Our scent adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” was first conceived as a Halloween 2020 release, inspired by the confinement we were experiencing during that maddeningly uncertain time. Good taste prevailed, however, and we decided to shelve this series for another time.

That time has now come! This beguiling and ruthlessly economical snippet of horror fiction has been a formative reading experience for high school students for decades, even though the subject matter is decidedly adult.

For new readers staring down non-fictional legislative attempts to revive 19th century standards for pregnancy, motherhood, and mental healthcare, our heroine’s predicament seems all too current… and her escape (as it were) oddly cathartic.

As of this writing on a lovely September afternoon, everyone who works at BPAL seems to have some kind of Halloween project going on in the background, whether related to costume creation, home decor, or brewing up frightful treats. And this doesn’t even count as “early” to most ‘Weenie wackos!

Our relatively recent tradition of previewing Halloween fragrances at Dragon Con has been incredibly useful in terms of getting us in the spooky spirit. And then we get to witness others’ enjoyment of it, which proves contagious. (If we’re lucky, this joy is the only infection we brought home from Atlanta this year. Get thee behind us, Con Crud!)

This year’s series is like a scrapbook stuffed with snippets from artists we love – illustrations from John Herndon, Becky Munich, and Drew Rausch are back in rotation – as well as our own personal experiences, tastes, humor, and horrors. Even this year’s literary component, a fragrant adaptation of the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, is connected to memories of the childhood discovery that words printed on a page can affect a person more brutally than anything they’d ever seen on a screen or in real life.

And of course, by now some of the perfumes in our Main Category of ‘Weenies have been in rotation for over twenty years. To the extent that little bottles of oily essence can function as scraps in a book, we share your pleasure in revisiting them, rereading the descriptions, and inhaling the contents, wondering how on earth this all happened.

May your season be filled with such fragrant remembrances, in whatever form those take. May our ghosts feel invited to visit and speak, and may their messages stand a chance of being heard before we’ve passed out of range, slipping back into winter’s relative peace and silence.