Dark Shadows in Spring: Every Day is Halloween featured on Dark Bites Podcast

May 13, 2025

Dark Shadows in Spring: Every Day is Halloween featured on Dark Bites Podcast

I can’t tell you how excited I was to hold the final print edition of my latest release, Every Day is Halloween back in October, 2024.

As usual, my emotions were a tightly wound ball of elation, excitement, satisfaction, and a tremendous sense of relief, like I’d been running with a flaming bucket of craptacular disjointed scene and prose fragments for a year and a half, watching them burn and melt together into something else, and could finally let it all go.

Endless rounds of revision finally made this book into the quirky, eerie, occasionally gruesome horror/paranormal coming-of-age-story it was meant to be. Yes, agonizing over every moment in fifteen-year-old Esther’s world, where the dead bully the living into wearing costumes every day, turned what was supposed to be a short story into something cogent, relatable, meaningful, surprising, and longer. Of course.

Now, shouting to the world you’ve written yet another book is oh so damned easy. Getting the world to listen, not so much. So when Rick Hipson, host of Dark Bites Podcast agreed to both review my book and interview me on his lover-of-all-things-horror podcast, I was thrilled. And here we are—you, me, and this delightfully experimental story I’ve written—shouting to the world…

No need to wait for autumn
now that the Dead casts their shadow
every day of the year.

In a world where the Dead force the Living to wear costumes, Esther must uncover the truth behind her bestie’s disappearance before fading into the shadows of her black robe and skull mask.

The Interview

Rick and I meticulously avoided giving away too much about the plot of the story while discussing:

how we forget the details in the books we write after we’ve written them;
different types of masking;
inspiration for the story;
characters, their arcs, their relationships with one another;
the epistolary elements;
World War I;
and using AI ethically to assist with the writing process.

Just when we begin wrapping up, Rick asks me to open up a bit about some difficult decisions I needed to make regarding scaling back on the business side of my writing journey, because sometimes doing less gives you more time to write.

Here’s the link for you to listen to our interview:

The Review

While the concept of every day being Halloween has all the makings of a fun, celebratory, good time, beneath Kit Daven’s pen, it takes on a much darker, somber connotation. While the idea of the dead rising and clashing with the living is hardly a new idea, this is not a zombie novel, nor does it rely on shock and grotesqueries to move the reader along its pages.

This is the story of 15-year-old Esther, a lonely girl who just wants to be seen beneath the glaring shadow of her best friend, a popular student and the polar opposite of Esther. When the dead come back to life and the world at large finds ways to coexist with them rather than eradicate them as we have come to expect, society is forced to adjust their culture, their laws and their every day living in the name of finding a way to the best of this strange evolution. In order to stave off the threat of violence from the undead lurking among them, everyone is ordered to dress up to show their respect to the dead by conducting themselves as if they are a part of them.

The more the living conform with the dead, the more Esther desires to be seen for who she truly is, even if it puts her and others in peril. To help showcase a world that its characters struggle to understand, Kit utilizes an epistolary approach with the inclusion of magazines articles and headlines, investigative reports and text messages among other tidbits to pull us readers in for a truly immersive experience.

Thanks to Kit’s poetic grasp on her commanding prose, following in the footsteps of Esther and her friends, her well meaning albeit controlling mother, and Mishu the undead cat with malevolent motives is far from mundane, always captivating.

Of course, when every day is Halloween, we must question how it might all end and let me be the first to tell you that as good as the initial hook as well as everything which comes after, the ending might just bring you to you knees and mourn for just one more day of Halloween. Highly recommend.

—Rick Hipson, host of Dark Bites Podcast

Thanks to Rick for writing such a wonderful review. In celebration of our discussion of Every Day is Halloween—before Spring disappears into the hot, steamy days of summer—I’m temporarily lowering the price on the ebook edition…