Halloween is celebrated each year on October 31st. It has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes in order to ward off ghosts. Eventually, the holiday became what we now know today as Halloween, where people dress up in costumes, trick-or-treat, put together yards of spooky lights, and carve out pumpkins.

Because of this upcoming Halloween, here is a selection of three Elgin nominated poetry collections describing all things spooky and dark.

1. Halloween Hearts by Adele Gardner: In this collection, Adele evokes the muses of Bradbury and Poe to bring light to themes that run deep through Halloween nights. Like a renewed childhood, witches, black cats, and poems inspired by the likes of Bradbury and Poe run deep throughout each poem. In the poem bearing the collection's name and dedicated to Ray Bradbury, Gardner writes, "Just rolled up and tucked dry and safe in / the hollow behind our withered, preserved hearts... new life! New air! Lifted to Mars / the moon, the stars, the skeletal heights of this Halloween tree..."

2. Tombstones by G.O. Clark: As described by the publisher, "Tombstones mark the passage of one's life and time, as do the poems within this collection." In this collection, Clark takes the observable and tinges it with the creepy and grotesque. Poems like "Sailing with the Devil" paint a starless picture of that dead-sailing journey, while poems like "Scarecrow" give sobering visualization to the standstill nature of a scarecrow "witnessed by a zombie priest."

3. Vampire Ventures by LindaAnn LoSchiavo: Sensuous, vampiric mischief encapsulates the entirety of Vampire Ventures. Whether it's a poem about Count Dracula penning his life or whisking away a vintner's daughter for marriage, this chapbooks holds "themes of desire, transformation, and the clash between tradition and modernity," much of it presented through poetic tales of the symbolic vampire Dracula.