Blood Moon Chapel

The Halloween moment I anticipate most each year is not midnight, but 5:17 in the afternoon—not fully dark, streetlamps already on but not bright enough. You're walking to the party, unopened candy in your pocket, passing a window where candles are already lit but no one has arrived yet. That tension of waiting moves me more than revelry itself. This collection grew from that moment. I once attended a séance reenactment on Hampstead Heath in London, organized by an old woman in a pink cardigan; her ghost props were hand-painted, with round eyes that seemed to ask for embraces. In that instant I understood that horror and tenderness have never been antonyms—they are two brightness settings of the same emotion. Baudelaire's dusk, Tim Burton's childhood, my grandmother's half-knitted Halloween sweater: all these memories of 'hours between' finally become wearable suspense at the fingertips—do you want to be read tonight as romantic, playful, glacial, or soft?