Victoria Sutton knows a thing or two about the macabre.
The Texas Tech School of Law professor's book "Halloween Law" was published last year by Vargas Publishing, and her next book, "The Things That Keep Us Up At Night: Reel Bio-Horror," is due to be published by the end of the year.
In the former, Sutton explores the fundamental areas of law through the tinted lens of Halloween. She uses cases pertaining to the holiday to illustrate concepts typically studied by first-year law students.
Sutton started coming across a lot of cases that involved Halloween in one way or another while researching other topics, she said. She started gathering material to compile into a book.
"I really wrote this for pre-law students," Sutton said. "I hope this book will introduce people who aren't lawyers to the law."
"What might happen if someone sold a house and you didn't know that it was haunted?" reads the introduction to the book. "Or what if your neighbor decided to write your epitaph on a tombstone that he used for a Halloween yard decoration? ... All of these fascinating questions span subject areas of law."
The book covers topics such as criminal law, property law, contract law, constitutional law and tort law.
In the chapter "Halloween Criminal Law," Sutton discusses the case of Ronald Clark O'Bryan.
In 1975, O'Bryan, an optician from Houston, poisoned his 8-year-old son by planting cyanide-laced Pixi Stix in with his Halloween candy. He also passed out the poisoned powder candy to other trick-or-treaters to mask the source.
His son died hours after ingesting the poison. The other children survived.
At the end of the chapter, Sutton asks the reader to define why O'Bryan was convicted - the correct answer, she says, is that he had a motive (mens rae), and physically fed him the candy (actus reus).
The book also covers lighter cases, such as the neighborhood feud that erupted when a man wrote grisly epitaphs for his neighbors on his decorative tombstones.
"You have to have a kind of dry sense of humor to find law funny," Sutton said.
In her next book, due out later this year, Sutton uses her background as the director of the Center for Biodefense, Law and Public Policy at Tech to define the subgenre of movies called "bio-horror."
The genre, she said, includes movies like "Quarantine" (2008), "Contagion" (2011) and "World War Z" (2013) in which the central antagonist is a virus or disease.
In the book, Sutton said, she explores the reality of the catastrophic scenarios presented in those movies. Readers will be forced to face a basic human fear. In a way, Halloween serves the same purpose.
"As a society, we have roots in ... being afraid of the dark," Sutton said. "It's a way of confronting that fear. We make it fun."
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