TRICK ‘R TREAT: WITCHING HOURS by Michael Dougherty, Various

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Well, this was a goddamn delight.

Trick ‘r Treat: Witching Hours surprised me by being just as fun as the film. Unburdened from the shackles of budgetary concerns that plague so many film productions, Michael Dougherty and company are free to go to some wonderfully wild and weird places—and they most certainly do. I never would have thought that a story sending Sam—our lovable, abominable Soul of Halloween—into space would work, but “Harvest Moons” (written by Curtis Waugh and Michael Dougherty, with art by El Garing, Charlie Kirchoff, and Werner Sanchez) proves me wonderfully wrong. Set aboard a generation ship in the far future, it follows a group of humans rediscovering the ancient traditions of All Hallows’ Eve. It is probably the best story in the collection, and undoubtedly the most epic.

“One Last Halloween” (written by Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty, and Zach Shields, with art by Rafael T. Pimentel) was, for me, the other highlight. In a nursing home that has seen better days, a group of lonely, elderly residents set out to celebrate one last Halloween before the end—with a little gruesome help from Sam. The result is a story that’s as moving as it is macabre. (I do love a cast of senior citizens.)

While the remaining entries may not have resonated with me as viscerally as the ones previously mentioned, they are by no means dull. Each of these episodes, in its own distinct way, is entertaining in the extreme. Everyone involved in the production of this slim volume appears to have risen to the ghoulish occasion, delivering some genuinely great and ghastly work—from the writers to, in particular, the artists.

And it’s in the province of those artists that we find another advantage the comics medium has over films—that the visual style can be vastly different from story to story. It’s something that’s particularly beneficial to the anthology format. While there is something comforting about the cohesion of a singular creative approach like the one present in the original Trick ‘r Treat film, the sheer aesthetic diversity seasoned comic book artists bring to the table can, and often does, make for a richer, more interesting experience.

It’s just rad work all around, and it made for the most fun I had reading this Halloween season. We love Sam in this house.

LORE OF THE JACK-‘O-LANTERN by Brian Serven, Dan Blakeslee

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In a small, sleepy New England town, the Ferals, a group of young misfits, meet in their treehouse on the edge of the local cemetery. There, they hang out. There, they eat junk food and joke around. There, in their ramshackle sanctuary, they are free to be themselves, for a little while.

Their casual chatter gives way to talk of the recent disappearances of children in town. That’s when one of the Ferals claims to have seen a strange man lurking around the house of one of the missing kids shortly before they vanished. The ominous figure, the boy continues, reminded him of an old story his grandmother used to tell. About Stingy Jack, a mischievous who, after tricking the Devil, was cursed to forever wander the Underworld with just a single ember inside a makeshift lantern to light his way through the darkness.

The rest of the gang think it’s a good story. Eerie and spooky and appropriate for Halloween—but they don’t really believe it. They think it’s all a myth.

But when one of their own is taken, the Ferals realize that Jack of the Lantern is more than just lore, and that they must follow his lonely light down into the dark depths of the Underworld in order to save their friend.

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This was a very interesting, very peculiar little story. The basic premise of Brian Serven and Dan Blakeslee’s Lore of the Jack-O’-Lantern may be familiar and conventional, but it’s executed in a wonderful and decidedly unconventional way. 

Like many of the things I’ve read this season, it’s a story steeped in folklore and nostalgia. Serven’s writing reinforces that feeling. His prose, apart from a few weirdly worded passages, has a certain folksy and lyrical charm that I found enormously appealing. That musical quality makes sense, since Serven also happens to be a songwriter. Good stuff.

The real highlight for me, however, was Blakeslee’s art, which is unhinged in a most delightful way. Firmly rooted in the underground comix tradition, it’s a rough-hewn, chaotic style I wouldn’t ordinarily find all that appealing—but it works remarkably well in a homespun, lo-fi sort of story like this one. (The fact that the physical edition also happens to look exactly like a coloring book only adds to the offbeat, whimsical vibes.)

“Texture” was the word that kept coming to mind while I was reading this. It’s a book with a lot of texture. It’s not something I seem to come across very often, and it made this small novella feel distinctly novel. I really dug this.

ALL HALLOWS’ EVE edited by Ellen Datlow

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A grieving couple tries to hide away from Halloween following the death of their only son on the holiday, but a familiar trick-or-treater keeps knocking on their door throughout the night.

On the Night of the Strigoi, a woman gives her granddaughter a leaf that will make her dream of the man she’s fated to marry, and unwittingly unleashes horrors upon their house.

In Ireland, during the Great Famine, an English captain sends a series of letters to his daughter, writing of an encounter with a strange, ethereal young woman who seems to hold him in her thrall.

In a small town in the nineties, a new girl struggles to make friends. After spending an awkward Halloween night with some kids from her school, she is humiliated in a public and horrible manner… and transforms into something terrible.

On Halloween, a group of young men set out to cause mischief and mayhem. The youngest, desperate to fit in, suggests defiling the grave of the local witch, and the night takes a sinister turn.

Bringing together leading voices in contemporary horror literature, legendary editor Ellen Datlow delivers a collection of stories about the myriad ways we observe, celebrate, or desecrate those nights devoted to the dead, when the veil between worlds grows thin and the mythic and the mundane can walk side by side in the dark.

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Taken as a whole, All Hallows’ Eve is a remarkably coherent collection. There are a few missteps, of course, as is the case with most anthologies. These were mostly the work of authors who, as the kids tend to say, didn’t seem to understand the assignment, turning in perfectly respectable and perfectly run-of-the-mill stories that, yes, may have been eerie and unnerving and even, at times, full of terror, but had only, in the end, the thinnest connection to Halloween or Día de Muertos or any other day of spiritual and cultural observance. The entire point of the thing, in other words.

Thankfully, much of this volume is a veritable feast of fine, folkloric fiction, so there’s still plenty to celebrate. Standout stories: “Treats” by Clay McLeod Chapman (a beautifully written, haunting gut-punch of a tale); “Or So the Story Goes” by Christopher Golden (mythic and Gothic and baroque—an abundance of atmosphere); “The Hungry Grass” by Siobhan Carroll (historical, mystical, vampirical—my personal favorite); “Give Me Something Good to Eat” by Theresa DeLucci (an impeccable and visceral portrait of nineties melancholia); “Dare Me” by Richard Kadrey (a wicked, intense tale of boyhood bravado).

My constant companion all through this lonesome October. There are worse ways to spend the month.

GIVE ME SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT by D.W. Gillespie

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There are few places that do Halloween like Pearl. The costumes, the candy, the customs—the close-knit community goes all out every year, transforming the small town into a veritable haunted paradise. For a horror aficionado like Mason, it should be the ideal place to live. But there’s something sinister happening in the heart of Pearl, and he seems to be the only one aware of it. Every Halloween, a child disappears, and everyone—from the kid’s teachers to their parents to, eventually, even their friends—seems to forget they ever existed. But Mason remembers.

This year, Mason is determined to get to the bottom of this cruel mystery—and become the hero he’s always wanted to be. Then his younger sister, Meg, is taken by a nightmarish scarecrow while they’re out trick-or-treating. Mason and his friends follow the fearsome figure across town, through the shadowy woods, and down into a dark, distorted version of the world they know. 

They soon realize that Meg is in the clutches of a witch who has nothing but malevolent intentions for the girl. To save his sister, Mason must first learn that there’s a difference between wanting to be a hero and having the courage to become one—and that sometimes real bravery simply means knowing when to rely on his friends.

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I pretty much purchased this immediately after finishing D.W. Gillespie’s The Doll House, which left me so impressed that I was certain I had found a new favorite author. My hunch turned out to be right, because this was another fantastic read. 

Give Me Something Good to Eat is an eerie, thrilling, and atmospheric adventure that people will inevitably compare to Stranger Things, although it is, in spirit and execution, much closer to the original inspirations for that seminal show: the great Amblin films of the late eighties and early nineties. Stories that may have been meant for younger audiences but were never afraid to deal with some darkness—not for shock or sensationalism, but because they understood that, yes, the good guys eventually win, but they don’t necessarily come out unscathed, and that endings are often far more bittersweet than blissful. Such stories are simply upholding deep-rooted traditions—witches ate children in the original fairy tales, after all. It’s something that storytellers like Spielberg, Selick, Bradbury, Arden, and certainly Gillespie just inherently get, and they have nothing but my admiration for it.

It’s not quite a perfect read for me, only because there are some themes about the nature of good and evil introduced halfway through the book that would have added a fascinating layer to the story had they been established earlier in the narrative. That said, the ending is fairly open-ended, so maybe these ideas can be explored more thoroughly in another novel. I hope it happens. I would love to return to this bewitching world Gillespie has brewed up.

DARK HARVEST by Norman Partridge

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The sixties. A nameless town. A dead cornfield. Every year on Halloween, someone walks into that withered field. They wake up the figure known as Ol’ Hacksaw Face, Sawtooth Jack… the October Boy. They carve a face into its pumpkin head. They stuff its threadbare clothes and vine-riddled body full of sweets. They hand it a butcher knife. They point the way towards town.

A group of hungry, restless young men anxiously await the freakish figure’s arrival. They know the only way out of this dead, dusty town is by killing the October Boy before the night is over. Pete McCormick, hungrier than most, is among these boys full of adolescent hubris and bravado.

A long, storied, bloody tradition.

He doesn’t realize it just yet. None of them do. But this Halloween, the October Boy is about to break that tradition—and everything Pete thought he knew about their town’s way of life.

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Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest is a lean, mean, no-nonsense novel that not once went where I thought it would go—and was all the better for it. I went into it expecting nothing more than a straightforward supernatural slasher, but encountered instead a surprisingly soulful, mournful story about the terrible things people learn to live with. And while I understand how that subversion of expectations might disappoint some readers, it definitely worked on this one. I very much dug this gloomy, grisly yarn.

Dark Harvest is, at its candy-covered heart, about a town being slowly consumed by its traditions. What began as a ritual ostensibly intended for the benefit of the community has, over time, eaten away at its soul. The townspeople are aware of this, to some extent, and yet they continue the practice, as much out of complacency as custom. They don’t know another way of life. 

Until this year’s crop of kids. Until last year’s October Boy.

The October Boy himself was another pleasant surprise. Rather than the mindless, murderous machine I expected to find, Partridge gives us a genuinely tragic, sympathetic figure who owes more to Frankenstein’s creation than to any masked, silent slasher. He ended up being one of my favorite aspects of this story. 

The other was the writing itself. Partridge’s prose may not be for everyone, but I found its rustic, casual quality appealing. It’s very reminiscent of Stephen King’s writing, particularly in the way it captures the peculiar cadences of small rural communities. Partridge gives that familiar style his own distinctive spin, though, with a narrative voice that’s disarmingly intimate and amusingly chummy, providing an effective contrast to the much darker, more somber tone of the story.

My only real reservation comes from the fact that, despite its brevity, Harvest somehow also manages to be a bit repetitive. Some of this is intentional, with Partridge returning to certain lines and phrases for poetic effect. Some of it, however, simply belabors the same points with slightly different wording. This tendency becomes particularly tedious around the novel’s halfway mark, when the otherwise propulsive plot slams on the brakes to accommodate several (several!) lengthy, melancholic monologues that drain much of the tension the story has so carefully built.

Thankfully, Partridge recovers a lot of that momentum in time for an explosive and entirely gratifying finale. I enjoyed this strange, surprisingly sentimental story a great deal. Good stuff.

THE GIRL IN WHITE by Lindsay Currie

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The small seaside town of Eastport has everything: charming shops, excellent restaurants, quaint architecture, several picturesque cemeteries, various ghosts, and, of course, countless curses.

The town has emphatically embraced its reputation as one of the most haunted places in the United States, to the point of hosting monthly celebrations of its many ghostly legends. And for the residents of Eastport, no legend looms larger than that of Sweet Molly, which tells of a young girl who mysteriously vanished following her brother’s death—but not before casting a curse on the coastal community, blaming them for her sibling’s untimely demise.

Twelve-year-old Mallory wishes her family still lived in Chicago instead of somewhere that pretends it’s always Halloween for the sake of tourism. She finds her new hometown’s obsession with all things macabre a little tacky and more than a little morbid. She doesn’t even believe in any of the ghost stories (although they’re definitely the source of her recent sleep troubles).

But as the town prepares to celebrate a major anniversary of its most infamous legend, Mallory comes face-to-face with Sweet Molly herself, discovering that some ghosts are very real—and bent on revenge.

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It took me a couple of books to warm up to Lindsay Currie’s style of storytelling. My notes for the first few books I read by her are hilariously testy, with one of them haughtily declaring, “I fundamentally disagree with every narrative choice Currie makes.” (Like, chill out, Past Rick.) My opinion has obviously softened since then, and I’ve come to genuinely appreciate Currie’s particular approach to children’s horror. And The Girl in White highlights everything I think she does best.

Which isn’t to say all of my initial reservations have gone away: I still find some of her character choices baffling, and her plots are often a bit too vague for my tastes. But Currie can also write some superbly spooky set pieces, and this novel is positively full of them. She’s also great at atmosphere: Eastport is a perpetually rainy and foggy sort of town—the ideal setting for a ghostly tale if there ever was one.

What I appreciate most about Currie’s approach is the way she incorporates historical elements into her stories. In The Girl in White, she draws inspiration from real towns like Sleepy Hollow, New York, and particularly Salem, Massachusetts. Like the famous Witch City, Eastport is a town fascinated by its haunted history, although Currie takes that fascination to far gaudier extremes. The result is a story about how easily places with harrowing histories can end up, however inadvertently, exploiting their past in the name of tourism and commercialization. About how doing so can trivialize the suffering of people who went through terrible things, no matter how long ago those events may have transpired. And what happens when a community is forced to reckon with that sort of collective carelessness.

Of course, the relationship towns like Salem have with their own histories is far more nuanced than the one depicted in this novel, and Currie never suggests otherwise. But I do think she’s as interested in exploring the more uncomfortable ways we choose to remember and engage with history as she is in celebrating the traditions that have grown around it. She manages to do both with grace and aplomb, in this reader’s opinion. I enjoyed this story quite a bit. 

DOWN CAME THE SPIDERS by Ally Russell

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Andi would rather spend her Halloween out trick-or-treating with her friends, Carly and Devon, than attending a party with a bunch of older kids from school at a farmhouse on the outskirts of town. But she’s convinced by the prospect of seeing the homeowner’s supposedly epic and expansive collection of spiders. Andi has always been fascinated by spiders, even if most people don’t happen to share her enthusiasm. To her, they’re simply misunderstood creatures. As an anxious kid who often feels out of place and overlooked, Andi has a certain affinity for the antagonized arachnids.

And the house’s array of eight-legged creatures turns out to be impressive indeed. Andi is particularly enthralled by a type of spider she’s never come across before: one that’s abnormally large, with glowing red eyes.

Then the strange specimen suddenly escapes, the adults seemingly disappear, and countless other spiders descend upon the farm, behaving erratically. And Andi is about to learn that the line between fascination and fear can be as thin as a spider’s web.

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There is a scene here where a bunch of youths stand around trying to figure out what exactly a landline is, making it, naturally, the most terrifying book I’ve read so far this Halloween season. Spine-tingling. Haunting, even.

Ally Russell’s Down Came the Spiders is a concise creature feature that wastes absolutely no time getting to the aberrant arachnid action. Despite the book’s brevity, Russell still manages to weave in themes of anxiety, growing up, and the changing dynamics of childhood friendships without ever slowing things down. There’s a surprising amount of compassion beneath all the creepy-crawly chaos, lending this relatively straightforward story a welcome layer of emotional depth.

But, yes, it’s also a lot of fun and will probably, most definitely, make your skin crawl. Good times!

A DARK AND SECRET MAGIC by Wallis Kinney

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Hecate “Kate” Goodwin is the first hedge witch in her coven in more than a generation. True to her craft, her days are spent in relative isolation, living in a cozy, comfortable cottage at the edge of Ipswich forest, where she tends to her garden and cooks up tinctures and concoctions that she sells in the town apothecary, which she co-owns with a fellow witch. She is, for the most part, content.

Then her older sister writes, asking Kate to host their coven on Halloween. It’s a momentous occasion, after all: not only is it the mark of a new year for witches, but Kate is also turning 31, a significant age in her coven, when she’s expected to declare her complete dedication to her craft by eschewing all other forms of magic. 

It’s all a little overwhelming for someone used to such a small, quiet existence. Then Matthew Cypher, a young hexan from a rival coven with whom she shares a complicated past, shows up in the middle of the night, throwing her life into further disarray. His arrival brings about revelations that threaten to unravel everything Kate thought she knew about her magic, her family, and her very sense of self.

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My enjoyment of Wallis Kinney’s A Dark and Secret Magic was saved by a particularly solid and satisfying climax and a truly excellent All Hallows atmosphere. I do think it’s a bit all over the place, though, tonally speaking. The story tries to be too many things at once: a witchy, whimsical slice-of-life (every single dish mentioned in this book has a cutesy, cloying, Pinterest-primed name), a charming frenemies-to-lovers fantasy, and a dark, sultry, brooding romance. It never quite manages to strike the right balance between these distinct sensibilities, which makes for some truly whiplash-inducing moments where one scene will feature characters giving one another magically induced tissue death, and the very next will have characters going to a Halloween parade to hand out candy to toddlers. Wild stuff.

Don’t get me wrong: the sudden shifts in mood could totally work—if only the writing leaned a little less toward the self-serious end of the spectrum and a bit more toward the whimsical. Alas, there must be Brooding.

But, again, the strength of this moody novel lies in its atmosphere and world-building, both of which are exceptionally well done. (I thought the magic system was particularly fascinating and I definitely wanted to learn more about it.) Anyway, despite my grumbling, I went into this expecting potent Practical Magic vibes, and I can’t deny that Kinney did her damnedest to deliver.

THE HAUNTED MASK: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL by R.L. Stine, Maddi Gonzalez | THE HAUNTED MASK II by R.L. Stine

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Tired of the pranks her classmates are always playing on her for being the school’s scaredy-cat, Carly Beth vows to get the scariest costume she can for Halloween, intent on frightening all her friends right back. The mask she finds at the mysterious new store in town is indeed terrifying, and once she puts it on, it feels almost alive. The longer Carly Beth wears the mask, the less she feels like herself, but now she can’t seem to take it off…

A year later, Steve still remembers Carly Beth’s frightening mask. This Halloween, he wants to have the scariest costume around, especially if he hopes to get back at the first-graders he’s forced to coach after school, who seem to delight in making his life miserable. The store where Carly Beth got her mask seems to have shut down, but Steve manages to break in, grabbing the first mask he finds among the discarded merchandise before he’s caught. His Old Man mask is truly revolting, and he’s convinced it will frighten everyone around him. But once he puts it on, he starts feeling like an old, weak man himself. Worse still, the mask won’t come off…

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I had a lot of fun with Maddi Gonzalez’s graphic novel adaptation of The Haunted Mask by R.L. Stine. She brought a modern, anime-inspired sensibility that I would never have thought would work for this most nineties of stories, but it really does. She did a great job with the Mask itself, which was suitably monstrous and wonderfully, grotesquely expressive (the bit with Carly Beth running around on all fours while scaring the kids around the neighborhood was particularly, delightfully unhinged). It’s also full of very funny visuals: there’s a bit with a mask resembling the Goosebumps author that genuinely made me laugh out loud (Stine has a very distinctive face what can I tell you). I liked this a great deal, and it made me want to pick up the other Gonzalez Goosebumps graphic novel adaptations.

R.L. Stine’s The Haunted Mask II is, admittedly, a considerable step down from the first book, but also I ended up liking it quite a bit? I just thought it was hilarious, and while I understand that the (perfectly predictable) twist of the Old Man mask transforming the main character into an actual frail old man would be a slightly disappointing twist for this series, I found it to be mostly an amusing and terribly relatable ride (I, too, wake up with aches and pains in my old age). Most Goosebumps caveats still apply, naturally: the plot is mostly goofy and very contrived blah blah blah, but I actually found Stine’s writing fairly strong here, refreshingly free of slightly condescending prose that tended to creep into most of the later books. Good stuff. 

Anyway, I did not re-watch the TV adaptation for The Haunted Mask this time around, but I did catch the episode based on The Haunted Mask II, which I’m not sure I ever saw as a kid. I may have liked it better than the book, partly because the show still had some stellar production (the Old Man mask looks great and gross), partly because it ignores some of the book’s sillier elements, but mainly because I watched a VHS rip of the original broadcast, complete with commercial breaks, that someone put up on YouTube. You know. The way god intended.

THE BELLWOODS GAME by Celia Krampien

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Every year, on Halloween, the children of Fall Hollow enter the Bellwoods to play a game: they must brave the darkness beneath the trees in order to find a bell that must be rung before midnight, or else the restless ghost of Abigail Snook is free to torment the town. Bailee’s not sure she believes in all the stories she’s heard about Abigail or the Bellwoods, but they also say that the first person who gets to ring the bell is granted a wish, and after a particularly dismal year full of social and personal turmoil, she’s willing to do whatever it takes to make things the way they used to be. But Bailee and her fellow players enter the woods, they’ll discover that all the stories are not only true, but far more sinister than any of them could have ever imagined.

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The Bellwoods Game by Celia Krampien had pretty much everything I look for in a story—for children or otherwise: a touching and deeply sincere plot; quirky and resilient characters; strong themes of friendship, courage, and acceptance—even stories and storytelling figured into the plot, because Krampien is clearly a spooky scribe after my own heart. I’ve long been an admirer of her artwork, and the illustrations included here add so much atmosphere to an already atmospheric sort of book. Chock-full of impeccably creepy imagery and creative, genuinely spooky set pieces, this was a sheer delight to read. I liked this book a lot. 🎃