It’s that time of year when we remember Hillsborough’s favorite self-taught mortician, RWB Latta (aka writer Allan Gurganus). Now retired, he offered trick-or-treaters a coffin full of candy, and his sales pitch promising deeply discounted and artistic funeral services, with examples galore of his work. To clinch the deal, he treated potential clients to a mash-up of skits, full of fright and politics and frightful politics. The crowds couldn’t get enough. 500 souls lined up each year. For more than a quarter-century on All Hallow’s Eve, the spookiest and most overrun place in town was the Latta funeral home, which took possession of writer Allan Gurganus’s otherwise-respectable bungalow.

Novelist Allan Gurganus has been delighting reading audiences for decades. His books include The Practical Heart, Plays Well With Others, Local Souls, White People, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which has been adapted for both stage and screen. Many of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker. He recently published The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus, and is at work on a new novel, The Erotic History of a Country Baptist Church.