Halloween Horror Just Feels Like Reality Now
In the face of so much death, mass-market decorations cut close to the heart of the pandemic
Not since April have the streets of New York City been piled high with so many corpses. This October, though, it is not the refrigeration trucks outside of hospitals, stacked with an overflow of corpses that the morgues and funeral parlors cannot handle. This time it’s the Grave & Bones Collection from Home Depot: A line of posable skeletons and ersatz tombstones, capped off by the towering, 12-foot Big Skeleton with flashing LED eyes ($299, sold out). A stroll through my Brooklyn neighborhood (or really, any neighborhood this time of year) turns up house after house bedecked with skeletons sitting in chairs on the porch, reclining in swings, or poking up out of the grass. It’s all festive enough, to be sure — but something about these grimly grinning articulated bones feels very different this time.
In any normal year, this crap would be a regular part of a long-standing tradition of Halloween decoration: cheap and mass-produced, part impulse buy and part attempt to one-up the neighbors. But this is not a normal year; this has been a year of death without end. Over 225,000 Americans dead from a nonstop plague, one too many of us treated cavalierly at the expense of our loved ones and the…
