"Based on your previous purchases, we think you may like..."

"Lame," said Marshall, scrolling down Amazon's list of suggested titles. "Lame, lame, l- seriously, Sleepaway Summer Slaughterhouse Seven? I didn't even know there was a third.."

He sighed and minimized the browser window, pushing away from the computer desk to stretch his legs out before him with a put-upon sigh. It was looking more and more like this Halloween's entertainment selection would comprise the same old favourites from previous years, plus a few quickly-forgotten lacklustre offerings scrounged up from the bargain bin at the World o' Stuff and left in a garbage sack outside Goodwill by November 1st.

The problem was that nobody knew how to make a good, old-fashioned monster movie anymore. These days it was all about implacable masked serial killers chasing groups of screaming teenagers down a succession of otherwise-deserted corridors under the flickering glare of conveniently-malfunctioning fluorescents. What was the point of a movie where the only way to defeat the villain was pushing him out of a window, onto a bomb, then dismembering him with a chainsaw that for some reason happened to be on fire, only to have him return in the next instalment anyway?

A few weeks later, thanks to a combination of drunk highschool kids, a ouija board, and a cemetery that was considered creepy and shunnable even by Eerie's lax standards for such things, the ghost of Eerie's most notorious axe murderer, Stabbity Steve, rose from his unmarked shallow grave and wrecked bloody havoc for three consecutive nights.

The first night, Marshall lured him into a pit full of broken glass, barbed wire and iron spikes, doused in holy water, and still ended up crashing his car on the drive home when Steve appeared in the road in front of him.

On the second night, Dash helped him burn down the mental hospital where Stabbity had spent the final years of his mortal life, having been found not guilty of his heinous crimes by reason of insanity. The evening's adventure culminated in five hours spent listening to Sergeant Knight recite detailed personal information about them in a monotone voice while sat in the drunk tank of the Eerie Jail.

When dusk fell on day three of Stabbity Steve's reign of terror, Simon showed up with a bunch of books on the theory of film making as it pertained to the horror genre, gave Syndi a flamethrower and a shard of glass wrapped in duct tape at one end, and sent her out into the night. She returned less than thirty minutes later, covered in blood and grumbling about ridiculous out-dated notions of "purity", and dragging Steve's severed head behind her in a burlap sack. When Mars asked her how it went, she threw the head at him, and it exploded in a shower of ectoplasmic goo that took three days to wash out of his hair.

After salting the earth over Stabbity Steve's final resting place, but before retreating to the couch to recover from various bruises, cuts, burns, broken limbs and psychological traumas, Mars logged into his Amazon account, selected next-day guaranteed delivery, and purchased every single title the website recommended.