You could dress as one of the presidential candidates for Halloween. I’ve seen paper Obama and McCain masks attached to greeting cards, and just about every bespectacled white woman I know has to explain why she isn’t going to be Palin for a day on October 31.
You could dress up as a character from a movie: that villain from “Saw,” Lorelei Lee from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” the Marx Brothers, Spiderman, Batman, or Heath Ledger’s Joker.
Or you could dress up like a character from a book. Period pieces like Gone with the Wind and Dangerous Liaisons certainly inspire elaborate costumes. You may find, though, that dressing up as the author of the book is much more interesting.
For example, you could dress as Sadako from Ring. With a wig of long (wet) black hair and a white gown, you could be a familiar, but terrifying, Halloween monster. Or you could become Koji Suzuki, author of Ring, who is (according to his back-of-the-book bio) “an avid motorcyclist, an accomplished yachtsman, and a respected authority on child-rearing.”
You could dress as Helen of Troy in a tired toga. Or you could dress as H.D., author of Helen in Egypt, and flirt with everyone at the party without consequence.
You and a friend could dress as Jay Gatsby and Daisy from The Great Gatsby and pretend to be carefree and rich. Or you could dress up as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and shut down the party with your drunken bickering.
You could dress up as Aladdin or Scheherazade from the translation of Arabian Nights (and risk looking like refugee from a Disney movie from the early 1990s). Or you could dress up as Sir Francis Richard Burton,who was (according to the Signet Classic author bio) a “daring explorer… and one of the most flamboyant celebrities of his day.” You could remind your fellow revelers that you also translated the Kama Sutra.