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.
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.