Warning: This Post Contains Graphic and Disturbing Imagery

I love Halloween and everything about it except Halloween stores.  It's too much.  An aisle of plastic pumpkins and candy at the grocery store?  Charming.  An entire warehouse devoted to fake tombstones, oversized novelty spiders and plastic skeletons?  DEPRESSING.

I did not think it was possible to make a Halloween megastore more depressing than it already is, but someone found a way: put the Halloween megastore in an old Borders.  (I described my last trip to the Borders at my mall here).

The mall didn't even try to conceal the fact that the Halloween megastore used to be a bookstore.  Quotes about books are still painted on the walls.  For example:

"Books are the carriers of civilization.  Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculations at a standstill."  Right. Well, sound the alarm, because apparently civilization is going to hell. But no worries! We have a huge selection of slutty witch costumes!

Behold, the old newsstand.  Is it symbolic that the magazines have been replaced by bloody masks?  

And lastly, my personal favorite: "Good novels are written by people who are not frightened."  Now, there are no books (let alone any good novels) in sight. But there is this scary ghoul thing hanging from the ceiling.  The word "irony" comes to mind.