillers to curl up with during the month of October. But be careful, only the extremely brave should dare to read these titles alone after the sun sets.

The Woman in the Park

As a summer 2019 release, The Woman in the Park is the latest psychological thriller from Beaufort to hit shelves. While The Purist Magazine called it “the beach read you’ve been waiting for” and SheReads named it one of the 10 best chilling end-of-summer thrillers, The Woman in the Park is just as great of a read while stretched out on the sand as it is curled up on the couch.

Synopsis:

When Manhattanite Sarah Rock meets a mysterious and handsome stranger in the park, she is drawn to him. Sarah wants to get away from her daily routine, her cheating husband and his crazy mistress, her frequent sessions with her heartless therapist, and her moody children. But nothing is as it seems. Her life begins to unravel when a woman from the park goes missing and Sarah becomes the prime suspect in the woman’s disappearance. Her lover is nowhere to be found, her husband is suspicious of her, and her therapist is talking to the police. With no one to trust, Sarah must face her inner demons and uncover the truth to prove her innocence.

RED Hotel

A timely thriller based on real-life acts of war, RED Hotel teeters on the edge of reality until the very end. This action-packed book is a combined effort of authors Gary Grossman and Ed Fuller, in which they use their long-standing experience in the hospitality and entertainment industries to write a novel about a terrorist attack at a Tokyo hotel.

Synopsis:

When a bomb rips the façade off the Kensington Hotel in Tokyo, dozens are killed and injured while one man walks calmly away from the wreckage, a coy smile playing on his lips. Former Army intelligence officer Dan Reilly, now an international hotel executive with high level access to the CIA, makes it his mission to track him down. He begins a jet-setting search for answers as the clock ticks down to a climactic event that threatens NATO and the very security of member nations. Reilly begins mining old contacts and resources in an effort to delve deeper into the motive behind these attacks, and fast. Through his connections he learns that the Tokyo bomber is not acting alone. But the organization behind the perpetrator is not who they expect.

Facilitated by the official government from a fearsome global superpower, the implications and reasons for these attacks are well beyond anything Reilly or his sources in the CIA and State Department could have imagined, and point not to random acts of terror, but calculated acts of war. RED Hotel is an incredibly timely globe-trotting thriller that’s fiction on the edge of reality.

Seeking Hyde

If you love Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you’ll love Thomas Reed’s Seeking Hyde. Reed’s book dives into the history of one of the world’s most famous authors, while taking readers along a gripping, heart-pounding journey through late-19th century London. This Beaufort title is the perfect Halloween read for lovers of historical thrillers and die-hard Stevenson fans.

Synopsis:

Seeking Hyde sticks closely to the biographical record as Robert Louis Stevenson struggles to write another book to be the successor to Treasure Island. After the infamous two characters, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, take form in a dream, Stevenson writes passionately for three days, convinced that he has crafted his masterpiece. His wife Fanny, a willful and demanding gypsy, offers a scathing critique, obliging him to start over from the beginning. While the revised tale is published to great acclaim, it is ultimately blamed for inspiring a gruesome series of murders in London’s East End. Desperate to address his own guilt, Stevenson enters the dark underworld of Victorian London. As he follows a twisted path through this midnight landscape, the author-turned-detective wrestles with the social demons of prostitution, police corruption, and the hypocrisy of powerful men—ultimately coming face-to-face with Jack the Ripper himself.

Ladies of the Lake

Author Ken Corday, established producer of popular day-time soap Days of Our Lives, made his publishing debut with the chilling thriller Ladies of the Lake. Since publication, Corday’s novel has been adapted into a successful digital TV series by the same name. This thriller offers readers entertaining family drama, a world-class cast of characters, and a shocking twist-ending that will leave you wanting more.

Synopsis:

From the outside, Avalon seems like the ideal place to live; full of rich men and beautiful women. Six couples form a close-knit friendship; the men all golf together, the women all shop together, and their six children all skip school together. But the wives begin to resent feeling like possessions and realize that the men become crueler every day. When more husbands start dying, the so-called “Ladies of the Lake” find themselves under suspicion from the LAPD and their own children. The six children try to uncover their parents’ secrets before the handsome Detective Daniels can discover what is truly going on behind closed gates. 

Get into the spirit of Halloween with any one of these Beaufort titles. Visit Barnes & Noble or IndieBound to pick up a copy of your chosen thriller today!

Wishing you all a happy Halloween,

Mia ThermoBEAUlis

“We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?” – Norman Bates

Thursday, October 31st, 2013

So, unless you are in some parts of the Midwest (where apparently Halloween has been postponed until tomorrow), it’s Halloween! And you know what that means: hilarious costumes, great parties, adorable children demanding candy, and, most importantly, it is time to put your cats in their witch hats for approximately 14 seconds to capture the perfectly appropriate picture to post on social media. I’m not dressing up this year, but I am living vicariously through my mom and brother and their awesome costumes (Skyler White and Fix-it Felix Jr., respectively). My own form of celebration usually comes from listening to Halloween-themed music (which we are doing in the office today), watching my favorite horror movies all night (John Carpenter’s Halloween is by far the best, followed closely by Gus Van Sant’s revamp of Psycho), and eating as much candy as I possibly can.

In Cold BloodI love horror movies, even the bad ones (especially the bad ones). But I’ve found that I always find the “based on a true story” movies (and books) to be the scariest. Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers is definitely one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. As far as books go, there have been a few books that I have read that have kept me up at night. A couple of years ago, I was getting ready to go on vacation in New Hampshire with my family. As usual, picking out the books I would bring with me (this was pre-Kindle) was an important step in my packing process. I grabbed a couple of books that I had recently bought and hadn’t read before. When I finally got to New Hampshire, my reading binge began. Sitting on the sand at Onway Lake, I breezed through Atonement, which one of my best friends told me I would love (I didn’t, but my mom did). After finishing that, I decided to start reading In Cold Blood. I knew that it was a true-crime, hard-to-categorize “novel” about the murder of a family in Kansas…and that’s about all I knew. I started reading the book and was immediately drawn into the first section, which details the lives of the Clutter family in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. Quickly, however, I began to regret the decision to read this book on my vacation.

During the day, I leisurely read the book on the beach while I took breaks from swimming and hanging out with my family. In broad daylight, there was nothing so terrifying about the book. However, in New Hampshire, we stayed in cottages on the lake that were very isolated and had (at times) faulty locks. We were on the edge of a large wooded area and, as I remember, I had bad cell phone reception. The setting itself sounds like a horror story. Even though it was lovely during the day, after reading about the family’s murder and the trial, I wasn’t able to sleep for the rest of the week. I was convinced that Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith were going to break into the cottage while I was asleep (even though they had been dead for about 50 years). The isolation of the Clutter’s farm where the family was murdered was eerily similar to the isolation I felt in New Hampshire. Even after I finished the book, I still found it hard to sleep in the cottage. Although the vacation was great, I was so happy to go home to a completely overpopulated and crowded New Jersey so that I could finally get some sleep.

-There’s Always Money in the Beaunana Stand

Little Beau Peep: Literary Halloween Costumes

Thursday, October 25th, 2012

Halloween’s almost here! If you’re like me and you haven’t figured out what to dress up as yet, here are some simple literary costume ideas (guaranteed to make you stand out and/or elicit teasing from your friends):


• Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby (see left)

What you’ll need: a white suit, slicked back hair, and a mysterious smile

Bonus: Get a female friend to dress up as Daisy Buchanan in a classic white dress

 

• Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter

What you’ll need: an old dress with an ‘A’ stitched into it and a baby doll

 

• Edward Cullen from Twilight

What you’ll need: pale foundation, red colored contacts, glitter, and a perpetually miserable facial expression

 

• Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games (see right)

What you’ll need: bright make-up, a curly wig, fake eyelashes, and an utterly ridiculous outfit

Suggested Effie quotes to randomly exclaim:

“May the odds be ever in your favor!”

“Manners!”

“That is mahogany!”

 

• The Giving Tree from The Giving Tree

What’ll you need: plain brown clothes, green body paint, fake leaves, and apples

Bonus: Give away all of your leaves and apples by the end of the night

 

Let us know what you’re dressing up as for Halloween!

 

Little Beau Peep

From Our Beau House To Yours-Halloween H20

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

As Halloween is over I thought I’d catalogue a few impressions from the wonderful night of mischief, vampires, and literary encounters with the ghosts of writers past. If you didn’t spend All Hallow’s Eve at a monster ball in Brooklyn and ended up in a loft party with sparklers, demanding fake passwords from strangers, you may have been in Manhattan, and well, I can’t help you out there, it’s the worst place to spend All Saints’ day.

Back to the Better Borough (yes, said that for the alliteration since this is a publishing house) Repulsed, enthralled, impressed, enlightened, and “Woah, my eyes hurt from all that stardust, Ziggy!” Here are the top 3 costumes I witnessed from my Zombie-Ben-Franklin-Your-Mom persona that evening. Before this list, a quick message on America’s numero uno founding father. First, it’s entirely relevant to this blog: he started as a printer and publisher, dirt poor (like me!) and changed the course of history, while also founding the first Philadelphia public library (not like me!). Back to the list:
1. Some cute little 13 18 year old hipsters (and it is affirmative they were not grad students with IKEA apartments with a creepy obsession with Liz Lemon) dressed as the entire cast of “30 Rock.” So either a) my friends aren’t that cool. b) I don’t have 9 friends.

2. Cast of “Freaks and Geeks.” Now I know you’re not cool enough to think of that, neither was I.

3. Kissing Booth. Genius.

So there you have it, the last ever post on Hallo – remember to hydrate next time kids! -ween.

-Nikki-Lee

From Our Beau House To Yours – Book Philanthropy

Friday, October 30th, 2009

While reading Edgar Allan Poe, rather defensively, as I came home to Brooklyn last night on the L train, a young man (ok, let’s say a hipster with an MA in English Lit) asked politely what I was reading. I was faced with a predicament. Do I ignore this (despite what must have been a hipster parody Halloween costume rehearsal) presentable young fellow who was clearly not a subway lunatic, law and order psychopath, or seller of illegal drugs? My non-New York roots said clearly, well that’s just rude. So I answered, rather defensively, Poe. He then said a pretty decent question in my book (yay “book” pun):

“Do you like poetry?”

Me: “Never heard of the stuff (read: lie).”

“What enchanting lies! Here’s a book of poems, take it, it’s good.”

Me: “Um…”

He got off at the next stop while I profusely claimed I couldn’t accept this gift. Now, while my crazy radar went off like crazy, as it does in NY, I thought: well now that’s pretty cool, man. It was an Italian translation of Umberto Saba, and is still in my totebag. In the future I think I’ll be more prone to impulsive fits of literary kindness in the big city. Turn to your neighbor, put on your best smile, a philanthropic book exchange in a looming misanthropic winter!

-Nikki-Lee

From Our Beau House To Yours – Literary Costumes

Monday, October 5th, 2009

As schedules become more hectic with the speeding year, it’s easy to forget about one of the best celebrations of the year, that is Halloween. As a firm believer in the make-your-own-costume Halloween ethic, and given the current economic crisis, I hope many New Yorkers steer clear of overpriced costume stores or websites.

Common Store Bought Costume Examples. And yes, everyone can tell you bought it online:

1. Slutty Devil/Angel/Vampire/Werewolf/Meercat/Whatever

2. Slutty Tinkerbell

3. Slutty Hermione Granger

Now, it may just be me, but the standard let’s pick a universal theme and sluttify it doesn’t strike me as that hard to come up with. But bridging into childhood fairytales seems a little off-kilter. Slutty Hermione Granger? Who came up with that? Why don’t they just say outright: Warning – this is a 13 year old favorite literary character aimed at pre-adolescent teens. Just saying it’s a little weird. What about that actress who plays Hermione Granger? On October 31 there’s going to be 20-somethings all over the world dressed like her, but looking like a prostitute. Just a little irresponsible.

To fight the masses here are some AWESOME do-it-yourself-literary costume ideas:

1. James Joyce: don some spectacles, a mustache and a constant supply of Guinness.

2. (for couples) Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Red lipstick, 50s garb, and a convincing look of manic depression in your eye.

3. Hunter S. Thompson: this one particularly helps if you look like Johnny Depp, but unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, short shorts, glasses, cigarette and cigarette holder, medicinal marijuana if you have a prescription.

4. David Foster Wallace. Um, too soon? Ok too soon.

And you get the idea: they’re fun, convincing, and you don’t have to worry about pedophilia or going to your cute friend’s Halloween party dressed as a hot dog. Or just the mustard.

-Nikki-Lee