Category: halloween 2026

DOWN CAME THE SPIDERS by Ally Russell

~ Ricardo ~ Leave a comment

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. 🎃

CHASING THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN by J.W. Ocker

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I’ve long been a fan of J.W. Ocker. Many of his spooky sensibilities have always seemed to align with my own (his opinions on writing scary books for kids in particular, but also his deeply personal, almost ritualistic approach to Halloween). Mostly, though, his writing is always a treat. I read A Season with the Witch, that passionate portrait of Salem, Massachusetts, a couple of years ago, and had such a blast with it that I’ve revisited it a couple of times since. So when I learned that he was giving the same treatment to the village of Sleepy Hollow, the setting of one of my favorite stories and one of the places I most wish to visit—well, I couldn’t not be excited. Chasing the Headless Horseman: The History, Hijinks, and Halloweens of the Real Sleepy Hollow is, as I’d hoped, every bit as exhaustive and enthusiastic as its witchy predecessor, and I had a great time with it. 

It is, admittedly, a bit drier than that previous book. A considerable portion of Chasing deals with what Ocker perceives as something of an identity crisis in Sleepy Hollow—both literally, with the village’s relatively recent name change (1996 is still recent do not @ me), and existentially, as a place that would like to capitalize on its reputation as a Halloween destination without letting its substantial historical significance be overshadowed by the holiday’s more kitschy, touristy trappings. It’s a tension Ocker explores throughout the book with his usual inquisitiveness and diligence, but one that he perhaps spends a little too much time trying to untangle, making for a somewhat less lively reading experience. Season, on the other hand, is all about a peculiar place that has fully embraced its peculiarity, which, to me, makes for a more entertaining read.

It makes for a fascinating contrast between the two books: one is about a city that has managed to balance a very real and very tragic history with the more frivolous aspect of its Halloween celebrations, while the other is about a small town with a literal work of literature as part of its foundations that is still struggling to find a more cohesive identity. Which maybe says something about the way America seems to capitalize on sensational violence much more readily than on its artistic endeavors. But that is, I’m afraid, an entirely different topic for another time.

Chasing is not without its share of fun, though. Ocker’s interactions with the locals are always as illuminating as they are amusing. The chapter exploring other, considerably less headless legends of Sleepy Hollow country is a standout, but the one in which Ocker subjects himself to endless hours of Headless Horseman media might be one of my favorite things he’s ever written (some of the adaptations sound so spectacularly absurd that I’ve already looked them up and hope to watch them before the season is over).

And for Ocker, it all goes back to that galloping goblin (the man has a Headless Horseman-themed bathroom, after all). His book on the Witch City may be more immediately fun and engaging, but the deep, abiding affection he has for “The Legend,” its celebrated author, and the quaint, quiet bit of land that inspired him is palpable, making this, in my opinion, the more earnest and heartfelt volume. 🎃