Halloween may be over, but try telling that to horror legend William Castle. The man won’t even acknowledge the fact that he’s been dead for over 30 years. As those who knew him best will say, Castle does what Castle likes … and what Castle likes most is terrifying the pants off people.

That’s why the infamous producer of Rosemary’s Baby has released “House on Haunted Hill: A William Castle Annotated Screamplay,” a 248-page book featuring the working script from his 1959 classic horror show House on Haunted Hill, complete with his very own hand-written notes and original formatting. An introduction from renowned producer/director Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins) is also included.

“House on Haunted Hill: A William Castle Annotated Screamplay” is now available at Amazon and selected retailers (visit the William Castle website for more info). But, those living in Los Angeles can pick up a copy autographed by Castle’s daughter Terry at Larry Edmunds Bookshop on Thursday, Nov. 10 at 7:30pm.

Those attending the event will be treated to trailers, clips and secret surprises … who knows, maybe, even a William Castle ghost sighting.

Castle returned from the dead last May during the 33rd anniversary of his death and has since published the young-adult novel “From the Grave: The Prayer” and set up Twitter and Facebook accounts to stay in touch with fans.

Stephen King read a chapter from his upcoming novel “Dr. Sleep,” the eagerly anticipated sequel to his 1977 masterpiece “The Shining,” while accepting the Mason Award at the annual Fall for the Book festival in Fairfax, Virginia.

“Dr. Sleep” follows a grown-up Danny Torrence as he uses his unique powers to help the ill pass away peacefully at the hospice where he works. Trouble arises, however, when a group of psychic vampires called The Tribe swoop into town to feed on people’s energy.

Peep the King:

Halloween is lurking around the corner and, if you’re a parent, that means it’s time to start planning some fright-filled activities for your kids. But, what can you do when haunted events cost too much money and letting your children trick-or-treat only exposes them to rape-happy pedophiles and type 2 diabetes?

Well, if you live in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and/or New York City, you can treat your little terrors to a reading from iconic horror producer/director William Castle’s new young-adult novel “From the Grave: The Prayer,” his first completed project since dropping dead in 1977 at the age of 63.

Excerpts from the book will be read by Castle’s daughter Terry. The all-ages event will also feature book signings and plenty of Halloween tricks and treats, including a demonstration of the Castle family’s “secret fake blood recipe.”

“From the Grave: The Prayer” is set be released on Oct. 2 and will be made available in print and eBook versions ($15.99 and $9.99 respectively) via Amazon, Kindle, NOOK, and iBooks. It is the first in a planned series of “From the Grave” books.

William Castle is the legendary producer of Rosemary’s Baby and the director of such demented frighteners as The House on Haunted Hill (1959) and 13 Ghosts (1960). He returned from the dead last May during the 33rd anniversary of his death and immediately launched his blog and  Twitter and Facebook accounts to stay in touch with fans.

“From the Grave” readings will take place at:

BOOKS OF WONDER on Oct. 16 at 1 pm.

18 West 18^th Street

New York, NY 10011

(212) 989-3270

website

BOOK PASSAGE on Oct. 21 at 7 pm.

51 Tamal Vista Blvd.

Corte Madera, CA 94925

(415) 927-0960

website

STORIES BOOKS & CAFE on Oct. 27 at 7:30 pm.

1716 West Sunset Blvd.,

Los Angeles, CA 90026

(213) 413-3733

website

“Master of the Macabre” William Castle, pronounced dead and buried in 1977, is back! And he wants your children … to read. The legendary producer of Rosemary’s Baby and the director of such demented frighteners as The House on Haunted Hill (1959) and 13 Ghosts (1960) has written a young adult novel entitled “From the Grave: The Prayer.”

The 75,000-word book follows four angst-riddled teens from distinctive backgrounds as their lives intersect in Southern France while stumbling upon a haunted house that holds clues to finding an age-old manuscript that could bring forth an evil known as the Ancient Ones. The group band together to find the mysterious document and to keep it away from a secret society hellbent on acquiring its powers.

“From the Grave: The Prayer” is slated for a Halloween release and will be made available in print and eBook versions ($15.99 and $9.99 respectively) via Amazon, Kindle, NOOK, and iBooks. It is the first in planned series of “From the Grave” books.

Says daughter and William Castle Productions head Terry Castle:

My dad was notorious for both his spine-tingling movies as well as the legendary gimmicks he devised to drive people to the theater again and again. And now, for his latest and perhaps greatest marketing gimmick yet, Dad has written “From the Grave.”  He’s really outdone himself this time!

Along with creating numerous genre gems, Castle was known for his outrageous and fun P.T. Barnum-like approach to movie marketing campaigns (i.e. providing audience members with vouchers worth a $1000 in life insurance from Lloydes of London should they die from fear during showings of his 1958 breakthrough Macabre).

Castle first returned from the beyond last May during the 33rd anniversary of his death. Not one to rest-in-peace on his laurels, he immediately launched a blog and created Twitter and Facebook accounts to stay in touch with fans and keep them informed on all his upcoming projects.

Benjamin Radford, a leading scientific paranormal investigator, believes he has debunked the legend of  the bloodsucking beast known throughout Central America as the Chupacabra. According to his new book “Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore (University of New Mexico Press),” the creature originated in the imagination of Puerto Rican movie fan Madelyne Tolentino.

Tolentino claimed in August of 1995 that she saw the Chupacabra (gringo translation: sucks goats) outside her mother’s house in the town of Canovanas at 4 p.m. She described it as being four-to-five-feet-tall, having dark gray eyes that sometimes glowed orange, spikes down its spine, and walking on its hind legs. A sketched rendering of her description eventually went viral and the Chupacabra legend was born.

In his book, however, Radford suggests that the monster Tolentino described is really a re-imagining of the half -human/half-alien SIL creature seen in the 1995 sci-fi classic Species. Tolentino admitted to Radford that she had seen the movie the very same year she spotted the Chupacabra at her mother’s ranch.

Says Radford:

There’s a phenomenon known as confabulation, where people confuse things seen in dreams or movies as happening in real life. It’s a natural, normal thing, and there was a fertile social ground for her story. In early 1990s Puerto Rico, there was a preexisting belief that something weird was attacking animals and draining them of their blood.

Radford, who spent years investigating the Chupacabra, traveling to Puerto Rico and Nicaragua, makes a compelling case against the cryptid, pointing out that DNA samples acquired from suspected Chupacabras revealed them to be dogs and coyotes suffering from the skin disease sarcoptic mange. Tolentino, to this day, sticks by her story.

Who do you believe? I, for one, am only certain about one thing: Species star Natasha Henstridge can chupa my cabra anytime.

SIL made Clatto’s list of The 11 Sexiest Maneaters in Horror/Sci-fi.

You got to hand it to Italian model/actress Monica Bellucci. Whereas most Hollywood starlets fill their memoirs with words and punctuation, the still-very-gorgeous 46-year-old starlet has released a 240-page book of photographs detailing every breathtaking curve of her twenty-year career.

Simply entitled “Monica Bellucci,” the book includes a wide variety of sexy portraits taken  by such noted photographers as Bruce Weber, Peter Lindbergh, Helmut Newton, Fabrizio Ferri, Richard Avedon and Ellen von Unwerth. An introduction by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso) gets the pages turning.

Bellucci first struck a large bulbous nerve with American movie audiences playing disenchanted trophy wife Persephone in Andy and Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix: Reloaded. The part led to roles in The Matrix: Revolutions, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, and most recently Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the French psychological-thriller Don’t Look Back.

Of course, it’s Bellucci’s graphic ten-minute ass-rape in Gasper Noe’s Irreversible that remains her tour de force performance.

“Monica Bellucci” by Monica Bellucci is published by Rizzoli and is now available for purchase everywhere that books are sold.

“Twilight” author Stephenie Meyers announced today on her website that she is not ready to stop earning ridiculous mountains of cash from her vampire empire. On June 5, Meyer’s publishing house Little Brown Books for Young Readers will release “The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella.”

The 192-page novella centers on the life of newborn vampire Bree Tanner, a character who only appears briefly in the “Eclipse” novel as part of Bella Swan hater Victoria’s army. Meyer’s insists that she thought of the Bree spinoff long before “Twilight” was adapted to the big screen.

She lies through her teeth says:

I never intended to publish this story as a stand-alone book. I began this story a long time ago—before ‘Twilight’ was even released. Back then I was just editing ‘Eclipse,’ and in the thick of my vampire world. I was thinking a lot about the newborns, imagining their side of the story, and one thing led to another. I started writing from Bree’s perspective about those final days, and what it was like to be a newborn.

Hmm. Looks like those crafty Twilight Saga movie producers have found a new way to keep the tween-loved vampire-soap going. Along with splitting Breaking Dawn into two movies, it’s pretty clear we’ll be seeing a Bree Tanner flick in the near future.

I’m gonna say it right now: “novella” will be the new “prequel” in Hollywood. What better way to keep a franchise going?

Studios won’t have to wait as long for an author to turn something in. New characters are pushed to the forefront, allowing for fresh faces to emerge and providing producers an opportunity to save money by not having to bring back all of the original franchise’s cast members. It’s genius.

“The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella” will be available for purchase on June 5 at 12:01 a.m.

A dollar from all U.S. sales will be donated to the American Red Cross International Response Fund to provide aid to Haiti and Chile. But, if you hate brown people, you can read it for free on BreeTanner.com from June 7-to-July 5.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse arrives in movie theaters on June 30.

Rocker/director Rob Zombie is collaborating with comic artists Donny Hadiwidjaja and Val Staples to create Whatever Happened to Baron Von Shock, a dark comic series centering on the misadventures of a television horror host.

Zombie explains on his MySpace blog:

This comic venture is very, very different in tone for me. Instead of a crazy over-the-top monster-fest like El Superbeasto, I wanted to create something that works more on a slice of life human level.

Whatever Happened to Baron Von Shock is published by Image Comics and will be made available on May 26.

Seth Grahame-Smith took the publishing world by surprise last year with his clever Jane Austen-meets-the-living dead mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (a film adaptation is in the works). The New York Times bestselling author is now sinking his teeth into American history with his new novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, available March 2 from publishing house Grand Central.

A trailer for the book has been circulating the web. Check it out:

The book’s official synopsis reads:

While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.

Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.

Man, I really hope someone writes The Diary of Ann Frankenstein next. That might actually make me leave my 60″ Bravia to seek out a library card.

The Yen Press has announced the launch of a new Japanese manga series based on author Cecily Von Ziegesar bestselling Gossip Girl books. Written and illustrated by HyeKyung Baek, Gossip Girl: For Your Eyes Only will re-imagine Ziegesar’s storylines and focus on two of it’s lead bitches: Blair Waldorf and Vanessa Abrams.

The Gossip Girl books—13 in all—follow the backstabbing adventures of troubled teen girls at an elite  private high school in New York. The CW Television Network adapted the first novel in the series to produce the hit show “Gossip Girl,” now on its third season.

Kurt Hassle, publishing director for Yen Press, says:

There are few series in the publishing world that have been as impactful or successful as Cecily von Ziegesar’s GOSSIP GIRL. The novels have captured the imaginations of young women around the world, and we look forward to demonstrating with GOSSIP GIRL: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY that graphic novels as a medium can be just as welcoming to girls as it is to boys.

Especially, if the girls are down with tentacle rape!

OMFG

I kid. Tentacle rape is only found in hentai. However, manga can be pretty racy and, judging this book by its cover, I’d say we’re finally gonna see some hot snooty beyotches get owned!

Gossip Girl: For Your Eyes Only debuts in January. It will be published monthly.